[Music] well welcome to the battle of bulge program on a battle of the Bulge night correct how many Battle of the Bulge veterans do we have in the audience besides you beside anybody else in the battle the ball just here anybody is here oh yeah yeah there he is yeah and then other World War 2 veterans I know I know somewhere we got a CD from the Pacific here but yeah Bob Johnson here down here [Applause] tonight you're not gonna hear from me I'm gonna sit down you got somebody better looking than me and younger and more vital mark Wiens come on up mark mark has spent a great bit of time doing the set up for tonight and he's going to introduce Greg and moderate our veterans thank you sir I want to wish everybody a season's greetings Happy Hanukkah and a Merry Christmas and tonight you're getting a peek at your Christmas gift early Greg Fontenot is going to speak battle the Bulge this is a great Christmas celebration here we have one distinguished well I got many distinguished people here but a good friend of mine a Red Bull comrade our Commissioner of the Minnesota Department of Veterans Affairs Commissioner Larry herky please Larry please stand up it's a real honor for me to introduce mr. Gregory Fontenot he is a full career as an army officer retired as a colonel what's really distinguishing about him is he led an armored battalion during Desert Storm the the dreadknots and a good friend of mine John McCombs was his Scout platoon leader Abdul six and not only did he use claws Betsy and decisiveness in his maneuver but he he caused extreme prejudice upon the enemy and he went on to lead a brigade the first brigade of the 1st Armored Division if you recall after the Dayton Accords we went in as a force he was the one of the first forces in there US forces to separate the combatants in the former Yugoslavia and set up the civil processes by which economics and justice and those kind of things could be set up in those areas and as a leader he held many positions especially in the Army's elite thinking training and Doctrine Command and you see all these things that are in the blue here the chief the director of the commander and the new director there all of those things have to do with training the next generation of leaders for the army in fact he trained the guys and the gals that are currently the leaders in our military that that have been fighting and are continuing to fight our Wars he's been on the forward edge not only as a soldier executing with the combat armor decision but he has also been a thinker executing with his mind seizing victory and the mind is the key to victory so after a lifetime of service in the Army in uniform doing a threat emulation and working on the on the suit side of things he decides to retire and what's he do he tells his wife I want to write and so we are gonna get to take a look or listen to his presentation he's written three books so far they're all up there as you can see on point his first book and that's about the US armed army and his transformation our correction US Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom his next book was the first ID and US Army transformation and then tonight's magnum opus loss Andrew dent redemption at st. vith the lucky 7th Armored Division and he says he's working on another book and so maybe we'll have him back in a couple of years and that one I guess the working title is education and combat first Infantry Division from North Africa to whenever I think we're very very very lucky to have him tonight sharing with us leaves and gentlemen I give you Gregor Fontenot well it is a small world as we all know John McCombs became Abdul six because I was underwhelmed by his gunnery my observation to the Scout platoon was they looked like the Lebanese militia and therefore their call sign from henceforth would be Abdul six they took that on as a challenge and became a world class outfit John later commanded a battalion in the red bull it is a small world I want to recognize my own favorite Minnesota and Minnesota veteran Mike McDonald who's the president of the 28th Infantry Regiment Association is here with his lady wife as I look at my Swiss Army watch I can tell you that it is about 1:30 in the morning in Belgium 75 years ago at 1:30 on the 11th of December the young men of 106 temperature vision had not yet marched up into what Paul calls the Schnee awful which the Germans referred to as the Schnee eiffel or snow plateau another hundred six divisions said he thought Shinae eiffel met a hell of a lot of snow all of those things are true we're going to talk about those experiences but this is the perfect weather for it the weather over the six weeks of the battle and it was six weeks you know we're not going to talk about the relief of the hundred first at Bastogne like that ended it because it didn't it was six weeks long fight why is that battle important I'm gonna suggest some reasons to you if you look at the Battle of the Bulge it is transcendent in the scale and scope of fighting in world war ii and it has enormous power to explain the American soldier in 1944-45 soldiers like Paul tonight we talked with students taken out of the Army special training program which was designed to save some of the best and the brightest for post-war efforts and he got handed rifles and he traded a philosophy to major for an infantry major and that's that's a that's a hell of an adjustment strategic choices made long before the Battle of the Bulge affected the fight and they will today choices we make now will matter 8 10 15 years from now the United States made choices and the army made choices in terms of acquisition of equipment and structure that caused us to be at a disadvantage in some areas during the battle of bulge and the last thing pair axle I'm speaking here of Kyle fund cassavetes when I say old dead Karl's theory still matters Carl von Clausewitz wrote the only unified field theory of warfare at least in the West some people claimed sons did that for China but I've read son said I've read the seven military classics I've read the i-ching I've read all these Chinese things and the only thing I've ever read in the Chinese theory that I understand is murder with a borrowed knife I get that China is such an old culture that much of what they write is an aphorism and the problem is an aphorism like a rolling stone gathers no moss well who watched people roll stones to see if Moss gathered at any point how do you know it's like what Clausewitz does is he describes the nature of warfare in ways that are valid to this very day one if one example of which is March columns how long they are how much time it takes to them to pass the opportunity to have road traffic jams all of those things still matter if you live in Minneapolis st. Paul at rush hour I've noticed that there's possibility of having a traffic jam so the theory of war matters and explains the way things are going on the other thing about the war is the technology of the time advanced really rapidly we talked about technology moving but you could find a jet airplane a nuclear weapon and horse-drawn artillery all on the same battlefield at the end of war to the US Army communicated with semaphore at the beginning of the war they had radios everywhere and used they said fax to each other by the end of the war we had no radar - very good radar by the end of the war I mean things happen fast because the enormous scope and I'll press on from there these are some purposes and themes that I have we're going to talk about terrain and weather weather matters and if you live outside in the wintertime for any length of time in a tank or in an armored car like the Recon troop of 106 division or in a foxhole you can be cold and wet it's just a fact of life and cold and wet people get sick so when you look at sickness disease you know trench foot all the kinds of bad things could happen to you you need to talk about that I'm gonna talk a little bit about the context doctrine and structure how we things and I want to talk about leadership and I want to talk a little bit and I can't do much of it because it's a big battle and we only have about 45 minutes so I wanted to speak some about the what pasa phone montoya phone called the Klein electa the Klein of like the the little people but the context in which von toi 'full said that he was talking about the sergeant's privates of lieutenant because it doesn't matter you know who's drawn the blue arrows and red arrows on the map the boys and girls that are down inside those blue arrows and red arrows things don't look quite so neat I used to tell my Brigade when I was a beginner I had the same number people in the brigade as the skipper of the USS America had about 5000 but when the skipper of the USS America said steer two-seven-zero the freakin boat went to seven zero and everybody on it went that direction and an armored brigade at 116 tanks and a whole bunch of instrument and every one of them had a better idea that I did if I said steer two-seven-zero I was happy if 95% of them went in that general direction so when you're talking about a combat operation on the ground it's not pretty so I'm going to show you a couple maps with blue arrows well they're gonna be grayscale arrows but then I'm going to show you what the maps really look like to the soldiers and you may come up to me later and complain I didn't understand that and if you did then I made my point so the context November 1943 strategic guidance is issued by out of Hitler and by the Allies at in Tehran and in Cairo and the bottom line is Hitler and the boys say Hitler decides to shift the main effort from the West or rather from the east to the west why would he do that well he knows the gringos are coming and they're going to come on the coast of France with the out with the other allies he has 300 400 kilometers maybe from Omaha Beach to the row to the Remagen bridge on the ride he has several several hundred more maybe 1500 kilometers from the West Eastern Front to the German border so he's going to move his main effort to the west try to separate the Allies and then turn to the east finally the Allies break out in August and I'm moving along really quickly but they culminate at the Siegfried line culminate is a fancy military term for who ran out of gas the Germans got back to the Siegfried before we did we didn't have enough fuel to go on the two armies we had doctrine very much like the German doctor and I'll talk to you a little bit more about that but we also had structure and in strength problems on both sides and there were parallels to the way that both sides thought about how to do it and bear in mind you count out the folks fight in two fronts of World War two the UK Burma and North Africa and in the United States and the Germans yeah the Russians like talk about well they're they really run the war and they really did win the