- 14 minutes ago
At Lanzerath, Belgium, eighteen Americans from an intelligence platoon found themselves facing a German parachute battalion, and the fight that should have ended in minutes stretched through the entire day. With the tank destroyers gone, no artillery to call, and the armored spearhead waiting behind them, Lieutenant Lyle Bouck ordered his men into foxholes on the wooded ridge and prepared to hold.
This World War II military history story follows one of the most remarkable small-unit stands of the Battle of the Bulge. It explores how a reconnaissance platoon, trained to observe rather than fight, managed to delay a far larger force and why the Germans never fully understood what they were up against. The story also leads to the midnight question in a village café that finally revealed the truth.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, battlefield history, combat narratives, and documentary-style military history, this is a gripping account of courage, confusion, and survival. It is ideal for fans of World War II history, forgotten war stories, and historical narration focused on small-unit action and the Battle of the Bulge.
This World War II military history story follows one of the most remarkable small-unit stands of the Battle of the Bulge. It explores how a reconnaissance platoon, trained to observe rather than fight, managed to delay a far larger force and why the Germans never fully understood what they were up against. The story also leads to the midnight question in a village café that finally revealed the truth.
For listeners who enjoy WW2 stories, battlefield history, combat narratives, and documentary-style military history, this is a gripping account of courage, confusion, and survival. It is ideal for fans of World War II history, forgotten war stories, and historical narration focused on small-unit action and the Battle of the Bulge.
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LearningTranscript
00:00December 16th, 1944. A wooded ridge above the village of Lanzewat in the hills of eastern
00:07Belgium, less than two miles from the German border. A little after first light, a 20-year-old
00:13American lieutenant named Lyle Buch watched the fog lift off the road out of Germany.
00:19Out of it came men. Two long columns, one on each side of the road, walking the way soldiers walk
00:26when nobody has told them to be careful. Rifles slung, machine guns carried on shoulders.
00:32And the uniforms were not ordinary infantry. Buch recognized them. Paratroopers. He kept counting,
00:39and the columns kept coming. The best estimate afterward was about 500 men. A full battalion
00:46of the 9th Parachute Regiment. Buch had 18. He radioed it to regiment. The voice on the other
00:53end didn't believe him. Buch told them he had 20-20 vision, and he was looking at them right now.
01:00Hold that picture, because everything that follows depends on it.
01:04500 soldiers on a road. 18 in the trees above. Between them, an open slope of snow more than
01:12100 yards long, cut across by a single wire fence. By any military arithmetic you care to use,
01:19this fight should have lasted about as long as it took the Germans to walk up that hill.
01:24It lasted all day. From morning until the light went out of the sky, a battalion of German paratroopers
01:31kept coming at that tree line, and the tree line kept holding. And here's the part that should bother
01:37you. By midnight, those 500 men were still in Lanzadot. They had not advanced a single mile.
01:45Behind them, stalled on the roads, sat the armored spearhead of Hitler's main attack,
01:50waiting for a door that was supposed to have been kicked open before breakfast.
01:55That night, in a cafe on the village street, a German colonel would stand in front of a furious
02:01SS commander and try to explain why. And in the same building, wounded and a prisoner,
02:07Lyle Buch would sit watching a clock on the wall, counting down the minutes to his own birthday.
02:12What that colonel said, and what the SS commander found out when he started asking questions,
02:17is the real answer to how 18 men held 500. Keep that cafe in mind. We're going to end up
02:25inside it.
02:26If you value stories about what American soldiers actually did, told from the record and not from
02:32legend, hit like and subscribe. It helps the stories of GIs like these reach the people looking for them.
02:39To understand how this was possible, you first have to understand that the 18 men on that ridge
02:45were never supposed to be fighting anybody. They were the intelligence and reconnaissance platoon
02:50of the 394th Infantry Regiment, 99th Infantry Division. Their job was to watch, patrol, and report.
02:59Many of them had come out of the Army Specialized Training Program,
03:02the college program the Army had stripped to fill its infantry divisions. The Regimental Intelligence
03:08Officer, Major Robert Kriz, picked them because they were bright and fit.
03:14Buch said it plainly years later,
03:16we weren't trained to occupy a defensive position in the front lines.
03:21Buch himself had joined the Missouri National Guard at 14
03:25because his family needed the drill pay. Before he ever saw Europe, he spent a year at Fort Benning
03:31teaching officer candidates one subject—small unit defensive tactics.
03:38On December 10th, the regimental commander, Colonel Don Riley, sent the whole platoon forward to the
03:44wooded high ground northwest of Lanzarote to watch the regiment's open right flank.
03:50Now here is something Buch did not know, and I want you to file it away, because it comes back
03:55at the
03:55worst possible moment. His hill sat almost exactly on the boundary between two American corps,
04:03V Corps to the north, V Corps to the south, the edge of everybody's map. And the valley in front
04:11of him
04:11was the Losheim Gap, the same corridor German armies had used to drive into Belgium in 1940.
