HURTGEN and THE BULGE: The LAST WAR HEROES Episode 5 (2026 Edition)

Added: 2026-05-31

[00:00:02]This is the story of the final year of World War II in Europe as told by the last war heroes.

[00:00:35]The big thing about being an infantryman is the living conditions.

[00:00:42]I spent the most of my time in foxholes.

[00:00:47]December 1944, deep in the Arden on the edge of the German border, 19-year-old private Arnold Whitaker was dug into his foxhole.

[00:00:59]To keep busy, we would uh improve on it.

[00:01:04]We'd make it wider and deeper. And then with our ingenuity, we'd always seem to find some kind of straw to put in the bottom.

[00:01:14]We take out our pictures of movie stars, i.e. Betty Greybel and Rita Hayworth, and we'd have find a stick and stick them on the side walls. We dig a hole in there to put our canteen in there.

[00:01:27]And the irony of the whole thing, it was typically an ideal size and depth for a casket.

[00:01:39]From Michigan, Arnold had never left the United States.

[00:01:43]Soon after basic training, he was sent straight to the front line.

[00:01:56]The first night I was caught in explosions, tree burst, mortars, nibble wers, 88s.

[00:02:08]They would hit the trees and then uh explode and then come down like rain, hot, hot metal, ragged metal, and hit you.

[00:02:22]Many of the guys were injured by splinters. It'd hit them and explode and they come down like arrows.

[00:02:33]One blew my helmet off and blew my M1 away.

[00:02:38]I was a 19-year-old kid reaching around on hands and knees in the dark cuz without your helmet, without your M1, you're useless. There's you're you're nothing. You're just cannon fodder.

[00:03:04]Now, after one day, I'm a veteran.

[00:03:12]The Allies had already fought across the beaches on D-Day, survived bloody street battles at Arnham, and chased the retreating Germans all the way back to their border.

[00:03:31]The front line now stretched from the tip of Holland as far south as Switzerland. The general's new objective was to break through the entire Seagreed line. 400 m of heavily defended fortification, the final barrier into the heart of Germany itself.

[00:03:48]The fighting now concentrated in the densely forested region of the Arden.

[00:04:09]We knew the winter was coming.

[00:04:12]It starts with a very cold blowing wind and just uh snow flakes just here and there. But the flakes aren't actually flakes. They're in little balls like pellets.

[00:04:28]It turned into the coldest winter on record.

[00:04:35]Getting supplies through to the men was often impossible.

[00:04:39]We weren't properly equipped. We didn't have pockets. All we had was that damn heavy overcoat. And once that overcoat got wet, it weighed a ton. So then they said, "Well, put your plastic raincoat over it." You put your plastic raincoat over it, then you're like a zombie. you can't move your hands because it was so so tough. But uh we were stealing, not stealing, we we liberated the white pockets from the Germans. When we captured Germans, we were taking their pockets. Now we found out Parkers and pile caps and everything had come up to the rear, but the guys in the rear kept them all. Us guys up in the line never got them. So needless to say, especially the 82nd when they got relieved and went to the rear, they beat the hell out of the rear. Anybody they saw wearing over shoes, galashes or a paka, the airbone just automatically beat the hell out of them.

[00:05:30]The temperature was so bad our Krations were frozen.

[00:05:34]So many times the little wooden spoons would break. So we eliberated sterling spoons and carried them in our pockets. And then from a sanitation standpoint, like a dishwasher, we would always sanitize them by doing this and stick them in our pocket that was filled with dirt. Well, it would caught up with us. We ended up with the worst case of dysentery.

[00:05:58]And when you have dysentery, you don't say to mother nature, uh, let's postpone that for an ideal time to satisfy you.

[00:06:10]If you had to go and artillery shells were coming in, you had to do something to your pants or you wet your pants. In other words, the decision was based on life or death.

[00:06:32]Conditions were atrocious. Even digging foxholes and slit trenches proved useless.

[00:06:40]As the German shells exploded in the trees above them, lethal splinters shattered everywhere.

[00:07:05]You were absolutely [ __ ] scared most of the time.

[00:07:10]Air bursts cause multi multi- wounds in all sorts of places.

