BRIDGE TO VICTORY

When Private First Class Francis S. “Frank” Currey arrived in Malmedy six days before Christmas 1944, the Belgian town wasn’t yet notorious for a massacre. Eighty-four dead American POWs still lay out beyond the lines at a crossroads south of town, where Nazi Waffen-SS troops had gunned them down two days earlier, but the full horror wouldn’t be known for weeks. The immediate worry for American troops then in Malmedy was focused on a bridge. The great German thrust through the Ardennes west toward the Meuse River in Belgium and France—an offensive best known as the Battle of the Bulge—had stalled. But if the enemy took the bridge over the Warche River, west of town, the Nazi offensive would roll again.

Currey’s unit, Company K, 120th Regiment, 30th Infantry Division, had been hurriedly trucked down from Holland to bolster the front after the Germans launched the offensive on December 16. “They spread us out pretty thin,” Currey, 19 at the time, recalled in an interview seven decades later. Stories of German infiltrators dressed as Americans and imitating Allied MPs, changing street signs, mining roads, and cutting phone wires behind American lines, along with collaborators in Malmedy—for much of its existence part of Germany—had the troops on edge. Indeed, although the Americans didn’t know it, two teams of disguised Germans had passed through Malmedy just before the arrival of Currey’s unit on December 19, found it lightly defended, and reported back to their commander a few miles to the south.

Stories of German infiltrators dressed as Americans had the troops on edge.

That man, SS Lieutenant Colonel Otto Skorzeny, was an ardent Nazi with no compunctions about fighting dirty. A six-foot-four Viennese with a face marked by —dueling scars—he would write in his memoirs, “My knowledge of pain, learned with the saber, taught me not to be afraid. And just as in dueling when you must concentrate on your enemy’s cheek, so, too, in