Lipton’s zigzag Bastogne story

 Lipton’s zigzag Bastogne story

I had an interesting game with a German fun a few days later. It was early in January that Lt. Dike was told by Battalion to establish contact with the unit o­n our left, across open ground from our position down near Foy. It might have been I company. Lt. Dike told me to send a patrol over to make the contact, but rather than send someone else – I decided to go myself. I asked “Burr” Smith to go along with me.

We made it down to the other unit okay and set up communication and outpost positions to be manned at night, but when we started back we found that a German artillery observer had seen us. Luckily as there were o­nly two of us he could get o­nly o­ne gun to fire at us. When we got out into the open ground we heard a gun fire off in the distance and heard the shell coming at us. We hit the ground, and it exploded near us, but neither of us was hit. It was a high trajectory, fairly low velocity piece of artillery so we could hear the gun fire in the distance and could hear the shell coming in for several seconds before it hit. We had 600 or 700 yards of open country to go, up hill, so after the shell hit we jumped up and ran toward our positions until we heard the gun fire again, jumping up and running again after that shell hit. We kept this up, jumping up and running, first zigging and then zagging, after each shell hit and hitting the ground before the next o­ne hit, and it got funnier and funnier. We could visualize the German artillery observer and his gun crew tracking us with their gun, trying to guess whether we would zig or zag. We fooled them with every move and made it back without a scratch.

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