A True story about American character lies buried under two feet of snow along the borders of Germany with Belgium and Luxembourg. The “cooled blood” of sacrifice under that snow is our American blood. In January 2017, two of us, friends from Helena, Montana, drove east from Brussels, Belgium to uncover the complex battlefield remembered in the kitchens of our childhood as the Battle of the Bulge, but which the Belgians call the “Rundstedt Offensive,” after German Field Marshal Gerd von Runtsedt, Supreme Commander in the West.

Before our visit we had heard from two veterans of combat in “the Bulge” area. Bob Crowe, a veteran of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division recalled the rat that shared his hole under a barn at the outskirts of Bastogne. “Over there we jumped a lot because our Colonel liked to jump. I had only one combat jump and that was Market Garden. The Colonel got killed but we came through in pretty good shape. The British landed on top of some German divisions and caught hell.” Bob later became one of the many airborne troops to jump after the war with the U.S. Forest Service Parachute Project in Missoula, Montana. Later, as a widower living alone in a walk-up apartment, he spent his post-smokejumper and forester years helping where he might around the old Veterans Hospital in Miles City, Montana. One of his jobs was helping other veterans in and out of their vehicles.

Another veteran of that area was Sergeant Ed Miller of Helena, sent into combat with the 69th Infantry Division at the tail end of the Bulge. Still in winter, he helped continue the advance into Germany. Ed said, “The guys from out here in the west seemed to have better luck taking care of their feet. We worked at it constantly. If you ever lost or gave up on your overshoes you were in real trouble.” At the end of one particular day’s infantry movement, he went back with his Captain to collect weapons and ammunition off the stiffened Bodies of other men from his own platoon. Quite a few had been killed in one clearing, running across under their heavy packs. “As I pried rifles from the other guys frozen hands, I heard organ music as though we were in a church.”

During our visit to the battlefield in 2017, we went into some churches but heard no organ music in them, or in the snow-quieted woods. We did experience humbling respect for the individual American soldier who fought their enemies night and day in a numbing cold. We trudged through the deep snow at temperatures of minus-six to minus-ten Centigrade, or about fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, slightly warmer than the cold winter of 1944. With the wind and moisture and knee-deep snow in many places, we felt cold even with knit caps pulled down over our ears, thermal underwear, layered sweaters and for one of us, a Harris Tweed wool coat long enough to sweep the snow banks. In Bastogne’s Jacques Woods, looking down on the exposed foxholes till evident and shaded by tall pine trees, we walked fast to keep warm. After eight decades it’s still impressive that Bulge veterans performed even simple acts in bitter cold. They fed ammunition into machine guns, pushed loaded clips don into their M-1 rifles, climbed up onto the unforgiving iron protrusions of bone-freezing armor vehicle, or sat quiet, still and cold in a darkened two-man foxholes with no warming fire.

In the best of weather, the terrain seemed confusing and full of surprises for us as strangers, especially when gray clouds blocked the sun. From two Belgians accompanying us at different times, we sensed the human social terrain as no walk in the park either.

The first Belgian owned the three-story bed and breakfast we stayed at in Stavelot. He and his wife had refurbished a mansion. He complained that it cost him 7,000 Euros to repair the first floor lobby damaged by an American combat engineer back in December 1944. The soldier sprayed the floor and wall with bullets from his Thompson submachine gun to convince the woman who owned the house to let his unit establish a defensive position. The same Belgian remembers his mother refusing to ever shop in near-by Malmedy, because, she said, “Boche lived there.” Boche is an unflattering term, carried forward from the tragedy of World War I, used by French speakers to label Germans, of any political persuasion.

The second Belgian was Henri Mignon, a retired Belgian Army officer and guide, who took us around the Bastogne area for three days. Henri grew up on his family’s farm near Houffalize, an hour north of Bastogne, in a sector occupied by the Germans for most of the battle. We heard his story as a boy of ten with seven sibling helping their parents on the farm, trading eggs for German food and money, living at ease with the relatively benign German regular army occupiers, but facing artillery rounds and bombs.

One day in February 1944, Mignon’s father, a forester, was wounded when a B-24 crashed where he was working. In January 1945, while he had not yet completely recovered, he ventured outside their farmhouse to gather snow to melt for water since the well was not working. This was a common practice. As the father stepped out he was mortally wounded by a stray artillery round. He managed to make it back into the house to say goodbye to each of the children before dying, and his body was taken to the basement while the fighting went on around the town. While the family was in the cellar, the Germans came by to see if any Americans were hiding in the house. Later the American soldiers of the 2nd Armored Division passed through. After the German retreated east, the Americans set up camp in Houffalize, where young Henri Mignon was sent to live with his uncle. The now-fatherless brothers and sisters were farmed out. Fortunately, the Americans opened the canteen to all the orphaned Belgian children like the Mignons, who now at least had food.

We often heard about the Americans being forced to bomb or shell crossroad villages occupied by the Germans, forcing the Germans out, but destroying the villages in the process and driving the civilians into cellars. The Belgians, including Henri, never blamed the American, their liberators, only the cruelty of war that necessitated such tactics.

Traveling around Bastogne, we could feel Henri’s sadness and appreciate the Belgians’ suffering. Their’s is a country often visited by war: World War I’s Somme in the west, the Napoleonic War’s Waterloo outside Brussels, and now Houffalize. There are a myriad of stories about German revenge against the Belgians and Luxembourgers for their support of the Allied cause. Massacres of families are memorialized on markers in Stavelot and the Bastogne area in particular, and throughout Luxembourg. The Germans were mad at the Belgians’ and Luxembourgers’ expressions of joy when the Wehrmacht was pushed out in September as the Allies advanced to the German border, short-lived joy for being freed of German occupation, only to be re-occupied during the Bulge in December. The Wehrmacht and SS, followed by the SD, the Nazi Party intelligence agency, did not forget.

In Stavelot alone 137 Belgian were killed. Even Belgians in what had been the German part of Belgium annexed by Hitler in 1938, including St. Vith and Malmedy, were not spared. They had not left their farms and jobs to move into Germany proper, just miles away, as ordered by Hitler. Thus, they were suspected of being disloyal Germans even though their sons had been drafted into the German army and were fighting in Stalingrad and elsewhere. Many deserted the German army when the end was in sight, taking off their uniforms and hiding in Belgian forests near their home towns, hunted by the Allies and later denied German military pensions given all other German soldier after the war.

From Henri, we also learned about SS soldiers. He remembered, as a ten-year old begging for scraps of food around Houffalize, German soldiers giving him friendly advice. Members of Germany’s Wehrmacht would tell the small boy, “Stay away from those SS soldiers. They’re dangerous!”

Get full access to Electric Bison at driscolljohn37.substack.com/subscribe