Battle of the Bulge profiles: 10th Armored first to Bastogne
“Hunger, capture and death seemed imminent. Under these circumstances, you do some serious praying,” a 10th Armored Division soldier.
Rufus Lewis Jr., an artillery fire control specialist from Spartanburg, was already in Germany when he heard the news about a shocking German breakthrough up north in Belgium and Luxembourg.
On a dime, his 10th Armored Division of tanks, self-propelled artillery and support troops turned north on Dec. 17, 1944, and covered 75 miles in one day to arrive in the beleaguered town of Bastogne, Belgium. It was one of the greatest marches in the history of modern warfare.
The 10th Armored was the first to arrive to defend the key crossroads town. Once there, it found utter chaos.
Demoralized American infantry units were streaming backward through the city. German artillery was pulverizing the place. The key crossroad was about to be overrun. So the division squared up, lowered the barrels of its howitzers and began firing directly into the forest in front of them, like tanks would, splitting trees into deadly shards and halting the German advance.
“We chopped some wood,” Lewis said.
This week, Lewis and more than 80 other veterans of the World War II battle will gather in Columbia for their national conference. They will be honored with five days of events, including a 40-unit parade of antique cars and military vehicles down Assembly Street and through the State Fairgrounds beginning at 4 p.m. Thursday, prior to the USC-Southern Mississippi football game.
The veterans are now in their 80s and 90s.Nationally, World War II veterans are dying at a rate of 850 to 1,000 a day. The two million still living are the remnants of 16 million American men and women who served in the war, and in many people’s eyes, saved the world.
Not only did the veterans win the war, said syndicated columnist George Will, who is speaking at an 11:30 a.m. luncheon on Thursday, but they forged the peacetime country as well.
“They came home and produced the baby boom,” he said. “They generated the greatest prosperity in the history of the planet. To meet these people, who are repositories of such history, is just amazing.”
Ready for duty
Lewis was a sophomore at Clemson in November 1942. These were in the days before college deferments. Every man age 21 or older was eligible to be drafted.
With the probability looming that the 20-year-old would be drafted the following March, Lewis, with his parents’ permission, joined the Army.
“I wasn’t a very good student so I decided to volunteer, and my daddy let me,” he said.
Lewis signed up at Fort Jackson and trained at Fort Benning, Ga., where he joined the 10th Armored as a fire controller for the 420th Armored Field Artillery, directing the fire of a battery of self-propelled 105 mm M-7 “Priest” howitzer artillery guns.
Each five-gun battery had a “computer,” a man who calculated the angle of fire.
“I was in charge of the computers,” Lewis said.
The 10th Armored “Tiger” Division was activated on July 15, 1942, at Fort Benning, and entered northwestern France through the port of Cherbourg on Sept. 23, 1944. It was part of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army – the first units to enter France through the newly liberated port, rather than over the D-Day beaches.
In football terms, the Third Army was to undertake a giant end run — a wide swing through central France around the American, British and Canadian troops that had stormed ashore at D-Day about four months before.
Their mission was to drive a dagger straight into the heart of Hitler’s Germany.
The Army was in daily and gruesome combat from the time it entered the country until it punched through the Siegfried Line — Hitler’s last line of defense — and into Germany on Nov. 19.
Then its advance was halted when Hitler struck back 75 miles to the north in the Ardennes forest. Lewis found himself hunkered down in a freezing farmhouse basement on Dec. 18, 1944, calculating the flight paths of 105mm artillery shells into the German lines, when his now-more-famous comrades of the 101st Airborne Division — the “Band of Brothers” — came rolling into the Battle of the Bulge to claim their glory.
“We were there eight hours before them,” Lewis said from his living room in Northeast Richland. “But thank goodness they got there.”
‘Take it as it comes’
Lewis especially remembers the bitter cold of Bastogne. “But I wasn’t as cold in the basement as the guys in the foxholes,” he said.
He remembers ammunition running so low that at one point the guns had only two rounds apiece to fire. “We saw the situation getting bad.”
He recalls the constant whistling of artillery shells. “You never knew if they were coming in or going out. You just automatically take cover. If there was a foxhole anywhere, you got in it.”
There was one day, the bitterest of all, when two of his men wandered outside and were killed by a German shell.
“That’s pretty tough,” he said. “You’ve been living with these fellows for 21/2 years. It’s pretty tough.”
Most of all, Lewis remembers being scared as the German shells dropped around him but working through it.
“If you were up in an airplane that was about to crash, how would you deal with that?” he said. “You just take it as it comes.”
The men of the 10th Armored Division and the 101st Airborne held on at Bastogne for 10 days until relief arrived. Both received a Presidential Unit Citation. The award requires the same high level of heroism from a unit that would warrant award of the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest individual service medal, to an individual.
The 10th Armored Division continued fighting, blitzing through Germany and liberating the infamous Dachau concentration camp.
By the end of the war, it had captured 650 towns and cities along with 56,000 German prisoners.
“The United States encourages initiative,” columnist Will said. “The Germans ran into a whole lot of that.”
This story was originally published August 31, 2010 at 12:00 AM with the headline "Battle of the Bulge profiles: 10th Armored first to Bastogne."