war in East all by themselves but they were fight two fronts they joined in against Japan eight days before the war ended and then they wanted a good chunk of Japan all of China and some other things in return for that so I'm not as sympathetic to the Russian position as maybe I should be the last thing that we'll we'll we won't spend any time on tonight I hope you all take the time to read the book is the December surprise we were surprised totally and completely by the German counter-offensive in the Bulge and a good example of that came on the 12th of December with g2 summary number 18 from Edwin L Seibert Brigadier General g2 intelligence army group commanded by Omar Nelson Bradley it is now certain mr. sybert wrote that attrition is steadily sapping the strength of German forces the crust is thinner more brittle and more vulnerable that it appears on g2 maps or to the troops in the field that's geek-speak for those of us at the headquarters know a lot better than you boys down front what's going on it didn't matter how many patrol reports went up the leadership didn't think it was rational for the Germans to attack us now I want you to think about that for a second when did you imagine the United States wondered whether the Japanese would use suicide bombers at Okinawan damaged and destroy 130 ships sunk or damaged and killed more Marines and sailors than at any other battle that they ever fought years later I wanted to use a suicide attack as a threat emulation device in a war game I was told it's not rational nobody do it we've been witnessing one or two kamikaze attacks since that you don't have to be a prophet you just have to look at what happened before because that what things go around as Mark Twain said history never never repeats itself but arrives and there's a lot of rhyming in this act in this operation so that's the 7th Armored Division I'll let you read that they get moved around quite a lot and they're up in Holland when this battle begins I promise to talk about terrain I have a map here that's kind of an artifact it's from an article written by Charles B McDonald for those of you that looked at the read ahead he wrote time for trumpets and he also wrote the Siegfried line campaign he is a guy that an official historian or two company commander and second FG division he was one of the troupe one of the company commanders were relieved by the 106th division when they came into the line the Ardennes the Hurtgen and the Eifel are all part of one big forest crossing several countries if if I can find out have if I don't screw up the pointer here aha see Luxembourg Belgium Germany and the three forests are all connected we had just fought in November a really bitter fight where we had a lot of Americans killed to no good purpose and those guys were withdrawn and put into the Ardennes to rest the 28th Infantry Division and the fourth empty division and the 2nd Infantry Division and then they started relieving those guys because they were going to be we were going to remove an offensive up into these this area so the other thing about this terrain is this bifurcated the front north of the hurt gun there is the u.s. 9th army south of Ardennes you are in the Ardennes and south you have the first US Army in a Third Army that's all 12th Army Group up here is the 21st Army Group led by Bradley with two field armies a canadian army and a british army south of them hung up in the sour brook an area south of tsar brooklyn actually is the 6th army group commanded by Devers and he has two armies the 7th US army and a french army so he has quite a lot going on I'm going to show you a little bit more about the terrain so you get an idea of what the place looks like and by the way if you want to understand the forest they're thick forest primeval fake console and Gretl I think scary stuff going bump in the night fake Maleficent you know that's the kind of force this is and that's what wrong button that's what the place looks like I don't know about you but that looks scary to me and especially if you had you're in a tank the best way my idea of a good time is fighting infantry in the open in the desert fighting infantry and trees where they can hide and shoot at you it's awful because then you could have some empty men kill one of us high-speed well-educated intellectual tanker types that's just not right you know so when you look at this this is this is the Ardennes that is uh those restore tanks from the 86th recon squadron or the 7th Armored Division at late January I'm going to show you he put that thing away this is the premier bear which is a ridge east of the city of South town of Santi Santi fen about 2,500 3,000 people at those days this is about a 1936-37 postcard and you can see the rolling terrain so it's not all bark scary forest there's little clear places where you get shot when you're trying to cross it so one of the things you want to we don't want to do is expose yourself the fire you guys that have been in combat you know it doesn't take more than one experience you'd get shot at one time you've learned to everything you're ever going to learn about combat well that's not really true but everything after that's post doctoral study and by the way to clear the record I am NOT a PhD but it doesn't take a PhD or write history just got to be willing to work at it this is a vague is a tile i'ts this is a a route sketch and it's for putt surf um pond actual bitte PUD surfer but it's a tank a tank route map and what's interesting about this is it tells you a lot about the terrain and I'm going to move relatively quickly through this there were five routes a b c d e this was captured by the US on the 18th of december these are the routes for the 6th panzer army this route which runs from pre-wrinkled makes a little curve down in here goes through Kaiser Barak and borne this is all inside the 8th US core sector and the fifth Panzer Army sector north of that is the 6th Panzer Army and the bad guy that we're going to talk about a little bit tonight is your lock on paper and he has a hundred and sixteen tanks and fighting vehicles of varying kinds and a 60 mile long column and he's trying to go here now each of these color schemes tell you something if you're Ted if it says Dorsch gung Strasse it's a throwaway Street you if it's red the German word for that is Laban Zafar danger life don't go here this is not good for tanks look at that a lot of that it's not good for tanks so what's Piper going to do he's gonna wander around looking for good roads these are dense forests this is marshy high a marshy ground these are peaks hulless finn is high Marsh a swamp at high altitude so it's going to freeze and if you happen to park in it you won't be able to get out of it then it'll thawed you won't be able to get out of it because it's deep mud the place is difficult a couple of quick things every German name tells you everything you need to know about the place I'm going to give you a couple quick examples of that if it ends in a are oth like this does it's a clear space it's clear you know are also are eau de Meyer eau de with is where Eric Fisher would a famous character and under six division was found if it's got a bear gone it there's a hill and if it says shied can't find it then it's a place where the valley or ravine so that place things tell you about about the places savy thon the other hand doesn't do that because it's named after Saint Vitus and he's not a terrain a piece of terrain it nothing's perfect concepts and conditions US Army doctor we built the Sherman tank explicitly to have narrow track 20 tons or less loaded on brake book freighters to do what to go through an infantry explore infantry penetration and shoot up soft targets in the rear so he had a low velocity 75 millimeter gun Germans did not get that memorandum so they add wide track long barreled 76 millimeter and higher eighty eight's and the Tigers high-velocity tank guns so if you've watched the movie fury there's a lot of about that that's accurate you don't shoot at a tiger whether Sherman from anywhere but behind it or the flank same with Panther tanks and the like so we are going to have to deal with the fact that we have the wrong tank designed to do something that isn't going to work they had problems too but what we really had gone forces artillery anybody here in artillerymen give you an idea the scale of artillery on the third day in the battle of bulge the 8th Corps the Corps we're going to focus on had 55 battalions all by itself and we had invented a technique no one else could do called time on target the gringos figured out how to fire 20 battalions from 20 different places to land on the same target simultaneously and if you don't do math you can't do that and we didn't have computers they did it with pencils and paper and they had to sharpen their pencils to a particular dimension em you remember sharpening pencils huh and what was the dimension for my charts and darts you had to have your pencil sharpened to a dimension or you couldn't pass the archery program but if you couldn't do that you couldn't hit targets we have no GPS we have no rangefinders we have no computers that computers inside your ears so the 89 divisions we were going to build 200 and our concept of replacement was 200 divisions would allow us to move divisions in and out of the line and rest we ran out of people we could only bill 89 22 over the Pacific one I'm sorry surrendered in May of 1942 every division the United States built his overseas at the end of the war not a single one left at home we were out of Schlitz sounds crazy but but it's true our Pabst Blue Ribbon if you prefer German army they believed in Bev a Google a war movement they didn't use the term blitzkrieg that was a term of art too for propaganda there's a lot of crap that was said about the German army in the 70s at the expense of the US Army one of which was the Germans did Alf Trucks tactic which is allegedly mission orders but it literally means task tactics an off track is a task it's not a mission the US Army preached mission orders even in World War two I don't know why we keep apologizing for what we do and keep relying on the Germans to do it for us because they really didn't do it they did have a term called shelves ton dictate which is self-reliance so if you had a shelf dedicate for interferer that meant independence of junior leaders and they did believe in that they had two armies the voff and SS and the regular armed the waffen-ss generally wouldn't listen to anything they were told by the regular army office and that's going to play a role here I submit we won only by the abuse of lavish use of artillery even if that were so why is that a bad thing we had a saying in the Army send a pro Joe so job don't go you know X and find those and gray see how my dad's name was Nixon Choctaws I don't know why they do that