[00:07:16]You'd get limbs being ripped, parts of limbs being ripped.

[00:07:26]Bored working in a munitions factory at just 16, Bill Edwards lied about his age to join up.

[00:07:35]He was now a stretcherbeer bearer with the first battalion worersha regiment.

[00:07:42]I remember one guy I knew quite well and his entire back was skinless from neck to waist and he was in a lot of trouble, a lot of agony and I gave him morphine. There was no chance of covering the wound. It's too big. I gave him morphine and a couple of doses and he was pleading with me to to shoot him.

[00:08:11]So I had to say to him, "Sorry, mate, that uh I haven't got a weapon. I can't do that." In any case, I couldn't do it cuz you're going to be all right. You're lying through your teeth. You cuz you knew he wasn't going to be all right.

[00:08:30]17 years old when he too lied about his age. Private Carl Beck from Missouri had joined the 101st Airborne Division.

[00:08:38]>> I was a slick sleeve private machine gunner. And I let you know I wouldn't hardly let anybody carry that machine gun. In fact, I had uh a stencil made and I stencled the side of that machine gun along the receiver. I called it Javan Joan.

[00:08:59]And that was a little lady that I knew back in my high school days.

[00:09:05]>> Carl with his machine gun had fought all the way from the Normandy beaches. With no air drops, he was now bogged down in a freezing cold forest.

[00:09:14]>> We were in this hole. I'd set up drive and Joan and had this kid as an assistant gunner.

[00:09:22]Word came that the mail had come in. I told him, "Okay, you stay here and I'll go back and get the mail." Well, this kid had a package and by this time getting all the way from the States, it was pretty beat up to begin with. And I had all this mail and stuff heading back for the hole.

[00:09:41]Artillery concentration came in.

[00:09:48]And when it did, I hit the ground. And when I did, that package came the rest of the way open in this peon bar. They make them here in South Georgia. They're very high calorie. They're just delicious.

[00:10:00]Came flipping out of it.

[00:10:03]And you see, you just lose all sense of morality because I knew, my instinct told me that that kid was dead.

[00:10:21]So, I picked up that bar and ate it. And sure enough, when I got back to the hole, he was dead.

[00:10:35]That I can't even remember his name.

[00:10:38]I don't remember.

[00:10:42]That's what combat does to you.

[00:10:45]You live like an animal and you react like an animal.

[00:10:50]But, you know, you get over it when you get back to civilization. And uh you know, I used to wake up in the night and say, "Here they come. Here they come." You know, I'd catch myself.

[00:11:06]But I've sort of outgrown it by now. And uh you never forget it. You don't want to do it again, but you just never forget it.

[00:11:18]Fighting through the coldest winter in decades, the Allies were still advancing towards the Seed line from the west and the Russians closing in from the east.

[00:11:28]Hitler's armies were losing on both fronts.

[00:11:34]Remarkably, Hitler took one last gamble and secretly amassed troops and armor behind his western front line.

[00:11:42]Then on December the 16th, 1944, he launched a massive counterattack through the Arden, pushing Allied lines back into Belgium.

[00:11:52]This was the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge.

[00:11:58]Instead of chasing a retreating army, suddenly exhausted Allied soldiers were up against Germany's most experienced and reinvigorated units.

[00:12:23]When an Allied division was overrun, young veteran Arnold Whitaker and his battalion was sent in to help.

[00:12:34]When we got there, it was just covered with snow.

[00:12:38]Then when you got closer, there would be a hand sticking out here or an M1 there.

[00:12:47]We were concerned that with all the snow we were getting that the quartermaster wouldn't find him.

[00:12:55]Wouldn't find him until spring. So what we did, we took the their the M1 and and put the bayonet on it and stuck it in the ground so the so it would stand up that high so the quartermaster would know that there's a a dead GI there cuz after a while with enough snow there weren't mounds.

[00:13:31]The counterattack had caught the Allies completely by surprise. The Germans were now racing to control the small market town of Baston. With seven major highways passing through its center, it was a vital crossroads.

[00:13:48]Allied generals knew the Germans had to be stopped.