04:17The platoon found a line of foxholes along the edge of the trees,
04:21dug by an American unit that had been there before them. For five days, Buch kept his men working on
04:28them—deeper, wider, roofed over with pine logs—cold, hard, boring labor—on a quiet front where nothing
04:37ever seemed to happen. Buch later called it probably the luckiest and wisest thing they did.
04:43You'll see why in a few minutes. They had rifles—Browning automatic rifles,
04:49one light machine gun, and plenty of grenades. And they had one thing an intelligence platoon had
04:55no business owning—a jeep with a .50 caliber machine gun on it. Buch got it from ordnance
05:01men he knew, who told him not to worry about where it came from. He dug it in at the
05:06edge of the woods.
05:07Two hundred yards below them, in the village itself, sat a section of tank destroyers from
05:12the 14th Cavalry Group. On paper, that was the muscle at Lanzavet. At 5.30 on the morning of
05:20December 16th, the eastern sky lit up. Along roughly 80 miles of front, German guns opened fire at once.
05:28On the ridge, shells burst in the treetops and sent splinters whipping down through the pines.
05:35The men lay in the bottoms of their holes under those log roofs and waited. The telephone wire,
05:41back to regiment, went dead. The barrage went on for well over an hour. Then, just as suddenly,
05:48it stopped. In the silence, the first sound Buch heard was engines—American engines. The tank
05:56destroyers in the village were pulling out. Within minutes, the 18 men on that ridge were the only
06:01American soldiers between a German parachute division and the open flank of their own regiment.
06:07And Buch was about to walk down into that emptying village, climb the stairs of a house,
06:13and find a civilian standing at a telephone. One of his sergeants raised his rifle.
06:20What Buch told him in the next second says everything about the officer who was about to hold that ridge.
06:25Don't shoot him, Slape. That was the order. The sergeant was William Slape, the man Buch had
06:31picked as his platoon sergeant because he carried himself like a regular army soldier.
06:36The civilian at the telephone was unarmed. He might have been calling a neighbor. He might have
06:41been calling the Germans. There was no way to know. Buch judged that shooting an unarmed man would be
06:47cold-blooded murder, and he sent him away. Notice what kind of decision that was. It wasn't dramatic.
06:55It was careful. A 20-year-old officer under pressure, refusing to do the easy thing.
07:01Hold on to that. Because over the next 12 hours, the fight for this ridge would turn on careful
07:06decisions made by exhausted Americans, and on careless ones made by the men coming up the road.
07:12Buch had come down into Lanzarath on orders. When the tank destroyers left, he had reported it by radio.
07:18The telephone line was gone, but the radio still worked. The answer came back. Hold your position,
07:25and send a patrol into the village to see what's coming. He went himself.
07:30With him was Private First Class William Tsakonikas. Tsak to everyone. A scout and jeep driver Buch had
07:38wanted in the platoon precisely because he was aggressive. From an upstairs window, the two of them
07:44watched the fog lift off the road from Germany and saw the column come out of it. Here is what
07:51made
07:51Buch's stomach drop. If that column turned north at the crossroads in Lanzarath, it would march past
07:58the foot of his ridge and straight into the open flank of the 394th Infantry. Now step back and look
08:06at
08:06the whole board. Because Buch couldn't. What he was watching was the opening move of the biggest
08:12German offensive in the West since 1940. The 6th Panzer Army had a timetable. One day to break
08:20through the American line. One day to cross the high moorland behind it. And by the evening of the
08:26third day, the Meuse River. The paratroopers in that column were the battering ram. Their job was to
08:33clear the road. Waiting behind them, still inside Germany, was the armored spearhead of the entire
08:39attack. A battle group of the 1st SS Panzer Division under a 29-year-old officer named Joachim Piper.
08:47His assigned route was so narrow and winding that Piper had said beforehand it was fit for bicycles,
08:53not tanks. He couldn't go anywhere until the infantry opened the door. Every hour those paratroopers lost
09:01was an hour Piper's tanks sat on that road. Buch didn't know any of that. All he had was the
09:07column. He left two men in the house as an observation post, Sergeant Slape and Private
09:13John Kreger, and hurried back up the ridge with Tsak. The rest of the platoon expected to pull back.
09:20That would have been the natural thing. An intelligence platoon had spotted the enemy and reported it.
09:25Job done. Buch ordered them into their foxholes. Then he called regiment and asked for artillery on
09:33the column. And here is the first time that boundary I asked you to remember comes back to bite.
09:38There was no artillery. Every gun in the division had targets of its own that morning, inside the
09:44division's own lines. Buch's hill sat on the edge of everybody's map. The 18 men on it would fight with
09:51what they had carried up the hill. Down in the village, things were already going wrong.
09:56German soldiers came into the house below Slape and Kreger. Slape was trapped on the second floor
10:02with the enemy on the floor beneath him. He fired down at them, got out the back door, and made
10:07it
10:07back up the ridge. Kreger got out by a more direct route. On his way back, according to the platoon's
10:13account, he ran into a German platoon and killed or wounded most of it. Buch had sent three more men
10:20down to
10:20reach that house. Jordan Robinson, a little older than the rest, whom they called Pop, along with
10:26Aubrey McGeehy and James Silvola. They never got there. They ran into Germans, fought, and were captured.
