 I found the safest place to be in any attack was in the assault wave because we were upon the enemy before he knew we were coming. We escaped much of a small arms fire and in addition we didn't get the retaliation from his artillery that the waves following us got. And in this town as we did on all of our objectives, each company commander in separate platoon that was ordered to take a certain position followed the practice of writing a message on an egg, on a fresh egg that they had taken their objective in what time and sent this by messenger to the battalion sergeant major battalion headquarters. And this is where we got our fresh eggs as we crossed Germany. As we were leaving for the attack that night the first sergeant said take it easy and don't get hurt. I said sure I won't but I knew right then that I was going to get it and a half hour later I did. We'd been fighting then for ten weeks and we brought back a spirit of feeling of confidence not only in the staff but also in the regiments, battalions and even companies which really put us in good stead for the future. These are the men who served in the 84th Infantry Division during the final months of World War II. As committed to action on the Siegfried Line in November 1944 they were quickly caught up in the Battle of the Bulge and the series of conclusive engagements that followed. This is their story. December 1944. In a last effort to regain the military initiative Hitler had ordered a major counteroffensive in the Ardennes. As fog and sleet grounded all Allied planes German infantry and Panzer units swept 50 miles into Belgium recapturing the key road junctions of San Vien La Ruche and surrounding the defenders of Bastogne. A major part of the German attack was turned against the town of Marsh Belgium, the key to the River Meux, beyond which lay Paris only recently liberated and Antwerp the Allies' chief supply court. The 84th Infantry Division had hurriedly left the Siegfried Line and had taken up defensive positions along the Marsh Houghton Road. Only by the most heroic resistance would the Allies be able to hold in the flanks of the Nazi salient and keep the enemy line from bulging further westward. I'm Richard K. Hawkins. I was a first lieutenant with A Company 334th Infantry of the 84th Infantry Division. We were spread over an extremely wide frontage. Our rifle company actually covered close to a mile and with Fox holes two men each roughly about 100 yards apart. This is perhaps four to five times the usual amount of frontage that a rifle company will cover in a defensive situation. There were several times when our forces were attacked by great numbers of tanks in one instance near the village of Verdun, approximately 200 enemy infantry and nine Tiger tanks attacked us and actually overran our position. This was one of the few times in which it became necessary for me to call down artillery fire on our own position. Enemy casualties during the Battle of the Bulge were much higher than ours due to the fact that they were expending themselves against defensive position and this happens in any battle. However they had far overextended their supply lines and many of the troops that we captured had not had any food for some time and I would say that their casualties outnumbered ours by at least three to one. This stately chateau situated at the edge of the village of Verdun is the property of a Polish baron. During the December fighting it became a house of horrors as it was methodically disfigured by some of the bitterest hand-to-hand fighting of the war. A member of the family recalls. My name is Elizabeth Deradiski and I spent many days in the castle at Verdun. We witnessed the whole battle and I was with my father and a few people from the village and some friends who had come here to find shelter. We spent five days and five nights in the cellar of the castle. First came the Germans then Americans. Generally we could not tell who was in the castle although we did notice that the Americans were rubber souls. They walked softly whereas the Germans who wore metal tips were very noisy. Our food consisted of bread, some butter and ham. The real problem was to get water. We had to walk through corridors where Germans and Americans were often fighting in order to reach the faucet where we could get the water. Sometimes we would meet Americans, sometimes Germans. A week after the Ardenna offensive had begun the weather suddenly cleared. Allied air reconnaissance and bombardment was now possible. Allied air superiority was complete. The ground fighting remained intense throughout the bulge. The turning point in the battle for March came on December 26th. On Donald Phelps I was the sergeant and the 333rd infantry of the 84th Division. I was leading the company column on the left hand side of the road and the company commander was leading on the right hand side. As we broke over the top of the hill it became apparent that there were some armored vehicles ahead of us. I knew that we needed something to really go after vehicles of this type with and that the bazooka which was being carried by another man farther back in the first platoon did not come up as fast as I'd like. I found the bazooka back in the platoon behind me but found the ammunition was across the road. I loaded once, got up real close and fired. I was very gratified that the bazooka worked properly and I made a good hit. I'd never fired one before. I made two or three back trips back to the ammunition supply and up and fired again. All of a sudden somebody had spotted that we needed some help in that area and some of our artillery fired. A piece of the shrapnel threw across my hand and arm and as it came I felt it burn and I heard it bounce off the end of the bazooka. I realized I had been hit but it didn't seem too serious. One of the men near me also realized I had been hit and he came over to see if he could give me aid. We succeeded in putting a tourniquet around my arm by using my belt but then I started back down the road. After we got back to a couple of platoons, action was such that I could stand up and walk down the road and all I could think of was