[00:13:52]All leave was cancelled.

[00:13:55]22-year-old left tenant Frank Greg of the 101st Airborne Division was on a three-day pass in Reams.

[00:14:03]>> A runner came down and he says, "The colonel wants to see you right away."

[00:14:08]So, I took off up the road. I knew something was serious.

[00:14:13]And he says, "We are moving out as soon as we can load the trucks which are coming in now and going to a town called Baston cuz we got to get there before the Germans do."

[00:14:30]These are the men of the US 101st preparing to set off for Baston.

[00:14:38]With easy company was 20-year-old Ed Shames.

[00:14:42]So we got on the trucks with uh the equipment that we did not have. Nothing.

[00:14:47]We had almost nothing. I mean absolutely nothing. We had no over coats. We had no over shoes. We had no gloves.

[00:14:59]I didn't know where we were going what we were going to do there.

[00:15:05]We drove all night up the French highway, the Belgian highway. We pulled into a big barnyard.

[00:15:14]The commander says, "Get your troops off and come daylight, I want you to get up this road here.

[00:15:25]You run into the Germans and stop them."

[00:15:29]I said, "Yes, sir. They were attacking with divisions." The Germans were. and I had one rifle company with about a 100 men.

[00:15:45]We were encircled the minute we got there and our whole medical company that was on the tail end of our command was cut off. They were captured. the whole command, the whole medical unit.

[00:16:06]The Germans were all around everywhere.

[00:16:10]180,000 Germans and that's where we fought.

[00:16:20]The German army began to close in on the troops defending Baston.

[00:16:29]refugees were coming in to Baston from the way I was going.

[00:16:37]And I knew what that meant. The Germans weren't very far behind.

[00:16:46]And there come the Germans over the hill. So we ran together on the side of this hill.

[00:16:54]And I deployed my men on both sides of the road. The Germans deployed their men on both sides of the road. And we fired at each other for the rest of that afternoon.

[00:17:22]Huh?

[00:17:23]It went from bad to worse.

[00:17:44]Baston had now been under siege for days.

[00:17:48]The weather prevented any possibility of air support or supply drops.

[00:17:54]The 101st were surrounded and cut off.

[00:18:01]One of them dug into a foxhole with diving Joan, his trusty machine gun, was Private Carl Beck.

[00:18:08]>> We were 17 or 18 years old. And the thing that you feel, of course, is a little bit of fear, pretty much of the unknown.

[00:18:20]But the greatest fear to me, and I'm sure I expressed this for my comrades, the greatest fear for me was to let my friends down.

[00:18:35]The company commander was named Hilton.

[00:18:38]He said, "Beck, get your machine gun to get up there and fire this what we called a final protective line, an FPL.

[00:18:45]It's got a different name nowadays, forward edge of the battle area or something." The idea of an FPL is to get interlocking machine gun fire and let the infantry walk through it.

[00:19:07]I looked out there the next morning and the Germans hanging over that bobb wire fence uh you know trying to get get through and that those guys next to me did a good job of stopping them. Oh gosh, they must have killed must have been 25 people hanging over those fences the next morning.

[00:19:34]When we killed these Germans, there was no need to to do anything with them because they froze up like a block of ice, hard as as granite. And if we uh they came up to us, uh we we dropped them right then right in front of our foxholes. We came we couldn't sure as hell wasn't going to move them. So, we used them as a table. What the hell are something to sit down on? They were warmer than the damn snow.

[00:20:04]With temperatures dropping to well below freezing and thick fog, the Americans were still unable to send in supplies.

[00:20:16]We were hurt.

[00:20:18]You're cold and hungry and wet, but you still go and go and go.

[00:20:34]Oh, it was brutal.

[00:20:38]We ran out of food and we we were just about out of ammunition when we got a break in the weather and some C-47s came in and threw out some bundles.

[00:21:02]One of my squad leaders came to me and said, "Uh, Lieutenant, you have a package." And at that time, I had burlap on my feet and I had nothing. I had a pair of gloves that was uh taken off of a a German soldier that had no fingers in it. And I had no hat. Uh I had my helmet, of course. had no scarf and certainly no coat. I said, "My God, somebody sent me a scarf or a hat or a pair of gloves." I couldn't wait for the package. And when he gave me the package, it was about 2 in by 2 in and about 8 in long. And I opened it up and there was a fountain pen, just what I needed.

