December 16th, 1944, 5:30 a. m. German artillery shattered the pre-dawn calm over the Ardennes, and within the hour, more than a thousand German tanks rolled across a 140-kilometer front against American lines. It was Hitler’s last desperate gamble—a massive armored counterattack aimed at seizing Antwerp and cutting off the Allied advance across Europe.
Throughout the summer and fall, the Allies had pushed the Germans back 850 kilometers. But by December, their supply lines were stretched thin, and the advance had stalled. Hitler hoped to exploit that weakness, quietly massing eight Panzer divisions over eight weeks, waiting for bad weather to ground the Allied warplanes. On that frozen morning, with snowstorms sweeping the forests of the Ardennes, the Germans struck.
The Americans were caught completely off guard. The line was held by exhausted, battle-weary troops—many of them green replacements who had just arrived from the States. The Germans broke through in one fell swoop. American soldiers dropped everything and ran.
Breakfast was still on the tables when they fled, leaving behind huge amounts of equipment, fuel, and shells. One of those who didn’t run was 23-year-old John Marshall of the 707th Tank Battalion. When the attack came, he and his crew were about to eat. A lieutenant charged in and knocked the mess kits out of their hands, ordering them to mount up.
The tanks were frozen solid. The oil had settled and thickened in the bitter cold, and they couldn’t get the engines started. They threw everything they had at it—burners under the motors, burners on top—and finally, lucky enough, got one running. Marshall moved out, looking for the rest of his unit.
He didn’t know the Germans had already punched through the line. Lost and alone, he joined two other Shermans in the same predicament. When they reached a bridge, Marshall jumped out to guide his tank across. Once safely over, he signaled the tank commander behind him to do the same.
The tank had barely crossed when a tremendous flash erupted—a German soldier hiding under the bridge had hit it with a bazooka. The other two tanks were machine-gunned as their crews climbed out. Marshall and his crew were now on their own, surrounded by advancing Germans. They pulled off the road and debated what to do.
Marshall lowered their gun so the tank looked knocked out. “I don’t want some son of a gun rolling a hand grenade down the barrel,” he said. All night long, they listened to German soldiers marching past, shouting “Achtung kaput,” assuming the tank was destroyed. The next morning, someone spotted them—German or American, he never knew—and a shell came in.
They had to move. They climbed back onto the road. Then they came face to face with the only Tiger tank Marshall ever saw. It was a 57-ton monster with an 88mm gun that could rip a Sherman to pieces, flanked by two smaller tanks.
Marshall opened fire. His round bounced off harmlessly. “Why they didn’t get us, I don’t know,” he later said. But they kept going, and so did the Germans.
Farther south, the elite 116th Panzer Division was advancing through the countryside, avoiding the mined roads. From a hill a thousand meters away, a German tanker spotted a lone Sherman with its small cannon. Jokingly, they called it a “knocking device. ” The gunner next to him fired.
The first shell bounced off. The second hit the barrel, and when the Sherman tried to fire back, the barrel burst. The third shot set the tank on fire. The German crew watched it burn and then continued their advance.
The Americans were falling back everywhere, exhausted by constant fighting and short on supplies. They retreated toward Bastogne, a transportation hub with roads leading to the crucial bridges over the Meuse River. Allied command issued a simple order: hold Bastogne at any cost. The 101st Airborne Division was sent in to reinforce the town.
For days, in freezing cold and snow, with no air support, they fought off repeated German attempts to take it. On December 19th, frustrated by the stubborn defense, the Fifth Panzer Army ordered its main force to bypass Bastogne and push toward the Meuse. But Allied command wasn’t about to let the town fall. General Patton was ordered to turn his entire Third Army to the rescue.
His forces were in France, 260 kilometers away. He ordered an immediate mass movement north—three divisions, with 127 tanks of the Fourth Armored Division at the spearhead. One tank commander remembered the order coming at 8:30 at night. “Be ready to move,” he was told.
They went all night and all day over snowy, icy roads, in bitter wind. The last night was under total blackout. The tanks had only tiny cat’s-eye lights in the rear to follow. The lead tank had nothing to follow but the road ahead.
They made the 161-mile approach march in under 24 hours. It was the greatest armored movement of men in the shortest period of time in military history. Every tank made it. But by the time they arrived, the Germans had already surrounded Bastogne.
