A partnership with the Winters Leadership Memorial, on Tuesday, December 15, 2015 survivor Harold Billow made a special appearance at the Ephrata Community Library in Pennsylvania to tell his story.

On December 17 1944, 21-year-old Billow and his comrades of the B battery of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were driving through the town of Baugnez, Belgium when they ran into a column of German tanks advancing is what became known as the Battle of the Bulge. Within minutes, Billow and his fellow comrades were captured and herded into a field.

There, many of these unarmed soldiers were ruthlessly machine-gunned down. They dropped to the snowy ground, some dead, some wounded; but Billow laid still, hardly breathing as Germans walked among the bodies and shot through the head any man who showed signs of life. Finally someone yelled, “Let’s get out of here!” and the survivors ran for their lives. Some were killed but others escaped as Germans fired after them. Billow was one of these lucky men who escaped and lived to tell about the brutality of what history has called the Malmedy Massacre that left 87 of his comrades dead in that frozen field.

**NOTE** The audio becomes clearer at the 4:50 mark. We apologize for this technical difficulty, which was beyond our control.

свернуть