--- title: "‘Good luck, soldier’: This World War II paratrooper recalls landing on D-Day" date: "2026-11-03" modified: "2026-11-03" authors: - name: "Stephen Ruiz" job_title: "Editor, Writer" link: "https://www.wearethemighty.com/authors/stephen.md" url: "https://www.wearethemighty.com/history/good-luck-soldier-this-world-war-ii-paratrooper-recalls-landing-on-d-day/" categories: - "Army" - "History" - "War History" - "World War II" tags: - "Army" - "D-Day" - "Military History" - "Veterans Day" - "VHP" - "World War II" --- # ‘Good luck, soldier’: This World War II paratrooper recalls landing on D-Day ![Albert Hassenzahl]() *World War II veteran Albert Hassenzahl told the Veterans History Project that he thought he 'was the only GI to land on the coast of Normandy.' (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress)* *Albert Michael Hassenzahl served as a U.S.* [*Army*]() *paratrooper during* [*World War II*]()*. He was in C Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division. Hassenzahl, who died in 2009, conducted an interview with the Library of Congress’ Veterans History Project in 1998. We Are The Mighty is running some of those transcripts leading to Veterans Day on November 11, 2026. WATM edited the interview for clarity and brevity.* “\[In\] the fall of 1941, I was attending the University of Toledo in Ohio. I was in the middle of my junior year when December 7, 1941, came along and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. I finished out the semester, and in early February of 1942, I enlisted in the United States Army as a private. “\[They\] ordered \[me\] to Louisiana at Camp Livingston and took basic training with the 28th Infantry Division. After completing basic training, I found that I qualified for possible officer training school at Fort Benning, Georgia, as an infantry officer. I applied for the school and was accepted and went to Fort Benning. After 90 days, \[I\] graduated as a second lieutenant in the infantry. **Also Read:** [**Kamikaze pilots couldn’t stop this Marine veteran, 104, during World War II**]() “We were popularly or unpopularly known as 90-day wonders. At this point in time, I had several opportunities to go to Columbus, Georgia, near Fort Benning, and I noticed the paratroops that were in town. I noted what excellent soldiers they appeared to be. I investigated the paratroops and I learned something about them, and decided that was the outfit that I wanted to be in. “After Fort Benning and the infantry school, I put an application in to parachute school, took a physical, and spent four rugged weeks undergoing training. There were four stages: A, B, C, and D. C stage was up on the towers. And at that point, we were hauled up on the 250-foot tower with an open parachute that could be released at the top of the tower. “And the Monday morning that our class made this formation, we made free jumps off those towers when they released the chute. But when we assembled and started our morning training, a strong wind came across the field. The first guy came down with his chute open and broke his leg with that strong wind. The second guy went up, and he came down and broke an ankle. I was the third man up. Everything was fine until just before I hit the ground, and a strong, strong gust of wind caught me and swung me at a sharp angle to the ground and slammed me down on my right knee. I spent a good six weeks on physical therapy before they let me go back and complete the C stage about six weeks later. “And then D stage was the last stage where you go up in an airplane and make five practice jumps to earn your wings, and that must have been sometime, oh, in November. I received a pair of silver wings, and I was a bona fide paratrooper from this point on.” ### Getting a Wink from Ike ![Winston Churchill]() *British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower (left background) review the 506 Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division before D-Day in 1944. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project)* “\[I was\] posted to the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. It's a regiment which was formed late the previous year and was still undergoing training. So we went to the 506th sometime in December of 1942 and/or early in 1943. And then I found myself pulling duty as an umpire doing Tennessee maneuvers. This went on for some six weeks. “When the maneuvers were over, I came back to C Company again. And we were still getting replacements and equipment, and finally we got on trains and went to New York to the port of embarkation and boarded a British troop ship called the Samaria. That must have been early February of '43. And we spent 10 