10:34Buch had started the morning with 18 men. Before the first real attack, he was down to 15. Then, the
10:42column
10:42did what he'd feared. It turned north onto the road below the ridge. Buch let the lead element walk past.
10:50He wanted the main body. And the main body obliged. It halted on the road almost directly beneath his
10:56guns. In the middle of it, he could see three men standing together, one of them clearly in charge.
11:04Every weapon on that ridge could reach them. One volley, and the battalion would lose its head
11:09before it ever knew it was in a fight. Buch waited for the right second. Then, a door opened in
11:16a house
11:16by the road, and a teenage girl ran out. She went straight to the group of officers, spoke to them,
11:22and pointed toward the ridge. The Germans threw themselves into the roadside ditches. The Americans,
11:29sure they'd been given away, opened fire and wounded several men. But the moment had passed.
11:35The ambush that might have decapitated a battalion was gone, and the fight for Landsevat had begun on
11:41German terms. For the rest of his life, Buch believed that girl had told the Germans exactly where his men
11:48were.
11:49Sixty-two years later, a writer found her and asked her.
11:53Her answer is one of the strangest footnotes of the whole battle. And when you hear it,
11:59it will tell you something about that mourning that nobody on the ridge understood at the time.
12:05But first, the Germans in the ditches made a decision. Their commander now knew there was
12:11something in those trees. He didn't send scouts around the flank, and he didn't probe the woods.
12:17He sent his men straight up the open slope, through the snow, toward a fence. Why would anyone order that?
12:26The answer lies in who those paratroopers really were, and it isn't what their uniforms suggested.
12:32Why would a German commander send his men straight up an open slope, into guns he couldn't see?
12:39To answer that, you have to know what a German paratrooper actually was by December of 1944.
12:45The name still carried weight. In 1940 and 1941, the Fallschirmjäger had been the elite of the German
12:54armed forces, and Allied soldiers had learned to respect them. But the 3rd Parachute Division that
13:00came out of the fog at Landsevat was a different outfit. The original had been ground down in Normandy
13:07that summer, first around St. Lowe in July, and then in the Falaise pocket in August. Most of its jump
13:14trained veterans were dead or behind barbed wire. It had been refilled with whatever the Luftwaffe
13:20could spare. By late 1944, that meant men from airfields that had more ground crew than aircraft.
13:28Here is one of them. Johannes Richter spent nearly 10 years in a Luftwaffe airfield company, doing supply,
13:36maintenance, and guard duty, and worked his way up to senior sergeant. In September 1944,
13:44he was sent to parachute school. The course lasted six weeks, and he never made a jump.
13:50By November, he was in the 3rd Parachute Division, leading a platoon of infantry. Think about what that
13:57means. A man who had spent a decade guarding hangars was now expected to lead 30 soldiers across a
14:04snowfield toward a tree line in the Ardennes. His uniform said paratrooper. His experience said airfield.
14:13The man commanding the 9th Parachute Regiment, Colonel von Hoffmann, wasn't a career infantry officer
14:19either. He had come from the Luftwaffe General Staff in Berlin. Brave men? Many of them, certainly.
14:27Experienced infantry? Almost none. And when green infantry takes fire from a position it can't see,
14:34it tends to do one thing. It goes straight at it. From the ridge, the first attack began almost quietly.
14:43Buch later described it as a line of German skirmishers walking up the hill. Walking. Now look at what
14:51they were walking into. The slope rose gently for more than 100 yards, open and white. Part way up,
14:59a wire fence ran across it. Fresh snow lay over the foxholes at the edge of the trees, so from
15:06below,
15:06the tree line looked empty. And every automatic weapon on the ridge had been sighted on that fence.
15:13This was the subject Buch had spent a year teaching at Fort Benning. Interlocking fields of fire.
15:21Find the ground where the enemy has to slow down, and make sure every gun you have can reach it.
15:27A fence in snow is that kind of ground, because a man has to stop to climb it.
15:33The platoon waited until the Germans reached the wire. Then the whole tree line opened up.
15:40Slape was firing. Private First Class Risto Milosevic, from Los Angeles, was on the light
15:46machine gun. Germans caught on the fence went down where they stood. Others threw themselves into the
15:51snow and tried to crawl. Years later, Slape still called that slope the most beautiful fields of fire.
15:59There was one more American officer on the ridge now. Lieutenant Warren Springer, a forward observer
16:05from the 371st Field Artillery Battalion, had been in the village with three of his men when the tank
16:11destroyers left. Sergeant Peter Gacky, Technician Willard Wibben, and Technician Billy Queen. They came up
16:19and joined the platoon. Springer tried to call down fire on the slope. Then his jeep was hit and his
16:26radio
16:26destroyed. Whatever artillery he might have brought down on that field was gone in the first minutes.
