Battle of the Bulge: 687th Field Artillery Battalion’s Stand at the Crossroads Cafe

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At the same time, Captain William Roadstrum, the Headquarters Battery commander, was just outside the building. “What a psychology lesson that area was,” he said. “Guys just wanted to stand around by the building in the dark talking with each other. In spite of the bullets whizzing around and the grenades and mortar shells. They were…almost hypnotized by the situation.” Roadstrum tried to get them to lay down some fire at the enemy. He even slapped a couple of soldiers in the face, “all with little or no effect.”

Then he saw Atkins and Fleury. He looked at Fleury and ordered, “Sergeant, get two or three men and follow me.”

Fleury was a smart aleck in the best of times. He liked Roadstrum as a person but thought he was overmatched as a combat leader. He glanced at the captain: “Follow you?! Where are we going, Captain?”

“We’re gonna outflank ’em,” Roadstrum replied.

“Outflank ’em?” Fleury shot back. “We don’t even know where they’re at!”

In spite of his reservations, he went with the captain. Roadstrum, Fleury and Atkins exited the house out the back door, to the south, and worked their way along the road, at a crouch.

A few feet away, a good friend of Fleury’s from the wire section, Pfc Norman Morgenstern, was huddled in a ditch, pointing his rifle right at the three men, wondering whether or not to pull the trigger. “I can almost touch them,” he wrote in a present-tense account, “They don’t see me. Who are they? I strain my eyes. Friend or foe? I have the drop on them.”

The shapes moved silently past Morgenstern. He was very close to pulling the trigger but, for some reason, he just could not do it: “I let them go.” At that moment, he had no idea how close he had come to killing his friends. Morgenstern was Jewish, so he had no wish to become a prisoner of the Nazis. He was debating whether or not to discard his dog tags when more Americans plopped next to him in the ditch. Collectively, they retreated from the area. Morgenstern kept his tags.

Meanwhile, Roadstrum, Fleury and Atkins had worked their way to an embankment. “We lay flat and observed the Germans,” Fleury recalled. “Our trucks at that time had Christmas packages in ’em. They were going through ’em and throwing ’em all over. They were firing machine guns and mortar fire at us. They were honking horns and they were hollering at us.”

A mortar shell exploded mere yards away. Fragments tore into Fleury’s chest, knocking him to the ground. Roadstrum was not hit, nor was Atkins. Unaware that Fleury had been hit, they got up and moved west along the road, toward Bastogne. Fleury lay there in shock for a few minutes, his chest bleeding and one of his ribs probably cracked. About 50 yards away, he heard someone shouting to surrender and he wanted no part of that. “Bullshit!” he exclaimed, and he got up to run away. He later met up again with Atkins on the way to Bastogne.

In Battery B’s area, just north of the road, German fire was sweeping up and down the line of vehicles. Private First Class Lou Dersch, a 20-year-old kid from Baltimore, did not know what was going on. Soldiers from his battery were scattering in every direction. “I mean, we were facing German paratroopers and we hardly had anything to fight them with,” he said. The private had fired his howitzer’s last shell in Wiltz, shortly before Billingsley ordered the unit to retreat. It turned out to have been full of propaganda leaflets, which Dersch had watched scatter over the target area. They were now facing an enemy while terribly under-armed. “They were heavily armed,” Dersch recalled. “We basically had carbines. There were flashes and tracers everywhere. It was pretty bad.”

Dersch and two of his buddies made a run for their truck, but one of Dersch’s comrades was hit by small-arms fire. “He was badly injured, bleeding,” he said. Machine gun bullets were bouncing off the pavement, clanking against vehicles. Mortar rounds were exploding uncomfortably close. Dersch said he and the other man picked up the wounded soldier “and carried him all the way to the trucks, probably a few hundred yards.” They got him into a truck and took off. As they drove west to Bastogne, Dersch could not help but wonder what had happened to the buddies he was leaving behind. He felt guilty but was happy to have escaped the slaughter.