days or two weeks in a slow-moving convoy crossing the Atlantic Ocean, perhaps it was a little less than that. Finally we came into Portsmouth, England, and spread across southeast England to various points where we had camps. And there we stayed in England, and we had training exercises almost continuously from late February or early March of 1943 all the way up almost to D-Day, June 6, 1944. “Incidentally, the Samaria—the ship that we came over to England on—was sunk several months later in the Mediterranean, and all hands on it were lost. So we were lucky in that respect. “A few days before D-Day, we left our camp in Ramsbury, and we went to a staging area that they cordoned off just before June 6. The day before we jumped holds a special memory for me, June 5, 1944. In the afternoon, they called us to assemble, and Gen. Eisenhower, Ike, and Winston Churchhill and a party of senior officers arrived at our staging area. They inspected the troops in our outfit, the paratroopers that were about to make the jump the next morning across the channel and into Normandy. “I just happened to be in one of the ranks with Ike and Gen. Eisenhower, and Churchill came down. I'll never forget how when Ike came down our rank, he paused in front of me for an instant and he winked, he winked at me and he said, ‘Good luck, soldier.’ That's stayed with me all of this time.” ### D-Day Arrives ![D-Day paratroopers]() *Paratroopers in a C-47 wait to take off on the night of June 5, 1944. (National Archives)* "We took off in our assigned C-47, and we were loaded down with equipment. We took off in the late evening and flew for several hours in big circles until the planes got in formation for the flight across the channel, which only took a comparatively short time. They gave all the noncoms and officers in our battalion and in our company leg packs to jump. These leg packs contained ammunition or supplies or whatever else, and they weighed 30-40 pounds in addition to all of the other gear that we had on us. “And they strapped to our right leg with a 15-foot rope attached, with a quick release on our parachute harness. We had never jumped these bags before, and we got a quick few words of instruction on what to do. That was after we'd got our opening shock from the parachute, we were supposed to pull this quick release on our parachute harness, and the theory was that this leg pack would detach itself from our right leg and dangle about 15 feet below us. When we hit the ground, the leg pack hit first, and in theory, it was supposed to slow our descent. “Well, it didn't work out that way. I still have the scars on my right three fingers where the rope burned almost to the bone, and I never did see the pack. In addition, we jumped about, oh, 1:30 in the morning, D-Day, which was about 4½ hours before the first beach assault forces hit Omaha and Utah beaches. They came in at 6 o'clock or shortly thereafter. “When my green light came on, I was the jumpmaster with 17 men in my stick. That was the number of paratroopers that filled up a C-47 fully equipped. The plane was full with that number of soldiers in it with all their equipment. Well, I also had to throw a cart loaded with 60-millimeter ammo, a rubber tire cart with a yoke on it. That was the first time we did that too, and the door was open. It's a small door on the C-47. “When the green \[light\] went on to jump, I was supposed to throw this cart out. Well, our plane evidently did not slow down to a prescribed 90-mph jump speed. When I attempted to throw that cart out, the yoke whipped around and got caught in the door. So I fell on my hands and my knees, and with all the strength that I had, I was trying to shoulder the darn cart out of the door. “Later on I learned that Sgt. Sam Smith and one of my machine gunners literally picked me out of the door after the cart, because it took three of us to get that damn cart dislodged from hanging up in the door. And every second was precious because you're only over a drop zone for a few seconds. "So it seemed like I just had an opening shock, hit the ground, and that was it. I was in pitch dark blackness, and I thought that I was the only GI to land on the coast of Normandy.” ### Caught in Trees “After I landed and got my wits about me somewhat, my next job was to get out of the parachute harness. That was a pretty difficult thing to do with all the gear that we had strapped on us. And we had the old-fashioned swivel hooks that you had to unhook by hand. Lo, in desperation, I reached down and I was able to reach a trench knife that I carried in my leg in a holster. It was razor sharp, and I cut myself out of the chute. “That’s how I got out of the chute, because I had hung up