Merry Christmas boys. My name is John Shaw. I fought as a buck private with the 84th Infantry Division during World War II. This excruciatingly cold night, I remember trying to get a drink from my canteen which was frozen solid and so we started out through the woods crouching and moving forward and then someone yelled fire and shout and so we started firing and shouting and the tracers went through the woods and we moved on in a kind of hysterical way getting more and more excited as we moved forward and heard more noise and were firing. We went perhaps 20 feet or 25 feet and all of a sudden there was that terrible noise that a person hates to hear, the little pop of a flare and it was a German flare and it lit up the whole woods and there we were and there they were. The Germans then opened up with machine gun fire and 88th and I know I had a kind of sinking feeling that this was it. This was the first real fighting that our company had been in where we were playing with the big boys and we knew that this was for keeps and all of us were terrified. These machine gun bullets were firing a few feet off the ground and then occasionally as they would rake up and down this line of all through the woods, occasionally they would dip down and then you'd hear somebody screaming from that section where they dipped down and they sprayed us like just if they had a garden hose and they sprayed and sprayed and then the morph flares went up and the tanks opened up directly again with 88th fire. The man on my left was killed outright and the man on my right on the other side who was equally close was wounded very seriously, a recap was blown off and the cries and shrieks of wounded really went up then and I turned to the man on my right and put a tourniquet on his leg. My name is Major General Bill Sutton and I was a battalion commander in the 84th Division in World War II. It was critically important for the 84th Division to hold the Marsh Hutton Ridge and stop the attack and only by the determination of the officers and men of the 84th Division and the expert leadership of General Bowling, the Division Commander, were they able to do this. After the German advance was stopped in the last few days of December, the Germans were noticed to be digging in in front of the position which indicated they did not intend to continue attacking. The bulls would bulge no further. Hitler had again misjudged the capacity of the American soldier. My name is Carl Theodor Siegfried Westfahrt. My last rank in the German Army was head of the General of the Cavalry. From the beginning of September 1944 until May 1945, I was commander of the General Staff of Commander in Chief West. Hitler had a vast and extensive technical military knowledge, but he was a fanatic. Fanatics are known for their disability to keep a cool head and weigh their thoughts carefully. This, however, is an absolute necessity for the strategists. At the same time, Hitler was not inclined to consider the enemy capable of accurate and fast action. He was and remained a military dilettante. The cost to Germany of Hitler's miscalculations would be staggering. More than a quarter of a million men dead, wounded or captured. At least 14,000 people were killed. The German army had a large number of soldiers. The German army had a large number of soldiers. The German army had a large number of soldiers. The German army had a large number of soldiers. At least 1,400 tanks and guns destroyed or abandoned. Slowly and painfully, the remnants of the once-proud Wehrmacht retreated behind their shattered Western defenses. It was the beginning of the end. By the 3rd of February, the 84th Division had again moved back to their positions on the Siegfried Line. Their watery objectives lay before them, the Roar, the Rhine, and the Elb. I'm Lieutenant General Louis W. Truman. During World War II, I was a colonel, chief of staff of the 84th Infantry Division, and chief of staff for Alexander R. Boling, who was the commanding general of the 84th Infantry Division. The Roar River Crossing was one of the most thoroughly rehearsed river crossings of any unit in the European theater. The original crossing date was to be 10 February, but it was postponed because the Germans had flooded the area. So we then had about two more weeks in which to work out all the details very thoroughly and to rehearse all the units for the overall operation. It's amazing that we ever got across the Roar River considering the confusion that takes place during the preparations for the attack. If you can imagine us being pitch dark with a narrow road with huge trucks with pottons for the assault bridges to come later along one side of the road and a very narrow strip available to move up troops through when you consider the horrible noise of the artillery preparation which lasted for 45 minutes prior to our crossing during which time commands can't be heard and it's very difficult to give any orders and expect them to be carried out. The Germans had constructed a rather wide band of wire, barbed wire, on the fore side of the Roar River and studded it with S mines which bounced up in the air when triggered off about six feet and exploded there making it impossible for anybody to avoid the fragment. This minefield and the barbed wire on the fore side of the river made the Roar River one of the biggest little rivers in the world as far as I was concerned. Before that day was over, we had two full infantry regiments across. The Germans were caught off balance. They did counter-attack us at the town of Ball but they were unable to organize themselves fast enough and after three days our position on the other side of the river was secure. It was General Bowling's impression at that time that the German soldier was no longer the same soldier whom we had faced earlier. Right now was to break through all of the resistance and give the enemy no time to catch his breath or to recover even for a moment. The final phase of the war began for us on April 1 when we crossed the Rhine. Everything that we had was on wheels and they were all turning. We rolled across the northern part of Germany on Autobahn for the most