The Americans in the city were trapped—and so were countless others like John Marshall, still trying to find his way back to friendly lines. Marshall and his crew kept moving, hoping to find their platoon or anybody. As they advanced, they saw two German officers come out from between the buildings, walking militarily down the road. His commander said, “Get ’em.
” But Marshall hesitated. “They weren’t bothering anybody,” he thought. He should have known better. He should have done what he was told.
The two officers made a sharp military left turn and disappeared between a barn and a house, turning like it was on a signal. At the end of that street sat a tank. The moment they turned, it fired at Marshall’s Sherman. The shell just missed, going over the tank.
Marshall’s driver made a hard left and drove down the lane. Ahead, they saw a German soldier surrendering—he looked like a kid. Marshall knew something was wrong. As they moved forward, the two officers jumped up with a Panzerfaust and fired at them.
The Panzerfaust was one of the deadliest anti-tank weapons of the war—a 140-millimeter rocket that could penetrate 200 millimeters of armor. The shot missed the tank. Marshall didn’t need orders. He pressed the solenoid to fire his machine gun, but all he heard was a sickening click.
“Spencer, the 30-caliber is jammed! ” he shouted. The Germans were just starting to get up. Spencer yelled back, “75 millimeter loaded.
All you have to do is turn your heel and press that solenoid. ” Marshall let it go. The shell hit right into them. The odd part was that the kid was still standing with his hands in the air, holding up his stubs.
Then they moved on. Marshall and his crew dodged the Germans for days and eventually made it back to Allied lines. By December 22nd, the German push toward the Meuse had slowed dramatically. The narrow forest roads of the Ardennes were a nightmare for tanks.
“The open field is typical landscape for tanks, but the Ardennes were poison for tanks,” one German tanker recalled. “It was catastrophic because of all the closed forest paths. Our tanks couldn’t maneuver. ”
One Panther crew was hit by an American anti-tank gun.
The first shell disabled the track, and the tank spun in a circle until it stood at an angle facing the gun. The Americans were firing phosphorus grenades—incendiary rounds used for smoke screens or marking targets, not usually effective against heavy armor. But the crew counted 22 hits on their tank. “It’s not very enjoyable,” one of them said.
“The only feeling you have is, am I going to survive this? ” Finally, the 22nd hit struck where the fuel canisters were stored. The tank caught fire, and only then—because the rule was that you could only abandon a tank when it was on fire—were they allowed to get out. They barely made it.
By the evening of December 22nd, the German advance to the Meuse had almost completely halted. Panzer columns clogged the roads, and many tanks were running out of fuel. The Germans turned their attention back to Bastogne. But the Americans in the encircled town were getting help.
Patton’s Fourth Armored Division was pushing north to break the blockade. Lieutenant Colonel Abrams led Combat Command B toward Bastogne. They reached a river where the bridge had been blown. The river was cold and raging—there was no way the tanks could cross.
They stopped and set up a defensive line, firing at the enemy across the river while the engineers worked under the cover of darkness to build a bridge. Once it was in, the tanks started crossing one by one. They prepared to rest for the night, but word came down: keep moving. Patton wanted them to push forward.
By first light, they reached the outskirts of a village called Chaumont. Suddenly, out of nowhere, came a shot. Three jeeps from the 25th Cavalry were hit. Abrams stopped his force.
The enemy must be down there in strength. He needed a planned operation. He devised a pincer movement, splitting his force into three units. C Company would attack from the west, A Company from the ridge east of the village, and with his flanks protected, Abrams would drive B Company straight down the main road into the center of Chaumont.
“If I were at Fort Knox taking a tactics course, I probably would have gotten an A,” Abrams later said. “But in combat, there were imponderables. ”
C Company reported that five tanks were completely bogged down—the ground was supposed to be frozen, but it wasn’t. Abrams knew C Company was no help.
B Company advanced down the town, hitting some resistance, but it wasn’t major. Then, “at that point, the heavens opened up and all hell broke loose. ” They were hit all at once by direct fire. B Company was downtown, and you couldn’t turn in town.
They were completely vulnerable. Abrams ordered his driver to start backing up, blind. He turned the turret so he could see the road and direct the driver. That meant the back of the turret was facing the enemy—highly vulnerable.
He began to breathe easier when they seemed to be getting out of range. Then he heard a loud, screeching, horrible sound for just an instant, and the tank was pushed forward as though something huge had hit it. A 128-millimeter shell from a Jagdtiger, the most lethal tank killer in the German arsenal—a 71-ton armored beast with a cannon that could tear open a Sherman from over three kilometers away—had hit the turret. It should have breezed through it like a hot knife through butter, but it must have hit the gun at an angle and ricocheted off.
