When rumors, frozen turrets and disguised commandos collide — Task Force Hogan fights to hold a vital line in the Ardennes. This is the story of Marcouray, frozen nights, and a desperate stand that helped blunt a German push toward Antwerp.

Hogan’s 400: The Surrounded Tank Battalion That Walked Out on Christmas

On Christmas Eve 1944, in the worst Ardennes winter in a century, 400 exhausted American soldiers blackened their faces with soot, smashed their radio sets, poured sugar into fuel tanks, and quietly destroyed their own tanks.

Then, in single file, they stepped off into the frozen Belgian woods.

Behind them lay the little crossroads village they had defended for days against a German Panzer division. Ahead of them, somewhere in the darkness, were friendly lines—and in between, unknown numbers of German tanks and infantry.

The man at the head of the column was Lt. Col. Samuel M. Hogan, a 28-year-old West Pointer from Texas, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 33rd Armored Regiment, Third Armored Division—“Spearhead.” In the fall, his tankers had dashed across France, celebrated with champagne-soaked Belgian villagers, and driven into Germany itself.

Now, with ammunition nearly gone and fuel completely exhausted, they were trying to walk out of Hitler’s last great offensive in the West.

History would remember them simply as Hogan’s 400.

From Normandy Breakout to Spearhead Legend

By mid-December 1944, Hogan’s battalion had already lived through more combat than most soldiers would see in a lifetime.

Third Armored Division—nicknamed “Spearhead”—had landed in Normandy, fought through the hedgerows, and taken heavy losses at Mortain. Hogan’s unit, part of the 33rd Armored Regiment, had led many of the division’s drives, frequently at the very tip of the spear. The battalion was a mix of tankers, infantrymen, mortar crews, cooks, mechanics—often reinforced by engineers, artillerymen, and anti-aircraft gunners. When grouped around Hogan, they were known as Task Force Hogan.

After the breakout from Normandy, they were thrown west toward the Falaise Pocket to help close the trap on retreating German armies. Hogan led from a Sherman tank that flew the lone star of Texas from its radio antenna.

To curious French civilians, the tank commander would nod toward the flag and say, “That is the flag of the free Americans.” One older Frenchman, who knew a little English, solemnly turned to the crowd and declared, “That is the flag of the American resistance movement.”

The column rolled on.

Once the Falaise Gap slammed shut, Spearhead swung north into Belgium in early September. For three days, Third Armored and the 9th Infantry Division, “The Old Reliables,” engaged in what amounted to a massive moving ambush—slamming into a German corps retreating from the French coast toward Germany. Armor and infantry collided on roads and farm lanes, in villages and hedgerows, as the Americans raced to cut off the fleeing enemy.

From then on, Task Force Hogan alternated in the lead with sister tank battalions of Third Armored as part of the always-forward VII Corps. They liberated a string of picture-book Belgian villages in furious, blurred firefights, followed by kisses, flowers, and champagne from grateful civilians. For a few days at a time, war almost looked like the posters.

Then they hit Germany.

Into the Siegfried Line—and a Sudden Calm

Pushing east, Spearhead drove into the first belt of the Siegfried Line. The tankers and infantry knew the deeper they went, the tougher the fight would get. Supply lines stretched thin. The division’s tanks, trucks, and halftracks had taken a pounding since July. Men were sick, exhausted, and numb with fatigue.

By early December, Third Armored Division, which on paper was supposed to have roughly 200 medium tanks, had fewer than 50 in working condition. The division was down to about a quarter of its normal combat strength.

Finally, Spearhead was pulled off the line to rest, repair, and rearm. Hogan’s battalion settled into a routine of maintenance and local patrolling. It felt like a lull before the next offensive, which everyone assumed would come sometime in the new year.

Patrols probed the German front, but the Ardennes sector seemed relatively quiet. Rumors drifted through intelligence channels about German paratroopers, disguised commandos, and possible mischief in the rear, but most front-line units assumed they were in for a cold yet static winter.

On December 16, that illusion shattered.

