The 11th Armored Division

As the 11th Armored Division headed for Belgium, we drove through places made famous on the breakthrough to Paris and beyond-Avaranches, Chartres, Rennes, Paris, Rheims, and Sedan. In these cities we saw the destructive results of massive battles between the Allied Forces and the German Army. Most of what had been buildings were mostly just burned... out shells of what they had been. Destroyed vehicles in fields and beside the roads, both U.S. and German, bore witness to the intensity of the artillery and tank battles. On Christmas Eve, 1944. we were quartered in French barracks near Sedan, France. I was on guard duty at midnight when suddenly a tremendous amount of rifle fire was heard. I was informed it was coming from an area occupied by the 82d Air Borne Division and they were being sent to combat in Belgium in the morning. They had been involved in serious combat before and were just letting off steam and frustration too, I guess, at having to go back into a situation where they knew what to expect. On Christmas Day we loaded into our half-tracks and headed toward Bastogne, Belgium. We were amazed that the cooks had been able to prepare a turkey dinner on the road. On Friday, December 28 orders came down to be ready to move early the next morning. We loaded into our squad halftrack December 29, 1944 on a cold, overcast, dreary looking day. We had not been told anything about our mission or what to expect. Our first night in Belgium we pitched our pup tents in a field covered with snow and ice about 200 feet from the highway used by the Red Ball Express. This was the road used by the American Army to bring supplies up to the front lines. The road was sprayed with machine gun fire frequently during the night by the Germans even though they couldn't see anything on the ground because only the red lights on the trucks were turned on. About fifty yards from our tents was a downed German airplane and two of it's frozen occupants, the first dead soldiers we had ever seen. We pitched our pup tents and climbed into ...Read More