The Belgian farmer, whose name was Henri Lejoly, was surprised at the nonchalance of the U.S. troops. Standing in the barren field outside of the town of Malmedy on that cold early afternoon in the winter of 1944, they smoked and joked with each other. Some of them had placed their hands on their helmets in a casual token of surrender to the Waffen-SS troops of Kampfgruppe Peiperâ??the mechanized task force commanded by the brilliant young German Colonel Jochen Peiperâ??as it passed by, but beyond that they seemed remarkably unconcerned.
The offhand behavior of the roughly 115 U.S. prisoners may have been because the men came from Battery B of the 285th Field Observation Battery. This was an outfit whose job was to spot enemy artillery emplacements and transmit their location to other U.S. units. It had seen relatively little frontline duty and was filled with numerous green replacements.
Most of the SS troops, including Jochen Peiper, had seen extensive duty in the grim killing fields of the Eastern Front. As Kampfgruppe Peiper passed by these Americans, an SS soldier suddenly stood up in the back of his halftrack, aimed his pistol, and fired it twice into a group of U.S. prisoners. One of them crumpled to the ground. Terrified U.S. soldiers in the field suddenly began to run. Then a German machine gun at the back of another halftrack opened up and U.S. prisoners fell screaming to the ground. Within a matter of a few minutes, the field was covered with quickly coagulating pools of blood and writhing bodies. Then the SS men began to walk among the injured and the dead, pistols out.
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