Hitler’s Gamble in the Ardennes

Before dawn on December 16, German artillery and rockets ripped into the American lines across the Ardennes. Under the cover of snow and fog, armored spearheads and infantry surged westward. The German objective was bold and simple: punch a wedge through the Allied front, cross the Meuse, and capture the Belgian port of Antwerp—the logistical lifeline of the Western armies.

If Antwerp fell, Allied supply lines would be crippled, and American and British armies could be split apart.

The German attack achieved complete surprise. Headquarters up and down the line reeled. First Army commander Lt. Gen. Courtney Hodges seemed paralyzed by the shock. But his staff wasted no time moving the only reserves they had on hand: the 82nd Airborne Division and Combat Command Reserve (CCR) of Third Armored Division.

At that moment, two-thirds of Third Armored’s combat power was already committed elsewhere. That left CCR as the only armored force available for the northern shoulder of the developing bulge. Its task: establish a defensive line from the villages of Grandmenil to Manhay and help plug the gaping hole.

Strategically, everything was in flux. The initial German penetration split Gen. Omar Bradley’s Twelfth Army Group from First Army. Supreme Allied Commander Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, faced with a fast-moving crisis, decided—reluctantly—to place First Army, and with it Third Armored, under the temporary operational control of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery.

The politics were awkward. The tactical situation was worse.

A Speed Bump with Half a Tank of Gas

On the evening of December 19, orders reached Task Force Hogan. The battered battalion, already under strength, was placed on two-hour alert to move from the Stolberg corridor in Germany to an assembly area near the Belgian town of Hotton, roughly 20 kilometers north of Bastogne.

What Hogan had left was thin. The battalion had its headquarters company and George Company with only eight Sherman tanks after losing seven in a recent offensive. To this he added a company from the 83rd Reconnaissance Battalion, a battery from the 54th Field Artillery Battalion, and a section from the 486th Anti-Aircraft Artillery Battalion.

Their mission was to secure a small village—mispronounced and misspelled by Americans but known to them as “Marure”—and the surrounding crossroads north of Bastogne.

Charlie Company and the service company stayed behind in the little resort town of Soy with the regimental trains and light tanks, protecting CCR’s command post. The battalion’s mortar platoon, mounted on three M3 halftracks each carrying an 81mm mortar, was positioned at Hotton, where it could support nearby units.

The mortar platoon was led in part by Sgt. John “Little King” Grimes of Forbes, Missouri—5’5″, determined, with sharp eyes that had seen too much. Among the assault gun crews at Melreux and the mortar teams at Hotton, men like Grimes and Staff Sgt. Arnold “Slack” Schlike would soon fight their own desperate holding actions.

Rumors swirled. German paratroopers were supposedly preparing to land in the American rear. German commandos wearing U.S. uniforms and driving American vehicles were said to be misdirecting traffic and setting up ambushes. No one quite knew what was true.

Fuel resupply, meanwhile, was late. Hogan’s column rolled out of Mausbach, Germany, into the freezing night with gas tanks only half full.

As snow and ice glazed the roads, drivers huddled behind blackout lights, squinting to see the faint glow on the vehicle ahead. Assistants sat on fenders in the open air, shouting warnings as trucks and tanks slid on the icy curves. Most of the soldiers were already fighting off colds and coughs picked up weeks earlier.

Above them, the sky flickered with the ominous glow of V-1 flying bombs, droning west toward Antwerp.

Sam Hogan didn’t need to tell anyone what the mission really felt like. Sending one-third of a tank battalion, low on fuel and with little intelligence, into what was already rumored to be a division-sized German counterattack looked a lot like sacrificing a speed bump to slow the enemy advance.

These were the hardest conditions for any officer: no clear picture of the enemy, bitter cold, and short supplies. Leadership and morale would be all that held the outfit together.

A Close Brush with the Enemy in American Uniforms

After ten miles of nighttime movement, Hogan’s column reached the Belgian village of La Roche. The streets were cluttered with abandoned trailers and supply vehicles left by rear-area units that had fled when they learned the Germans were coming in strength. Elements of the 7th Armored Division’s trains were still there, jumpy and already under sporadic enemy fire from the outskirts.