[00:21:54]Finally, on December the 26th, the US Third Army broke through to relieve Baston.

[00:22:04]Greatly outnumbered for a week, Ed, Frank, and Carl had been part of the US forces who'd successfully held off the German army.

[00:22:16]For those who fought at the siege of Baston, they never felt they were rescued.

[00:22:22]>> We were glad to get relieved, believe me. But rescued, we were not, cuz we were still full of fight. And to prove it, we moved on into the Bojac wood and took them on again.

[00:22:41]A week into the Battle of the Bulge, the Allies were losing hundreds of men a day.

[00:22:56]As the dead and injured were taken away, young, inexperienced replacements were rushed to the front to take their place.

[00:23:06]>> We get new replacements, get to know them by their first name.

[00:23:11]Two days later, they're dead. You We're talking about 70% turnover all the time.

[00:23:16]If we had an eight-man squad, which is supposed to be 12, we thought that was a big deal.

[00:23:23]They just killed us all the time.

[00:23:28]>> 18 years old from Boston, USA, Bill Ryan saw many of these green troops join his unit.

[00:23:35]>> They sent in so many new replacements and they didn't know nothing.

[00:23:42]I can remember the first sergeant coming around asking, "Hey, remember this guy that came in last night? Do you know what his name is?" They didn't even know what his name was. Crying out loud.

[00:23:51]That's how these casualties was. The replacements were killed so quick in the battle of the vault cuz you got to pick him up in the morning reporters signed and joined and the first sergeant's pulling his hair out cuz he didn't even know the names of these guys.

[00:24:06]New to the front line, 19-year-old Gil Nelson was sent out with his company and what he thought was a training exercise.

[00:24:18]Suddenly, single rifle bullet went over my head and the next thing, German machine guns.

[00:24:30]We had never heard a German machine gun before.

[00:24:34]We had lots of uh practice in under American machine guns which went boom boom boom boom boom boom. And uh but there's absolutely no comparison between what the German machine gun sounds like and ours.

[00:24:53]It's like a string of Chinese firecrackers that wrap very rapid and and they're they're snaps over your head.

[00:25:07]The sound was deafening.

[00:25:10]It made me very, very frightened. There was so so many bullets going over our heads.

[00:25:22]So much mayhem.

[00:25:25]The sound, the sight of blood, the death of people, the screams.

[00:25:40]Not long after arriving on the battlefield, many of Gil's troop were either killed or wounded.

[00:25:50]Baptism of fire was a a major thing and it forced me to uh think what life was all about.

[00:26:07]With so many inexperienced soldiers coming forward, the front line descended into disarray.

[00:26:20]Hitler issued orders to create fear and terror and cause chaos amongst the allies. Germans dressed in American uniforms, misdirected traffic, changed road signs, and cut telephone lines.

[00:26:36]Many of them had lived in the United States at one time. They knew about Lou Garrick and they knew about the Yankees and the Giants. And as that word got around that we were being infiltrated, any little sound that you heard, you just automatically assumed it was somebody sneaking up on you. So the nervousness increased.

[00:26:58]>> No one could be trusted. Security was tightened. Passwords issued.

[00:27:06]Password that night was jingle bells.

[00:27:10]So, I'm hollering, you know, I'm hollering, "Jingle bells, jingle bells."

[00:27:14]And then their shots come, you know, shots come over my head and I'm getting down and yelling all them and for Christ's sake, get down. So, I crawled a little bit forward and I knew it was British and I'm yelling jingle bell, jingle bells. And I then I'm saying, "For Christ's sake." And finally some guy in a red beret got up from behind a a truck or something rather and said it's the bloody Canadians. So I made I said to the six men I had with me come on follow me and we'll get up to the British lines and there was an officer there from the eighth battalion. He had a smile on his face and I said for Christ's sake what are you shooting at us for? And he said you didn't give the right first password.

