What YANK Magazine of January 21, 1945 said about the 4th Armored’s part in the historic Bastogne fight

By SAUL LEVITT

Since December 27 it has been possible to come up from the south into Bastogne through the corridor originally established by elements of the Fourth Armored Division. The corridor is still so narrow that you can see and hear the battle on both sides of the main Arlon-Bastogne highway, but since the 26th there is no longer any Bastogne pocket. Now the fight takes place three quarters of the way around Bastogne, but the evidence of the desperate eight days of fighting until the Fourth Armored Division broke through has not entirely disappeared.

* * *

Meanwhile, to the south, elements of the Fourth Armored Division commanded by Colonel Creighton W. Abrams and its attached unit of infantry from the 80th Division, the 318th Regiment, were fighting north in a series of savage encounters, trying to force some kind of passage to Bastogne.

Farther away, at the 12th Evacuation Hospital, volunteer doctors and medics prepared to take off by plane and drop down by glider into the Bastogne pocket. The next day five doctors and four sergeant medics took off.

Some of them had never been in a plane before. The doctors thought it was going to be a parachute jump at first but were ready anyway. They took off on Dec. 26, landed near Bastogne in the snow, and set up their hospital. There could be no question of taking their wounded out, not until the lifeline from the south could reach Bastogne.

The lifeline was being made down below Bastogne. It was being forged by tanks through teller mine fields on the roads.

The Fourth Armored was going north. Stopped cold at noon of the 26th by heavy resistance and with further movement possible only at the heaviest cost, they decided to force through at once. They knew it would have to be a very fast and continuous movement. The armor took off, playing machine-gun fire on the woods and surrounding hills. In that drive through to Bastogne, lasting more than four days, they killed, captured, and took prisoner more than 2,000 Germans. But they did not come through easily. The straight rush through the German ring cost lives.

In the woods north of Assenois, Lt. Charles Boggess Jr., lifted his head out of a turret and spoke to the first American soldiers on the inside of the pocket. They were engineers of the 326th Airborne who had maintained the southernmost salient of the perimeter. As Lt. Boggess lifted his head out of the turret nobody said anything to him. He said, “Come on out, it’s all right. It’s the Fourth Armored.” Nobody moved or answered. It was late afternoon under the dark green firs. Boggess yelled again, and again nobody answered.

Finally a young officer crawled out of a hole, but the two men kept each other covered. The engineer officer said at last, “I’m Lt. Webster.” They shook hands. Later Gen. McAuliffe rode out in a jeep and shook hands with some of the men. And as dusk started to come down Col. Abrams rode through—a short stocky man with sharp features—already a legendary figure in this war.

The Fourth Armored seems to span the history of this war. In France, you met the division as it made its first big play in the hot summer days, going through Coutances in our big breakthrough after St. Lo. Again you ran across the outfit in the fall as its big tanks lumbered through the mud of Vollerdingen, near the German border, with the tanks out of contact across the mine-covered hills where neither man nor jeep could follow them.

And now they showed in Bastogne, lumbering through the snow with the men of the 80th Division, against the blooming green of the pine trees and into the town itself ...

The battle of the Bastogne pocket ended at 1545 on December 26, 1944.