excellent and grace didn't want their little boy Greg to be killed so why not use artillery instead of Greg you know I I like that German effigy did have far better automatic weapons than we do the mg42 would fire as I may get this wrong about 3,000 rounds a minute we badly reverse-engineered it built a machine call a machine gun called the ax the m60 machine gun any Vietnam vets here that fire diem 60 I fired one it's bigger than a breadbox weighs about a ton and how often does a jamb always and you can't take it apart and once you've got it apart you can't put it back together but the German mg42 as a was a joyous machine gun and it still is it's still one of the best machine guns ever there's also a myth about continuous front lines ask anybody that's ever been in a combat zone anywhere except World War one had they experienced continuous front lines no there are gaps in the lines there's only 55 divisions in Europe and we have over 500 miles and the average division was able to cover about ten so we put four divisions where there were an 80 mile front and the Ardennes that piece of ground that we're going to fight in so they were trying to defend more than twice as much ground as they were able to defend so that we could take other divisions and use them somewhere else the smart guys the tactician zkk all that economy of if you're in the hundred six division you might call it sucking chest wound but this is how the 7th Armored Division was organized it was organized like German units on what was called the einheit principle I'll let Axl explain that to you later I'm going to tell you to remember only one thing rule of three three squads in Apatow three platoons and a company three companies in battalion three battalions in a in a in a regiment and three regiments in a division and a partridge in a pear tree so in this case we don't have regiments because it's the armored division so I've already cheated they have three combat commands think of them sort of like regiments three tank battalions three infantry battalions they have three artillery battalions kind of a rule of three thing then they have some supporting guys including the cavalry the 87th recon you see here 814 tank storage tank destroyers were built the destroyed tanks and we built them without a top to the turret and I don't know why that would encourage anybody to go try to kill a tank with one of those things but that's what we did some decisions sub strategic and conceptual choices matter long after they've been made infantry divisions are organized by the rule three for 20 second for twenty third forty twenty fourth are the regiments of the hundred six division each of them had three battalions each battalion had three companies each company had three you know all the way down and you except for one place they're all walking and that is in the Recon troop and that is a motorized recon troop using the m8 armored car which our good friend Paul has been on five to thirty seven millimeter cannon there's one upstairs in the museum marked with the markings of the 2nd Armored Division they had four battalions of artillery so I did lie a little bit about the rule of three the 4th battalion was a 155 battalion it could reach out across the entire front of the division I'm going to show you the Germans they did the rule of three to three regiments and under 16th Panzer Division but they'd run out of troops so they only get two battalions in each of the regiment's and they have artillery also eighteenth folks Grenadier 's the folks going to Deer divisions were constituted toward the end of the war with combination of young men and old people and it was they were running and running out of folks and they have three regiments but they only have two battalions and they also have a few salir battalion a light battalion on bicycles now riding bicycles in hip deep snow and all that good a deal and 60-second voc's going to dears in particular complain bitterly about now being able to use their bikes I broke my hip on a bike so maybe I shouldn't used bikes either so the miracle in the West I don't think I need to say any more about that I told you we ran out of fuel the Germans got back to the seat freed and Omar Bradley commented more than once god these Germans have an astonishing capacity for recuperation every time we thought we had him on the ropes they'd hit us in the face and one of the remarkable things to me about this when you look through the German records you look at what the Germans were saying the German troops morale was pretty good in December 1944 they knew what they were fighting for they're fighting for their homeland they're not confused they're not worried about fascism they're just trying to keep the gringos from taking proof and I find it puzzling but they actually had pretty good morale to this day I don't understand it and I was fortunate enough to to get to know a number of German War 2 veterans quite well including one that was a radio telephone operator at Omaha Beach with artillery that was killing our soldiers as they came ashore one of the finest men I've ever known who used to take Americans out to Omaha Beach because he said you had to see it to believe I went this summer and he was right no more about the miracle in the West let's show what the advance to the Siegfried looked like I told you this is an artifact from a personal experience monograph done by an FG officer in 1940 six or seven at Fort Benning and they had school trained cartographers that could do the maps for the officers as they were writing their papers and that's where this came from that shows you the armies I talked about and you can see the bifurcation here and the distance by the way from Aachen r8x la Chapelle the capital the Holy Roman Empire Charlemagne's capital down to Luxembourg City is about 90 kilometers and that's where the fights going to take place this map is a quick map showing an attack the attack into the 8th Corps and in particular the 106th division with 5th Panzer army eighteenth folks Grenadier is going north of the Eiffel and the 62nd north-south this is a little bit inaccurate because the 6th army didn't go far this far south that's yo akhom Piper's guys looking for a road that'll work so you've heard me say that on the 11th they went up into the Schnee Eiffel the 106 goes in a position they settle in with the four 22nd to the north the four 23rd the Center for 220 4th regiment and the south the division commander pulls two battalions out and puts him in reserve Colonel Alexander read in the 424 thimpu regiment say hey I can't do this with just two battalions so he got the Recon troop that Paul Thompson was in he got a cavalry troop out of the 18th cavalry got the canon company out of the four 24th he put them all together the recon trip wasn't part of it originally but they put together a provisional battalion to give him some additional troops to his south or right down in just south of I'm sorry to be get up to where I'm meant to be just south of here is a hundred 12th Infantry Regiment of the 28th division now I want to take a second to make a quick list of protagonists for you on the on the good guys side we had 160 vision with the troops I just mentioned we had the 28th division with the 112th regiment I just mentioned we had the 7th armored division commanded by Robert W Hasbrouck which had the three tank battalions the three mg battalions to scout the Recon squadron and so forth combat command B of the 9th Armored Division led by an incredible man named Bill hope some day someone has to figure out how to write a biography about him Hogue built a good chunk of the alkane highway after having stood up combat command via the 9th armored division he goes to Alaska Alaska and Canada builds highway in Omaha Beach and Utah B to command the first special an engineer amphibious engineer brigade to clear the obstacle stay there hell of a job many returns to command CCB 9th Armored Division this is this first fight later all he takes the Remagen bridge subsequently he commanded the 4th Armored Division later in Korea he commanded 9th corps and ended his career and as a commander 7th US Army in a four star his that closest colleague in his fight his men named Bruce C Clark Clark command CCB Combat Command via the 4th Armored Division very famous world war ii division did the extraordinary work in the isolating nancy and won a couple of big battles he comes to command CCB 7th ad he's the star of the show in a lot of ways here he goes on to command 4th ad turns it over 4th armored they turned it over to bill Hogue later he commands 9th corps after bill Hogan commanded it he goes to commands Europe turned it over to Bill Hope so these two guys we've kind of you know patterned their careers together and they were both engineers they were not Calormen where our telling them the engineers who got into the armored Corps early because it was a forward-thinking place to be the armored Corps and the Airborne Corps in World War 2 we're kind of the let's get ahead and think about the problem in a new way vertical and Velma was a new deal and if you haven't done the c-47 right here you got to do that to get an idea of how much fun that might have been so when the Seventh Army I let me go back I didn't get done here so when you look at the friendly guys are the good guys you come up with three cavalry squadrons four tank battalions three tank destroyer battalions ten FG battalions and six artillery battalions eventually one man Robert W Hasbrouck is going to take control of all of that without any particular authority to do so and I want you to think about that because now you're operating in a situation where you can't see the battlefield unless you see it through your ears on the radio or you see it through your eyes on a message or you go down to a place and see it for yourself there is no there's no computer screen there's no graphic uner interface interface there's no Xbox there's nothing not that's going to help you see it you're gonna have to see it through your eyes and ears and through what's in your little gray cells to quote Poirot and Agatha Christie's television series so when the 7th Armored Division goes down here's who they're going to encounter they're going to encounter the 1st SS the 2nd SS the 6th Panzer army the 9th SS division the 62nd core of the 18th with including the 18th books from the dear division the 62nd Vokes Grenadier division the 58th Panzer Corps including the 116th Panzer Division the second punch of division the five hundred and sixtieth folks been a dear and the Fuhrer escort Brigade eeja gababa doesn't speak so hooped as they would say in German I think this isn't such a good deal they're outnumbered and they're going to have to fight them the good news is they have 200 tanks of their very own and six artillery battalions and more about them later so how do they