It was their first day in battle and the two best friends had just switched places. Bob Fordyce rested while Frank Hartzell crawled down into the shallow foxhole, taking his turn chipping away at the frozen ground. Just then, German artillery fire began falling all around them. With his body plastered to the ground, Hartzell could feel shrapnel dent his helmet. When the explosions finished, he picked himself up to find that his best friend had just been killed in the blur of combat.
“When you’re actually in it, it’s very chaotic,” Hartzell said.
The following day, New Year’s Day 1945, Hartzell battled Nazi soldiers for control of the Belgian town of Chenogne. In the aftermath, American soldiers gunned down dozens of unarmed German prisoners of war in a field—a clear violation of the Geneva Convention.
“I remember we had been given orders, take no prisoners,” Hartzell said. “When I walked past the field on the left, there were these dead bodies. I knew what they were. I knew they were dead Germans.” News of the massacre reached General George S. Patton, but no investigation followed.
This was an untold story that occurred during the epic Battle of the Bulge that began in December 1944 and continued for six weeks, an event that British Prime Minister Winston Churchill described as being “undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war.” With 700,000 Allied forces involved, it was the largest battle fought by Americans, resulting in enormous numbers of casualties and marking the last offensive on the Western front.
This week on Reveal, reporter Chris Harland-Dunaway investigates why the soldiers who committed the massacre at Chenogne were never held accountable.
This is an update of an episode that originally aired in July 2018.
