Hell Frozen Over

Outside in the slit trench, sleety drizzle was falling. Coleman remembers having to pull one young soldier, a replacement without the necessary training, down into his trench. Not one chance could they take.

Bleialf was quiet during the night, but Division knew at 2:55 a.m. that something big was coming to that village. A German prisoner captured up on the Eifel gave information that about 6 miles southeast a Volksgrenadier division was massed.  By 3:00 a.m. patrols discovered infantry on the move. It was the German 293rd Regiment re-formed and ready to fight for the small village imperative for their breakthrough.

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Early on December 17 in the still-dark Sunday morning while all was quiet, Coleman heard his name called. “Coleman, you’re wanted inside,” a voice said.  He saw no one, just heard the voice. In he went, probably grateful for a chance for some warmth and asking who had called him.  He polled each man inside, but no one had asked for him.  That was puzzling.  He had been inside perhaps 5 minutes when the proverbial “all hell broke loose” outside.  At about 5:30 in the pre-dawn blackness  “the Germans rushed from the direction of the railway tunnel near the village and swept through the town.  Records show the fighting down in the town was heavy and—in many cases—hand to hand with bayonets. Cole says, “The Germans later reported a stiff fight.”

At the command post, the men inside went to windows and began firing.  Machine gun bullets ripped at the exterior and shattered windows, pelting and finding their targets with sharp dings or soft thuds. Coleman still sees the image in his mind: “You’d see fire coming out of the barrels. Germans were running by and giving a few squirts from the ‘burp’ guns [machine pistols]. I could see continual tracers as the shots came toward us. The enemy didn’t come in the house because they couldn’t GET in.  We were shooting.”  In Coleman’s memory, the fight was several hours long.  In reality, the Germans tore through the town rather rapidly, within an hour of their entry. At one point a grenade suddenly blew the door off, and jagged shrapnel found its home in a man’s knee.  The fighting went on.  “The screemin’ meemies [multiple rocket launchers]—they’d come out with fire flying.”  Coleman discovered something then, as did all the young 106th men in that first battle:  “Actually till you get shot at, it’s a different war, just one where you hear the noise in the rear, but when they’re actually trying to kill YOU, then it becomes personal.” The defined combat zone of several miles is larger than the actual front-line “killing zone.” Fewer than 14 percent of the army ever experience either.  These men knew they were there.

Each man followed a mixture of instinct and training, fighting first for himself and then for others.  Both down in Bleialf and up on the hill overlooking it that morning, the men of Company B were not thinking of freedom and American values or ideals; they were fighting a personal war of survival. Coleman says, “You fight for reasons you don’t really know. You just get in the situation; then it’s the matter of survival.”  When asked if he felt anger at being in the life-threatening situation, he answered, “I was never angry at anyone for being over there.  It was just a matter of being in a bad situation, making the best of it, and trying to get out of it.”

That may sound strange to those who have never been in battle and who have envisioned American soldiers nobly fighting beneath the flag—metaphorically at least—”in the twilight’s last gleaming” or searching for that flag in “the dawn’s early light.”  Civilians will never be able to separate an image of the flag from fighting soldiers. However, Gerald Astor states the truth of what keeps men fighting.  “During the crunch, nobody advance[es] under fire with the motivation of striking a blow against tyranny or to preserve the Stars and Stripes.” He adds that although spiritual values sustained men, it did not make them fight.  What then was the impetus to head into danger, to hold a weapon and keep firing?  Astor says good leaders are the key in inspiring men to go beyond what they would ordinarily do.