How 700 US Troops Held Off Four SS Panzer Divisions With One Radio
Lieutenant Weiss spent the afternoon of August 6th doing what every good forward observer did.
He climbed every observation point.
He registered targets.
He plotted on the grided map every road, every crossroads, every dip in the ground where a German column might come at him.
He gave each one a number.
He sent those numbers back to fire direction.
He called them emergency barrage numbers.
If anything happened, he would not have to dictate coordinates.
He would just call a number and the shells would already be on the way.
At about 5:30 in the afternoon, Weiss looked through his binoculars and saw something moving on a road to the east.
It was a German column.
He called the first fire mission of his career on Hill 314.
It was the first of 193.
The Germans came at 1:00 in the morning on August 7th, 1944.
They came in fog, a heavy low summer ground mist that hugged the river valley and the hedge.
The German plan called for darkness and fog precisely to neutralize the great Allied advantage.
The fighter bombers, the typhoons of the Royal Air Force, the thunderbolts of the 9inth United States Army Air Force.
Those aircraft owned the daylight skies over France.
In the fog and dark, the panzas thought they could move with impunity.
What they did not know and would not know for many years after the war was that British codereakers at Bletchley Park had decrypted German radio traffic.
The intelligence community called it ultra.
By late on August 6th, the Americans had a fairly clear picture of what was coming.
The warning reached General Hobbes at his command post at 38 minutes after midnight on August 7th.
Far too late to bring up reinforcements.
The 30th Division would have to fight with what was already on the ground.
The first to hit them was the second SS Panza division, Das Reich, under SS Brigade Furer Ottob.
Two regimental battle groups, what the Germans called Camp Groupen, came at Morten from north and south.
They were reinforced by another regimental-sized camp grouper from the 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division.
North of them, the second Panza division, a vermarked army formation under General Hinrich von Llutwitz, made the main effort toward the villages of St.
Bartelli and Juveni.
The 116th Panza Division, also Vermacht, was supposed to attack on the far north flank, but its commander, Count Ghard Vonerin, had quietly decided he did not want to throw away his men on what he believed was a doomed mission.
His division failed to attack on time on August 7th.
He was relieved of command at 4 in the afternoon.
Only one Panther battalion of the first SS Panza division, the Libstande SS Adolf Hitler made it into the fight on the first day, reinforcing the second Panza near dawn.
So the popular story of four SS Panza divisions is not quite right.
The truer story is this.
two SS Panza divisions and two Vermarked Panza divisions, plus an attached SS Panza Grenadier Camp Grouper, all under General Hans vonFunk’s 47th Panza Corps.
Together, the largest concentration of German armor the Americans had faced since the campaign began.
And the spearhead, the unit that would actually grind into the slopes of Hill 314, was Dar Reich.
For the men on the hill, none of this mattered.
What mattered was the sound.
Lieutenant Weiss was awakened in the dark by a sound that began as a deep, distant rumble.
The rumble resolved into engines, tracked engines.
Small arms fire began crackling along the slopes.
The first artillery shells began to land.
Weiss reached for his radio.
He did not know where the Germans were.
He could not see them through the fog, but he had his pre-registered barrage numbers plotted the day before.
He called fire mission.
He called number after number.
The howitzers of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion opened up across the valley.
Within minutes, the hill was ringing with the sound of American shells exploding on roads the Germans were trying to use.
Down in the town of Morta, things were going badly.
The German infantry of Dasich infiltrated through the cobbled streets.
They reached the hotel deost where Lieutenant Colonel Eids Hardaway had his battalion command post.
Hardway tried to slip out with his staff.
He did not make it.
He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner.
With Hardway gone, the battalion needed a new commander.
Colonel Burks, listening on the regimental radio net, made an instant decision.
The senior officer, still in position on hill 314, was Captain Reynold Ericson of Company F.
Ericson would take command of everything on the hill.
Lieutenants Curley, Woody, Rezer, and Burn would command their companies under him.
Robert Weiss would be the eyes of the artillery.
And so before sunrise on August 7th, the perimeter on hill 314 was set.
A loose oval on a bare granite hill above the town.
Company E on the southeast.
Company G on the southwest.
Company K to the north near a stone farmhouse called Bonvoisa.
Company F survivors in the center with the wounded.
heavy machine guns and mortars of Company H around the rim.
Two artillery forward observer teams with two FM radios, just under 700 men surrounded on every side at every compass point by some of the most feared Panza divisions in Hitler’s army.
By 8:00 in the morning of August 7th, the situation looked very nearly hopeless.
The town of Mort had fallen.
The first battalion of the 117th Infantry holding the village of St.
Bartellamy to the north was being overrun by second Panza division Panthers fighting almost tankto-tank in the streets.
American soldiers were being captured, killed, scattered.
German tanks were already on the western roads, driving toward the next high ground.
On Hill 314, Captain Ericson’s perimeter had taken its first casualties.
