Once the tanks began to move, the artillerymen could make out the muzzle breaks on the guns, and Garrett ordered, ‘Let the shit hit the fan.’ Cooper later remarked that with those words, all hell broke loose. Several tanks were immediately disabled by the 463rd’s guns, their crews scurrying from the turrets of the burning panzers.

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The artillery was quickly joined by soldiers from Batteries A, B and C with bazookas, machine guns and rifles firing at the tanks and the enemy infantry around them. Since most of men of the 401st were busy with the infantry that had followed the tanks on foot, Cooper’s men were part of the thin buffer blocking the German armor and infantry from the center of Bastogne, less than a mile away.

As soon as the fighting began, Cooper called division headquarters and informed them that the 463rd had been attacked and would hold out as long as possible. To the question ‘Cooper, are you telling me the facts, that you are under attack?’ Cooper replied, ‘If you don’t believe it, look down this way, and you will see five spirals of smoke, which represents five tanks burning–no, there are six spirals of smoke, which makes six tanks burning.’

Cooper did not know how long his battalion could hold out, but he was determined that his guns would slow the enemy advance, if not stop it. By 8:30 a.m. enemy infantry had approached to within 200 yards of the 463rd’s command post in Hemroulle. Cooper ordered all classified documents and the M-209 cryptographic machine destroyed. Captain Victor Tofany of Battery D and the other battery commanders ordered their men to stack their barrack bags in a pile, ready to be burned if the enemy broke through.

There was no need. The fight in and around Hemroulle ended at about 9 a.m. with the destruction of the last of the German tanks that had attacked the town. The seven panzers that had veered away from the column heading toward Champs met the same fate. Although panzers knocked out two tank destroyers from the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, they were themselves destroyed by a combination of fire from American tank destroyers and bazookas fired by members of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment near Champs.

While his battalion fought the tanks outside of Hemroulle, Rogan had been with the remaining men from the 401st as they shut the door behind the tanks and dealt with their supporting infantry. Brought out of reserve, C Company of the 401st joined the fight against the 115th until daybreak, when American artillery and mortars could deal with the enemy infantry, which was now outlined against the snow-covered slopes west of Hemroulle. Battered by increasingly accurate American artillery fire and the small arms of the 401st, the Germans tried to dig in and hold what they had gained, but the ground was frozen. Instead, they hugged the earth and waited for the artillery to stop. During a brief lull their commander, Colonel Wolfgang Maucke, had his men retreat to a hill southeast of Flamizoulle. Allied aircraft soon began battering Maucke’s isolated men. By nightfall it became clear that the German force that attacked early on Christmas morning had been almost completely destroyed, with the bulk of the men dead, wounded or captured.

Soon after the fighting ended, Carson ‘Booger’ Childress, a member of Battery B, radioed Cooper to tell him that he had captured one of the tanks in good running order. Childress informed Cooper that when the firing started, the tank crew had tried to get into the panzer, but it was hit on the turret, killing the first man trying to enter. The rest of the tank crew members ran for cover and were later captured by the 463rd’s tank stalking party, commanded by Lieutenant Ross Scott.Cooper drove out to the tank and placed a white undershirt on the tube to identify it as captured. Ever the resourceful soldier, Childress figured out how to drive the Mark IV and followed Cooper back to his headquarters. The lieutenant colonel then called Colonel Sherburne, the acting division artillery commander, and told him that he had a Christmas present for him but that he would have to personally come to pick it up.

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