partially in a tree in the middle of the Normandy field that I landed in. We had those earthen hedge rows around all of these comparatively small fields, and so I crawled over to the edge of a hedge row. This being, oh, about quarter to 2 or 2 in the morning, I finally made contact with \[my machine gunner\] and Walter Gargas, another soldier in my platoon, and we started out and we gradually accumulated a few men. “I then ran into our platoon pilot, 1st Lt. Bill Pine. When we had accumulated a half-dozen or so guys, we cautiously went down this road and attempted to orient ourselves, because we were dropped pretty much all over the Cherbourg Peninsula. “It took some time before we determined just where we were. So many of the road signs were down, we couldn't use that as any kind of a beacon. In the meantime, we ran into a few \[Germans\] and had some minor exchanges of gunfire with them. And very luckily, we didn't land in the center of any big \[Nazi\] compound. We were on the outskirts of a little place called Ste. Marie-du-Mont. “Some of our men got hung up in trees. Sgt. Bill Clemens, for example, our operations sergeant, was hung up in a tree, and he came right down in a German compound. He swung off the ground, his parachute hanging there, and the \[Germans\] just riddled him with gunfire. Bill Knight, one of our other men, found him a day or two later. He managed to cut him out of the chute and put him in a collecting point so his remains could be taken care of.” ### “I’m Not Going to Die” ![American World War II paratroopers]() *American paratroopers move cautiously through a French churchyard at St. Marcouf, Utah Beach, France, June 8, 1944. (U.S. National Archives)* “D plus 2 or 3, everything was kind of like a fog. We were constantly shooting and firing and trying to take cover and trying to kill \[Germans\]. I remember we were in a running fight with some \[of them\] along a hedge row, and we probably weren't more than 20 or 30 yards away from one another. We were exchanging gunfire like mad. “I felt—I think it was D plus 2—a burning sensation in my right side, and I just crumpled. The firefight was pretty quick, and we had killed most of the \[Germans\] along the road in this bout, fighting in the ditches. One of our men, Punchy Zettwich, had been an amateur boxer, and he was one of the sergeants in our outfit. I still remember Punchy pulling me under cover and taking my big bandage that we all carried. He cut my jacket open, and that's where all the blood was on my right side. And I can remember him saying, ‘Jesus Christ, Al, I'm going to do the best I can,’ and he did, the poor guy. “Punchy patched me up. And the next thing that I remember, I \[was\] laying on a stretcher in a courtyard of an old chateau. The \[Germans\] were throwing mortar rounds on the roof in the courtyard. Roof tiles were dropping down all around us on the ground, and I kept hoping that one of those tiles wouldn't hit me in the eye. Anyway, our regimental chaplain, Father Maloney, came up and he was going to start the last rites with me. I told Father Maloney, ‘Get lost. Goddamn it’; he told me this later, I said, ‘I'm not going to die; cut that crap out.’ “And he had a half smile on his face, and he moved on out. And then I remember Bill Pine said something to me and I tried to answer him, but I couldn't. I could feel a lot of fluid in my throat—I guess it was blood—and I couldn't talk to him. “He just patted my face, and he said later on he never expected to see old Hassenzahl again. But a curious thing happened then. I've never forgotten it. They transported me in a Jeep, two stretchers to a Jeep, down to the beach on Utah. Smaller boats would come in and transport the wounded back out to the LSTs that were in deeper water. While I was laying on this beach at this particular time, there was quite a storm that had blown up. The wind was high and the waves were high and my blanket blew off of me. I didn't have the strength to pull it back on. “It was cold, and we were in shock. You're in shock and the stretchers were real close together. This arm came across my body and gathered up that blanket that had blown partially off of me and tenderly tucked it all around me. And I was just barely able to move my head a little bit. And the fella that did this was a German prisoner who was on a stretcher next to me.” ### Their Next Mission “When we got to England, I remember going to the 160th General Hospital in southeast England. It wasn't too far away from our training camps where we'd spent the previous year. I spent a good month there or six weeks, recuperating and getting treated. “Fortunately, my wound didn't puncture the lung, but it took a lot of flesh out. I