Lieutenant Bart’s forward observer team had been hit hard in the opening hours.
Barts himself was wounded and combat ineffective.
Robert Weiss later described him in his memoir with a phrase that has stayed with anyone who has read it.
Weiss wrote that Bart seemed to be looking over his shoulder and that he could already see the pale stamp of death on his face.
Charles Barts would die of his wounds on October 31st, 1944.
With Barts down, the artillery fire direction for the southwest sector of the hill fell on Corporal Frank Denius, the instrument operator.
He picked up where Barts left off.
He kept calling fire missions.
The men called it laying steel.
Around 11:00 in the morning, the wind shifted.
The summer sun, climbing toward noon, began to burn off the fog.
The pilots of the Royal Air Force Second Tactical Air Force, sitting on air strips back in Lower Normandy with their engines running and their cockpits open, had been waiting all morning for that moment.
By noon on August 7th, the sky above Morta belonged to the Allies.
Hawker Typhoon fighter bombers came in low.
Each one carried eight rocket projectiles under its wings, 60 lb warheads with a flight characteristic that sounded to the men on the ground like a freight train coming down from the clouds.
Corporal Frank Denius later wrote a sentence that captures it perfectly.
He wrote, “I’ll never forget the sound of those rockets fired from the British typhoons.
We had never heard anything like that before.
The typhoons came in waves.
The Royal Air Force flew about 294 sorties over the Morton battlefield on August 7th alone.
American Republic P47 Thunderbolts of the 9th Air Force flew several hundred more.
They strafed and rocketed and bombed German tank columns, supply trucks, fuel bowsers, motorcycle messengers.
The Germans had no air cover.
The Luftwaffer had been swept from the skies of Normandy weeks before.
Now here we have to tell the truth.
For years after the war, the story was told that Allied fighter bombers had destroyed hundreds of German tanks at Morta.
Royal Air Force pilots claimed 140 German tanks killed.
American pilots claimed another 112, that is more tanks destroyed than the Germans had committed to the entire operation.
After the battle, the British army sent a team called the number two operational research section to count the wrecks.
Every burned out Hulk in the Mortain salient was inspected.
The verdict, when it came in, was sobering.
About 46 German tanks and assault guns had been lost in the entire operation.
Of those, only about nine could be attributed with confidence to Typhoon rockets.
The pilot claims were inflated by roughly a factor of 20.
What the typhoons actually did was destroy German supply.
They shot up the fuel trucks.
They wrecked the ammunition carriers.
They forced the tank crews to button up and stop.
They terrorized the support troops in the soft skinned vehicles.
and they gave the German commanders in their headquarters miles away the unmistakable feeling that they had lost the battle for the sky and could no longer move by daylight.
At 1:00 in the afternoon on August 7th, a signal went out from German Army Group B’s headquarters.
It is preserved in the records of the Royal Air Force.
The signal said that the German attack had been brought to a halt and it gave two reasons.
The reasons were, in the German wording, the employment of fighter bombers by the enemy and the absence of our own air support.
The hardest fighting was not yet over.
The German tanks could still move by night.
The infantry could still attack.
The hill 314 perimeter was still surrounded, still desperate, still cut off.
But on the afternoon of August 7th, on the great hill above Morta, Lieutenant Robert Weiss made a radio log entry that survived the war.
He wrote, “Enemy north, south, east, and west.
” And the American shells called by his radio were already coming down on every one of those compass points.
To understand what Robert Weiss and Frank Deius were doing on Hill 314, you have to understand the American way of war in 1944.
The German army was the world’s master of mobile armored warfare.
The British were the world’s master of carefully prepared setpiece battles.
But the American army by August of 1944 had become the world’s master of one specific thing, artillery.
The Americans had more artillery, fired faster, with better coordination and better fire direction techniques than any army in the world.
The American Fire direction center, where men with map boards and slide rules and field telephones translated a forward observer’s voice into a kill zone, was a quiet revolution in how war was fought.
and the man with the radio, the forward observer on the hill, was the trigger for that revolution.
Lieutenant Weiss had spent the day before the attack plotting numbered concentrations.
Every crossroad, every defile, every patch of forest where a tank could hide had a number.
When the Germans came at 1:00 in the morning, Weiss did not need to read off coordinates.
He did not need to dictate corrections in the fog.
He just had to say a number, and the shells were on the way.
But Hill 314 was not relying on the 230th Field Artillery Battalion alone.
Behind the Morta front, the Americans had assembled what some historians estimate at 12 and a half artillery battalions in supporting range, 105 mm howitzers, 155 mm howitzers, and three battalions of 155 mm long toms, the big rifled guns that could throw a 95lb shell more than 10 mi.
When a German column was cited, Weiss or Denius would call a fire mission.
The fire direction center would calculate and then the order would go out not to one battalion but to many.
The shells were timed to arrive together.
The Americans called it time on target.