part at great speeds and long convoys. This was exciting because we were covering so much ground compared to what it had been like on the Siegfried line earlier and we rarely had to get out of the trucks except when we'd run into a rash of firing then we'd have to jump out and run for cover and then after a while whatever difficulty would be taken care of and then we'd roll on again. If combat can be described as fun this was because the weather was fine and we were rolling and we were going through a part of Germany which had not been much shot up and we saw civilians for the first time, German civilians and we were able to shout at Troy lines and do all the things soldiers like to do. Allied morale was high. For each man of the 84th knew that the war was near its end. During the more and more frequent gloves and fighting there was time for a little relaxing time even for the humorous anecdote. Army rations were pretty good but one day after too many servings of corned beef we spotted a half-star German chicken. One of the men went out gutting for it and he was using an M1 rifle but he had armor-piercing bullets in it. The soup we made that night we had to strain the bones through our teeth. I am Fritz Kramer. I was with the 84th Division as a rather elderly soldier from my 35th to my 37th year. In one respect I have to admit however I probably was not a very typical and normal soldier. I did like the army food. I wanted to get lots of food. I got it. I wanted to get simple food. I got it. Very many of my playmates felt that the army food was not good but I must say in this connection that I have found in life that the people who went traveling complained that the oysters are never fresh enough and the champagne never cold enough. In general the people who at home had nicer champagne nor oysters. There was one fellow that we had who was really sharp at gathering eggs. He knew where they all were and he gathered a big armful of them one morning. It was very early about five o'clock and he was just coming around the corner of a building and a German officer came around the other way and they stared at each other for a second and then he took the eggs that he had in one hand and he threw them all about five or six of them right at the German officer and the German then ran around the building the other side and later on the German said to us in impeccable English he said you know you fellows are lousy soldiers he said I've been trying to surrender all night long and he said now finally you throw eggs at me and here he said I've been trying to surrender. But there were other German soldiers who found surrender less of a problem. This experience was noted by a new member of the 84th Division Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Boling Junior then a rifle company commander and a son of a commanding general. He had only recently escaped from a German prisoner of war camp. By the end of April a company had reached the Elbe River and this started a short but rather strange life for the men in the unit. The Germans had naturally withdrawn across the river to the other side and they permitted us strangely enough to enjoy a degree of freedom during the daylight hours. We actually could go out into the river and fish near our banks of course but at night time any movement along the river whatsoever drew fire. At that particular time there was a degree of mixed emotions among the men in the company. There was that particular feeling in which they wanted to go on and be the first unit into Berlin which had been the division objective ever since they landed in Europe and at the same time the soldiers I don't believe wanted to have the honor of being the last man, the last casualty in the war and I must admit the Elbe looked very wide at that time. After just a few days really on the Elbe we awoke one morning and discovered much of the amazement of everybody that the far bank was virtually covered with tens of thousands of German soldiers desperately trying to get across to our side. It's quite apparent that there was no effort, that this wasn't an attack and as a result there was no effort on our part to prevent this crossing. They were trying to get across on rafts that they had made during the night and on boats, on inner tubes, any way they could get across and they were quite successful. And this of course was the day when our battalion and I guess the division captured the largest number of prisoners. The war wasn't over but the Germans had decided that they were going to surrender to us rather than to the Russians. One of the lasting memories for me of this last action was when General Bohling and I crossed the very swift Elbe river to meet the oncoming Russians. This was on the 26th of April. On the far bank of the river were at least 10,000 German soldiers who had not yet been taken prisoner. Some were wounded, others were sick and all were thoroughly demoralized. The very sight though of so many men trapped there on the other side of the river symbolized for me the total collapse of the German army and the absolute conclusion of hostilities. When we finally encountered the Russians on the opposite bank of the Elbe they appeared to be a rather motley disorganized crew with all kinds of transportation including horse drawn wagons, ambulances, motorcycles, bicycles and even a few riding bareback plough horses. They were a very friendly, boisterous lot who seemed extremely happy to meet up with the Americans and finally realize that the war was at an end. For those who met at the Elbe on that April day in 1945 the war had reached its inevitable conclusion. On May 7th the end would be made official by the formal surrender of all German forces to the Allies. The third Reich which Hitler had proclaimed would last a thousand years now lay buried within the rubble of a devastated Germany. For the majority of Germans there was nothing left to fight with, nothing left to fight for. For the men of the 84th Infantry Division there was the knowledge that from the roar to the Rhine and from the Rhine to the Elbe they had accomplished every mission. They had been tried by fire and they had won.