While Admiral Nimitz directed the war with the Japanese in the Pacific, hundreds of young men from the Hill Country were fighting an equally formidable foe in Europe. And though the handwriting was on the wall for Hitler’s Reich by December of 1944, the German army had enough strength left to mount a powerful counterattack through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, commonly known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Y.B. Johnson, who would later be the mayor of Goldthwaite, was near the town of Krinkeit, Belgium (just 500 yards from the German Seigfried Line), with the 99th Infantry Division when the assault began. He described his experiences in a letter from Germany in 1945.

“At 5:30 on the morning of December 16th, all hell broke loose. The whole eastern sky was lit up with flashes. For two hours, there was a mass of shells on us; most who were not hit were stunned from concussion. The infantry hit us at 7:30 while it was still dark. Snow was on the ground and they were dressed in white. We could hardly see them until they were on top of us. . . . They came in bunches, screaming at the top of their voices. We stacked them like cordwood, but still they kept coming. The machine gunners fired until their guns were burnt up; even the wounded kept firing. Our front lines were overrun by 9 a.m., and by that time all the cooks, clerks and everyone was there. We stopped that assault at the C.P. (command post?), where we held out all day of the 16th and part of the 17th, expecting help any minute – help that never came.”

“On the night of the 17th, we were surrounded by tanks and infantry; I lost all but my platoon sergeant. He and I started out alone; the snow was knee-deep in places, and I hadn’t eaten or slept since the 15th, so you can imagine how hard it was to walk. Germans were everywhere; my compass had been shot off my belt, and since we were in the middle of the Monchau Forest, I had no idea which way was which. Finally, a buzz bom ...

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