12 battalions could put a small storm of shells onto a single piece of ground.
All of them arriving within seconds of each other.
To a German infantryman on the ground, it was the end of the world.
Sometime on August 9th, Frank Denius spotted a column of German trucks unloading near the base of the hill.
He called the mission.
A multi-battalion time on target landed on the convoy.
Denius later wrote in his memoir, “Their casualties and vehicle damage were incredible.
The few undamaged German vehicles withdrew to the east, loaded with men fleeing from a killing ground.
That was one fire mission.
” Robert Weiss called 193 of them in 6 days.
The Germans understood almost immediately that the artillery was the worst thing they faced.
They tried to silence it.
They could not.
The radio that connected Hill 314 to the fire direction center was too small, too well hidden, too well operated.
A German 88 mm shell clipped the antenna of Weiss’s radio.
On August 7th, the set kept working.
A Panza Grenadier rifleman put a bullet through the canvas of Sergeant Sassa’s pack near the radio handset.
The set kept working.
The batteries began to fail on August 8th.
That was a different problem.
The SCR 610 FM artillery radio ran on dry cell batteries.
In an FM radio of that period, the batteries did not just fail gradually.
They held a near full charge until they were nearly depleted and then they died very fast.
Once they were dead, that was it.
You could not recharge them.
You needed new ones.
Lieutenant Weiss had brought a small supply of spare batteries up the hill.
On August 6th, By the morning of August 8th, that supply was running low.
By August 9th, it was almost gone.
The men did three things to extend the life of the batteries.
First, they shut the radio off between fire missions.
Every minute of receiver hiss was a minute of battery life.
Weiss and Sassa learned to switch the set off, then switch it back on a moment before they pressed the handset to their lips.
Second, they laid the dying batteries in the August sun.
A warmed, dry cell can sometimes give up another few minutes of usable charge.
The men set the spent batteries on flat rocks at the top of the hill and rotated them in and out of service.
Third, they scavenged.
There was a jeep concealed below the crest of the hill that had belonged to one of the observation teams.
It had a vehicle-mounted radio set.
The men cannibalized it.
They pulled batteries from any piece of equipment that could spare them.
Down in the valley at the headquarters of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Lewis Vman was listening to the situation on the hill and trying to think of how to keep his observers alive.
Robert Weiss had been radioing in steadily darker reports.
Water gone, food gone, wounded piling up, morphine almost out, plasma gone, and increasingly batteries almost gone.
If the batteries failed, the radio was dead.
If the radio was dead, the hill could not call artillery.
If the hill could not call artillery, the Germans would simply walk up the slopes and take the position.
The whole defense, Vimman understood, was hanging by the thinnest possible thread, by the electrical charge stored in a few square ines of zinc and carbon.
The men on the hill were running out of everything.
They had climbed up on August 6th, carrying the ordinary load of an American infantrymen, a canteen of water, a few krations, one unit of fire of ammunition.
By August 8th, the cantens were dry.
By August 9th, the Krations were gone.
What saved them in the most literal sense was the kindness of strangers.
Around the foot of hill 314 lived a few French farming families, the Lene family, the widow Boda and her young son, Madame Lec and her daughters.
These were people who had welcomed the American liberators a few days earlier with bottles of cider and food set out on tables.
Now they were caught between the German SS who had massacred the village of Oridor two months earlier and the American defenders on the hill above them.
Some of those families pumped water from the well at a farm called Lerage.
They refilled American cantens.
They risked their lives doing it.
To be caught carrying water to surrounded American troops by men of Das Reich was a death sentence.
The men on the hill also ate.
They ate green apples from a small orchard on the slope.
Private First Class Alan New House later remembered with the gallows humor of a soldier that it was the first time he had ever eaten green apples without getting a stomach ache.
Private Thomas Street wrote that the first bite of a raw cabbage dug from a French garden was about the most delicious taste he had ever experienced.
Some of the men going out at night to scavenge potatoes and rooterbaggers from the gardens at the foot of the hill came face tof face with German soldiers doing exactly the same thing in the dark.
By unspoken agreement, both sides pretended not to see each other.
They were all hungry.
They all went back to their lines with their pockets full of root vegetables.
There was no aid station on Hill 314.
The battalion aid station had been overrun in the town of Morta on the first morning.
The Germans had captured the battalion surgeon, the chaplain, and the medical orderlys along with the wounded who had been there.
By most accounts, the SS troops treated those captured medical personnel correctly on that occasion.
But the wounded on the hill itself had only the men of the line companies to care for them.
Stone outcrops near the summit.
Natural overhangs of granite sheltered the worst cases.
Some had been hit on the first morning.
Some had been waiting 4 days without plasma, without morphine after the first night, without sulfur powder for the infected wounds.
The August sun was hot.
The flies came.
Men with stomach wounds, who would have lived with proper care, died slowly.
The healthy soldiers carried water to the wounded when they could.
They gave away their own rations.