still have a big long scar on my side, and it damaged one of my ribs real bad. But I was posted back to active duty, and I know I fought hard to request it. I could have taken a limited duty assignment, but I elected to go back to my outfit. In those days, your company was your family. “We were like a band of brothers; we didn't know it at the time. That's the only place that I wanted to go back to, was C Company, 506th, and I did. About a month before, it must have been about late August now, we were getting replacements in and training. We were in a place in England fairly close to our original camp, but we were in a tent camp this time. “We were training for our next mission, which turned out to be called \[Operation\] Market Garden. And that happened on September 17,, 1944. And that was when the 82nd and the 101st Airborne Divisions were attached to the British Second Army. Our mission was to go up north into Holland and all the way into Germany. At this point, I forgot to add that the 101st Airborne Division and the 82nd had been pulled out of Normandy in late July after D-Day and returned to England to camps, to get replacement troops and to resupply, and all of the companies were in pretty sad shape. “They had all lost a lot of men, certainly C Company had. In addition, our company commander, Knute Rodstein, had been severely wounded in Normandy after I was, D plus 7 or 8, and had been sent back to a general hospital in England. He didn't rejoin the regiment until after we were in Bastogne in December of '44. And also my platoon leader, 1st Lt. Bill Pine, had become the company commander after Rodstein was wounded. Then when I came from the hospital in England to rejoin the company, I was promoted to first lieutenant and took command of the third platoon, my old platoon with Bill Pine originally. “Our jump into Holland was September 17. \[It\] occurred early in the afternoon, in broad daylight, and we came in at a very low altitude. We jumped somewhere around 600 to 800 feet, and we jumped through a lot of anti-aircraft fire. “\[The Germans\] were around the area. That meant we weren't in the air very long at that altitude. Tragically, C Company lost a second planeload of men through anti-aircraft fire. We had lost a planeload of men in Normandy on D-Day, in addition to this plane in Holland. Our drop zone was near a place called Son in Holland. Our jump zone was approximately two miles from our battalion's objective, which was a bridge over the Wilhelmina Canal. We assembled quickly on the drop zone, and we moved out. When we got perhaps 30, 40 yards to the bridge, the Germans blew it up in our faces from the other side.” ### You Could Tell Who the Enemy Was ![German soldiers]() *German soldiers at Arnhem in the Netherlands during World War II. (Wikimedia Commons)* “When the engineers put that \[temporary\] bridge across, we poured across it, and due to the fact that we had pretty much an element of surprise, we were very aggressive, and we \[got\] pretty close to Einholden. Einholden was our regimental objective, as well as the division's grand objective, Einholden and the surrounding areas. “The first British airborne division had as an objective the bridge over the Rhine River at the town of Arnhem. Now this was the northernmost objective and, by far, the toughest one. You remember the movie ‘A Bridge Too Far’; it's part of this saga. The British airborne division was just decimated because they never received their resupply up through that road that we had contained through our sector. The British tank columns never reached Arnhem and never reached the Rhine River, which would have resupplied their British 1st Airborne Division. So consequently those people were almost decimated. “They were called the Red Devils, by the way. They were a good outfit, but they took an awful, awful shellacking there in Arnhem. At the end of this particular campaign, we helped pull some of those poor British paratroopers across the Rhine River and bring them to safety in rubber boats that the engineers brought up under cover of darkness. We went across, and C Company participated in this little rescue operation. We would paddle across the Rhine River, and we'd bring back eight or 10 or perhaps a dozen, as many as we could crowd into those rubber boats. We'd bring them back into the American lines. “The Dutch people appreciated that the Americans had a great hand in their liberation from the Germans. So shortly after Eindhoven was taken, the Germans cut back through our sector, the 101st sector, and cut the road at a place called Veghel. Our regiments, the 506th, were sent to straighten out the line and take the road back from the Germans. And this developed