Abrams told his driver to keep going. As they moved back, he saw daylight through a crack in the turret. Something had definitely hit them. When they finally pulled out of range, he asked himself why they were still alive.
He looked at the turret and saw an object next to the antenna well—an appendage that must have deflected the shell. “It was an absolute miracle that I survived that battle,” he said. At the Battle of Chaumont, Combat Command B lost 18 tanks and most of their crews. The Germans and their deadly Jagdtigers had stalled Abrams’s drive to Bastogne.
Twelve kilometers to the southeast, tanks of the Combat Command Reserve moved toward the town of Bigonville. Their mission was to take the heavily defended town and protect the flank of the units advancing on Bastogne. On the way, they encountered a German patrol, including a captured American Sherman tank with its stars painted over and German crosses painted on. The tanker pulled his own tank up behind a railroad track, his hull hidden in defilade.
He adjusted his gun carefully, firing over the track. The first shot hit the rail. He pushed up a little more, fired again—hit the second rail. He pushed up further, got beyond the track, and put a shell into the Sherman and one into each of the German self-propelled guns.
The patrol was eliminated. Captain Leech led B Company into Bigonville. Every village approach was a recon by fire—the bow gun shooting one direction, the coaxial machine gun shooting another. They fought with hatches open so they could see targets quickly, exposing themselves to enemy fire in return.
It was dangerous. Many tank commanders were wounded. Moments after entering the town, Leech was hit. A bullet cut through his helmet, hit his head, and knocked him out.
He fell into the turret floor. His crew joked, “Captain, get your butt back in the turret. You got work to do. ” He did have work to do.
In 16 hours, the Combat Command Reserve took Bigonville. On December 24th, Patton ordered them to join the main attack toward Bastogne. They spent Christmas Day moving west. On December 26th, 1944, the tanks of the Combat Command Reserve prepared to launch one of the most daring armored charges in the history of tank warfare.
Bastogne had been under siege for five days. Lieutenant Charles Boggess led eight Sherman tanks into the heavily defended town of Assenois. Abrams left him in position and said, “I’m going to run our C Company through you straight ahead and go to Assenois and try to link up with the 101st Airborne to make that final breakthrough into Bastogne. ” Boggess led the attack with an armored infantry company, fighting Germans who were trying to mine the road.
German artillery knocked out several halftracks and mortar shells destroyed several vehicles. But Boggess and his men pushed right through the intense fire and advanced down the final stretch of road to Bastogne. A halftrack in the column was destroyed by a German mine. Boggess pushed on with two other tanks and reached the outskirts of the village.
There, he encountered the final line of German defense. He and his wingman fired three rounds into it. The last obstacle on the road to Bastogne was eliminated. Moments later, men of the 101st Airborne emerged from the trees.
Boggess saw what looked like American uniforms and hollered, “Fourth Armored! Come on out! ” Hesitantly, the Americans showed themselves. The siege of Bastogne was broken.
The cost had been steep. In just ten days of combat, the Fourth Armored Division lost over a thousand men killed or wounded, and 28 tanks. But their efforts marked the turning point of the Battle of the Bulge. The weather cleared, and for the next 21 days, American tanks—now supported by airstrikes—forced the Germans out of the Ardennes.
“Once the weather cleared up and the sun was shining, they were able to deploy the artillery and air force and stabbed us in the back,” one German tanker said. “The fighter bombers were dangerous. On one tank, believe it or not, we counted 500 hits from a machine gun. We couldn’t compete with that.
Shortly after Christmas, we barely had any tanks left. At the end of ’44, beginning of ’45, we had no further supply, no further equipment to fight with. ”
The Battle of the Bulge, the largest battle on the Western Front, ended on January 12th, 1945. The casualties were enormous.
More than 90,000 German soldiers were killed, wounded, or captured. Almost 20,000 Americans died, and 50,000 more were wounded—their bloodiest battle of the war. The Americans lost over 320 tanks, but the Germans had gambled and lost even more. They lost over 500 irreplaceable Panzers and would never launch another offensive again.
Looking back, John Marshall said, “I can’t believe I was there. I can’t believe I did what I did. It’s a very strange feeling.
”
Abrams believed the breaking of the siege of Bastogne was the turning point of the Battle of the Bulge—and the Battle of the Bulge was the turning point of the war in Europe.