16:32It didn't matter. As Bouk remembered it, the first attack was over in eight to ten minutes.
16:39One American was hit. Private Joseph McConnell took a bullet in the shoulder.
16:44Stop on that for a moment, because it's the first real clue in this whole story. A battalion of about
16:49500
16:50had been thrown back by fifteen riflemen and four artillerymen, at a cost of one wounded American.
16:57Now put yourself at the bottom of that slope. What had the Germans actually seen?
17:02Muzzle flashes in a tree line? Fire from at least two machine guns? Their own dead hanging on the wire?
17:10Not one American face? Ask yourself what an inexperienced officer concludes from that.
17:17It isn't a platoon. It's something much bigger. Keep that in mind, because it's half the answer to the whole
17:24day.
17:25And somewhere behind the village, a long way back on that narrow road, Joachim Piper was waiting.
17:32His orders were to move once the infantry had broken through. The morning passed and the word didn't come.
17:39It wouldn't come until four in the afternoon. On the ridge, the men reloaded. Springer's artillerymen,
17:47with no radio left to work, crawled between the holes, refilling magazines.
17:52Buch counted ammunition. There was enough for now. But it was enough for a reconnaissance platoon,
17:58not for a siege. And the Germans hadn't left. They were in the ditches and the houses below,
18:05regrouping. Around 11 o'clock they came again, and this time with mortars behind them. In the middle of
18:12that second attack, a rifle grenade hit one of Buch's men square in the face. What happened in the next
18:18half second is the kind of thing no training manual can account for. And within the hour, Buch would get
18:24on the radio and hear the three words that would decide the rest of the day. The grenade hit Private
18:30Louis Khalil in the face. And it didn't go off. A rifle grenade is built to explode on impact.
18:38This one struck a man in the head and simply failed. Khalil was badly hurt, and he would carry that
18:44wound
18:45into captivity. But he was alive, and he was the only American hit in the entire second attack.
18:51That attack came in heavier than the first. Mortar rounds walk through the tree line. More men came up the
18:57slope, and they came harder. Molosevich left the light machine gun for the .50 caliber on the dug-in
19:04jeep, and fired it until enemy fire drove him back into his hole. At another point in the fight,
19:10Tsakonikas climbed out of his foxhole and took the same exposed gun. Remember where Buch had put that
19:15jeep? At the edge of the woods, where it could reach the ground to the south, the way German reinforcements
19:21had to come up from the village. Every time the Germans gathered for a rush, that gun found them.
19:27This was also the moment the pine logs paid for themselves. Mortar rounds burst in the treetops and
19:33on the roofs of the holes, and the men underneath came through. Those five days of cold, boring labor
19:40that nobody had wanted to do were now keeping the platoon alive. Not one German got past the wire.
19:49When the slope went quiet again, Buch had his radio operator, technician third grade James Fort,
19:55raise regiment. Buch asked for artillery again, and again the answer was no, other priorities. So he
20:03asked what he was supposed to do without it. The answer was four words, hold at all costs.
20:11Think about what that order meant from where Buch sat. Nobody above him had planned a defense at
20:16Lanserat. The plan had been two tank destroyers, and they were gone. A headquarters that couldn't send
20:22a single shell had just told 15 men to stop a battalion with rifles, a few machine guns, and whatever
20:29ammunition they'd carried up the hill. Why couldn't anyone help? Step back and look at the whole front
20:35that morning. Along the entire line of the 99th Infantry Division, German infantry was attacking.
20:42A short way up the road, at Los Heimagaben, the 394th's own 1st Battalion was fighting the 12th
20:49Volksgrenadier Division. Every battery in the division had calls for fire coming in from inside
20:55the division's own lines, and the division answered those first. And Buch's Hill wasn't inside anybody's
21:02lines. Remember the boundary I asked you to file away back at the start? Here it is in full.
21:09The Germans had found the seam between two American corps, and the only thing standing in that seam was
21:15an intelligence platoon that no one higher up was responsible for. Then, late in the morning,
21:21something strange happened. A white flag went up at the bottom of the slope. It was German medics. They
21:29called up to the tree line asking to collect their wounded. Buch let them. The firing stopped. For a
21:36little while, the war on that hillside simply paused. Men in German uniforms walked up the snowfield,
21:42past the bodies at the wire, and loaded the wounded onto stretchers well within range of rifles that had
21:48been killing their comrades all morning. Nobody fired. But as the Americans watched, something started to
21:55bother them. The medics seemed to be paying a lot of attention to the tree line. Some of the men
22:02became
22:02convinced they were noting positions and passing them back. Whatever the truth was, that ended the truce.
22:10Here's something to carry with you. If those medics really were studying the American line from up
22:15close, at the wire, then what the German command believed about these woods that night is even harder
22:22to explain. We'll get there. Down in the village, Colonel Von Hoffman's picture of the fight was
22:29taking shape. Two attacks broken. Dead men on the wire. Machine guns, a heavy one among them, firing from
22:38positions nobody could see. He reported stiff resistance. In his mind, and in what went up the chain,
22:45the woods above Lanzarote held a great deal more than a platoon. Notice how that belief was built.
