There were many sad points along our journey, places where we saw the brutal nature of war. At Honsfeld, Belgium, we passed through the intersection where Kampfgruppe, or Battle Group, Peiper rolled over the bodies of defending U.S. engineers, whose remains were then photographed by German cameramen. In the photos, three dead American soldiers lie on the road, and German soldiers mull over their bodies after stripping away their boots. Today, this site has been memoralized with white road signs. The American combat engineers, along with a few anti-tank guns of the 612th Tank Destroyer Battalion, were the first obstacle in Peiper’s path after Lanzerath, standing alone against the massive German surprise attack. The men lying there to be photographed for perpetuity had no chance, not even the option of becoming prisoners. The same SS troops they faced were from Hitler’s 1st SS Panzer Division, recently transported from Russia where they had routinely been killing prisoners and burning villages. Peiper’s unit had justly earned the nickname “Blowtorch Battalion.” Private William Sorteberg of Sidney, Montana was one of those killed at Honsfeld while serving in the 612th Tank Destroyer Battalion.

Moving past this early no-name skirmish, Peiper’s Kampfgruppe continued killing American prisoners: 19 GIs and 3 Belgians in Honsfeld; 8 more GIs in Bullingen; the the atrocious running down, murdering, and mutilating of 11 African-American GIs. The best-known Malmedy Massacre of 100 Americans shot in a field or by coup de grace at Baugnez Crossroads eclipsed the killing of another 8 Americas at Hotel du Moulin in Ligneuville. As superior SS officers were enjoying their lunch, an attending sergeant told a private guarding some nearby American prisoners, “Take the swine out and shoot them.” After the war when the lunching SS officers were tried for these routinized executions, the world learned that before the Bulge attack the commander of the 1st SS Panzer Division told his officers, based on procedures in Russia, “You know how to deal with prisoners.”

Major John C. Harrison, a Helena, Montana attorney doing his military service on the First Army staff, helped plan the D-Day invasion on Eisenhower’s staff and was subsequently sent to investigate Bulge atrocities and other German violations of The Hague Convention on Warfare, including the Malmedy Massacre and the Stavelot civilian massacres. In letters home, he described his anger at seeing where 75 Belgian men under the age of 35 were pushed into a cellar and shot one at a time, and a house where the SS killed 25 women and children in a separate incident. Harrison would return home after the war to serve a long tenure on the Montana Supreme Court. He once said he had two jobs during the Bulge, investigating war atrocities and staying alive. It was so cold, he said that “we warmed up by keeping our backs in front of burning buildings.”

Once the word was out, American soldiers undoubtedly repaid SS troops in kind. Near Bastogne at Recogne is just one of the German military cemeteries filled endlessly with neatly arrayed black stone crosses demonstrating the German toll paid in combat. Each short, chiseled marker holds the name, rank, nation and date of birth for six men, buried one on top of the other. Their rank identifies the SS men, perhaps one of the six on each stone. These SS and regular soldiers from the many other countries dominated by the Nazis paid the brutal price by dying violently on a large scale.

But then, so did Americans. We found the price of our country’s and our state’s exchange in this deadly quid pro quo in two nearby military cemeteries, Henri-Chapelle, Belgium, and Hamm, Luxembourg.

Tucked quietly into rolling hills west of Aachen, Germany, Henri-Chapelle holds 7,992 dead Americans from aircraft news, the green hell of the Hurtgen Forest, the Battle for Aachen and the Battle of the Bulge. These liberators lay interred one for each marker beneath row upon row of white crosses and stars. At Hamm, further south along the German line of attack, the American war cemetery in Luxembourg contains another 5,076 beautifully arrayed Carrara marble headstones. They’re dressed in white rows that narrow away to distant sections. Most of these buried, including 22 sets of brothers lying side-by-side, died in the Battle of the Bulge serving with Patton. The two cemeteries’ combined 13,068 dead represent one-third of the original interment; twice the number of those still remaining were sent back to their homes for re-burial. At least 77 young Montanans never went home. Each one, even if there is no one now left to remember the details of their abbreviated lives, was such a terrible price to pay to finally stop Hitler.

As life continues, above these still-honored dead the same kinds of jet-powered airliners that carried us to this place convey a dreadful feeling that modern technology makes quaint the hard lessons here, or never learned or long forgotten.

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