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After leaving Bullingen, Colonel Peiper halted his leading vehicles at a crossroads so that the column could close up. During the pause, a half track reconnoitered a dirt track that led more directly than the main road to the next point on Peiper's route, the village of Moderscheid. Since the road appeared to be serviceable, Peiper took it and from Moderscheid proceeded northwest toward the village of Schoppen. On the way, the Germans captured the two-man crews of two ambulances, plus Staff Sgt. Henry R. Zach, two junior officers (1st Lt. Thomas E. McDermott and 2d Lt. Lloyd A. Iames), and six other Americans in a four-jeep convoy. They loaded some of the prisoners on their vehicles but made the four jeeps join the column.
About midway between Schoppen and the village of Faymonville at a little chapel, St. Hubert, Peiper found another side road that appeared promising and would enable him to avoid Faymonville and the adjacent fair-sized town of Waimes, where he might well run into opposition. It was little more than a country lane, but Peiper risked it, and his vehicles made it.
The lead tank was approaching the village of Ondenval when an American 6 x 6 truck appeared. The machine gunner in the tank fired, hitting the truck and sending it careening into a ditch, where it turned over on one side. As the tank passed by, the German gunner gave the truck another burst of fire, as did the gunners in several other tanks that followed.Inside the cab of the truck, two American engineers huddled. Miraculously, the German fire hit neither man. When the noise of the German vehicles had passed, the two scrambled out, raced to a nearby railroad embankment, clambered to the other side, andbegan to run back south in the direction from which they had come.
That little episode marked the beginning of what was to prove a series of fateful encounters between Kampfgruppe Peiper and Americans of the 1111th Engineer Combat Group.
Excerpted from A Time for Trumpets. Copyright © 1985 by Charles B. MacDonald. A Time For Trumpets. Copyright © by Charles Macdonald. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.