22:52It wasn't built from anyone's direct look at the American line. It was built from losses, noise, and
23:00reports. That word, reports, turns out to be the key to the whole day. Meanwhile, the men on the ridge
23:09had a
23:09problem that no amount of courage could fix. An intelligence platoon carries enough ammunition for a skirmish.
23:16These men had now beaten off two assaults by a battalion. The belts were getting shorter, and the
23:23magazines Springer's artillerymen were refilling were coming from a pile that was no longer growing.
23:28They had held through the morning. The afternoon would be different.
23:34When the third attack came, the Germans got close enough that Americans climbed out of their holes
23:39to fight them hand to hand. Welosevich would look down the slope and see a German medic kneeling over
23:44a soldier who was clearly already dead. And he would notice something on that medic's belt.
23:50And one of the four artillerymen who had come up the hill that morning,
23:53a 24-year-old from the hills of West Virginia, was standing beside a foxhole when the shooting started.
23:59His name was Billy Queen. Technician 5th grade, Charlie Battery, 371st Field Artillery Battalion.
24:07Born in Wayne County, West Virginia, in November of 1920. He had come up that ridge in the morning
24:14to call down artillery for somebody else's fight. When his lieutenant's radio was destroyed,
24:20he stayed and filled rifle magazines for men he had barely met.
24:25The third attack came in the afternoon, and it came closer than anything before it.
24:31This time, the Germans didn't stop at the wire. Some of them got through and into the edge of the
24:36trees, and the Americans climbed out of their holes to meet them at a distance where there's no such
24:41thing as aiming. For a few minutes, the fight on Lanzarote Ridge stopped being a defense and became a brawl.
24:50Queen was standing beside Joseph McConnell's dugout when he cried out and went down. Stomach wound.
24:57McConnell, with a bullet already in his own shoulder from the morning, had nothing to treat him with.
25:03No bandages, no morphine, no medic.
25:06Billy Queen lost consciousness and died within the hour. He was 24. He would be the only American
25:13killed on that ridge all day. Down the slope, Milosevic saw something that made him go cold.
25:20A German medic was kneeling over a soldier who, as far as Milosevic could tell, was already dead.
25:27There was nothing to treat. Then Milosevic saw a pistol on the man's belt.
25:33After the white flag that morning, after the feeling that the medics had been studying the tree line,
25:39he made up his mind. He decided this man was spotting the American positions for the German mortars.
25:45And he shot him. Was he right? Nobody can say for certain. But think about what eight hours of this
25:55had done to these men. In the morning, they had let German medics walk up to the wire.
26:00By afternoon, they no longer trusted a red cross. Then the third attack broke, the same way the first
26:09two had. At ten minutes to four, James Fort tried to send Regiment an update on the Jeep radio.
26:16He couldn't get through.
26:18The Germans were playing martial music over the voice channel, a band blaring into the frequency
26:24to jam it. So Fort switched to a side channel and sent his report in Morse code, a letter at
26:30a time,
26:31hoping nobody on the other side was listening. The platoon was still holding. He estimated about 75
26:37Germans in that last assault. Look closely at that number, because it shows you the strange shape
26:43of this whole day. On the ridge, the Americans could see the men coming at them and counted dozens.
26:50At the bottom of the hill, the Germans couldn't see a single American, and they were sure they faced far
26:56more than 15. Both sides were guessing. Only one side's guess was paralyzing it.
27:03And just as Fort was tapping out that message, about four in the afternoon, a long way back on the
27:08road
27:09from Germany, Joachim Piper finally got the order he had waited for since dawn. Move. He had been sitting
27:17since the barrage, waiting for word that the infantry had broken through. The word never came, so the
27:22order came anyway. And when Piper tried to move, he found the roads packed with everything the infantry
27:28divisions owned. Men on foot, horse-drawn guns, wagons and trucks, all crammed onto narrow forest lanes.
27:37His column had to crawl forward in single file. A railway bridge on his route had been blown in the
27:43German retreat three months earlier and never repaired, so his engineers had to find a detour and
27:49build a temporary crossing. Piper's order to his men was to push through fast and ruthlessly shove
27:55aside anything in the road. Now look at the calendar, because it matters. The 6th Panzer Army had given itself
28:03one day to break through. That day was ending, and its sharpest weapon was still on the German
28:09side of the line. Lanzovat wasn't the only place things had gone wrong that day, but it was the door
28:16Piper
28:16would end up going through, and that door was still shut. On the ridge, the light was starting to go.
28:22Ammunition had moved from a concern to a crisis. Milosevic's machine gun had jammed. He kept firing
28:30with his rifle, and when the rifle ammunition ran thin, he pulled cartridges out of the belts for the
28:35useless machine gun and loaded them by hand. All along the line, men were counting rounds in single digits.