get there well you know you can't just pick up drive it to the battle you have to do things like route clearances you're moving to 250,000 troops were moved by convoy during this fight that's all done by pencil and paper and on paper maps yeah no Xbox no no texting allowed you can't drive using your cell phone none of that what's going on so they were given two routes one from Guilin Kirk in Germany going more or less straight south through Aachen - Malmedy Manorville if you look at this it did too hard to figure out it's not that far it's only about 30 to 40 miles on this route and a little bit longer on this one but anything ever done in a tank or in an APC a personnel carrier takes a long time you'd get 50 tanks together each tanks about 25 feet long and these days and you have about a 50 foot interval if you really want more but it's a a 50 foot interval let's let's say let's say 10 yards 25 yards it'll 75 feet so each tanks 100 feet so 50 tanks times 100 any math majors here anybody go to West Point I didn't go to West Point so I can't do math it's a long column it's a very long column a tank battalion in those days would cover about two kilometers to two-and-a-half plumbers all by itself and that's if everybody's too close together it gets a lot worse so down this road remember there's two hundred tanks moving here in a whole bunch of pcs how pcs be a personnel carriers on the east route we're gonna move the reserve command with with a tank battalion trip time division tactical command post this is a bunch of trucks and jeeps and attempts and stuff the division artillery that's just a headquarters in this case the 203rd air defense Artillery and beech B Company 129th ordnance and an observation battery from 8th course going to sneak in and they're going to sneak into past the the nobel line and go to Malmedy against advice and we'll talk about that briefly now the autumn Piper is trying to get this way and he's been on all three of the five routes they showed you earlier right after this tank battalion went by the 17th tank battalion goes by so only thing left after that's this stuff and that stuff's not designed to fight tanks they're not designed to fight from the move either so oh you're welcome Piper goes through Malmedy and then he hits the stop low and drop home so the dudes over here they get by all that this crowd doesn't be Troop B Company or B battery the object I forget what the battalion was observation battalion is told by an engineer colonel named Peregrine at Malmedy Labor's gaffar dude danger life don't go down there the road is under fire we think the Germans have broken through the company commander since you know I really got to get south I'm gonna take a shot habit so he goes south didn't turn out so well yo ah come Piper's guys kill his yeah a few open get away meanwhile the 7th Armored Division took his advice and these guys had across from almeida franco' silent and then down through here when they get to top all guess who they run into you like a piper he's been trying to get West he's only trying to go about 15 kilometers but he's got 116 vehicles he's 16 kilometers long and he's got it what the Germans call a style which is what we call rush hour traffic and say Paul and Minneapolis everybody's bumper-to-bumper and you got guys cutting you off and trying to get two ramps and going for the fast lane all the way to the ramp it's just a crazy I don't know how you people live as long as you do and so you he gets down here big fight now meanwhile back at the ranch very quickly what's going on in the fighting 106 division they have two regiments overrun and Alan Jones is in trouble he's the division commander he talks to the 8th corps commander he says I wonder if I should pull my two regiments off the hill off the stay I fall and I'm paraphrasing and Middleton says you know maybe you should pull your two regiments off this thing I fall he says well I think we might be able to hold they get in the conversation where neither one of them communes communicates clearly when the conversation is over milton turns to his staff and says I told Jones to take his two regiments off the snare Ifill Jones turned soon as staff and says died was screwed milton says we got to keep the two regiments there so in a situation in which communications are imperfect ambiguity is rampant because you can't see the battlefield and there's miscommunication two regiments are lost Mull that over for a second and you say well that could happen now anybody lose their identity or have somebody steal their card on cybernet and let me remind you in 1944 we had every intelligence means that we have today except two we had no satellites and we had no cyber intelligence because we didn't have computers so in 1944 they had everything we had today and they got it wrong fast forward to 9/11 we got satellites we have cyber intelligence we've got computer stuff going and how did we get surprised by by nineteen Saudis on 9/11 have we been surprised since do you think would be surprised to get in the future why yes we will because we have a tendency to confirm our own biases think about that when you get an argument over politics with somebody else each of you starts with a biased position hey this is what I believe it's in my heart I'm right you're wrong it's really hard to correct self correct on that point thing and it's very hard at bureaucracies like the military anyway they leave the two regiments up Milton says to Jones of no problem I'm sending you CCB 9th armored division CCB 9th armored division is in a little town north of Lena Ville right in the Lima Vale area called foeman Ville and they're going to get there early in the morning of the 17th he also says 7th armored division is going to be there at 7:30 in the morning on 17 December not possible because 7th Armored Division isn't told to start move until 4:30 in the morning and it takes them more than all day to go that that that miles so what in fact happens on the 17th I'll show you now there's the two regiments the four 22nd and it's battalions you see where each of them are two regiments of the fighting 18 folks wounded ears have reached Sundberg a Schoenberg and another regiment of the fighting 18th is East event winter spell Thor Venters felt the gringos are coming this way the 14th cavalry has been pushed back from where they were started out and less hot it's actually lost time but I left the art of this as an artifact so I left it like it was they've been pushed back to here 9th armored CCB 9th armored division comes down from Farmville they get to vinter spell not until late in the day on the 17th at sunset does the 7th Armored Division begin to arrive so the only thing east of sent thief except the two isolated regiments is two companies the 168th engineers and a platoon and a company of the 81st engineers the 81st engineers is led by an Illinois football player all-american football player named Tom Riggs if you give a chance watch the big picture two parts shell and savvy Tom Riggs is a real hero he got fought to the end and got captured on the Primmer bear escaped in March of 1945 and made his way back to us lines that took command of his battalion back that is not a guy I would ever want to piss off that is one bad dude so in the 7th Armored Division arrives Bruce Clark shows up and old Jones was thinking he's got 200 tanks behind him and Clark says no it's just me captain Woodruff minus three in the driveway what he does is he goes into the center of town and his troops arrive he sends them out to the east and it looked like this everybody clear on that any confusion so here we are we're starting to fill in here's here's combat command B 9th Armored Division B 9th a 7th Armored Division they get out to just east of santhi bits and pieces Clark has literally taken the first unit that arrived was B troop 87th recon he says go into town there's a big engineer Lieutenant Colonel named Riggs duty tells you by the end of the evening he has a handful of troops in there and this begins to form up this uh this overlay is part of an attempt to get a distinguished Unit Citations so there it's of the 20th of December over the first three days of the fight they built up this crust they're being attacked by the 1st SS they think it's the gross Deutschland it's actually the Fuhrer escorted AGD is ghost Deutschland 18 folks Grenadier 's 164th reservoir the 62nd votes gonna deers the guys who fought your recon truth Paul and the other regiments 190th and then you see down here to the south they think it's the 116th and they're beginning to see tanks out of the 2nd at puns err division and they see units from the 506th folks printed ears this is the so-called frontline it's not continuous and back here is a cavalry troop and the realistic combat trains that's what this simple means of the 7th Armored Division they are about 25 kilometers to 30 kilometers away that's too far to support the division and they're in a fight they've man 1919 roadblocks to keep the German units from cutting them off completely so they're almost in a 360-degree fight on the on the 3rd day of the battle this is the this this begins to clarify it now I'm sure looks a lot now clear to the fighting a 30th Infantry Division this is the northern shoulder met someone today said his father was in a5 17th regimental combat team on northern shoulder that's what the shoulder looks like five-o fourth parachute infantry regiment 5o v 508 3 to 5 these are the four regiments Airborne Division's had four regiments not three Rula three went to hell again and the 82nd airborne is here third Armored Division is coming down and here is old the trains this is the 2nd SS division which has made its way this way all the way around because they couldn't use the roads because eurocom Piper had them tied up so confusion reigns on both sides and little guys are making all the difference in the world at this little town Poteau the one of the most famous pieces of film ever taken as Task Force Mays at the 14th Calvary regiment being shot out by Kampf grupa hunson by the 1st SS Panzer Division he sees Germans running across the street cavalry vehicles are on fire and you know the guy walking down well everybody else was pretending to be charging under fire it's German propaganda film made a few minutes after the fight a soldier named Jovi Whiteman Lieutenant Whiteman executive officer of Alpha Company 23rd armed and MC battalion is a few miles away he sees all these tracer fire and all the stuff going says damn somebody better go up and find out what's going on take take care of this so he goes up with a couple of half-tracks a VT our vehicle track retriever the best truck and you know partridge in a pear tree and they get into a fight at Poteau by the end of the day he had 900 people working for him from 10 different units and a lieutenant-colonel it showed up to support