WW2 & Kentuckians: Voices of a Generation

On the snow covered morning of December 16th 1944, American forces all along the Ardennes Region of Eastern Belgium and Northern Luxembourg were preparing for what would seem to be a regular day in this remote part of Western Europe. In just a few short hours however, the German Army, which many thought could barely defend themselves, would crash 29 divisions of tanks, men and equipment against the thinly held American line. For a solid month, American, British and German forces engaged in what became the largest land battle of the United States in the entire Second World War.

" We were up around Bastogne, when they made that breakthrough. The battle of the bulge there. We went up there to blow a bridge and we met the Germans on the way. The Germans had come across the bridge before we got there and so we pulled the trucks off to the side and when we did those German convoys just went right on past. Once they did we couldn't get 'em out. They saw us but they didn't stop, the first one didn't, but then there was a convoy right behind it and it stopped. They got the truck, one of them boys from New York was sittin' in there. They dragged him out and had him out in the middle of the road and they were shaking him around and asked him if he had anybody with him and he said no. I figured old Corelett would tell them that he had someone with him because he didn't wanna go by himself and I backed a little bit on the shoulder of the road and I was laying there watching them shake him around. Then I backed off a little bit because I thought they would come up there looking and sure enough here came this officer coming up there right where I had been laying. He had one of these little generator lights in one hand and a pistol in the other. I was laying on the ground so I could see him but he couldn't see me. I had an M1 and I had it pointed right in his back, about six feet from his back. He shined that light right around to where I was laying and if he had shined any further I would have had to shoot him, because he would have shot me with that pistol. So he turned around, he didn't want to shine that light around back towards that town, so he went around so far, right around to where I was laying, and then he turned around and walked back that same way."

The hectic chaos of battle exhausted most troops, even in combat, some found relief in the most unusual places. Thomas recalls:
"I started walking back towards what I thought was back towards that town [Bastogne], and I run into a tank trap, a big hole in the ground; I went down in that and you know I laid down in there and went to sleep. Those bullets going through there, I went sound to sleep. The next morning I rubbed my feet, to get the circulation back and then went right on."