Christmas During the Battle of the Bulge: 1st Lt. Belton Cooper

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Lieutenant Belton Cooper. Cooper served in World War II as an ordnance officer. He and his team were tasked with recovering damaged allied tanks, often from behind enemy lines, and repairing them.

In this special holiday episode, he describes a chaotic air raid around Christmastime of 1944, during the Battle of the Bulge.

1st Lt. Belton Cooper:

Christmas '44 was in the Battle of the Bulge. I was a First Lieutenant. I was ordnance liaison officer with Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored Division. And at that time we won the northern flank of the Bulge.

On Christmas Eve, the maintenance battalion headquarters company had moved into a big rock quarry at Aywaille, Belgium, and that rock quarry was about a half a mile in diameter and about 100 feet deep. It was an ideal place to put the maintenance battalion because it was down below the ground. It was below defilade position. It was a good, safe place to be, and they had a lot of hard standing there on this rock, and they had some buildings down there, and we set up the headquarters and set up the mess there temporarily. And so they told everybody that they wanted everybody to be able to get a hot meal on Christmas Day or Christmas Eve and even rotated some of the combat troops, some of the line troops.

Now, we were in ordinance and we were in and out, and sometimes I was with the line troops and sometimes I went to the rear depending on the time of day. I generally rotated back and forth several times during the day. So I made a point to get back to the battalion at noon because I knew we were going to get that hot lunch. And we just sat down to lunch and all of a sudden we heard this terrific zooming noise. And the sentry runs in and tells that the German plane is trying to strafe us. So everybody runs out and jumps in a foxhole.

Now in a concrete place, you can't dig a foxhole, but there were these big open places, four or five feet square and about four feet deep where they've removed blocks of granite. So I jumped in one of those and expecting the strafing plane to return and it didn't return, but all of a sudden I heard this humming noise. I looked up and the sky was just filled with planes. And this was the first day that the sky had cleared up. It was crystal clear and a large formation of bombers about 1000 planes were going over to bomb the German marshaling yards to the rear, which were about 50 miles from us, and the planes were directly overhead. And I was looking up directly at the sky and admiring these beautiful planes and seeing these contours. And there was just one group, as far as eye I could see all the way over the rise, there's just 100s of these planes coming.

And all of a sudden, the lead group, I saw these things in the sky, just looked like crystals flashing in the sky. It looked like some kind of flashing. And the lead plane just absolutely exploded right in midair, just completely disappeared. The plane right next to it they'd sheared the wing off and it started coming down. One of the planes got the tail shot off and it started tumbling end over end. Two other planes were shot in the engines and engines caught on fire and they kind of spiraled. It looks like wounded birds. It just spiraled round and round and round. And all of a sudden the sky was filled with debris and parachutes. There were bombs dropping into the area.

Fortunately, we were low to the ground and most of the bombs landed outside this area, that is, outside the rock quarry. But we immediately sent out troops to recover the men that had been parachuted down. We always sent the patrols out to see if there were wounded, try to bring them back in and give medical aid. And I noticed one of the men parachuted, almost made it to the ground, and a piece of debris came and we could see it. We kept screaming and hollering at him and he couldn't do anything about it, and he couldn't hear us. And it cut his parachute and dropped him about 300 feet to the ground and he was killed instantly.

When we went out to recover the plane that had had the tail shot off, we found there was a body still inside there. We took him out and he was alive, and Ernie Pyle was there. I didn't know it at the time, but he writes about it in his book Brave Men. So he was obviously the reporter that was there at the time that that happened, but I didn't know that until after the war when I read his book.

The plane that had the wing sheared off started spiraling down and it crashed with its full bomb load, its full gasoline load on the edge of the quarry, about 500 feet away, not, about 50 feet away, from the edge of the quarry. And it was a big explosion. So the gasoline, the bomb load and everything went up and shot flames 1000 feet and a lot of debris fell in the quarry, but fortunately, none of our people injured.

The parachute that was coming right beside this plane was a bombardier. He'd gotten out and just as he was about 5 or 600 feet in the air, this German plane started strafing. I'd heard about this, I never believed I could actually see this, but this German plane, this fighter plane, was strafing him. And there were rockets. These planes had knocked these other planes down. There were nine ME109s that were firing rockets. They were right behind the B-17s, and you couldn't see them until after the firing started, but at 20,000 feet you can barely see a fighter plane. But these planes came out of formation and started strafing these pilots and strafing them in the parachutes, and he missed him the first time. So he turns around and he makes a second pass, and he was so intent, because we were screaming from the ground, we couldn't fire any aircraft guns to protect him because we were afraid we'd hit the parachutes. And so on the second pass, he came out, he was so intent to killing that young bombardier that he just completely just, I don't know what, he's just like a horse has bitten him about, but anyway, he crashed inside the quarry and killed himself. And I thought that's real irony. We recovered the man and brought him back in and his worst thing was he had a frozen foot. But I think that's probably the most dramatic air battle I've ever seen. And I believe if I'd had a camera from the ground, it would've been one of the most dramatic pictures of an air battle taken to the ground. And that happened on Christmas Eve.

