re: December 23, 1944 - The Siege of Bastogne Begins

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Has anyone heard any accounts of men who went through that typhoon?

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There are a couple of good documentaries on YouTube about Typhoon Cobra where they talk to survivors of the storm. One of the most iconic photographs in meteorological history was snapped as the fleet was approaching the eye of the storm:



This was only the second ever tropical storm to be observed on radar and the first to ever be recorded by media.

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My grandfather was in the Bulge with Patton's army. He was with a regimental sout platoon.

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My maternal grandfather was a tanker in the 4th Armor Div. under Patton. It was 4th Armor that broke through to relieve the encircled 101st Airborne in Bastogne. I wish I could have met him and heard some of his stories. But he died three years before I was born.

My grandfather nearly froze to death in the Bulge. Both of his hands and feet were permanently disfigured from the frostbite they sustained, he could still hold a saw and hammer and worked as a carpenter for the 50+ years after returning home. He never wanted to talk much about his experiences, as a first generation immigrant from Germany I believe he thought often about how he could have been on the other side of the lines if not for a decision or two by his parents a couple decades earlier.

Many years ago I worked for a gentleman that was on the front lines in Luxembourg when the attack started. He and a bunch of his unit were captured and became POWs till the end of the war. On the 50th anniversary of the battle, he returned to the area where he was captured with a veterans group he belonged to and while there they met with a German veterans group that attacked them.

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My grandfather was in the Bulge with Patton's army. He was with a regimental sout platoon. All he ever talked about was how cold it was. Till the day he died I never saw that man without a sweater and a knit cap if it got below 60 degrees. He said he swore to himself that he would never in his life be cold again.

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I had a great uncle that was the exact opposite. No matter how cold it was he would be hunting in a pair of old briar britches and a flannel shirt. When you asked if he was cold he always answered “ Hell boy, I ain’t been cold since January of 45 in Belgium”.

As a kid I always thought it was an odd answer. I was grown and he was dead and gone before I understood what he was talking about.

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Grandad held the line near Duren with the 104th infantry, part of the 9th Army.

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My mom’s uncle was a belly gunner in a bomber shot down over France. I have the Purple Heart along with a photo of the crew, all dead in that crash in 1944.