The infantry sergeant and the staff sergeant commanding the M4 Sherman tank were both anxious, yet cautiously optimistic. Under the cover of a winter storm, German forces had broken through the American front lines. Everyone had been sure that the enemy had been seriously weakened in the last several months, so the offensive came as a surprise. Both NCOS knew that many nearby American units had been overrun. But they also believed in the ability of their combat team to survive and function-they had the experience, the men, and the weapons to deal with an attack and to buy time for the "higher-ups" to get reinforcements on the way.

Taken together, the tank crew and the attached infantry squad made up a small unit-less than twenty men. But between them, the two noncommissioned officers commanded a combined arms organization with more firepower than an entire Civil War

regiment. The Sherman contributed its 75-mm. main gun and three machine guns to the team; one of the infantrymen carried a Browning Automatic Rifle (BAR), and the rest were armed with the clip-fed Garand semiautomatic rifle. If the sergeants had done their job properly, ensuring that each man attained proficiency with his individual weapon and that all understood the tactics of employing armor alongside foot soldiers, they could handle whatever the Germans threw their wayeven the new King Tiger tank.

When the resupply of ammo and C-rations had been distributed and stowed away, and after the tank commander checked in with higher headquarters on his radio, the NCOs decided that the unit was ready for its next mission. The squad leader issued the terse command "Mount up!" and the Sherman tank moved off across the December snows.

Had they faced this same situation a few years earlier, these same men might well have lacked the equipment, the combined arms training, and the experienced NCO leadership necessary to meet the German threat. The armistice of November 1918 that ended the fighting in World War I also ushered in the traditional return to low peacetime manpower levels that meant hard times for the Army.

The War Department tried to avoid that drawdown. After evaluating wartime performance, especially the problems encountered in the first massive mobilization since the Civil War, the Secretary of War asked Congress to approve a force of about 600,000 men and

universal male military training. Officials argued that this approach (which amounted almost to a return to the colonial militia concept) would help to deter future war. Since most Americans had been told that World War I was the "War To End All Wars," Congress did not accept the argument. After all, the defeat of Germany and the exhausted condition of the other European powers meant that another large-scale land war was very unlikely for many years to come. Beyond that, an isolationist spirit prevailed in the United States during the interwar years.

Rapid demobilization from the wartime high of 3,250,000 men continued until it finally bottomed out in

the early 1920s at 12,000 officers and 125,000 men, grouped in nine skeleton divisions. In the years that followed, Congress rarely appropriated enough money to sustain the training needed to prepare even this small force for the possibility of combat. The reductions compelled many experienced noncommissioned officers to return to civilian life. Yet this was the time when the Army needed them the most. As John C. Calhoun had recognized after the War of 1812, a small peacetime Army needed a professional NCO corps to preserve the knowledge essential to train recruits in any future mobilization.

Tight budget restrictions-which became even tighter when the Great Depression arrived in 1929— prevented the Army from doing much about new weapons and tactics. In fact, Congress, acting upon General John ("Black Jack") Pershing's recommendation, deprived the Tank Corps, created during World War I, of its status as a separate combat arm. As late as 1938, while German armor experts were developing advanced tanks and Panzer tactics, the major general in charge of the Army's cavalry urged the country not to be misled into believing an "untried machine" could replace the "proven and tried horse."

In 1933 the Nazi dictator, Adolf Hitler, came to power in Germany. Within three years, Germany renounced the Treaty of Versailles and began to rearm. America responded slowly at first to this potential threat. Beginning in 1935 Congress started to increase appropriations for the armed forces, giving priority to the Navy and the Army Air Corps. Active enlisted strength in the Army crept back up toward 165,000 men, and increased funds permitted the resumption of summer maneuvers that involved National Guard units as well as regulars.

In the fall of 1939 Hitler invaded Poland, launching a new war in Europe. Reluctantly, the United States began to accelerate its military preparations. At the same time, a new leadership team gradually took over in the War Department with the appointment of General George C. Marshall as Chief of Staff in September 1939 and Henry L. Stimson as Secretary of War in July 1940. In September 1940 the National Guard entered federal service for a year of intensive training, and the same year, after bitter debate, Congress voted the nation's first peacetime draft. Other reforms introduced at this time were the creation of a General Headquarters to coordinate training, the establishment of the Armored Force at Fort Knox, Kentucky, and the creation of a small airborne force. By the autumn of 1941 the Army had grown to 27 infantry, 5 armored, and 2 cavalry divisions, plus a host of supporting units. This sudden growth placed a heavy burden on the small professional NCO corps that had endured the lean years.

In July 1940 Chief of Staff Marshall selected Brig. Gen. Lesley J. McNair as his deputy at General Headquarters and later at Army Ground Forces (AGF). McNair pushed hard to improve both weapons and tactics. In particular, he sought to maximize resources by designing lean but flexible organizations that balanced mobility and firepower. McNair also ardently supported the development of armor, favoring mass production of a maneuverable medium tank and self-propelled tank destroyers. But above all, General McNair was a trainer. He insisted on progressive training, beginning with the fundamentals for individual soldiers, then moving on to combined arms operations, and finally to maneuvers involving whole armies and corps.