[00:27:58]And I said it was chang. He said it was it was can it was changed. It was jingle bells was yesterday. Today it's till brook or something.

[00:28:13]With everyone on edge looking over their shoulders, stories spread of atrocities committed by German troops.

[00:28:26]Then on December the 17th in the Belgian town of Malmdi, an SS Panza division took a whole American battery prisoner.

[00:28:34]Many were found lying in the snow, shot in the back of the head.

[00:28:42]Now, the rumor was that 800 was killed and they went down to about 80. To this day, I don't think they really know how many actually because the bodies froze over and they had to wait till it thawed out to pick them all up. But the word spread to the infantry immediately that the the SS had massacred these people in Malmi.

[00:28:58]So the word went out unofficially, don't take any prisoners.

[00:29:02]If we were out on patrol to capture prisoners for interrogation, yeah, we didn't kill them. But if they came in close and everything and they throw their rifle down, we shot them.

[00:29:16]>> Ed Shames remembers when Easy Company captured a group of Germans.

[00:29:22]We determined who was the leader of the group.

[00:29:26]We asked him to give us the information.

[00:29:28]We wanted to know where more of the Germans in American uniforms were because that was necessary to save our skins, if you know what I mean.

[00:29:42]And uh we said we will give him 5 seconds to answer the question. And if he didn't, we was going to blow his brains out. And in some cases, we blew his brains out. I said, you know, after that, we had no problem at all getting all the answers we wanted.

[00:30:07]At 16, Harley Reynolds left his family to join the army. He'd seen action in the deserts of North Africa and fought his way through Europe.

[00:30:19]With his company, Harley was now deep in the Herkin forest.

[00:30:26]During the night, the Germans caught us by surprise.

[00:30:32]And they had developed a flare gun, but instead of a flare, it shot a it shot a grenade.

[00:30:40]Now, this is close quarters. You're talking about 20 to 30 yards, but that was one wicked thing. And it's our first time to ever run up against it.

[00:30:54]It sounded like buses or trucks or something being thrown.

[00:31:05]For an explosion to go off that close to you, it makes you like a piece of jelly.

[00:31:11]It goes through you and you have to recover for this and everything has to settle back into place, realign itself before you can even move.

[00:31:26]And they just slaughtered us.

[00:31:32]I was one of 13 men left standing from the battalion.

[00:31:41]The rest of them were either captured, wounded, or lay dead in the forest snow.

[00:31:52]Scared or afraid.

[00:31:55]That's not the word for it.

[00:32:01]I wish I had a good description of fear.

[00:32:06]It's uh I don't know if I could describe it as there's a good fear and bad fear. The good being that you become numb to where you're able to function under these uh threats of death.

[00:32:31]Having witnessed the massacre, Harley was taken off the front line.

[00:32:38]After two years of fighting, he was eventually sent home.

[00:32:47]I topped the rise where I could see the house. And my dad had finished this house. He had started it before I left home. And he had finished this house. I could see it. And when I spotted the house, there was one of my sisters that was on the front porch and she saw me top that rise and recognize me immediately.

[00:33:15]And she let out a scream and I can hear all the way back in Virginia even now that Harley's home.

[00:33:35]Did it.

[00:33:50]Both parents and my three sisters were home.

[00:34:01]They came running to meet me.

[00:34:11]And my father's first words were, "Well, son, maybe we can get a good night's sleep now.

[00:34:39]January 1945, the Allies began to claw back the ground they'd lost in the Battle of the Bulge.

[00:34:48]Thousands moved forward, pushing the Germans backhole by foxhole.

[00:34:56]Deep in a forest, dug in for the night with his regiment was 19-year-old Clayton Bird from Tennessee.

[00:35:05]We woke up the next morning and the normal tactic is to check the people on your right, check the people on your left to make sure they were still there.

[00:35:16]And we did both of those things and there was nobody there. And we realized that all of a sudden we were behind what had suddenly become the German front line all by ourselves, lonesome, probably with a week with a day supply of food, water, and ammunition.

[00:35:38]The next morning at daylight, a platoon of Germans stumbled into us. Having no idea we were there, we wiped them out.

