Dog Company

Nervously, Sigurd Sundby studied the woods at the far side of the open field and mentally marked the German machine gun positions waiting for them. The Ranger next to him, John Conaboy, soberly noted, “Just like All’s Quiet on the Western Front.”

The sunken road where they crouched provided an embankment about three feet high that stretched about two hundred yards in front of Hill 400. The road provided some protection from small arms fire, but the Rangers were exposed on their flanks and to the rear.

At this point, the assault companies had dwindled to fewer than 120 men. In front of them loomed their objective: the rocky, scarred summit of Hill 400. German machine gun nests and bunkers dotted its slopes. Although pockmarked by artillery shell holes, it remained largely covered in pine trees.

To get there, the men would have to cross about one hundred yards over an open, frozen field laced with mines. It offered no protection from German machine gun fire, mortar shells or artillery rounds. Lomell described it as “a level table-top field that was filled with snow and ice.”

Suddenly, a German soldier at the edge of the woods near the hill jumped up, fired a flare into the air, and made a mad dash toward a German pillbox. Most of the Rangers took pot shots at the German but missed. As the Rangers readied their positions, Morris Webb remembered being told, “Keep firing as you walk and don’t stop walking no matter what happens. If they pin you down in the field, you’re done for. Keep moving and keep firing. And watch out for the mines.”

As the Rangers waited behind the earthen wall, German mortar shells began falling behind them. The barrage of death was creeping closer and closer. According to L-Rod Petty, “The first mortar burst exploded about seventy-five or one hundred yards behind us and seemed to be coming from our left front. While [the Germans were] establishing their range and lateral adjustments, the bursts began to creep nearer. You could feel the tension building up in the lines in the voices grumbling about why we didn’t charge. Of course, we could not because almost simultaneous with the German artillery fire, our own artillery commenced to shell the hill. I think every man on the line was convinced that mortars would reach us before our artillery lifted.”

Caught in an area less than two hundred yards between the two opposing barrages, tension was building up to the exploding point. As the two walls of heavy artillery closed in on the men, the Rangers listened incredulously as a newly minted F Company officer barked to Sergeant Petty, “Send out a scout!”

Herm Stein no doubt echoed the thoughts of many of the men as he muttered, “Why? Are they nuts—sending a scout into the face of obvious fire?”

Petty snapped back, “Fuck you, no way!” The officer yelled the order several times and received the same response. He then barked to Sergeant McHugh, “Send out the scout!” McHugh barked, “Fuck you!”

Bourchard obeyed the order. He stood up and started walking across the open field. In stunned silence, the men of Fox watched the sickening scene unfold. After taking no more than four steps, Bourchard collapsed, taking a rifle shot to the belly. “This was the fuse that ignited the explosion of the Ranger charge.”

But the men would not wait. Two minutes before the official jump-off time, F Company’s McHugh waved his tommy gun over his head, and screamed, “Let’s go get the bastards!”

In Petty’s opinion, had the Rangers waited until the prescribed time, the encroaching German mortars would have killed many of the men along the sunken road before they jumped off for the attack. Petty believed that the German machine guns “would have mowed us down” as the Rangers hit the wide-open field. “It’s doubtful that any or very few would have reached the woods,” concluded Petty.

“We were supposed to move at 7:30,” Petty related, “but we felt that if we didn’t make the move beforehand, we’d get slaughtered by the German mortars. We stood up just like in a movie. It was like seeing a wave in the football field. It started with F Company and moved across into D Company. We went over the field as one.”

Private Bud Potratz admitted his mouth turned “dry as cotton” as he charged across the field, firing his weapon at the German lines, and yelling “Heigh ho, Silver!” at the top of his lungs. Shooting from the hip, the Rangers rushed headlong through the same icy, snow-dusted killing field that Captain Rhein’s company had fatefully attempted to cross only one day earlier, leading to their slaughter in their failed attempt to recapture all of Bergstein. Most of the Rangers’ thoughts were simple: “How do I get across this field and onto the hill in the woods?”

Artillery shells were landing all over the field, wounding and maiming Rangers—though many of them kept up the charge. It was all or nothing. German machine guns opened up from a nearby bunker and other positions. Halfway across the icy expanse, the Ranger charge grew staggered because some men ran faster than others. According to Petty, “it became a disarrayed assault with no one in command. It would have been impossible to do so.”

