Dead Man's Ridge

In the frozen hell of the Battle of the Bulge, green American paratroopers faced German tanks on Dead Man’s Ridge—and prevailed.

The Battle of the Bulge was one of the worst places imaginable for an American GI to receive his baptism of fire in World War II, but that’s where the paratroopers of the 17th Airborne Division – “The Golden Talons” – got their first taste of combat against the Germans during the bitter and bloody winter of 1944-45. When the Germans launched a surprise attack through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium in December, the division was rushed to the front, and by early January, the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment – green but highly regarded for the quality of its well-trained men – found itself in the thickest of the fighting, northwest of recently liberated Bastogne.

Believing the Germans were on the run, General George Patton ordered an all-out attack to take the village of Flamierge. As it turned out, the Germans were preparing an attack of their own. Dug in with heavy artillery on a ridge overlooking Flamierge and equipped with a fearsome array of tanks, German forces made the paratroopers pay dearly for every inch. Trudging through fog and waist-deep snow as enemy shells burst all around, the Americans managed to take the town, only to be forced to abandon it and try again.

When Flamierge finally fell for good a few days later, the paratroopers had performed the stunning feat of holding off a German armor onslaught with no tanks or close artillery support and contributed mightily to pinching off the precarious bulge the Germans had punched into the Allied front line. The 17th Airborne Division had lost nearly 1,000 casualties a day. Losses in the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment ran as high as 50 percent in some units. One platoon lost all but three men, who fell into German captivity at the end of the fighting. The heights from which the Germans exacted a horrible toll of the paratroopers would ever after be known as Dead Man’s Ridge.

Based on a remarkable trove of unpublished personal accounts of the action, Dead Man’s Ridge is a heart-pounding, minute-by-minute chronicle of untested American paratroopers taking on battle-hardened Germans – and winning.

Peter M. Hanrahan has spent more than twenty years researching the 513th’s battle for Flamierge. He lives in Topsham, Maine.