28:43Buch made his decision. They would hold until dark, and then, with what they had left, they would slip back
28:49into the forest. He had his men pull the distributor caps from the jeeps so the Germans couldn't drive
28:55them away. Then he sent two men, Corporal Samuel Jenkins and Corporal Robert Preston, back toward
29:01regimental headquarters to find Major Kriz and bring back orders, or help. Neither of them made it. Both
29:09were captured on the way. Buch was on the radio, trying one more time to reach the regiment, when a
29:14German sniper put a bullet through the set in his hands. A second round took out the radio in the
29:20jeep. From that moment on, the button on Lanzavatt Ridge was completely alone. And there is one more
29:27thing Buch didn't know. All day, the Germans had come at him from the front, up the slope, toward the
29:33wire, into the guns he had laid out exactly as he used to teach it. But now, as the light
29:40failed,
29:40about 50 more German soldiers were moving through the woods toward the platoon's flank.
29:46They weren't paratroopers. They came from a different division, and they were coming from
29:51the one direction nobody on that ridge had been watching all day. On the German side, someone had
29:56seen the obvious hours earlier. A sergeant named Vince Kuhlbach had spent the afternoon asking for
30:03permission to do what any experienced infantrymen would have tried first, stop climbing that slope into
30:08the guns, and go around. He had to plead for it. Remember that detail. All day on the ridge,
30:16an American lieutenant had been making his own decisions with no one above him to ask.
30:21At the bottom of the hill, a German sergeant with the right idea had to beg for the chance to
30:26use it.
30:27By the time permission came, it was dusk. About 50 men from Fusilier Regiment 27,
30:33part of the 12th Volksgrenadier Division, moved into the woods and came at the platoon from the side.
30:40In the half-light under the pines, they couldn't see the foxholes any better than the paratroopers had
30:45from the field. But they were no longer walking into a killing zone laid out along a fence. They were
30:51walking along the line of holes, from one end to the other. The platoon had one surprise left. Earlier,
30:57the men had rigged grenades on wires in the woods. Some of the attackers walked into them and died there.
31:03It slowed the Germans down, but it couldn't stop them. What came next took only minutes, and it went hole
31:10by hole.
31:12A German would reach a foxhole and fire down into it, or shout for the men inside to come out.
31:18One position fell, then the next. Milosevic, who had held his ground with a jammed machine gun and hand-loaded
31:26cartridges, finally ran out of ammunition entirely. He was taken in his foxhole.
31:32In Buk's hole, Sakonikus was getting ready to make a break for the trees when a burst of automatic
31:37fire caught him in the right side of the face. He collapsed against Buk, bleeding badly, and passed out.
31:44Buk was sure he was dead. He kept holding him anyway, and he said a prayer over the man he
31:49had
31:49picked for this platoon, because he was the most aggressive soldier he knew.
31:53Then the muzzle of a German weapon came over the edge of the hole. A German officer hauled Buk out
31:59of the foxhole and pressed a machine pistol into his stomach. He pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
32:05The weapon didn't fire. In the confusion, shots were still cracking through the trees,
32:11and both Buk and the German were hit. Buk took a round in the calf. Then Sergeant Kuhlbach was standing
32:18over him, asking a simple question. Who is in command here? Buk said he was. Kuhlbach asked why the
32:26Americans were still shooting. Buk told him it wasn't his men. He was telling the truth. There was no one
32:33left on the ridge to shoot. The fight for Lanzavatt was over. Stop and look at what was actually lying
32:40on that hill in the dark. One American was dead, Billy Queen, beside McConnell's dugout.
32:47Of the 18 men in the platoon, 14 were wounded. Three had been captured that morning, two more on the
32:54way
32:54a regiment, and the rest at dusk, along with Springer's surviving artillerymen. A battalion of German
33:01paratroopers, with infantry help from another division, had spent the entire first day of
33:06Hitler's great offensive taking one wooded hill from a reconnaissance platoon. And now the Germans had
33:12something they hadn't had all day. The defenders in their hands. They could count them. They could look
33:19at the uniforms, the wounds, the empty magazines, the jeeps with their distributor caps missing.
33:25Any soldier who walked along that line of foxholes could see how few holes there were.
33:31So here's the question that should bother you as much as it bothered Joachim Piper a few hours later.
33:37With the ridge taken and the road north open, what did the German paratroopers do?
33:43They stayed in Lanzavatt. They didn't push north through the dark toward the open flank of the 394th.
33:51They didn't send patrols into the forest beyond the ridge. As night fell, the battalion settled
33:57into the village and began taking up defensive positions for the night, as if the real danger
34:01were still out there in the trees. Somewhere in the German chain of command, the conviction that the
34:07woods above Lanzavatt were full of Americans had outlived the Americans who were actually in them.
34:13Fifteen exhausted men had been led down the hill as prisoners, and still nobody went to look at what
34:18was behind them. The prisoners were marched down the slope they had defended all day, past the wire,
34:24past the bodies the medics hadn't reached, and into the village. Sacanicas was alive after all,
34:30but so badly wounded he couldn't speak. Buch, limping on his wounded leg, was taken into a building on the
34:37main street the Germans were using as a command post. It was a café called Café Schultzen.