Hogan ordered his men to grab all the rations and cigarettes they could carry from the abandoned loads. Then he detached his headquarters assault gun platoon to help the 7th Armored service troops hold the town—and thus keep Hogan’s line of supply open.

By then, the battalion’s fuel tanks were half empty, and still there was no clear information about German strength or disposition.

The column coiled up in the dark and waited through a bitter night, artillery flashes on the horizon signaling the approach of German armor and infantry.

At first light on December 20, Hogan climbed into a jeep with his operations officer, Maj. Travis Brown, and scout platoon leader Lt. Clark Warl. With a second jeep following, they pushed out to reconnoiter the forward areas themselves.

At the edge of town, a nervous American picket warned them that Germans were rolling grenades down the road ahead.

“Push on,” Hogan said, lighting another Camel cigarette and cinching down his steel helmet.

The driver gunned the engine.

Ten kilometers beyond La Roche, the little recon party came upon a group of soldiers in U.S. uniforms standing by halftracks, eating rations, and apparently guarding several healthy-looking “German prisoners.” The “prisoners” wore German trench coats and steel helmets—but something about the scene felt off.

The two groups stared at each other in tense silence.

Then one of the “American” soldiers suddenly swung his Thompson submachine gun toward Hogan’s jeep.

“They’re all Germans, Colonel!” yelled Pvt. Charles Gast, Hogan’s driver.

The ambush exploded. Hogan and his staff dove into the woods as machine-gun fire stitched the gravel where they had just stood. German commandos—almost certainly part of the special units operating in American uniforms that winter—had come within seconds of capturing or killing the commander of Task Force Hogan.

The Americans managed to escape, slipping into the trees as the German impostors turned back to loot the abandoned jeeps, helping themselves to Hogan’s gear—including one of his prized Christmas fruitcakes sent from home.

Separated from the battalion, Hogan’s small party spent the next 24 hours stumbling through the woods in freezing cold. Twice they blundered into enemy pickets. Finally, they came out near an American artillery battery whose guns were pointed straight at them. Miraculously, the gunners held their fire long enough to recognize Hogan’s group as friendly.

By the time the lost patrol made it back to the battalion’s new defensive perimeter at the crossroads village of Marure, the situation had worsened.

German infantry were maneuvering to cut Task Force Hogan off from the rest of Third Armored Division.

“If You Want This Town, You Can Try and Take It”

Soon after Hogan’s return, CCR commander Col. Robert Howze ordered Task Force Hogan to move to yet another village, Emmels, to shore up the line. But the road ahead was already blocked by strong German forces. A roadblock outside the hamlet of Beffe had knocked out a Sherman with Panzerfaust fire. One artillery forward observer had been killed, 17 men wounded, and the road was swept by fire from Germans dug into woods and along a cliff.

Flanking the position was impossible—sheer slope on one side, dense, German-infested forest on the other.

Hogan weighed his options. Marure, where his battalion now sat, was actually a strong defensive position. One flank was secured by thick stone houses. Open fields stretched out with clear lines of fire to a thousand yards. Ditches and hedges offered cover for infantry.

He decided to stay.

Sam Hogan, whose calm presence tended to steady those around him, addressed his officers and NCOs plainly: they would hold where they were.

“We’re on very defensible terrain,” he told them. “And we have a good deal of firepower and ammunition. This is where we’ll make our stand.”

He estimated it would take at least a full German regiment to push his men out of Marure. In reality, Hogan’s 400 were about to play a key role in slowing an entire Panzer division.

All through the night of December 22, his men dug in, improved foxholes, and wired in their positions. Patrols under Air Operations Chief Capt. Helmer “Ted” Carden and Sgt. “Shorty” Wright from the recon platoon slipped beyond the lines, calling in artillery on German columns trying to bypass the village. Clear skies and bright moonlight turned German trucks and Kubelwagens into perfect targets. Flames from burning vehicles lit the horizon.

At dawn, Hogan stepped out of his stone farmhouse command post and was shocked to see two eight-wheeled German armored cars packed with troops roaring past his front door, racing through the village.

He ducked back inside and grabbed the radio, warning the tank at the far roadblock to be ready—and then calling the tank guarding the exit the armored cars had just passed.

