The men of the 687th Field Artillery Battalion hadn't had a warm meal in four days. Ever since the Germans launched an offensive in the Ardennes region of eastern Belgium and northern Luxembourg on December 16, 1944, the artillerymen — and all the makings of their Christmas dinner — had been on the move. The day of the 19th had seen them firing in support of American defenders at various displacements around the Luxembourgian town of Wiltz. Just before sunset, however, they had run dangerously low on ammunition and were forced to retreat.

So when the battalion paused to regroup about six miles southwest of Wiltz at a quiet crossroads containing little more than a two-story café, it seemed a good time to break out the Christmas dinner; they'd likely be at the crossroads, known as Poteau de Harlange, overnight. The battalion's commander, Lt. Col. Max Billingsley, and his executive officer decided to head into Bastogne, about 10 miles to the west, just over the Belgian border, to learn more about the situation. The battalion's batteries set up around the crossroads: Headquarters Battery in the café; Battery A in a field to the west; and Batteries B and C lined up bumper-to-bumper in open areas to the north and south, respectively. Meanwhile, the battalion's cooks prepared the special fare in the café: chicken and all the trimmings. When it was ready, the exhausted men formed a chow line and filed through.

Lieutenant Les Eames, an officer in the survey section, had just finished his meal when a GI burst into the command post in the café and yelled: "Small arms fire! Down the road!" The battalion had been outnumbered and outgunned in Wiltz. Now, with the ammunition nearly depleted, the odds were even worse.

While it wasn't apparent at the time, the weary men of the 687th Field Artillery Battalion and other desperate groups of GIs played a critical role in the Allied victory during the Battle of the Bulge. By putting up persistent resistance against powerful and numerically superior enemy forces, those ragtag bands of American soldiers gave General Dwight D. Eisenhower enough time to rush reinforcements to the Ardennes and blunt the enemy offensive. Without their efforts to slow the Wehrmacht juggernaut, the battle might have turned out much differently.

On the heels of his comrade's warning cry, Eames felt his heartbeat quicken and his blood seem to bubble like ginger ale. He and the other soldiers around him grabbed their rifles and helmets and poured outside. They heard the popping and rattling sound of small-arms fire in the distance. Corporal Arch Jack, a survey section clerk, was lying in a ditch, peering up the road, thinking that some GI was probably just trigger-happy. "The next thing, a vehicle turned lights full-on and headed up the road towards us," he recalled. "There was a lot of hollering and confusion. I crawled in a shallow ditch all the way to the café with tracers zooming over me."

The intensity of the distant shooting grew, and the vehicle kept coming, right at the 687th. No one could quite tell whether the vehicle was American or German. It looked like an armored car. Could it be an American vehicle but with Germans inside? Why in the world did the driver have his headlights blazing in a war zone?

Just across the road from the café, a halftrack with a 40mm anti-aircraft gun had been set up. The gunner decided to take no chances. He opened fire at the approaching armored car and scored a direct hit. The vehicle turned into a ball of fire. Machine gunners added to the carnage.

The vehicle, it turned out, held Americans. The M8 armored car was the point vehicle of a small retreating column of scout soldiers and 3rd Battalion, 110th Infantry, troops retreating from Wiltz. This group included the commanding officer of L Company, 110th, Lieutenant Bert Saymon, who was hanging onto another M8. Saymon and the others were now under fire from German troops on either side of the road, as well as their own 687th comrades. Another officer from this column managed to run into the café and inform his colleagues that there were two companies of enemy paratroopers from the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division just down the road.

No sooner had the warning come than the German paratroopers attacked the 687th, prompting a wild, chaotic, intimate fight around Poteau de Harlange. The Germans were everywhere. Tracers were flying all over the place in the dark night. Corporal Jack was under a truck next to the café, wondering what to do next. "All kinds of fire were going now — mortars, burp guns and rifle grenades," he said. "A flare shell lit up the area. I saw a figure crawling toward [the] building and came close to shooting. I then hollered at him — it was a B battery GI." Jack got up and ran inside the building.

Upstairs, on the second floor, Pfc Dick Atkins and Tech. Sgt. Gene Fleury were scrambling out of their sleeping bags, grabbing for their weapons and pulling on their boots. Atkins figured the building would be a magnet for enemy fire and he wanted to get out of there: "The Krauts used flares to light up the area and with each flare there was much more fire in our direction." All over the house, Atkins remembered, men were yelling in confusion. Outside the enemy was hollering too, "calling each other by name but also yelling orders in German that could not be understood by us. By the sound of their voices, they had to be under the influence of something alcoholic."

Like Atkins, Sergeant Fleury noticed the slurry, boisterous timbre of alcohol in the Teutonic voices: "They were drunk. They were cussing in German and calling us a bunch of names. They were saying: 'No more zig zig [sex] in Paris!'"

The enemy paratroopers were very young, very frightened — but very excited. Many of them believed that they would make it to Paris for their own zig zig. Atkins and Fleury piled down the stairs and through the doorway.

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