Potratz recalled a few men who froze and did not join the rest of the company on the charge. “I hate to say this, but [some of the men] never got up. I never knew what happened to those guys but they didn’t make the charge.”

But all the others, Lomell remembered, “were running as fast as we could and running at the base of the hill. The Germans called in mortar and artillery fire. They started a crawling fire effect behind us. It made us move faster. It followed us right up the hill.”

At the sight of more than one hundred crazed, screaming Rangers tearing across the field, charging at them with their cold, steel bayonets pointed and guns blazing, many of the Germans began to surrender.

As Stein recalled the tragic incident, “I got about halfway across the field. A German was coming with his hands on his head to the right of me.” The German was being waved back to the American lines “until he met up with one of our men who was cussing him out and hollering at him. The German promptly got on his knees, pleading for his life. But this Ranger, with a wild gleam in his eyes, shot him through the head.”

According to Webb, “[he] shot him even though he had his hands up. I don’t agree with that kind of stuff, but when you are being shot at you have all that tension, I guess you want revenge. I don’t agree with it. I saw that a couple of times, but it’s a sad sight to see. It shouldn’t be.”

As the Rangers continued to charge, more Germans abandoned their pillboxes and machine gun positions and ran for their lives up the hill. “I guess if you see one-hundred twenty men acting like a bunch of Indians coming at you, you think ‘These guys are nuts.’ We were yelling like crazy, the ‘Rebel yell.’”

Petty reflected on the moment, “With bayonets shining, hip firing, and yelling a battle cry that probably goes back into the eons of time, we charged into the jaws of death. I know that I will never see a more brave and glorious sight. It was for me indeed a moment of being proud to be a Ranger.”

To Ruggiero, “It was something straight out of Hollywood. Someone yelled, ‘Fix bayonets,’ and we screamed and took off. The Germans didn’t know how many men we had. At that time, we were shorthanded. To take that hill with Fox Company and Dog Company was quite a feat. It was less than 120 men, for Christ’s sake. . . . I didn’t see any sun at all, there was so damn much smoke.”

“As we moved out,” Ruggerio continued, “we were taking sniper fire from a nearby building window. The round hit right near McBride’s foot. They were sniping at us. Mack would hear it every time the bullet would hit in front of us. He shouted, ‘That son of a bitch is up in a window to the right.’ I almost emptied an entire clip of my carbine into the window. At that instant, an artillery shell hit the window. Something big hit it, and it just blew up.”

McBride and Ruggiero then moved to a small mound of earth on the edge of the open field. “The first hummock was about seventy-five yards maybe from the back end of the church,” Ruggie related. “All I know is that when we got out of the church, right after the tail end of 1st Platoon, [Dog] was making their way across the field at the foot of the hill. We went through the churchyard and there was this big, high hummock-like thing. Myself, McBride, and Joe Stevens, who was the mortar sergeant, we were up against this hummock. We were watching the guys go across. Every now and then a shell would come in right in back of us.”

Even worse, explained Ruggie, “the Germans started using that six-barrel thing. A Nebelwerfer, a rocket launcher. We could tell that’s what it was. One dropped between Mack and Joe Stevens and me, just in back of us. That’s when I got blown over that hummock.”

After the blast, Ruggiero wasn’t able to move. “McBride threw me over his shoulder. He had to run back to the church with me over his shoulders. That’s when I threw up all over him.” As McBride was carrying Ruggiero across the field, McBride was shot in the buttocks.

Fortunately, the Rangers did not fall victim to the same carnage that had befallen the Volksgrenadiers on December 6. Smoke from the artillery barrage partially obscured the Germans’ field of vision. In the murky haze, the scores of screaming, bayonet-wielding Rangers swiftly rushing toward the 980th caught them by surprise.

As World War I had proven, a bayonet is usually no match for a machine gun. However, the timing and circumstances of this charge—the heavy smoke, the premature charge, and the narrow gap between the two artillery barrages—miraculously created a window of opportunity that would allow the Rangers and their bayonets to overcome the Volksgrenadiers’ entrenched machine gun positions.