The tank crew on the near side had been alert all night, but a cruel twist of physics intervened: condensation had frozen the turret ring solid, and they could not traverse the gun to get a shot at the speeding German scouts.

Normally composed, Hogan erupted in a stream of expletives, then turned back to the larger task: keeping the position from being overrun.

At the far end of town, another tank crew was ready. They knocked out the second armored car, sending German troops hurtling into the roadside woods. Carden and Wright led a patrol that followed them and killed several in a brief firefight.

On another patrol, American soldiers came upon five Germans lying prone in a ditch near the road. Before anyone could stop him, a jittery recon lieutenant stepped forward and fired his .45 pistol into the backs of two of the prisoners’ heads.

He was immediately disarmed.

For Hogan, the scene was nauseating. They were already surrounded, low on ammunition and fuel, and in serious danger of being destroyed. Now they also had two enemy dead with execution-style wounds. The thought of what that might mean if the Germans took the village did not sit well with him.

He was furious—and determined that his men would remain better than the enemy they were fighting.

A Lonely Fight at Hotton and Melreux

While Hogan’s 400 held Marure, the battalion’s mortar platoon and assault gun platoon were fighting their own desperate battles several miles away.

At Hotton, Sgt. Grimes and his mortar crews had already spent two days firing nonstop missions in support of CCR and nearby units. They knew from the frantic radio traffic that things were going badly to the southeast.

On the morning of December 22, standing at the window of a small stone building that housed the fire-direction center, Grimes looked out and froze. Lumbering toward town, straddling railroad tracks, was a German Panther tank—no more than 300 meters away and closing.

“Kuzloski, get your gear,” Grimes snapped. “Enemy tank coming up.”

Mortars were nearly useless against the thick armor of a Panther. Grimes got on the radio and broadcast the alarm. A handful of infantrymen from the 36th Infantry Regiment set up a hasty ambush. Waiting until the Panther rumbled past, they fired bazooka rounds into the thinner armor at its rear.

The big tank burned.

That night, Grimes’s section—Kuzloski, Zabota, and a third man named Dabone—took turns firing illumination and high-explosive shells. Flares on little parachutes floated down, lighting any enemy movement. When Germans appeared, HE rounds followed.

Even so, German troops slipped through an enfilade route around Hotton, bypassing the town to cut off the assault gun platoon under Staff Sgt. Schlike at Melreux. There, lightly armored howitzers were forced into direct-fire duels with German armor and infantry.

The fight around Melreux raged into December 23. When German troops closed in dangerously, Schlike called in artillery and mortar fire almost on top of his own positions to break up their attacks.

By evening, his assault guns were nearly out of ammunition and fuel.

Grimly, the crews prepared to destroy their vehicles and attempt to slip back to American lines on foot, under the cover of mortar fire from Grimes’s section at Hotton.

“We Have Orders to Fight to the Death”

Back at Marure, the noose tightened.

A German staff car approached the American lines under a flag of truce. A young German lieutenant was blindfolded and escorted to Hogan’s command post in the farmhouse.

Hogan called in his battalion surgeon, Capt. Louis Spiegelman—a Jewish doctor from New York who had studied at the American University in Beirut—to help translate. Between Spiegelman’s Yiddish and Hogan’s broken German, they managed.

The German officer produced a written demand for surrender, signed by a colonel general. It claimed Hogan’s force was surrounded by three Panzer divisions. To spare unnecessary bloodshed, it said, the Germans would accept an immediate American capitulation.

Hogan, partly to steady his own nerves and partly to project confidence, lit a cigarette and let the smoke curl out slowly as he answered.

“We have orders to fight to the death,” he said. “And as soldiers, we will obey those orders.”

Then he added, more coldly: they had plenty of ammunition and firepower. If the Germans wanted Marure, they should come and take it.

The German lieutenant stiffened, shook his head, and was led away.

No one in that farmhouse knew that, in a few days, Hogan would make a very different decision—not to surrender, but to abandon his vehicles and try to save as many of his men as possible.