[00:35:46]Then when they knew we were there, they attacked us. One day across a 500yard area of flat country, which was a stupid tactical blunder, we mowed them down.

[00:35:57]Then they tried to do the same thing at night and put up a flare just before they got to us so that they could see to wipe us out.

[00:36:08]Well, by mistake, they sent the flare up with them, still 7,500 yd or so out. And we used the flare to mow them down.

[00:36:24]We hadn't eaten for a week. Every shot that we fired had to have a specific target because we didn't have ammunition to waste.

[00:36:38]>> For 7 days, Clayton and his small group of men managed to hold off an overwhelming force of Germans.

[00:36:47]When Allied troops finally advanced through the forest, Clayton and his men were discovered.

[00:36:56]>> We got credit for so upsetting the Germans. They didn't know where the front lines really were cuz they sure wasn't expecting front lines in our area.

[00:37:08]We had trusted each other and we knew if we were all going to go down, we'd go down together.

[00:37:19]And um and I'm I'm proud of that group of people.

[00:37:30]By the 28th of January 1945, the Allies had recaptured all the territory lost to the Germans. The battle of the bulge was over.

[00:37:40]Now they could concentrate on breaking the seek freed line, Germany's final defense.

[00:37:53]Stretching nearly 400 miles, the troops faced tank traps and barbed wire linked by a network of more than 18,000 heavily defended concrete bunkers.

[00:38:11]After fighting their way back from behind enemy lines, Clayton Bird's company was sent to break through the line of pill boxes.

[00:38:22]>> But it was a very difficult thing because what you wanted to do was to find some way to get firepower through that slot that they used for shooting.

[00:38:43]At first, we'd take a flamethrower if there were any infantry there to get them out of the way.

[00:38:51]>> With the soldiers came engineers like Frank Cam, experts in blowing up even the biggest concrete structures.

[00:38:58]We'd have a soldier run down with a 40 lb satchel charge of explosives, swing it against the door with a time fuse on it, run back around the corner, and then it explode. And when it would, the back door would blow in, and the concussion would be such it would knock out everybody that was inside.

[00:39:25]Then our men would run in, grab the place, and that was it.

[00:39:32]When Clayton Bird's company was ordered to destroy four pill boxes, something unexpected happened.

[00:39:39]There was a white flag hanging out that opening and we had conversation with the German. He says, "If you will put on a display of force, I will surrender the people in this pillbox."

[00:39:55]And what we did, we shot hundreds, thousand, maybe thousands of rounds of ammunition up into the sky and we really had a fireworks display.

[00:40:09]Well, he gave up. Well, when all that happened, two of the other pill boxes, they decided they would give up as well.

[00:40:23]The next morning, the men in the fourth pill box also surrendered.

[00:40:29]>> So, we got four pill boxes without a single casualty. That's aund over 120 people uh that came out as prisoners of war.

[00:40:42]Once the pill boxes were cleared, the engineers filled them with explosives and blew them up.

[00:41:03]With the Sief Freed line in ruins, the Allies could now advance towards the Rine, the last obstacle before the heart of Germany.

[00:41:21]Clayton Bird carried on into Germany.

[00:41:24]For holding off the Germans after finding themselves trapped behind enemy lines, Clayton and his troop were all decorated with the Silver Star.

[00:41:35]Having survived the horrors of his first combat, Gil Nelson eventually became a sergeant in charge of replacements.

[00:41:44]Injured by mortar fire during the siege of Bastau, Private Carl Beck continued on into Germany with his beloved machine gun, Jing Joan.

[00:41:58]In the final chapter, the Allies cross the river Rine while desperate Germans try to stop them.

[00:42:07]>> So, you weren't killed by the artillery, you just drowned.

[00:42:11]Across Europe, the Allies discover the reality of Nazi Germany.

[00:42:17]>> What we could smell and see were rags all over the place.

[00:42:24]Rags. They weren't rag. They were dead bodies. and the RAF fly in to bomb Berlin, the most heavily defended city in Europe.

[00:42:33]The wing commander is pointed to Berlin and in one voice 150 voices would say, "Oh,