They held the hands of dying men who, in many cases, were not even in their own company.
The chaplain was gone, so the men prayed for each other.
In their letters home in interviews many years later, the survivors of Hill 314 said the same thing again and again.
The worst part of the battle was not the German tanks.
The worst part was the sound of the wounded.
Tony Jabber, a mortman in company E, later said something that historians have quoted many times.
He said, “I would take six months in the Bulge over 6 days in Morta.
Those were the hardest days of the war for me.
” On the evening of August 9th, in the long European summer twilight, the men on the southeast perimeter of Hill 314 saw a small group of Germans walking toward them across the open slope.
The lead man was carrying a white flag.
He was an SS officer.
He spoke English.
He walked up to the American outpost and he asked to speak to the commanding officer.
The man they brought him to was First Lieutenant Ralph Curley of Company E.
Curley was a Texan.
He had been on the hill for almost three days.
His company had taken heavy casualties.
His radio operators were calling for ammunition that was not coming.
His wounded were not eating.
The SS officer made his pitch.
He told Curley that the position was hopeless.
He told him that the Germans had captured the rest of the battalion in the town below.
He invited Curley on behalf of his men to surrender.
Now, the popular version of this story, the one you will read on websites and hear in some documentaries, says that Ralph Curley gave a long, eloquent, defiant reply about the last bullet and the last bayonet and bastard bellies, that is a post-war embellishment.
The actual reply, according to the men who were there, was short.
It was profane.
It was very Texan, and it was very clear.
Curley refused.
The SS officer walked back down the slope.
A short time later, the German artillery began again.
Then the infantry came again.
The Americans on the perimeter with their last full magazines held them off.
Down in the valley, the artillery fire direction center was tracking a German truck convoy unloading near the eastern slope of the hill.
Frank Denius called a time on target.
Roughly 12 battalions of American guns answered.
The shells came down on the convoy as one continuous wall of explosions.
The Germans did not come back up the southeast slope that night.
By the morning of August 10th, the situation on Hill 314 had become a logistics emergency.
The men had not had water in 2 days, except what they could scrge from French farmers and from a few stagnant pools in the rocks.
The wounded were dying.
The radio batteries were almost spent.
Ammunition was short.
The Germans were still all around them.
The 9inth Air Force agreed to attempt an airdrop.
At about 4:25 in the afternoon on August 10th, 12 C47 Skyrain transport aircraft escorted by P47 Thunderbolts came in low over hill 314 and dropped approximately 71 parachute supply containers from an altitude of 300 ft.
It should have worked.
It mostly did not.
The wind was wrong.
About half of the parapacts drifted into German lines.
The Germans recovered them and used the captured American supplies to feed their own troops.
The other half landed inside the American perimeter, but the cargo was a story unto itself.
Most of it was 30 caliber rifle ammunition.
The ammunition arrived loaded into obsolete stripper clips.
The men’s M1 Garand rifles required onblock clips, eight rounds at a time.
So under fire with German artillery still falling, the men of hill 314 sat behind their rocks and handloaded 30 caliber rounds from stripper clips into garand on blocks one round at a time.
Some food made it.
Some replacement batteries for the radios made it.
Just enough to keep Weiss and Deius on the air, but almost no medical supplies came down in the airrop.
No plasma, almost no morphine.
The wounded got a few bandages and not much else.
Down at the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, Lieutenant Colonel Vehman was about to try something nobody in the United States Army had ever tried before.
The idea was simple in the way that desperate ideas are simple.
The 230th had a supply of M84 base ejection 105 mm smoke shells.
A base ejection smoke shell when it reaches its target opens at the rear and releases a canister of smoke compound.
The shell body itself is essentially a hollow steel tube.
What if you emptied the smoke canister out of a base ejection shell? What if you packed the empty space inside with bandages, sulfur powder, and morphine cigarettes? What if you sealed it back up? What if you fired it like a regular round with the base ejection charge timed to pop the cargo out a few feet above the ground? What if you used American artillery to deliver American medicine to American soldiers, fired through enemy lines, lobbed over the heads of the SS onto the top of a hill.
On the night of August 10th, the 230th Field Artillery Battalion fired the first such rounds.
The artillery fire direction center on the hill confirmed the firing.
The shells arrived where they were supposed to, but it was the middle of the night.
The men on the hill could not safely cross open ground in the dark to recover them, and the Germans almost certainly got most of the loads.
On the morning of August 11th, after the morning mist lifted, the battalion fired more medical rounds.
Four were used as range markers, weighted with sand.
Six were the real thing.
All six landed inside the perimeter.
All six were recovered.
When the men opened them, they found two things.
They found bandages.
They found sulfur powder.
Those things had survived the launch and the impact.
But the plasma vials had shattered every one of them.
The shock of the launch from a 105 mm howitzer is enormous.
Glass vials cannot survive it.
And most of the morphine cigarettes had been destroyed by the same shock.