him a field artillery Jovie Whiteman was born in a across the street from the Navajo reservation near Shiprock New Mexico he's in the 1940 census one of eleven kids he went to college selling Navajo blankets so naturally he's a Navajo Indian who sold now the whole blankets therefore he is called Navajo at sunset that evening Robert W Hasbrouck knows a good thing when he sees it and he designates that formation Task Force Navajo and you think about what happened here one guy shows up at 4:00 about 60 troops he says I'm outta ammo out of orders and Navajo says I can give you some ammo and I'll give you some orders and these four guys from the 400 24th empty regiment Joint Task Force Navajo and the defense of San teeth and the area accreted it wasn't drawn up nobody said here's how we're gonna do it you go to the left you go to the right it accreted like like crystals forming on a string like making a candle the old way by individual soldiers deciding if this has to happen I'm going to be the one to do something about it the innovation the adaptability the agility of the American soldier in 1944 in the absence of information it also happened down down south in a town called GU V and I probably won't be able to find it because I'm as confused as everybody else is but GU V is right around here 116th Panzer Division which is being splotch of Tanks is headed into a town called movie where there's a rations dump and a lieutenant colonel Stone is leading the 440th anti-aircraft artillery battalion he's been ordered out because he's Corps artillery any aircraft artillery whose job it is to shoot at v1 buzz bombs because they're all heading west and so he's up there to do nothing but so they want him out of the way he goes there in a tank a Panther tank blows up his compressor truck and he gets the jaws that he says by God I don't know what everybody else is going to do but we're gonna fight right here and the 440th takes control of goo V grabs a tape company that's driving by said hey fella come over here I need you and the defense accretes in the south again initiative adaptability agility in the space of ambiguity now how many of you during the course of a day feel an absolute requirement to consult your iPad really telephone how comfortable are you with ambiguity if you don't know your kids are do you have the little gizmo that tells you where they are do you have I lost my phone my problem is when you use your phone it'll tell you what town it's in I lose my phone in my own house so that's that's not much help to me goofy by the way is actually this little town right here these guys could deal with ambiguity they accepted it and that and the lesson learned for anybody that's a soldier or future soldier is you're never going to know you're never gonna know you're gonna be like me and command of the 1st Brigade if 95% of my guys go where I want him to I'm a happy guy the Admiral the captain of the America didn't have that problem and that's the that's the thing about ground combat is it's really hard to know what's going on plus people don't tell you what they know because if they tell you what they know then you'd know what they did and there's a lot of that going around in World War two believe it or not sounds crazy but it's true so you have the worst of the best of people in this this is what the place looks like again on one of these post-war sketches in late December this is the Sabbath armed division defensive position this is Bastogne which one would you like to be in I don't think either one I'm sound very good but by Stone has help coming and it's real close there it is if you're in this crowd it's not so close so they got to figure out a way to get out and they're in a the fight gets worse and worse Field Marshal modle the Army Group B commander and hi so fun Montoya are out directing traffic to unstart the style the the traffic jam that is so bad they can't get they artillery the core artillery for the 62nd court doesn't get up until the 21st of December once they do that they begin to turn the tide against the Americans and so the problem is how do we get out this is what the line looked like on the 22nd we've been driven out of savvy and gonna have to read the book to get the details and there's only three ways to get out route a B and C and this shows where they want them to go on the way out these are the tick marks that you lay down on the map this is a lot cleaner picture B in defeat everything begins to look pretty clear this is the loss of Savi these are the units they've been fighting now they had 200 tanks but if you if you add up the 70 odd tanks that were in the 1/16 and 30 any tank guns you add up about a hundred tanks and this outfit 30 plus and this outfit 100 plus and this outfit then the odds don't look as good as they as they did before there's just a lot of bad guys out there and guys are making decisions to do things like defend at crossroads town crossroads called Baraka free tour we're gonna talk a little bit about that only ex post facto in that I want to show you what happened to the 7th armored division on Christmas Christmas Eve 1944 there this is Baraka free to work with the crossroads I told you about it's called Parker's crossroads if you want to learn about a fight where a major named Parker gathered three howitzers that survived from the 5 89th Field Artillery Battalion and whole handful of troops and they fought off the thus Pizza or advance guard of the 2nd SS but later on they got driven out when the entire 2nd SS went through town on the night of the 24th the 7th Armored Division had a Tank Battalion down here 40th Tank Battalion there are there call told to withdraw up national highway 15 through the town of monje to the north and they would join the defense which was going to form along this road bran Menil vash of on and the rest 4th SS Panzer Grenadier regiment a lot of Tanks supported is ordered to attack at the same time so if you've ever been in a night move anybody here been in a night moving track vehicles on blackout drive can you see really well when it's snowing outside and it's middle of the night not so much and so does one tank look like another in the dark yes it does and so the German tanks are coming up the same road we're going out the same Road they pass one of these companies they said don't want to shoot because it might be us and the next thing you know old Jed's a millionaire and there's 40 tanks dead because the Germans figured out where the Americans were and killed them quite rapidly 40 out of 58 in about 30 minutes one German tank led by a tank commander named barkman goes and what folks laughingly called a who czars ride this is where some hussar gets all happy and glad and wants to show it here oh he is grabs his saber waved it around his hand and rides off into the enemy line well Bartman didn't do that on purpose he got intermingled with us with a tank battalion convoy the 4th tank battalion and he can't get out of the column and he's afraid to shoot anybody because if he does someone might notice and shoot him so he goes through the town of Mont a and when the what's left of the 40th tanks start to pull out to go where they're supposed to go Bartman turns his tank around Panther number 401 there he is all of his friends are down here he's up here this is a problem so he decides he is gonna eat me with a tank at night through a town so an Army Major who'd probably not have gone to Staff College yet or he wouldn't have done this drives a jeep out into the middle of the intersection and says halt what's Bartman's next move drives over the jeep and the guy and heads on South returns to the warm bosom of the second SS division by the way the division that killed every human being that lived at the town of oradour-sur-glane so they're not one of my favorite guys either so on the next day Matthew D Ridgeway who's now shown up and is commanding the 18th court tells the 7th Armored Division he's very embarrassed that he wants them to retake monje Christmas Day 1944 the 7th Armored Division fails miserably to take monje they're exhausted they try to go down a route that the 3rd Armored Division had mined and not bothered to tell anybody remember ambiguity so the first column drives over land mines say so well let's go to this other Road surely I didn't mind that too and they had so the attack failed and Ridgeway orders an investigation asked chewings all around I guess we're being recorded so I bleep that out or whatever one does and Bruce Clarke said it was the worst day I ever had States arm he was commanding that attack and it didn't go very well so what happened after eight days of intense combat outnumbered the way they were the 7th Armored Division failed miserably to retake mount hey they lost a hundred and ten tanks more than 50% of their authorized strength twelve tank destroyers they had about thirty to start with and more than 200 evils they lost 1,100 killed and you see the rest of it B troop of the 87th recon da got off the Puma Baird with 35 people now cavalry troop a mechanized cavalry troop was 135 people one one sergeant loyal lad and 35 others 36 guys the others were dead or captured or missing and weren't found for weeks so you have to when you get into that situation there are no time outs so you have to do with the army calls reconstitution and I've only got a couple more charts won't be done here so they have 8921 assigned on Christmas Eve out of a not quite 11,000 so they got a problem by December 30 140 train take crewmen show up the US Army could do a lot of things right and one of them was get people in combat that's that's a hell of an achievement by the way I was in the first teams division in Desert Storm as somebody pointed out we ran out of food and water on the 28th of February we literally had c-130s landing on a highway to bring us water that was after somebody had a bright idea probably was not an airman to drop pallets of bottled water yeah yeah it was a thing of joy and beauty fear was like Old Faithful big geysers of water nobody got to drink any of it so they landed him on the highway so not everything goes the way we plan and not everybody's as smart as they thought they were by the 8th of January they have 2,000 replacements in the team so what does Hasbrouck do he trains him he brings him on board yes as he told me 40-plus years ago when I interviewed him he had a little unit school call it here's the Sabbath armored division this is who we are we call ourselves the lucky seventh we were really kind of we are the baddest outfit in the US Army you try to inculcate some pride try to make people feel welcome the idea that you see in every movie where the where the the new arrivals treated like dirt because nobody wants to know him because he's going to get killed and you know that's not how it works soldiers aren't aren't cruel by Nature I used to ask my