Veterans remember The Battle of the Bulge.
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The day after the German attack began, Bill Merriken's 30-truck convoy collided with a German armored column led by SS Lt. Col. Joachim Peiper at the Baugnez crossroads, near Malmedy.
"I was in the second vehicle in the convoy," Merriken said. "We saw shells coming into this field."
Quickly overwhelmed by German tank and machine-gun fire, his unit soon heard the voice of a German officer in an armored vehicle shouting, "Up, up, up," Merriken said, telling the Americans to get out of the roadside ditches into which they dove for cover, and to go to the rear.
The battery officer told his troops to surrender, because they were defenseless against an armored column, Merriken said. The German commanders were already running behind schedule and frustrated, Kershaw said in a phone interview.
"These guys don't stop for anybody," he said of the delayed German SS Panzer column. "There's a big problem with what you're going to do with POWs."
Soon after they were captured, the group of prisoners was directed into a field, near a cafe and a few farmhouses.
"All of us didn't know what was going to happen," Merriken said. "I think most of us assumed we'd be prisoners of war."
Another German armored vehicle approached - perhaps a half-track - from which an officer stood up, took his pistol and shot a prisoner point-blank, Merriken said. With that, the machine guns on tanks positioned nearby opened up on everybody, starting with those in the rear ranks and methodically moving forward.
"It was over in about 15 minutes," he recalled.
German soldiers soon moved among the bodies, kicking, poking and prodding them for signs of life. At one point, they feigned offering medical attention, he said.
"You hurt? You hurt?" Merriken remembers them asking.
Anyone who responded was shot or clubbed with the butt of a rifle. One grievously wounded American, clearly in pain, moved near Merriken's left.
"He was so delirious, he didn't know what he was doing," he recalled. "I whispered to him, 'Be still, be still.' "
The man, however, wound up rolling over on the back of Merriken's legs. He said two German soldiers walked up to them.
"They stood right over us," he said.
They fired a single pistol shot, which passed through the wounded man's body and continued through the right knee of Merriken, who never flinched. He does not attribute that to will power, but to the weight of the man's body.
When the slaughter was over, more than 70 American soldiers lay dead, many with gunshot wounds to the head, inflicted at close range. Months after the recovery of the main massacre site, more bodies were found nearby. The monument that marks the site today bears the names of more than 80 men.
Precisely how many were killed in the massacre still isn't known with absolute certainty.
Perhaps two hours after the shooting stopped, losing blood and weakening, Merriken somehow found the strength to get to his feet. Dragging his wounded leg, he struggled toward a woodshed, but first came across a German officer running after survivors headed for some woods.
From perhaps 10 feet away, as Merriken tried to cross a fence, the German pointed his pistol at him and attempted to fire, but the gun jammed. Merriken kept moving.
"I don't know why it didn't go off. I can't tell you that," he said. "God was with me, I can tell you that."
Eventually, he made it to the woodshed, where he met another American soldier, Chuck Reding, who had managed to escape the massacre unscathed. Without food or water, in nearly zero-degree weather, the two crawled from one hiding place to another before being taken in by a Belgian farm family, who hid them in an attic.