A few survived.
They were precious.
They were used immediately on the worst cases.
The medical artillery shell at Morta was not a triumph.
It was a partial success born of desperation.
Almost certainly the first time in modern warfare that artillery had been used to deliver medicine across enemy lines.
Some men got bandaged who would have bled to death.
Some got sulfur on infected wounds.
A few got morphine.
Some did not.
The plasma never came but the radio was still on the air.
And outside the perimeter, the German pressure was beginning to slacken.
By the night of August 11th, the second SS Panza Division Dar Reich was no longer the spearhead of an offensive.
It was the rear guard of a retreat.
Far to the east, General Patton’s third army was racing through Leong deep into the German rear.
The German 7th Army was about to be encircled in what historians would call the Fallet’s pocket.
The Germans on the Mortain front had to pull back or they would be cut off entirely.
That night, the German tanks around Hill 314 began to disengage.
The men on the hill did not know this.
They knew only that the morning of August 12th came up again with the smell of burning rubber from wrecked tanks at the foot of the slopes and the moaning of their own wounded.
At about 5 in the morning on August 12th, a single artillery round, possibly American, possibly German, exploded near the spot where Staff Sergeant John Korn was standing watch with Robert Weiss.
K was mortally wounded.
He lay on the granite.
He knew.
He gave away his nickelplated pistol.
He gave away his watch.
He said goodbye.
He died on the hill.
Robert Weiss went back to his radio.
Around 11 in the morning, the first American scouts came up the slope from the west.
They were soldiers of the 320th Infantry Regiment, 35th Infantry Division.
They had been fighting toward the hill for 2 days, attacking through the boage on top of Sherman tanks of the 737th Tank Battalion.
They had reached the southwestern outposts of Company G.
The men on the hill did not cheer.
Most of them were too tired to stand up.
They watched the scouts move past their positions and into the perimeter.
They drank from the cantens the relief column brought them.
Some of them began to cry and did not know why.
Just before noon on August 12th, 1944, Lieutenant Robert Weiss of the 230th Field Artillery Battalion, lying on a rock on Hill 314 with an SCR 610 radio set whose batteries had refused to die, called his final fire mission of the siege.
It was the 193rd.
By 1:00 in the afternoon, the first battalion of the 119th Infantry had marched up through the town of Mortaine, taken control of the western slopes and linked up fully with the perimeter on the summit.
Captain Reynold Ericson, the senior officer on the hill, walked his lines for the last time.
Of the roughly 700 Americans who had climbed up hill 314 on August 6th, about half came down dead, wounded, or missing.
The battle of Mortaine was over.
Operation Lutic, Hitler’s last great gamble in Normandy had failed completely.
The German Panza divisions that had punched west toward Avanches were now exposed at the bottom of a deep salient with American and British armies converging from north and south.
Field Marshall von Kluger had warned that the failure of this attack could lead to collapse of the entire Normandy front.
He had been right.
Over the next 10 days, with the Filet’s pocket closing, the Germans began their full retreat.
By August 21st, the pocket was sealed.
Inside it, the German 7th Army lost about 10,000 killed and 40 to 50,000 captured.
The wreckage was so total that American officers who walked the battlefield in the days that followed described stretches where it was almost impossible to step around the dead horses, the dead men, and the burntout vehicles.
Field Marshal von Kluga was relieved of command on August 17th.
Two days later on the road back to Germany with the certainty that he was about to be arrested by the Gestapo for his suspected role in the July plot against Hitler.
Vonluga stopped his car at a meadow near Mets.
He swallowed cyanide.
Hitler when he heard about the failure at Morta said the attack failed because Field Marshall Vonlug wanted it to fail.
He was wrong.
The attack failed because of a French hilltop, 700 American infantrymen, 12 and a half battalions of artillery, the Royal Air Force, the 9inth Air Force, two FM radio sets, and the inexhaustible patience of one young lieutenant who kept calling fire mission after fire mission for six straight days.
The men of the second battalion, 120th infantry, were rotated back into reserve.
They had taken roughly 50% casualties.
They were given a few days to rest, to write letters home, to mourn the men who would not be coming back.
Then they went forward again.
The 30th division would fight through France, through Belgium, through the breakthrough into Germany, through the Battle of the Bulge, and across the Rine.
After the war, many military historians called the 30th Division the finest American infantry division in the European theater of operations.
The four company commanders of the second battalion who had held Hill 314, Reynold Erikson, Delmont Burn, Ralph Curley, and Joseph Rezer each received the Distinguished Service Cross, the second highest American decoration for valor in combat.
Lieutenant Ron Woody received the same.
Lieutenant Robert Weiss received the Silver Star.
Lieutenant Charles Barts, who died of his wounds in October, received the Silver Star postuously.
Corporal Frank Dinius would receive multiple silver stars across the campaigns of 1944 and 1945.
