Fatal Crossroads

On December 17, 1944, a convoy of unarmored trucks carrying Battery B of the US Army's 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion left Schevenhütte, Germany, near the dark and foreboding Hürtgen Forest that had been the focal point of such vicious combat, for Luxembourg and what was hoped would be some easier duty.

Most of them would never arrive.  In the Ardennes, just south of Malmédy, Belgium, at a crossroads called Baugnez, the column fell foul of the spearhead of the German offensive that would become known as the Battle of the Bulge.  By the end of the day, some eighty US soldiers would be dead, having surrendered to the improvised German task force known as Kampfgrüppe Peiper, and, unarmed and herded into a field, subsequently murdered by troops of the Waffen SS.  It was at least the second such massacre of Western Allied troops by the Waffen SS, the first being the murder of some 80 British POWs near Dunkerque (Dunkirk), France, in 1940.  This was also the only such large-scale massacre of American troops by the Germans in World War II.

The Malmédy Massacre, as this incident has become known, is the subject of a new book by Danny S. Parker called Fatal Crossroads: The Untold Story of the Malmédy Massacre at the Battle of the Bulge.  I discussed the book in passing earlier and highly recommended it.  Now I want to give some meat to that recommendation.

Kampfgrüppe Peiper was a group of elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, (the same unit that commited the 1940 massacre, with the same commanding officer, Wilhelm Mohnke) under the command of SS Lt. Col. (Obersturmbannführer) Joachim ("Jochen") Peiper.  In this desperate, stupidly-conceived and poorly-planned German offensive, Peiper's orders were simple: get to the Meuse River with one tank.  As fast as possible. 
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