into quite a firefight. “We took a portion of the road back from the Germans at Beckel. Later in the day, it started to rain, and we went as far as we could while there was still some light. We held up at a large ditch, and there were open fields. We were told to maintain our position there for the night, so we did. “The heavens just opened up, and the rain came like cats and dogs. And around 1 or 2 in the morning, a reinforced \[German\] patrol came right in on top of us. There must have been a good 20 or more of them, and they came right in on top of us. We spread out in this ditch. Anyway, this developed into a real fistfight. And it was as dark as the dickens, and you couldn't be quite sure, but you could tell who was a \[German\] and who wasn't.” ### “Hot and Heavy in Opheusden” ![Operation Market Garden]() *Six American paratroopers receive a final briefing from their commanding officer before boarding a plane for Operation Market Garden. (Imperial War Museum)* “I had a tangle with a big \[German\] who must have outweighed me by 50 pounds or so, and it really took some doing to put him under. I had a little help. He was one strong son of a gun, that \[German\] was. “The next morning in the first light, we must have had 15 or 16 or more dead Krauts in that ditch. And on top of the ditch was where we had thrown them out, and I didn't lose any of my men. There were a couple that were stabbed and bruised up, and I was pretty well bruised up, because \[the German\] worked me over pretty good before we put him away. “While it was still daylight, \[and\] before we had this fight with the \[Nazis\], a single German tank opened fire on us. And one of the men in my platoon with a bazooka put a round through their tank tracks. That immobilized the tank itself, and the crew poured out of that hatch. There were four of five of them as I recall, and they came out of the tank. When they came out of the tank, our guys popped them off one at a time. And a little later, one of my guys went into the tank and he got a Nazi flag from there, and I have that. “I traded something or other with him for the flag. I still have that flag in a foot locker upstairs in the attic over my garage. It's got a big swastika on it. This action in the ditch occurred early in October. And then we had an action in Opheusden. “On October 6, 1944, we were ordered to attack through the little village of Opheusden. It was a regimental effort. First battalion and then A and C Company were crawling through this village house by house. And I was on the left flank, and a British guard unit was on my left flank. And I'll never forget that British officer coming down like he was going to a picnic, and he saw me as the platoon leader. In his typical British clipped voice, he introduced himself and said something like, ‘Jolly good show.’ I often wonder what happened to him, because from that time on, things got hot and heavy in Opheusden. “We had house-to-house fighting, and we entered this action in Opheusden with something like 118 men that we had left and six officers, including myself and Capt. Pine, the company commander. At some point, the \[Germans\] retreated back from where we were in contact with them, and they almost immediately called in a barrage of 88 fire on top of us. That 88 fire was the most terrible weapon in the world. It far surpassed anything that we had in the way of artillery, medium artillery, or tank artillery. “That German 88 was a multipurpose gun, it was anti-personnel, it was anti-aircraft, and it was anti-tank. And the \[Germans\] used it with precision. They poured that fire in on us, and we lost so many men, I'll never forget that afternoon and evening. We finally were relieved that night by the 327th light infantry regiment. Capt. Pine had been horribly hit up on top of a dike where he shouldn't have been, but he was. He was evacuated back to a windmill where we had our aid station. “From 118 men or so when we went into Opheusden and six officers, I took 26 men and myself. I was the only officer left out of Opheusden. The whole battalion, the whole battalion was down to just over a hundred men; that was three infantry companies and a headquarters company.” ### “We Must Have Taken 150 Prisoners” “We were pulled back about 1,500 yards to the rear, and this is late at night, and we were dead, dead tired. At the first crack of dawn, wouldn't you know we had the unfortunate luck to have stumbled upon a \[German\] battalion—we didn't know it at the time—in an orchard across the field from us. A machine gun, \[German\] machine gun had opened up at the crack of dawn, and you couldn't miss it. It was totally different from our machine guns. It was a real rapid fire weapon. “Col. LaPrade came up to me, and he said, ‘You're company commander. You take command and take your 26 men.’ Well, he didn't know we had 26 men. Maybe he did; I don't think he did, though. But he says, ‘You take your company around to a left flanking attack on those \[Germans\] in the woods, and we'll give you 81 millimeter mortar support from headquarters company.’ We started along, my 26 guys and myself, and God knows we didn't know how many people were in that orchard over there. We went along into a ditch to flank them from an angle. “And Sgt. Sanchez, God bless his memory, he had eyes like an eagle. I said, ‘Sanchez, you can see better than me. You call that 81 millimeter fire in on those \[Germans\] in those woods, and we lift it. We'll rush 'em.’ And that's what he did. He walked that 81 millimeter mortar fire right into those woods, and you could see the explosions in the words and you would hear the cry of the \[Germans\]. And when he lifted it, we rushed those woods. We started out and we went across the road, and we hit the edge of the orchard not knowing again what was even in there. “Harold S. Forshee was my scout, and I was the second or third man behind him. In those days we led our men, we didn't follow them up. We led them. Somebody fired from the woods and killed Forshee right on the road. And anyway we bored into that woods. And when we got into the edge of the woods, honest to God, to my complete surprise, the \[Germans\] came out of there, those woods, with their hands up. We must have taken 150 prisoners. We formed them up in a column or two on the road, and we disarmed them. This with 26 guys, 26 guys. And we marched them down the road to our battalion. “I'll never forget Col. LaPrade coming up the ditch, trying to keep under cover, and his face, his face had a look of amazement like you wouldn't believe when he saw how many prisoners that what was left of Charlie Company had taken. Anyway, a later count showed something like 50 or 55 dead \[Germans\] in that orchard.” ### “All Hell Broke Loose” ![Bastogne bombing]() *The effects of bombing in Bastogne, Belgium, during World War II. (U.S. National Archives)* “When we were fighting house to house through Opheusden, I had this little crew in a ditch, and I told them to stay there and I'd call them as soon as I needed them. Well, at one point, I was in a doorway, and I had the strangest feeling come over me. Something told me to get those two kids out of that ditch. “I yelled across the street—and this is with fire coming in and artillery coming in, 88 fire coming in. I called them over to me where I was in this doorway. They both got up with their ammo pouches, and they ran across the street. They came up to me and crouched down alongside the wall where I was. And just as they got to me, a shell came in where they had just been just an instant before and blew a tremendously big crater. And those two kids looked at each other and they looked at me. The look they had on both of their faces, I'll never forget as long as I live. “After this action in the orchard, we went into a reserve position. The regiment was pretty well shot up anyway, and we were in this reserve position for a few days. Then we were ordered out to man an outpost line of resistance along a branch of the Rhine River, close into Germany. “The \[Germans\] were on the other side. We had sent out patrols, and the \[Germans\] had sent patrols over to us into our lines. On one occasion, I took a recon patrol out myself one night with two of my people. The three of us started out from a point on our lines. We went about a good thousand yards across some open area to get up to an embankment that had a double railroad track on top. “The track was a good 40-foot high on the top of this embankment, so we went out slowly to the end of this embankment where the railroad track was, and we listened. I started to climb up the top of this embankment. I got to the top, and I was on my stomach, and I had a Tommy gun with me. With a man on each side of me, I got across the second row of tracks. All of a sudden, I heard some noises and I froze. By God, the damnedest luck, a \[German\] patrol, there weren't too many of them, was coming along their side of the embankment. It was dark, and I could see their helmets come up the side just above the railroad embankment. “This lead \[German\] came face to face with me not more than 30 inches, 36 inches away from my face. And he looked in my face, and everything happened in seconds. I had shifted my Tommy gun so that it was pointed forward. As soon as he saw me and I knew he saw me, I let him have a burst from the Tommy gun. And then all hell broke loose. The other \[Germans\] and the patrol reacted, and they were firing at the top of the embankment. “At the same time, both of my guys were one on each foot. They were dragging me across these double railroad tracks and down the other side. So that kind of shot our recon patrol for that night. We were very, very lucky to get back to our own lines with our skins intact.” ### Trouble in the Ardennes “When I got back to the company CP that we moved through, Bill Reed was the company commander at the time and he said to me, ‘Jesus Christ, Al, what the hell has happened to your lip?’ “The \[German\] I had clobbered or possibly the one behind him, they were all firing automatic weapons, anyway he raised a big bloody blister on my upper lip. And that's about as close as you can come, I guess. Now in the first part of November, we were finally pulled out of Holland after about some 62 days of straight combat. We loaded up on trucks, and the British came in and took over our lines from us, relieved us, and we headed back to a place called Mourmelon, France. There, we were put into reserve and we were supposed to regroup and get replacement men. None of the units were at full strength. “We were supposed to get equipment, new equipment, including radio and communication equipment which had been lost during the battle in Holland, and replacement men, of course. So we were assigned quarters in Mourmelon, France, this old French army barracks which had been there for a number of years, since [World War I](). But they were comfortable. “This took us up close to the middle of December. Oh, one day on December 15, as a matter of fact, we were alerted for an imminent emergency move out to the Ardennes in Belgium, and it seemed that the Germans had mounted a surprise major offensive. Our troops that were up there on the line in the Ardennes had been pushed back with extremely high casualties. “The Germans had taken a lot of ground back that had been won in the previous months. \[They loaded us\] onto these trucks late in the evening. We started from Bastogne on the back roads in a convoy and drove all that night. We arrived at Bastogne early in the morning, just before dawn, on December 16. And I'll never forget the spectacle of American troops streaming back to the rear; many of them had thrown their weapons away, and they were in a panic. Here we were, the paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division, getting ready to go into combat again. We had just been out of combat. It never ends.” ### No Retreat “Our battalion commander got orders to go northeast of Bastogne about five or six miles through a little cross road village of Foy to a very small town called Norville. Maj. William Desobry had a battalion of tanks in this town of Norville. We were sent up there to reinforce them. The \[Germans\] were pushing within a very short distance of Norville at that time. So we went on a quick March through Bastogne, which wasn't very big anyway, to Norville. For the lack of ammunition that we had, there were 10th armored tanks on the road going up out of Bastogne and they were stripping their 30-caliber machine gun belts of 30-caliber ammo, and they'd give the loose shells to us along the road so we could load the clips for our M-1 rifles. That's how serious and close this whole mission was. “We made contact with the major’s outfit and immediately went into the attack northeast of the town. We already had our orders; the company commander had been on reconnaissance and knew exactly where to place us. Maj. Desobry years later in his memoirs—he became a major general—he had never seen combat infantry troops that reacted with the precision that these American paratroopers did. We came up in a column of twos, a column of troops on each side of the road, into Norville to reinforce his outfit. We immediately went into attack with no confusion. He said it was the most well-integrated infantry attack that he ever witnessed. That made us all feel kind of proud. “When we started this attack, we got about half or three-quarters of the way there. We had already suffered quite a few casualties both \[to\] our battalion and the 10th Armored. The 10th Armored had lost a number of tank destroyers and Sherman tanks by virtue of that German 88 that was mounted on the tanks. Those tanks opened up on us on the high ground and we had to fall back. We put a perimeter defense around Norville until all that day and into the 18th. “Our orders remained the same. Our orders were to hold Norville, no retreat. We had to stay right there. And I never thought that we'd ever get out of that alive. I said to myself a number of times, ‘Hassenzahl, this is it. This is the end of the outfit and the end of all your people here.’ But early in the afternoon on December 18, we got orders that we could fight our way back to Bastogne. And when we got back to Foy, back through Foy, we could expect to receive some artillery support from the second battalion, the 506th, and from the artillery unit. So we started in the afternoon of the 18th with C Company at the point, and we went west toward Foy. “When we got into Foy, there was a strong point that was reinforced by German tanks, and we had a lot of trouble getting off the road and through the area of Foy. We were stopped by heavy machine gunfire and tank fire at Foy, which is the crossroads between Norville and Bastogne. “We had a sergeant, Eugene Esquible, and he mounted an American Sherman tank that had been hit at this time and had a 50-caliber machine gun mounted by the turret. He neutralized the heavy machine gun nest as well as a number of \[Germans\] that were dug in. Finally, a blast knocked him off the tank, and he was hit pretty hard. Of course, the rest of us were under fire and were returning fire all this time too. This was a big firefight at Foy.” ### “A Lucky, Lucky Man” ![Albert Hassenzahl]() *Albert Hassenzahl in his Army uniform when he was 21 years old. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress' Veterans History Project)* “We spent the night in some barns in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Bastogne. And what happened was a \[German-\]estimated battalion force had broken through our lines at some point around the railroad tracks, just to the west of where we were quartered in this barn, and away from our lines. And C Company and A Company of our battalion were ordered to sweep the woods to the east of us and clean out this force of \[Germans\]. “It became a dreary, cold, miserable, wet, snowy day. We had to go through pine trees which were grown really thick. This was the beginning of the coldest winter that the Ardennes had recorded for the last 100 years. That snow never stopped. It just kept coming and coming, and the temperature kept going down and down. And it was so miserably cold and wet that you can't imagine. You just couldn't seem to get warm. At any rate, we managed to comb those woods, and between the two companies, we cleaned out. How we did it, I don't know to this day. We took a good many prisoners. "We also left a lot of \[Germans\] laying in there. As a matter of fact, their cries went on for hours after we pulled back. But that particular threat was taken care of. One sad part of it was that a platoon commander, like Joe Reed, had lost men in his platoon that he had to take a look at their dog tags. Matter of fact, he couldn't bring himself to look at the dog tags. He had to get somebody else to do it. “I can't help but think that all of this that I'm relating happened almost to the day 54 years ago. And I am so lucky to be able to possess a nice, warm, comfortable home and family. I've had a pretty good business career, and I've been able to enjoy the fruits of that career. When I think of many of my poor buddies that never had the chance..., I am indeed a lucky, lucky man. And I appreciate it so very, very much.” **Don’t Miss the Best of We Are The Mighty** **•** [**Meet the first woman in the Coast Guard to earn a Bronze Star**]() **•** [**What this airman did to survive at the Hanoi Hilton during the Vietnam War**]() **•** [**Korean War veteran pinpoints the most important lesson of war**]() ## Author Stephen Ruiz is an editor and writer at We Are The Mighty. His writing revolves mostly around military history and sports stories, but it can branch into other areas. Stephen has more than 35 years of journalism experience. His career began with stints at The Ledger newspaper in Lakeland, Florida, and The Kansas City Star in Missouri, but most of his time was spent on the copy desk at the Orlando Sentinel. After accepting a buyout from the Sentinel in 2020, Stephen worked at Military.com for 4½ years as a content editor and writer. He joined the We Are The Mighty staff in December 2025. ### Author social links [Facebook]() [Twitter]() [Instagram]() [LinkedIn]() ## More - [Celebrate the heroes of D-Day with these unique World War II-era 48-star flags]() - [Kamikaze pilots couldn’t stop this Marine veteran, 104, during World War II]() - [The first American on the beach at D-Day served through the Vietnam War]() - [German boats successfully stopped D-Day landing practice]() - [The immense challenge of teaching World War II in 270 minutes]() - [The story of the only US soldier executed for desertion since the Civil War]() - [Korean War veteran pinpoints the most important lesson of war]() - [How friendly fire could have killed Scotty from ‘Star Trek’ on D-Day]()