soldiers in formation everyone said everybody raised their hand that join the army to be a screw up it's all it's your army raise your hand if you do if you join the army so you can get court-martialed and flown out and go to Leavenworth hardly anybody ever raises their hand yeah the deal is people don't start out to do the wrong thing some of them do but they don't start out that way and so you do what you can to bring him in the 7th Armored Division pride itself on tank country and so it's zeroed all the new tanks which means that made sure the tank fired around where it's supposed to go by the way let's talk about technology for a second mark and I were leis and blaze tankers well she's playing a laser fiber laser then he puts trigger and the bullet goes where the laser went that's not hard when I first came in the army we had to do what they did one or two except we had a coincidence rangefinder and if it didn't work we had apply something called the worm formula anybody ever heard of the worm formula you take the width of the combat vehicle is equal to the range over mils everybody got that so you're computing this and an enforcer man tank with a tiger shooting at you let me see with of a tiger be about seven maybe fifteen feet and the mils I'm seeing is a hundred mils therefore God I don't know how far that is so what they did is they shot white phosphorus and what would that tell you if the ground landed short then you move where the bursts appeared in your reticle to the tank that's called burst on target that's what the gringos did because they didn't have range finders and they didn't have calculators and they didn't have cell phones they didn't know what a worm formula was and I do remember stuff like that you know well 12 mil superelevation or six mil superelevation at 1200 metres for the high-explosive anti-tank round I'll never forget that because that's the basic range of which you zero the m60 tank which I first grew up on these guys did a really good job of that they also figured out how am I going to figure out how to move these tanks which was designed to operate on roads with narrow tracks in soft ground so they had the Army had a thing called duck feet that attach to the track that wasn't enough so the 7th Armoured then invented other cleats and one guy discovered if you ran over barbed wire the rubber band track there's literally a rubber band track that was one single rubber band on the stuart tank would would provide traction and and a tank a tank man was telling me this he said after about 20 miles you need to find more barbed wire but they were figuring out how to do things and then they returned to the attack and they start out at Malmedy and they go down through every last one of these towns starting on the 12th of January and on the 23rd of January they retook southeast and when they got back this is what the town looked like a first emptied division soldier said that that we took Aachen and we'd reduced it to a Roman ruin this is Sabbath at the end of the fight this is the Primmer bear right here where Tom Riggs and the boys were these are the roads you know those you can see the major roads coming through down this way about 15 kilometres of grouse slangin felled where Paul Thompson got captured the Schnee Eiffel and Schoenberg is this way who enter spelt the southern end the Schnee eyeful is that way and it was a cold blustery day on the 23rd of January when that happened and that's the redemption at Southie that's it I want to let you ask some questions I went over a lot of this hurriedly if you if you want to get at the details I'd urge you to buy the book I am a starving artist I recommend you buy at least 10 they make great gifts as I've told a couple of people and at the worst they make a good doorstop so I'd like well I'm gonna have you just start out and tell us a little bit about yourself how you got in the Army and the 106 I enlisted in the Army on the when I was 17 and February of 43 I was trained as a radar repairman and I also got 16 weeks of infantry basic and that took about a year and a half on June of 1944 I was assigned to the 106 division which was training at Fort Atterbury Camp Atterbury in Indiana and I was assigned to the recon troop as a radio repairman on October of that same year we were ordered to the European theater we wound up in harbor of la Harve on the 2nd of December we were deployed through the Ardennes forests through through Belgium through northern France and wound up at a little German farming community known as a grouse long and felt was just over the Belgian border into Germany on the 16th of December we were hit with a total surprise attack we drove them back well our officers deployed their armored cars we had 37 millimeter cannon and 50 caliber machine guns and they were deployed we drove the Germans back they made another attack later in a day we drove them off again apparently with very heavy losses during the night the German has decided we were too strong for them they thought that there was perhaps an armored battalion and you gross loggin filth actually there was a hundred thirty-one totally green in an experienced cavalry man the next day they attacked again about 10 o'clock with two reinforced infantry companies something like six hundred men and they just rolled over us we ran out of ammunition we were ordered to try and break out and get back to the American lines but none of us did those who were killed or captures I was in three prison camps Limburg 12a which is down somewhere near Cologne I understand or Koblenz rather I was in Luke involved Stalag 3a which is near Berlin and I was at all invariably Stalag 11a which is somewhere near Magdeburg late in late late in the war probably probably late March the prisoners were divided into what they called our bike commandos of 30 or 50 men and we were ordered west to the to the front to repair railroads as we got closer to the front we were looking for opportunity to escape of course and that occasion arose on the 10th of April my buddy and I saw an opportunity to escape and we did so we joined the American army a day later received usual debriefing and delousing and all that good stuff and I was back home in Chicago before my 20th birthday which was a 16th of May 1945 that's that's amazing Paul you packed all that in just to a couple of years and we're gonna we're gonna back up just a little bit to about this the the night of December 15th yes to the morning to December 16th and can you tell us I've got the map with Lennie 7 able on there and I've got it here so you don't have to turn around Paul yep tell us a little bit about what that battle position was why how it got its name and what you did there yeah I was in the headquarters platoon I'd been trained in it as a rifleman and I was one of the few men in our platoon who knew how to handle infantry weapons so I was assigned to a bunker facing south and west over the a 42 Road I believe it was with a light machine gun air-cooled liked the caliber T caliber machine gun let's see what and then you went to bed and you had day oh yeah yeah the 16th of December of the the Germans opened the attack with a terrific artillery barrage and I I was her buddy and I had set up housekeeping in the second floor of this house out on the south and the west end of gross loggin failed I was absolutely certain that every time then Excel came through was going to come through the through the wall and blow up in a bedroom so I grabbed for my trousers I could not for the life of me get those trousers on I threw him aside to grab my overcoat the Hellmuth boots rifle ran for the bunker and we fought I fell off the first German attack in my underwear yeah if I've been captured dead not and you get the Pearson salted nut roll prize for tonight anyway there was a lull between the attacks that I managed to go back and get the rest then there was a there was a later attack after you were fully clothed yes the Germans didn't give up after that yeah well when we got these got the order to to evacuate trend make it out get his back to the American lines there had been a burp gunner burp Gunners a sort of an automatic pistol that fires a cloud of bullets and it just makes a ripping sound burger so that's why they call them burglars I suppose anyway it flies fires a cloud of bullets and one of them is going to get you so I ran out of the ran out of my position running four armored cars and this Burpo gunner had me in his sights and he was firing bursts after bursts and they're whistling and snapping all around me but I didn't get hit and I finally made it to an armored car later on after we were captured and waiting to see what the Germans were going to do with us I looked down with my trousers that burp gunner had shot holes in my trousers and not one of them had touched me so kind of concentrates your mind a little bit living a charmed life so far yeah let me let me add one other thing you know thinking back I believe I owe my life to Field Marshal von Rundstedt because he ordered the attack to start at 5:30 I had we had a an observation foxhole about a hundred yards or more down the slope out in front of our lines and we was manned with an observer from 6 o'clock and warning until dusk and I had been ordered to go out and man that foxhole at six o'clock von Rundstedt ordered attack at 5:30 if I'd been in that foxhole I certainly would have been as the first casualty of the war so Thank You Field Marshal we'll send them a telegram wherever it is yeah Paul some of the highest praise that we have whether it's in sports or in war or any type of competition is from our opponents and you were after the war you were able to find one of the the German company commanders notes and the battle battle plans yeah he's very good things about the 106 recon yeah yeah he as I said I knew we were attacked with 600 by 600 men on the third day and I learned that from a [Music] post on on on the Internet written by lightning Gerhard worms who was led led one of the attacking companies he said that our officers deployed their cannon cannon fire and machine-gun fire so skillfully they thought they were facing an armored battalion I think I mentioned before we were a hundred and thirty one men and I might add that we had no experienced or trained military officers they are all 90-day wonders or ROTC men so that's something for the quality of our officer training corps I'm sure all I'm gonna ask you if you can explain you had Leni seven able oh yes how did you that was your battle position yeah Omar my officer was Leonard prostate one of the 90-day wonders who was incidentally killed he had he had several bunkers under his command and mine was Leonard product number seven a Lenny 780 and that's how that title came I don't know how many bunkers he had - four or five I think there his command and error was a first-rate officer that crawled