The Bastogne Perimeter

The 101st Airborne reached Bastogne on the night of December 18, 1944, in trucks, without winter clothing, short of ammunition and with the division commander away in Washington. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe had the division. By December 21 it was cut off, holding a perimeter of about sixteen miles in the snow, with German armor on every road.

The weather that had grounded Allied aircraft for a week broke on December 23. That morning the C-47s came over the perimeter at low level and dropped more than a hundred tons of ammunition, rations and medical supplies under parachute. Men in the foxholes stood up to watch.

Three days later, on the afternoon of December 26, the lead tanks of the 4th Armored Division came up the road from Assenois. The siege was over. The fighting was not.

Gray on gray: snow, sky, and the black uprights of shell-splintered pines. Four men in a foxhole line at the edge of the wood, one standing with a hand shading his eyes toward the transports coming in low over the plain and the parachutes already drifting down. A single fire burns in the middle distance. The palette is stripped to almost nothing, which is how the Ardennes looked that week, and the few warm points — the fire, the faces — carry the picture.