'44, Christmas Day was a very sad day, for me, because my driver had been severely wounded the night before on Christmas Eve, and I didn't know whether he survived the night. In fact, it wasn't until after the war that I knew about it and he had taken my peep with the warrant officer and gone back to division headquarters at night. And I didn't know it. I was still in the sack and I told him not to take the peep without asking me. But anyway, the warrant officer told him to go ahead and take it and so they got out on the road. It was a crystal clear night and there were no trees. And the German Air Force did come up en masse at night during the Bulge and the peep riding around on the icy roads, just like a bug on a mirror. And this plane came out straight to and filed a rocket and it struck the road right beside the peep, blew it off the road. The warrant officers had blown into the ditch. He wasn't hurt, but my driver was, had a fragment in the base of the skull and he was bleeding from the mouth and ears when they took him out. They got him in the ambulance, evacuated, and that's all I knew. And I didn't know until several years after the war whether he died or not. I didn't know. So that was a sad day for me.

I said something about this in my book about the fact how I felt about it. And I remember at Christmastime I wondered where I would be next Christmas or if I would be, and I had no idea how long the war was going to last. I mean, I was never one of these people thought the war was going to be over the next day. I mean once it started, once we got into it, it just looked like it was going to go on and on and on. Now, some people thought it'd be over shortly, but I never felt that way. And most of our people felt like we were taking such horrendous losses and we were suffering so terribly losing all of our tanks that it was just a desperate day-by-day thing. So I guess I did think about home.

I remember my mother gave me a little book. It was something that they gave to soldiers. I mean, not everybody gave it to them, but they were available in the stores. It was called a Prayer for the Day and had them duplicates and the soldier would get one and the wife or the mother, somebody, of course I was a bachelor at the time, my mother gave me one. And you could read that little book at night and it was a date, it was dated, and your wife or your mother could read that same book and you could read the same prayer. That was very comforting to me. And I remember thinking what a wonderful thing it was that I had had been fortunate enough to be raised by Christian parents who had taught me certain values and certain things that gave me tremendous strength. And without that, I don't think I could have survived emotionally. I did remember that particularly at Christmastime.

I think morale was good in my unit all the time. I mean, the men were really getting desperate in some cases. One of the most terrible things was the fact that we didn't have the adequate clothing or equipment to fight in this type of battle in the Bulge. We'd never anticipated anything like this. And of course, during the battle of the Bulge, this was a retrograde movement. We were moving back. Prior to that, we'd always been moving forward. The Germans had been moving back, and when you're moving back, there's a hell of a lot of difference between moving backward and moving forward. A retrograde movement is very disconcerting because you don't know what's going to happen next and you don't have any stability, you don't know how long you're going to be able to stop, or if you're going to be able to stop.

And so in spite of that, morale in our unit was very good because we knew we had good men. We were well-trained. We knew we'd beat the butt off the Germans before, the Germans had surprised us and been able to mass this tremendous army south of us. But I don't think at any time, in spite of it, it was a desperate situation. I don't think at any time that morale ever got to the point to where we thought we weren't going to make it.

I'm glad I wasn't home during the war. I mean, it had been terrible to be there at that time because I would think that these other guys are overseas and I felt like I should be there. So I'm glad I was, even though I didn't want to be overseas, I didn't want to be in the battle and I didn't want to be in the battle of the Bulge particularly. But I was there, and I felt very proud that my unit was there and was doing what it had to do. And I felt like that we were doing what we had to do, even was a desperate situation. Of course, everybody would be glad to get home and I would be delighted when it was over with.

I've always tried to analyze how a soldier feels in a desperate situation. And I don't think you can really recreate or describe it, but I do know this, that your thoughts, you have the future, the present, and the past. Now you don't think about the immediate future, but you think about the long-range future, and then you think about the past. And as you get more involved in a desperate situation in combat, the future just disappears slowly and the past just kind of fades away. And the present is all you've got. And you just live from moment to moment there. And then when the situation's not so desperate, then you think back about the long-range future, but the immediate future, you don't think about that. You just do what you have to do and try to survive.

I fortunately had a very stable family situation to go back to. Some people didn't have that. Some soldiers had problems with their wives and girlfriends and it was not a happy time for them, but they just had to make the best they could of it. But I was fortunate in that respect. I had a good situation to return to. I had to go back to school. I knew that. I knew I had to go back and finish college, and I was looking forward to that, even though I didn't think I'd ever want to go to college, but I really didn't want to go then. I was looking forward to that and I did finally do it.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Lieutenant Belton Cooper. To hear more accounts of the Battle of the Bulge, or more Christmas war stories, visit our show page.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.