A Christmas Without Resupply

The days leading up to Christmas were a blur of hunger, cold, and incoming fire.

Cargo planes tried to drop supplies by parachute. But German anti-aircraft guns in the area, protecting a nearby corps headquarters, filled the sky with steel. The American soldiers on the ground, watching from their foxholes, saw parachutes drifting down into the woods—often from such low altitude that it was doubtful whether any of the aircrews survived.

Many of the falling bundles landed in German-held territory.

Two bruised and battered American airmen eventually staggered into Marure. They carried devastating news: their aborted drop had been the last attempt. They had taken off from England with only a vague idea of where exactly Task Force Hogan was. A mix-up in the operations tent of the 435th Troop Carrier Group had garbled the names of Marure and another town. Most of the supplies meant for Hogan’s men had ended up as Christmas presents for the Germans.

A final, desperate attempt was made to fire 105mm artillery shells loaded with medical supplies. The rounds arced overhead and landed inside the perimeter, scattering canisters of blood plasma.

When the medics opened them, they found that every vial was shattered.

The Decision to Walk Out

By Christmas Eve, 1944, Task Force Hogan had no fuel, dwindling ammunition, and no realistic prospect of relief.

If they stayed, the Germans would eventually crush them. If they surrendered, Hogan knew his men—especially Jewish soldiers like Doc Spiegelman—might suffer a fate far worse than captivity. If they tried to break out with tanks and vehicles, the noise and lack of fuel would doom the attempt.

So he chose a fourth option.

They would walk.

All day, the men of Hogan’s 400 prepared for the escape. Tank crews started their engines and let them run until they seized up from lack of oil. Tires on trucks and halftracks were slashed. Sugar was poured into fuel tanks. Radios were smashed with rifle butts. Anything that could move or be repaired was deliberately ruined.

If the Germans took Marure, Hogan did not want them to find a functioning armored battalion waiting for them.

Soldiers smeared black ash and soot on their faces, raider-style, and pulled their scarves and collars high against the cutting wind. The air was full of the sound of metal being broken and the low murmur of last-minute briefings.

Seventeen men lay in aid stations, too badly wounded to walk.

Capt. Louis Spiegelman, fully aware of what capture might mean for him personally, volunteered to stay with them, along with two medical sergeants. He refused to abandon his patients.

One last radio message crackled in before Hogan ordered the sets destroyed. A patrol from the 82nd Airborne, the message said, would guide the column in once it reached friendly lines.

The challenge and password for the night: “Final Edition – Out.” Somewhere in a headquarters tent, someone had a dark sense of humor.

Hogan could only hope the phrase would not prove prophetic.

The Christmas March

Moving 400 men through snow-covered woods at night in peacetime would be hard enough. Doing it under the guns of an enemy that had you surrounded bordered on impossible.

Under cover of darkness, Hogan’s column slipped out of Marure and into the trees.

There were close calls all night long. At one point, the point man—Sgt. Lee Porter of the battalion scouts—halted abruptly. In front of him loomed the shadow of a German sentry. Porter blurted out a challenge, as training had drilled into him.

The German began to move.

The Missourian launched himself forward, clamping one hand over the German’s mouth and driving his bayonet into the man’s neck with the other. He eased the sentry down into the snow, signaled silently to move on, and the column flowed past—hundreds of boots stepping quietly around the still-warm body.

It was the sort of encounter that, had it gone even slightly differently, could have brought machine guns and grenades crashing down onto the exposed Americans.

Instead, they moved on, teeth chattering, fingers numb, eyes burning with fatigue.

By dawn on Christmas morning, the long snake of men emerged, blinking, into the outskirts of Soy—back in American-held territory.

In a farm compound, regimental cooks stood waiting with field stoves.

Frowns and clenched jaws melted into weak grins as steaming coffee and hot soup splashed into mess tins and canteen cups. Thick bread was passed into hands already tingling with the first signs of frostbite. Some men cried quietly as they ate.

Combat cameramen were there, too, capturing the sight of a weary, camouflaged battalion that had walked out from under the nose of a German Panzer division on Christmas night.