around all during the fighting from bunker to bunker under his command keeping us up-to-date telling us what was going on on Sunday morning where we hadn't hadn't eaten for 24 hours or 30 hours or something he brought sandwiches for my buddy and I first-rate officer yes I got the map up here that shows the the village that you're in in did you mention it was a german village and you manned a bunker that was a German bunker yes yeah these bunkers is built by the Germans the Germans had driven out and we occupied the bunkers it was a it was reached through a tunnel from the bot from the house and we were living in you ran through the tunnel wall to the bunker I'm told that bunker still exists and it was a log cover log sidings and people and you watched watch for the Germans didn't charge up the hill like Pickett's Charge you know they they crawled through the grass to try and get close enough to throw a grenade into the bunker so we kept a sharp eye out when the grass move we fired into it and that's how we defended ourselves now there's a special story about this house oh yes the some time later made him 20 years later or so I met the van who owned that house his name was Jacob Roy she lived in that house and he had been captured by the British early in the war he spoke excellent English he came through two or three of our reunions and I spent a lot of pleasant hours with Jacob and I was kidding him I says you know when he got back to your house it was a mess that wasn't my fault that was a term house adorable you had an interesting experience as APO W you were at three different camps you had mentioned and one of the camps had other nationalities had French folks there too and you had you were you had maybe an altercation with another prisoner from another nationality well yeah yeah the next to us was the French compound and I had arranged a way to sneak over the barbed wire and get into the French compound and that was a no-no you and you were if you were found you were shot but I was in 19 you know bored stiff it was really kind of an adventure and so this particular night I had sneaks over over the wires and I went in to see the Frenchman that I had knew and this guy came out of the blue I don't know where he came from but he had a knife and he attacked me that's where the infantry training came in handy I knew some basics of knife fighting and I was able to hold him off long I had a knife too of course I was able to hold him off long enough yelling all the time for my friends and that they grabbed him took him away I have no idea what he's after never seen him before no no idea is why he did it but that brings brings to mind another time a little later on which I was extremely fortunate but let me add here that every time I visited the French I got a meal yeah I got and that that was the incentive believe it was French food too yeah yeah the the French were the French were relatively well-off they worked in a tank Factory they had regular hours more or less at plenty of food and of course I would bring some back to my buddy when I could and I think that was a major factor and my buddy and I getting out of prison camp and somewhat better physical shape than most of our buddies but on this particular event occasion I was over in the French compound and it so happened that a number of other guys thought this guy Thompson has got a good thing going we're going to get in on that act but they didn't bother to go over the wire and sneak in they dug a trench underneath underneath the wire and crawl through the trench well of course the Germans couldn't couldn't ignore that they threw a ring of soldiers around the French compound and sent in police dogs to find find the prisoners my French my French friends opened the panel in in in the barrack and there was another guy in there and a Larry and he they hid the two of us behind those panel and we were not discovered but along about three o'clock in the morning it became pretty evident you know we've got to get back to the American compound I remember this is this is the dead of night it's a dark as the inside of your pocket star lights the best so Larry and I decided we better make a break for it so we started to sneak across the compound the guard saw something started firing killed Larry outright missed me totally and I ran over the wires why they never turned the spotlights on their searchlights I don't know but I thank God for that that that that ended my visits to the French compound I never won again Paul at this time I'm going to invite mr. Fontenot to come in and join us up here but if you could tell us how you escaped and then we'll take questions after yeah well long about let's see there was April yeah long about the last week in March or something like that they divided the prisoners this is this was a at Alton Grable they divided the prisoners into work details seven thirty forty fifty men I don't know how many and sent us West to repair the railroads the Germans of course over the Americas of course were bombing the railroads and our job was go back and fix them we were rather overjoyed that even though we were in pretty bad shape physically most of the guys because to get out from the barbed wire made escape at least conceivable so as we approached the the American lines the horizon was a flame just see the see that American front moving forward and we're moving toward him and on this particular night we were camped along a dirt road heavy woods we were camped into heavy woods and out in front of us was nothing open fields and no trees no bushes no nothing and there was shooting in so we could hear shooting from an area of other Arbeit commandos the guards are obviously bit confused they've been marching as around in circles for a couple of days and my buddy and I had decided we better not stick around here to see what our guards are going to do we better get out of here so we reasoned that they would expect people to try to escape through the woods and there was a shooting back into the woods my buddy and I decided nobody no guards would think anybody was dumb enough to walk out into the open fields and that's exactly what we did we did we just walked out in the open fields hung out till the army got closer and and rejoined American army and I guess it would be the 11th of November of April 11th of April 45 yeah so we're gonna move in to some questions right now if you'd raise your hands we've got some people with microphones that will come to you and you can ask a question either of Paul or a Greg and it's okay for people over 19 to ask questions here so my question is where did you get the knife in the prison camp there's a long story in a short story well our recent operations in prison-camp were five men to a loaf of military bread which is substantially sawdust if you have developed the bacteria in your stomach that you could draw sustenance from sawdust you lived if you couldn't you died I was fortunately one who did but somewhere along I picked up a playing card which is which is pretty stiff and of course the Germans had taken everything away from us long long before but it was stiff enough that I could cut bread so I was the bread cutter this day I was wandering in the in the yard and I stumbled out a piece of strapping from a barrel metal strapping and I ground that piece on on the stones and till I ground a knife out of it which I could cut bread with I found a branch and I split it to make a handle and I took threads out of our my socks the army issued they were blue nylon socks and as far as where is concerned they are made of made out of cast iron they they just did not wear out so I pulled some thread that's out of that and wandered around a haft and so i had a bread cutting knife well on one of my visits to the French compound I showed it to the guy well you know one of my French friends and he thought that was absolutely the funniest look at knife he ever had says I'll trade you a good knife for that one as is done and so he did and I have that knife with me as a matter of fact so he traded he traded me that knife and I got this one and replacement I thought that was a pretty good bargain that was a good trade and we'll go over a question over here hello Paul I was just wondering at the time when you were captured if you felt that or if you were treated in accordance with the rules governing the treatment of prisoners oh yeah absolutely we were treated with the greatest respect I should say that the Volks Grenadier is that captured us were all old men there was no one of them that couldn't be couldn't have been my father you know they were 40 and 50 we had wounded and carried him down to the aid station German aid station there's German wounded lying all around waiting into for treatment they took our wounded in the first and took care of him so we were treated with the was with respect to where we were we were pleased about that they they were citizen soldiers as safe as we were they probably didn't want to be out there killing one another any more than we did okay we'll go one more up here do we have anything for Greg on the presentation got one down here Thomas we come down a couple steps yes thanks very much for your presentation in the reading I've done about the battle I remember a lot being said about the youth the inexperience and the unpreparedness of many of the soldiers and I respectfully mention your presentation emphasized a lot of the really positive things that the Americans did could you maybe emphasize or at least speak to to the role of of you know the unpreparedness of the American military at that juncture there is some truth to that in the case of the hundred 6th Infantry Division 106th Infantry Division was late in the deployment scheme activated relatively late and in the summer of 1944 they were about half its strength was pulled from it late summer August September after it had done unit training so the 106 division was before gotten combat had lost half its strength they replaced people arriving in september/october some of more AST people like paul who had not had 16 weeks of infantry training they'd had many fewer weeks so when they when they went forward they moved in October up to the Northeast they boarded ship in November they were in England for a couple of weeks they went to sea on the 1st or 2nd of December got caught in a storm spent four days bobbing up and down in the channel you know throw on the inside of their guts up and then they landed and lahar of a good chunk up and spent the first night in lore of standing in about an inch of water because there was no there was no dry place to be and then they boarded trucks and went for days to get to the Shahi fold and walked up in it I went to visit the grave of the division surgeon of the hundred six division of the day doctor Belzer Belzer had already had to deal with cold-weather injuries immersion