The second battalion 120th infantry and company K of the third battalion received the distinguished unit citation.
The battalion was also awarded the French cuadare with palm.
But the most extraordinary recognition came many years later.
For most of the rest of the 20th century, the veterans of the 30th division campaigned for full divisional honors.
It took a generation.
On March 17th of the year 2020, the president of the United States awarded the entire 30th Infantry Division, the Presidential Unit Citation, the highest unit honor in the American military.
It is the same award as the wartime Distinguished Unit Citation, renamed in 1957.
The formal ceremony was held on July 25th of the year, 2020 at the Joint Forces headquarters in Raleigh, North Carolina.
By then, only a handful of the men of Morton were still alive to receive it.
They were in their 90s.
They came in wheelchairs.
They watched as the streamer was attached to the regimental colors of their old division.
Robert Weiss came home from the war, went to law school, and built a long post-war life as an attorney in Portland, Oregon.
In the late 1990s, he sat down and wrote a memoir of his six days on Hill 314.
He called the book Fire Mission.
It was published in 1998.
It remains one of the great American combat memoirs of the Second World War.
Frank Deius came home, finished his law degree at the University of Texas, and built a long post-war life in Austin.
He used his time and his wealth for the next several decades to fund veterans causes and university programs.
He wrote his own memoir called On the Way near the end of his life.
Ralph Curley returned to Texas.
Reynold Ericson went home to Iowa.
Joseph Rezer returned to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.
Delmont Burn went home to South Dakota and eventually became a professor of education at the University of Michigan.
Ronal Woody returned home.
Eids Hardaway, the battalion commander captured in the town of Morton on the first morning, was repatriated at the end of the war.
He came home.
He talked very little about Morta to anyone who had not been there.
Charles Barts did not come home.
He had died of his wounds in October of 1944.
Staff Sergeant John Korn does not appear in the standard award roles, but his name is preserved in Robert Weiss’s memoir.
He died on the hill on the last morning of the siege with his pistol and his watch passed to the hands of the men who would carry them down.
The French families around the hill, the Lace family and the widow Bodin and Madame Lec and the others who carried water at the risk of their lives were honored after the war by the people of Mortine.
Their names are preserved at the small chapel of Lemitage on the slope of the hill itself.
The hill is still there today.
There is a stone monument near the summit dedicated by the survivors of the 30th division many years after the war.
It stands on the rocky shoulder where the radio once was.
If you stand at the monument on a clear summer afternoon, you can see what Robert Weiss saw on the evening of August 6th, 1944.
You can see for miles in every direction.
You can see the roads, the river valleys, the orchards, the little stone villages with their slate roofs.
You can see in your mind’s eye the German tank columns coming through the fog.
And you can almost hear, if you listen carefully, a young American voice on a small FM radio calling a number that has been pre-registered on the map.
A few weeks after the battle, American intelligence officers interrogated some of the captured German Panza crewmen who had attacked Mortar.
The Germans wanted to know one thing above all others.
They wanted to know how the Americans had brought down so much artillery so accurately, so fast from so many directions at once.
They had assumed there were artillery observers everywhere.
They thought every farmhouse, every hedge row, every hilltop must have a hidden American spotter team.
They sent patrols to find them.
They sent infantry to clear them.
They could not find them all.
What they never understood was that on the hill above Morton, there were not many observer teams.
There were two, just two, Robert Weiss with one radio, Frank Denius and the wounded Charles Barts with the other.
Between them, with the men who carried their batteries and protected their position, they had a panoramic view of the German offensive and the trust of 12 and a half battalions of American guns.
The Germans had better tanks than the Americans in 1944.
They had better small arms in many cases.
They had veteran infantry.
They had men who had fought in Russia and in Italy and in North Africa, but they did not have the system.
They did not have the radio that called the howitzers.
They did not have the howitzers that answered every radio call.
They did not have the fire direction centers that turned a voice on a shoebox-sized FM set into a wall of steel coming down on a road junction.
And on the slopes of Hill 314, that gap decided the campaign for Normandy.
The battle of Morton is sometimes called the forgotten battle.
It is overshadowed by D-Day.
It is overshadowed by the filet’s pocket.
The men who fought there came home and mostly did not speak of it.
The 30th division had to wait 76 years for the presidential unit citation.
But every student of the Second World War who has spent time with the records knows what Morta was.
It was the moment when Hitler’s plan in Normandy died.
It was the moment when 700 American infantrymen with two radios and a hill stopped four Panza divisions in their tracks.
700 men, 6 days, one radio that refused to die.
The men of Morton are gone now.
The hill remains.
The records remain.
And if we tell the story right, the memory remains, too.
Thank you for watching.
Until next time.
The relief column reached the summit of Hill 314 shortly before noon on August 12th, but the battle did not end in a burst of triumph.
It ended in silence.
The surviving men of the 120th Infantry looked less like soldiers who had won a victory than men who had crawled out of a shipwreck.