“My Feet Hurt”

With his face still streaked with camouflage and his head wrapped against the cold, Sam Hogan found himself standing in front of Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose, the respected commander of Third Armored Division.

Rose was immaculate. His taupe riding breeches were crisp, his knee-high boots gleamed, and his steel helmet shone in the pale winter sun. Hands on his hips, he looked from his disheveled subordinate to the ragged line of Hogan’s 400.

He asked, in a measured, businesslike voice, why Hogan had been the last man out of Marure.

Hogan thought of a dozen gallant answers. He could say he had stayed to make sure every last man was clear. He could claim he had wanted to be the last defender of the crossroads.

Instead, he told the truth.

“My feet hurt,” he said.

Rose, not known for sentimentality, cracked a rare smile. He clapped Hogan on the back and turned to climb into his jeep.

For the moment, Hogan still had his command.

After a short tactical road march, the 400 survivors of Task Force Hogan moved to the village of Barvaux, where they would spend the turn of the year re-equipping and reorganizing.

Doc Spiegelman’s Walk into Captivity

Back in Marure, the ruse had worked.

At dawn on Christmas morning, Doc Spiegelman awoke to a village that seemed eerily quiet. The Germans, still believing the town to be occupied in strength, were keeping their distance. Hogan’s 400 were already miles away.

Spiegelman gathered his 17 wounded troopers, his two medical sergeants, and the few German prisoners left in their care. Under a Red Cross flag, they formed up and began walking out of town, hoping to reach American lines on their own.

At the first German roadblock, startled sentries tried to stop them. Spiegelman pointed to the Red Cross flag and argued in Yiddish and broken German. He managed to talk his little column through. They did the same at a second and third checkpoint.

At the fourth, they met officers who had fresh orders. The Germans had discovered, too late, that the battalion holding them up at Marure had vanished in the night.

Spiegelman and his wounded were detained and became prisoners of war.

The doctor would spend four months as a POW. He would escape once, be recaptured, and ultimately be liberated by advancing American forces near the end of the war.

Hogan’s Crossroads and the End of the Bulge

Overnight, the story of Hogan’s 400 spread.

Their breakout from what troops began calling “Little Bastogne” made the pages of Stars and Stripes and then stateside newspapers. Newsreels showed footage of the gaunt, grinning men. At home, Sam Hogan’s wife and her friends went to the local cinema and leaned forward, searching every muddy, camouflaged face on the screen for a glimpse of Sam.

Within the division, the crossroads village the battalion had defended began to be called “Hogan’s Crossroads.”

But there was little time for celebration.

Marure was retaken on January 7, 1945, by other elements of Third Armored Division. The Germans had not been able to use any of the vehicles Task Force Hogan had left behind. The sugar-choked gas tanks and ruined engine blocks had done their job.

Reequipped—this time with only 12 medium and 10 light tanks—and reinforced by infantry from the 83rd “Thunderbolt” Division, Hogan’s men went back on the attack. They rolled past roads littered with burned-out German vehicles, wreckage from weeks of brutal artillery fire.

To the south, the First and Third U.S. Armies linked up, closing the bulge and regaining the lost ground. Field Marshal Montgomery, having overseen the northern shoulder of the fight, sent a confidential cable to Gen. Eisenhower:

“I have great pleasure in reporting to you that the task you gave me in the Ardennes is now concluded… It can therefore be said we have now achieved tactical victory within the salient.”

He added that it had been a pleasure to command such a splendid army.

Victory in the Ardennes had not come cheaply. Third Armored Division alone lost 125 medium tanks and 38 light tanks. The division suffered 1,473 casualties, including 187 killed in action.

For Hogan’s 400, the war was far from over. There were still four and a half months of hard fighting ahead—two more crossings into Germany, more sleepless nights, more empty places where friends had stood.

But they had survived Hitler’s largest offensive against the U.S. Army. They had held a crossroads that mattered, defied a surrender demand, and walked out of a trap that should have killed them.

On a freezing Christmas night in 1944, when the Ardennes forests were full of enemy tanks and the sky glowed with the burning wreckage of war, a handful of American soldiers shouldered their packs, put one foot in front of the other, and marched quietly toward home.