foot trench foot and a bunch of other problems the other thing with respect to the hundred six division is it was not uniformly well led I don't think that Paul's experience was necessarily common the division commander was clearly not up to the task he made some serious mistakes I didn't talk much about that because I was focused on other people the 7th Armored Division in particular but it I do talk about that at some length in the book Alan Jones was overwhelmed by the problem general Middleton that the corps commander was indolent in the first two days and he was almost made no decisions he failed to communicate clearly by the way when I mentioned the phone conversation between him and Jones in the room with Jones was the assistant g2 of the 8th corps a guy named William Slaton by-the-bye incredible luck I happened to buy a book of the 106 division history lion in the way by re to Pugh and Slayton had bought the book for a friend and had annotated it all the way through so I had Slaton's notes on what dip you had to say what's going on Slade was in the command post I mean I don't know how that happens ok but it did you know it's like that genome and digesting wood I apparently don't have it I've eaten with a couple times in any case slade knew that when Jones was told the 7th Armored Division would arrive at 7 o'clock on the 17th he knew it wasn't true and he writes a little snide little note in the book that says you know maybe I should have said something but I want to contradict the boss so I don't know what kind of man Slade was I'd like to think I'd had the courage they wait a minute let's not probably going to happen but that was part of the problem the second problem was Jones's son Alan W Jones jr. was in the scenario with the two regiments so he's beside himself you know you shouldn't let your kids serve in your own unit and the Army's done that a couple times where somebody says hey I really want my son to be in this guys outfit then the guys killed and then you have a big hoodoo between two old friends about why did you let my son get killed in your outfit you can imagine we just had a situation like that a few years ago when I was still working for the Army on in a place called whaaaat and the Korengal Valley and Afghanistan bad things still happen in good people the other thing they happens to of the regimental commanders were the youngest regimental commander United States Army was a man named Donna who command the four 22nd Colonel Cavender who committed the for xxiii was a fairly an older officer who won great respect apparently in the prison camps according to what Paul told me but Cavinder and Asano did not act with a great deal of initiative in the snowfall the problem I have with reaching a judgment on either of them is the only thing I could do with them and I began this work more or less as a major in the night in the 80s as I couldn't interview them that both of them had passed on so I you know you can only interview the people you could talk to I mean it's you know no way I have not been able to do seances so I have I have no mains for being able to say with an absolute certainty that - no and Cavinder should have done other than what they did but they did nothing and Jones tells them to do nothing and they never even had conversations about and then their communications went to hell in the absence of good communications they decided to do what they'd been told to do and I think that was a mistake and a lot of the people that were captured up there I grew up with some of them my one of my high school classmates was a guy named Tom Baloo his dad sergeant major Baloo was in the four twenty third by the way the novelist Kurt Vonnegut was captured in the Schnee Eiffel he described marching out of the state I feel as being part of the river of shame other things that happened in 106 division in some companies they issued one clip of eight rounds to the garand rifle because they didn't want to take a chance of an accidental discharge shooting somebody by accident you're in a combat zone the other thing they did in de PUE talks about it and send the after-action reports they spent a lot of time getting warm because it was cold and miserable and they were sick and tired and they hadn't had a chance to get settled so my rule of thumb with soldiers is you do the thing that's gonna cause you not to get killed first then you do the things later that might get you killed later and on it might make you uncomfortable better to be cold wet and miserable and do some patrolling and then build the build the huts later but they focused in a couple of units on building huts first the morning after they went in to the Schnee Eiffel a soldier in hundred six and on his pup tent a German had chalked 106 division welcome to the front the Germans were patrolling deep into the American rear eight ten kilometers on the on the northern shoulder on the Elson borne Ridge there were there were ski trails being done by Germans on skis deep into the de jus rear the 18th Oakes Grenadier division discovered a four mile gap between the southernmost unit of the 14th cavalry regiment the northernmost unit of the for 22nd the Americans know about it did nothing so there were plenty of bad decisions made but what I think is important to remember for every bad decision there was somebody like Lenny in his recon troop doing what was right by the soldiers and doing the best they could and the other thing I'd say to you about this is in the seventies it was very popular to say how bad the US Army was and how little it achieved when you go look at this and I've done that and I've done it pretty carefully you will find that by the end of 44 or 45 we were as good as the Germans probably were ever that wasn't true 106 division but nobody expected them to get assaulted at odds of 5 or 6 to 1 on the first day of combat so this 106 division I write a section in the book called aces and eights the dead man's hand the 106 division got dealt a really bad hand and they weren't helped by their corps commander and their division commander that's a long answer to a short question but that's the best I can do well we thank you for the long answer because that was very good I think we can take one more question one more question over here yes this is for Greg this summer I was in Normandy and Bastogne the whole place there for two weeks and one of the places that we went was I can't remember exactly but the waffen-ss and Piper were there and there was a massacre and right and the folks there who stopped them coming up the road there but whatever happened to Piper and that he get reconciled all the yellow was gone from the bog nets corner at Malmedy when that happened but he was responsible as the commander he was tried after the war spent ten years in prison and for reasons that I just I am puzzled by jock and Piper decided he wanted to retire to a house in France and so he did and one night French communists came to the house blockaded a minute and set fire to the houses burned him to death so you locking Piper whatever you know he was called Hitler's adjutant there's some real bad characters in the SS one other one I want to mention quickly the commander the Fuhrer escort Brigade if you ever saw the movie operation Valkyrie where Tom Cruise and the boys tried to stop Hitler well the guy that that turns the COO over and wins the day for Otto Hitler is a man named Ernst Otto rumor he commanded the Fuhrer escort Brigade you can go on YouTube and that guy to the end of his day was a dedicated and devoted Nazi and never thought any other way so you had experiences like Paul had decent treatment and the right thing to do and it was true in the eighteenth folks Grenadier as well and then you had people like heard a rumor and the lovely and talented and Piper second SS Panzer Division which I mentioned at Parker's crossroads in monje burned every living human to death in the town of ordered or sub blonde in the summer of 1944 they collected all of these people they put him in Church barricaded the church set fire to church burn them all my parents took me to see that when I was six years old we were living on on top of a bunker by the way on the Atlantic Wall sergeant Fontenot was frugal to the point of absurdity and we were living on the bunker my mother made him move eventually thank God and we took me to see our door sir glance if you wonder why I'm a history geek and why I hate Nazis that's part of them right there and it is still there and they haven't repaired it and the other thing you might want to know we talked about the French and the Germans and all these Europeans to somehow you know they don't get it they don't care but if you were if you go to Normandy is I have done and he has done you go inland the French don't fly flags it's not a custom there but all over Normandy you see French French people flying American flags you go into places I've been dealing with a guy named Karl Wooters of Belgian attorney he sets me I there's a picture in the book of a foxhole on the Primmer bear that belonged to a medic he knew personally in 106 division and he has his own little museum I have another Dutch guy of dealing with Nick Hendrix he has a museum the 7th Armored Division all over Europe there are these people that are doing reenactments there's a reenactment group for the 7th ad that's got about 30 vehicles I don't know why they do it but these people have a sense of commitment and loyalty to to the myth if you like the American soldiers participation in the liberation of Europe that endures to this very day and every time I hear somebody tell me the French aren't good allies I get the jaws now maybe it's because I'm also French but well stranger things have happened we we French or chauvinistic because we really are better than everyone else so yeah very good just a couple of housekeeping notes here our next event is January 14th we'll have dr. Bruce menning he'll be discussing the Russian army and its evolution World War 1 to World War 2 and for the student outreach we'll have Fred awful Bakr a veteran of the 2nd Armored Division hell on wheels and also will have Dan Weber talking about his father Russell who was in the 82nd recon battalion that's the recon battalion of the second ad and and his fighting in France we would ask that you purchase your books and if you want them signed by the author and/or by Paul that you'll do that upstairs axel will show you where to go and we will export Paul and and Greg upstairs and thank you so much and we wish you a happy holiday gonna take down this way support for this program provided by viewers like you thank you additional support provided through the Catherine B Anderson fund of the Saint Paul foundation upcoming roundtable topics can be found at w WM & W - roundtable urg production services provided by barrows productions [Music] you [Applause]