In the meantime, Lieutenant Eames was lying behind a hedge, just outside the café. Four feet away, a German soldier stood up and unleashed a burst from his burp gun. “I reckon I never will get flatter in my life than I got right then,” Eames recalled. “I felt bullets around my heels but none hit…a grenade went off close by too but still no holes in me.” He crawled through the doorway, into the café. The place was crammed with soldiers, including several wounded men who were howling and moaning.

On both floors, several men were standing at the windows, firing their carbines at unseen targets. The Germans were obviously closing in on the building, but in the darkness and the confusion it was hard to tell friend from foe. Staff Sergeant Walter Austin, a former steelworker from Pittsburgh, was in the attic, pointing his carbine out of a window, looking for a target. Bullets were smashing into the walls and floors of the building. “[They] were coming through windows and through the roof and through the floor,” he recalled. He fired one clip into the night, took out his pistol and fired it until the ammo was exhausted. Then he went downstairs to see what was going on there.

On the first floor, Major Ed German, the battalion operations officer, was contemplating what to do. With Lt. Col. Billingsley and his executive officer elsewhere, he had a growing number of wounded men stacking up in the hallways. It was only a matter of time before the enemy overran the café. German gathered together a group that included Lieutenant Eames and discussed their predicament. “Major German suggests we surrender,” Eames wrote in his diary, “to save piles of wounded & yet let the [batteries] make out as best they can.” Eames and the others agreed it was the right thing to do.

German passed the word around the house. He shined a flashlight outside and, able to speak German, asked to see the enemy commander: “Wo ist der chef?”

A few minutes later, enemy troops stormed into the café. Eames recalled hearing “heavy boots in the hall….[A] burp gun let [a] few rounds out against [the] ceiling to quell any overambitious soul.” The troops yelled at them to get out, bellowing: “Raus! Raus!”

Outside of the café, the Germans lined up the Americans and began to work them over. “These guys were wild and they were very young, no doubt teenagers,” Pfc Ervin McFarland wrote. “They were handy with their gun butts as they used them on many of us.” Anyone who did not keep his hands firmly on or above his head risked getting pummeled. Major German overheard one sergeant urging his men to shoot the prisoners, but a nearby captain squelched any thought of that.

Farther down the line of prisoners, Sergeant Austin kept his hands high and tried to remain calm. “They slapped and banged you around,” he said, “stripped you down, took…your watch, took your wallet, pen knives, and even made me take off my shoes.” As the German soldiers lined them up, Corporal Jack found himself shivering uncontrollably. “It was bitter cold standing in the open,” he said. “My hands were numb from standing…with hands over head. We were placed in columns and started marching east.”

Thus ended the debacle at Poteau de Harlange. An exhausted, under-supplied artillery unit was no match for an aggressive force of enemy airborne troops in this kind of close-proximity fight. The Germans captured between 110 and 125 men, many of whom were wounded.

Not surprisingly, Headquarters Battery was decimated. Battery A got away to Bastogne. Battery B lost 21 men, but escaped with most of its vehicles and guns. Both batteries later fought alongside the 101st Airborne Division during the battle for Bastogne. Battery C lost all of its equipment, including its howitzers, but many of the soldiers got away to Bastogne, or to Sibret, to the southwest of Bastogne. The 687th still existed as a unit, but it was badly mauled. Several more weeks would pass before an influx of replacements and new equipment brought the battalion back to strength. They fought well and served until the end of the war in Europe.

Even many decades later, the American survivors had little idea that their sacrifice had done some good for the Allied cause. Without question, the battle at Poteau de Harlange was one-sided, but it cost the Germans valuable time and organization. The Fallschirmjäger unit that overran the 687th was preoccupied with its new prisoners and loot, rather than a forward advance. The Germans’ timetable was upset, and they played no part in the looming battle for Bastogne.

Whether or not they understood their contribution to American victory in the Bulge, those who experienced the horror at Poteau de Harlange could never forget that night. Their nightmarish experiences, in combination with those of untold numbers of other Americans throughout the Ardennes, bought Eisenhower the time he so badly needed to strike back and win.

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Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Historical Conflicts, World War II