His capacity for work was prodigious. McNair oversaw the creation of new tables of organization for the entire Army, the formation of thousands of units, the staging of twenty-seven large-scale domestic maneuvers, and the preparation of hundreds of thousands of soldiers for combat. Under his guidance, AGF also perfected the tactical doctrine that these forces would carry overseas. Significantly, both training and battlefield doctrine stressed teamwork. McNair himself observed that “you cannot use men against Hitler, you must use fighting units." This emphasis on trained teams contributed directly to the growth of the NCO's small unit leadership function.

By December 1944 the preparatory work done by McNair and the NCO corps had paid off. In three years of war, American troops had invaded Africa, Sicily, Italy, and finally France. Six months after the successful D-Day landings, the western Allies stood poised to cross the Rhine River. Not only had German forces been driven out of France and most of Belgium and the Netherlands, Russian forces on the Eastern Front had made similar gains while inflicting terrible losses on the Nazis. Hitler's last hope to reverse the course of a losing war depended upon a daring counterattack in the heavily forested Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. A "quiet sector," it was defended by two types of American divisions: green units sent to gain their first experience under fire and veteran outfits being reconstituted after exhausting combat elsewhere. Against the 6 divisions in the Ardennes, Hitler decided to send 3 German armies-between 17 and 25 divisions, counting reserves. He gave the bold plan the deceptively defensive code name "Watch on the Rhine."

The attack began on 16 December 1944 in predawn fog and drizzle along a front stretching more than sixty miles. Exploiting the bad weather, which grounded the Allies' superior air forces, the Germans hoped to sweep all the way to Antwerp, a critical Allied supply base on the North Sea, and to split the Allies, as they had in their Blitzkrieg of 1940. The spearhead of the offensive was

Kampfgruppe (battle group) Peiper, led by SS Obersturmbannfuehrer (lieutenant colonel) Jochen Peiper, a daring young officer with a well-deserved reputation for ruthlessness during the German campaigns in the Soviet Union.

Although the initial assault achieved one German goal immediately-complete surprise and confusion-its only chance for success depended on reaching objectives swiftly. If the armored and infantry thrusts were delayed,

or failed to keep to the tight German schedules, two things would happen to doom Hitler's desperate gamble. First, the Allies would have time to reinforce the Ardennes front with superior numbers of troops and tanks, and second, the weather would eventually clear, allowing the devastating potential of the Allied aircraft to be unleashed. Timing was all-important to the German planners; to the Allies, delaying the enemy was equally essential.

The American First Army was fragmented by the initial German onslaught. Soon the front ballooned into a ninety-mile-long bulge in the American lines, giving the Ardennes battle its popular name. And yet, despite the initial successes, little things began to go wrong for the attackers almost at once. Many U.S. units were overrun, captured, or driven back, but pockets of resistance formed, forcing German troops either to make long detours or to take the American strongpoints by assault. Many small units or groups of soldiers led by NCOS fought without orders, buying time in a "soldiers' battle," like the Wilderness in the Civil War, or Bataan in the Philippines, where NCOs had also played a crucial role. The delays created a ripple effect that upset the delicate Nazi timetable, especially for their follow-on elements.

Some major points of resistance developed in important crossroads towns like St. Vith and Bastogne-places where corps, division, regimental, or battalion commanders and their staffs were able to orchestrate relatively large defensive forces. A few of these positions were held so tenaciously that they never fell into German hands. Even in cases where enemy forces eventually overwhelmed the Americans, the defenders' combined arms teams (often improvised on the spot by mixing units that had never worked with each other before) made possible a more stubborn resistance than infantry or armor could have offered alone.

Perhaps even more important, in the long run, was the host of companies, platoons, and squads holding out on their own. Some of these small, nameless groups were made up of riflemen on the original front line who were cut off in small villages when the Germans swept past. Some held out for days before surrendering, denying the enemy the use of important roads. Others, waging firefights that never made it into the pages of history books, instinctively recognized the importance of some terrain feature and applied the lessons that had been absorbed during their years of training. In countless

actions, the Army's NCOs distinguished themselves as capable small unit leaders. As the historian John Strawson put it in his account of the Ardennes offensive: "On the United States side there were many examples of low-level resistance, determined on and executed by young lieutenants and sergeants with a handful of men and without the benefit of either inspiring direction from above or adequate artillery support from behind."

This determination to fight back came from all branches of the Army caught up in the action, but proved to be especially true among technologically sophisticated air defense artillerymen and engineers. West of the town of Stoumont and elsewhere, antiaircraft artillery units revealed a great capacity for innovation as well as courage. Equipped with weapons ranging from 90-mm. guns designed to hit high-altitude bombers to quadruplemount .50-caliber machine guns for point defense against low-level fighters, their units bristled with firepower. Since the adverse weather had grounded German as well as Allied planes, the gunners turned their fire upon the advancing German armor and infantry.

Fighting beside them were the combat engineers. Here NCOs and company grade officers seized the initiative. As Kampfgruppe Peiper approached the village of Trois Ponts, where a strategic bridge could carry its tanks west over the Salm River, the American engineers in the town blew up the bridge. Doubling back from Trois Ponts to Stavelot, wasting precious time, Peiper managed to cross the Ambleve River to the west, only to have American engineers dynamite the recaptured bridge at Stavelot behind him. Now cut off from his communications and fuel supplies, Peiper forged grimly ahead only to have engineers blow up yet another bridge, literally before his eyes, over the River Lienne.

This type of delaying action by individual units was crucial. Later, after the battle, Peiper stated, "If only we had captured the bridge at Trois Ponts intact and had enough fuel, it would have been a simple matter to drive