34:43There was a clock on the wall. Lyle Buch was born on December 17th. In a few hours, if he
34:50lived that
34:50long, he would turn 21. Years before, his Aunt Mildred had read his palm and told him something he had
34:57never quite managed to forget. If he lived past his 21st birthday, he would have a long life.
35:04Now he sat under that clock as a prisoner, and watched the hands move toward midnight. And as the
35:10hands crept up on 12, engines sounded in the street outside. Heavy ones. German ones.
35:19The man who climbed out of the lead vehicle and walked into that café was about to ask the
35:24paratroopers officers the one question nobody had asked all day. Their answer is the real reason 500
35:31men spent a whole day on that hill. Joachim Piper had not had a good evening. His lead vehicles reached
35:39Losheim at half past seven. The direct road west through Losheimegraben was still blocked because the
35:4612th Volksgrenadier Division hadn't broken through there either. So Piper was sent the other way,
35:53south and then west, through Lanzarote, the door the paratroopers were supposed to have opened that
35:59morning. The road there was mined. Some of the mines were American. Some had been laid by Germans
36:06during the retreat that autumn, and nobody had cleared them. Piper lost tanks and other armored
36:12vehicles on that stretch of road without seeing a single enemy soldier. By the time his column rolled
36:18into Lanzarote, it was close to midnight. He had expected to be miles to the west by then. Instead,
36:26he found the 9th Parachute Regiment settling in for the night. He went into Café Schotzen and demanded an
36:33explanation. Colonel von Hoffmann gave him one, and it sounded solid. The woods ahead were packed with
36:40American troops. There were tanks. There were fortified positions in mines. Attacking at night
36:47would be madness. The regiment would go forward in daylight. Now watch what Piper did next, because this
36:55is the moment the whole story has been building toward. He didn't argue with the Colonel's conclusion.
37:01He asked where it came from. Who, exactly, had seen these Americans? Von Hoffmann hadn't seen them
37:08himself. The information came from one of his battalion commanders. So Piper asked the battalion
37:15commander. The battalion commander hadn't seen them either. He had it from a captain. So Piper asked the
37:22captain. And the captain admitted that he hadn't personally seen the American positions at all.
37:27It had been, as he put it, reported to him. There it is. That is the answer to the question
37:36in the title. 500 men spent the whole day on that hill because, from the regimental commander down to
37:43the company officer, not one of them had actually looked. The Colonel believed the battalion commander.
37:49The battalion commander believed the captain. The captain believed a report. Somewhere at the bottom
37:57of that chain were men lying in the snow at the wire, who had seen muzzle flashes, felt the fire
38:03of a heavy
38:04machine gun, and watched their friends die. And from that, they had imagined an American battalion.
38:11Every step up the chain, the imagined force got a little bigger and a little more certain.
38:17Piper wrote later, in his own account, At this point, I became very angry.
38:23He demanded a battalion of paratroopers to put under his command, and said he would lead the
38:28breakthrough himself. Now go back through everything you've seen, because the answer has two halves,
38:34and you need both. The first half is American. Buc had picked a position where the enemy had to cross
38:42open ground and stop at a fence. He had made his men roof their holes with logs,
38:48so the barrage and the mortars couldn't kill them. Under that snow, the foxholes were invisible.
38:54He had a heavy machine gun that an intelligence platoon had no right to own. He held his fire
39:00until the wire. He turned down the easy withdrawal when he first saw the column. And after his radio was
39:06shot out of his hands and his ammunition was down to the last rounds, his men were still firing.
39:12Every one of those decisions made fifteen riflemen look like something much larger from the bottom of
39:17the hill. The second half is German. A rebuilt division short of experienced infantry. A regiment
39:25led by a staff officer from Berlin. A sergeant who had to plead for permission to go around.
39:32Medics who walked up to the wire under a white flag. And an officer corps that still never got a
39:37true
39:38picture of what was in those trees. The Americans created the illusion. The German system did the
39:44rest. Because no one in it was willing to walk up the hill and check. How much did it cost
39:50them?
39:51The numbers vary enormously. Some accounts claim four or five hundred German casualties,
39:56and those figures don't hold up. The most careful count by the Dutch historian Hans Valles, who worked
40:03through German records, comes to about ninety-two. Sixteen killed, sixty-three wounded, thirteen missing.
40:10Set that against one American killed. Even the sober number is staggering. And while Piper was
40:17questioning the paratroopers officers, Lyle Buch was in the same building, under the clock on the wall.
40:23He had no idea who the angry SS officer was. He only learned years later that it had been Joachim
40:29Piper.
40:30What he did know was the time. When the clock reached midnight, it was December 17th, 1944,
40:37and Lyle Buch was twenty-one years old. He remembered his Aunt Mildred's promise and thought,
40:43for a moment, that they couldn't get him now. Then the relief gave way to rage. He believed he had
40:50failed.
40:51His platoon was gone. His men were shot up and captured. And the Germans were in the village. It
40:57never occurred to him that the furious officer across the room was furious because of him.