Their uniforms were stiff with dirt and dried blood.
Their eyes were hollow from lack of sleep.
Some had gone nearly four days without a full meal.
Many had not shaved since before the attack began.
Most could barely remember when they had last rested without artillery shaking the ground beneath them.
The men of the 35th Infantry Division who climbed the hill to relieve them were shocked by what they found.
Dead Germans lay scattered along the slopes where artillery had caught them in the open.
Burned-out halftracks sat tilted against hedgerows, their metal warped black by heat.
The smell of exploded ammunition still drifted through the orchards below.
But what the relief troops remembered most was the condition of the Americans holding the summit.
One officer later wrote that the defenders looked “like cave men dragged from underground.
” They had been isolated too long.
Every face seemed gray with exhaustion.
Near the center of the perimeter, under a rough shelter made from ponchos stretched across rocks, the wounded were still lying where they had been placed days earlier.
Some had survived against impossible odds.
Others had died only hours before rescue arrived.
Medics from the relief force moved quickly among them, giving morphine, cutting away filthy bandages, starting plasma where they could.
A few of the wounded cried openly when they realized fresh medical personnel had finally reached them.
Others were too weak even to speak.
Captain Reynold Ericson walked the perimeter with the officers of the relief column and pointed out the positions his companies had held.
Here Company E had stopped a German infiltration attempt.
Here Company G had fought off Panza Grenadiers at grenade range.
Here Company K had nearly been overrun before artillery broke the attack apart.
The ground everywhere bore evidence of how close the fighting had become.
There were shell craters inside foxholes.
Broken rifles.
Empty ammunition boxes stacked beside machine-gun pits where barrels had burned nearly white from continuous fire.
The summit itself had changed shape during the siege.
Days of artillery had blasted apart sections of the rocky crest.
Trees had been shredded into splinters.
One oak near the observation post had been hit so many times by fragments that only a blackened trunk remained.
The men had stopped noticing the destruction after the second day.
Survival narrowed the world.
Eventually the entire universe became one thing: the next incoming shell, the next German movement in the fog, the next radio transmission.
Robert Weiss finally climbed down from the observation rock where he had spent most of the siege.
His hands were swollen from gripping binoculars and radio equipment.
He had barely slept.
Every few minutes for six days someone had needed him.
Infantry officers needing fire support.
Radio operators checking batteries.
Men shouting coordinates.
Wounded soldiers asking if relief was coming.
He did not think of himself as heroic.
Years later he would insist that none of the observers on Hill 314 had done anything extraordinary.
They had simply kept working because stopping would have meant death for everyone on the hill.
But the artillery officers who later reviewed the battle records understood exactly how unusual the achievement had been.
One forward observer calling nearly two hundred fire missions in conditions like that should have been impossible.
American artillery doctrine in 1944 relied on communication, coordination, and preparation.
It was designed for fluid battlefields with functioning supply lines and overlapping command structures.
Hill 314 had none of those things by the second day.
The observers were cut off.
Ammunition was uncertain.
Batteries were failing.
German units were operating within yards of American positions.
Yet the fire missions continued with astonishing accuracy.
One reason was Robert Weiss himself.
Forward observers required a particular kind of temperament.
They needed mathematical precision under stress.
They needed calm voices.
They needed the ability to think clearly while exhausted and frightened.
They also needed imagination.
A good observer did not simply react to enemy movement.
He anticipated it.
He studied terrain the way a chess player studies a board.
Weiss had done that on August 6th before the attack began.
Every road intersection.
Every narrow lane between hedgerows.
Every patch of dead ground where tanks might assemble.
He had marked them all before the Germans ever moved.
When the attack came through the fog, he already knew where the Germans had to go.
The barrage numbers he assigned became a kind of invisible map of death around the hill.
German officers later admitted that the American artillery response during Operation Luttich was unlike anything they had experienced in France.
Tank crews advancing through the fog would suddenly encounter explosions arriving with terrifying speed and precision.
Road junctions became kill zones.
Vehicles trying to bypass wrecks found secondary routes already bracketed by artillery fire.
Units attempting to regroup during daylight were attacked from the air.
Units attempting to move at night were hit by artillery directed from the hill.
The Germans had expected to face tired infantry divisions resting after Operation Cobra.
Instead they encountered one of the most integrated fire support systems of the war.
And at the center of that system sat two battered radio teams on a rocky summit.
For the German commanders, the failure at Mortain became catastrophic almost immediately.
General Hans von Funck had launched the offensive under impossible conditions.
Fuel shortages plagued the Panza divisions from the beginning.
Allied aircraft made daytime movement suicidal.
Communications constantly broke down.
Worse still, Hitler’s operational assumptions were detached from reality.
The German dictator imagined that one hard armored thrust could cut through to Avranches and split the American armies apart.
But by August 1944 the Wehrmacht in France no longer possessed the logistical strength to sustain such an operation.