41:03At 4.30 that morning, Piper's column rolled out of Lanzavatt with a battalion of paratroopers riding
41:09on his tanks. They found the woods empty, just as the platoon's prisoners could have told them.
41:15Before dawn, Piper took Honsfeld and opened the road west. He was moving at last, but by the
41:22reckoning of the officers who studied it afterward, he was roughly eighteen hours behind where the plan
41:28said he should be. Eighteen hours. In an offensive that had given itself three days to reach the Meuse,
41:35that was a quarter of the entire timetable lost before the first tank had even driven into Belgium.
41:42What those eighteen hours ended up costing Piper, where his column finally ran out of road, and what
41:48happened to the eighteen men who took them from him, is a story that didn't end in the Ardennes.
41:54For the platoon, it would take another thirty-seven years. Joachim Piper never reached the Meuse.
42:00Once he was through Lanzavatt, he drove hard to the west, and for two days it looked as if the
42:05lost time
42:06might not matter. Then the American defense in front of him began to harden. Bridges blew up in his face.
42:13Engineers, infantry, and tanks closed the roads. By December 19th, his column was stuck around Stoumont
42:20and La Glaise, deep in a valley, with American forces closing in, and his fuel tanks almost empty.
42:27The American fuel depots he had counted on capturing were never his. On Christmas Eve,
42:33at two in the morning, Piper led what was left of his battle group out of La Glaise on foot.
42:40About eight hundred men slipped across the river on a footbridge and walked back toward their own lines.
42:46Behind them, they left their armored vehicles, more than a hundred of them by one count, cold and silent
42:52in the snow. One of their King Tigers still stands in that village today. Lanzavatt didn't stop Piper by
43:01itself. A long chain of American units did that, from Elsenborn Ridge to the bridges of the Amblev.
43:08But the first link in that chain was a wooded hill held by an intelligence platoon.
43:13And the eighteen hours taken there were hours Piper never got back. The men who took them knew none of
43:21this. They were marched east. Buk was packed into a boxcar with more than seventy other prisoners.
43:29Allied aircraft attacked the train. By Christmas, seven men in his car were dead.
43:35He went through camps at Nuremberg and Hamelberg. In March 1945, when a task force from Patton's 4th
43:43Armored Division broke into Hamelberg, Buk went out with it, was wounded again, and was recaptured.
43:50He was liberated about a week before the war ended. He weighed 114 pounds.
43:57Billy Queen stayed on the ridge until American troops took the ground back in 1945. He's buried at
44:05home in Crum, West Virginia. Back in St. Louis, the Army paid Buk's back pay at an enlisted man's rate.
44:11He was so angry he walked away from the career he had planned. He married Lucille Zinser in April 1946,
44:19went to chiropractic college on the GI Bill, and practiced for almost 50 years.
44:25He raised five children. Two of them became Navy pilots.
44:30For two decades, the fight at Lanzarote barely existed on paper. The Army's official history,
44:37published in 1965, mentioned the platoon only in passing, and got its size wrong, calling it 30 men.
44:44It was William Sakonikus, by then William James, the man shot in the face in Buk's foxhole,
44:50who read it and pushed his old lieutenant to fight for recognition.
44:55A silver star finally reached Buk in 1966. His men got nothing. It took books, a newspaper columnist,
45:06congressional hearings, and in December 1979, a law signed by President Carter waiving the time limits.
45:13In October 1981, 37 years after Lanzarote, the platoon was awarded the presidential unit citation.
45:22Buk, Schlape, Milosevic, and Sakonikas received the Distinguished Service Cross.
45:27Every other man was decorated with the silver star or the bronze star for valor.
45:33It became one of the most decorated platoons of the war for a single action.
45:39Fourteen of the eighteen were there to receive their awards.
45:44We were frightened and we were tired, Buk said that year. And it was like a hellish nightmare.
45:51Asked over the years what they had really done, he never made it bigger than it was.
45:57They had defended themselves and tried to live through it. And the girl who ran out into the
46:04road that morning? In 2006, a writer found her and asked her. She said she hadn't known the Americans
46:12were still on the hill. She thought they'd gone, and she had been pointing the way the tank destroyers
46:19had driven off. So the first report the Germans got at Lanzarote was that there were no Americans there.
46:24It was wrong. Every report after it said the woods were full of Americans. That was wrong too.
46:32The whole day was decided not by what was on that hill, but by what men believed was on it.
46:39Lyle Buk died on December 2, 2016, two weeks before his 93rd birthday.
46:46His Aunt Mildred had been right. Once he made it past midnight in that cafe, he got his long life.
46:54So how did 18 Americans hold 500 German paratroopers for an entire day?
47:00They dug in where the enemy had to come to them, held their fire, never let the other side see
47:07how few
47:08they were, and stayed when every instinct said go. 500 men spent all day fighting the battalion they had
47:17imagined. And 15 tired Americans in log-covered holes kept them believing in it until dark.
47:30It's the simplest way to help the story of these GIs reach people who would want to hear it.
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47:52So