Even when German tanks achieved local breakthroughs, they could not maintain momentum.
Fuel trucks were destroyed.
Bridges became blocked by wreckage.
Allied fighter bombers turned roads into graveyards of abandoned vehicles.
Most critically, Hill 314 never fell.
As long as the Americans held the summit, every major movement around Mortain remained visible to Allied artillery observers.
German commanders found themselves operating under constant surveillance.
The hill became a thorn driven into the center of the offensive.
Several German units tried repeatedly to eliminate it.
Assault groups climbed the slopes under darkness.
Snipers infiltrated through the rocks.
Mortar teams attempted to suppress the American observation posts.
None succeeded.
Every attack that gathered momentum eventually drew artillery fire onto itself.
Some German veterans later described the experience with genuine bewilderment.
They could understand tanks.
They could understand machine guns.
What they struggled to comprehend was the speed of the American artillery response.
It felt to them as though the Americans already knew where they intended to move before they moved there.
In many ways, that was true.
The Americans were not simply reacting faster.
Their doctrine allowed them to integrate observation, communication, and massed firepower at a scale the Germans could no longer match by late 1944.
The hill at Mortain became one of the clearest demonstrations of that system in action.
Yet for the men trapped there, none of this felt historical.
War rarely feels historical when you are inside it.
Private Alan Newhouse later remembered that most soldiers on the hill had no idea they were helping stop Hitler’s final counterattack in Normandy.
They did not know about Patton racing across France.
They did not know about the developing encirclement near Falaise.
They barely knew what was happening beyond the next hedgerow.
Their concerns were immediate and painfully simple.
Water.
Ammunition.
Batteries.
Wounded men.
German movement in the trees.
Whether the artillery would answer the next call.
The psychological strain became enormous by the fourth day.
Sleep deprivation distorted perception.
Men jerked awake believing they heard tanks approaching when no tanks were there.
Others became so exhausted they slept through nearby shellfire.
Tempers occasionally flared over trivial things, a missing canteen, a place under cover from artillery fragments, a rumor that food had arrived somewhere on the line.
But the perimeter held together.
Part of the reason was leadership.
Captain Reynold Ericson emerged during the siege as exactly the kind of battlefield commander infantrymen trusted.
He moved constantly between positions despite sniper fire and artillery.
He checked on isolated squads personally.
He redistributed ammunition.
He encouraged exhausted men without making theatrical speeches.
The company commanders beneath him performed much the same role.
Ralph Curley’s Texans in Company E held some of the most exposed ground on the southeastern approaches.
Ron Woody’s men covered dangerous western sectors where German infiltration attempts repeatedly developed.
Joseph Rezer’s Company K fought in terrain so confused by rocks and hedges that some firefights occurred at distances of less than thirty yards.
The officers did not ask their men for impossible heroics.
They asked them to stay in position a little longer.
Hold until dark.
Hold until artillery arrives.
Hold until morning.
Then they repeated the process the next day.
One of the strangest aspects of the siege was how small the battlefield really was.
When people imagine great battles of the Second World War, they often picture enormous fronts stretching for miles.
Hill 314 was different.
The entire American perimeter occupied a relatively compact area of rocky high ground.
Men fought, slept, bled, and died within sight of one another for nearly a week.
That closeness intensified everything.
The wounded could hear the firefights around them.
The infantry could hear the wounded calling for water.
The radio operators could hear German voices at night drifting up the slopes.
At times American artillery landed so close to friendly positions that fragments showered the perimeter itself.
The defenders accepted the danger because the alternative was worse.
Years later some veterans admitted that fear became almost abstract after the second or third day.
There is a limit to sustained terror.
Eventually exhaustion overrides it.
Men focused on tasks instead.
Cleaning rifles.
Carrying ammunition.
Watching sectors.
Replacing batteries.
Digging foxholes deeper into the rocky ground with entrenching tools that sparked against stone.
The radio operators became especially important psychologically.
As long as the radios functioned, the men knew they were still connected to the rest of the army.
The tiny SCR-610 sets represented more than communication equipment.
They represented survival itself.
Every successful artillery mission proved the hill had not been abandoned.
Every voice crackling back through static reminded the defenders that someone beyond the German lines still knew they were alive.
When batteries began failing, anxiety spread through the perimeter faster than any rumor.
Weiss understood this immediately.
If the radios died, morale would collapse almost as quickly as the defensive perimeter.
Infantrymen who could endure hunger and shellfire might break once they believed artillery support was gone forever.
So the radio teams guarded battery life obsessively.
The sets were switched off whenever possible.
Messages became shorter and more efficient.
Spare components were protected like gold.
Men scavenged through damaged equipment for anything usable.
The survival of those radios now seems almost improbable.
Rain, artillery fragments, exhaustion, battery depletion, constant movement, and continuous operation should have destroyed them.
Yet somehow they endured long enough.
After the war, historians examining Mortain often focused on the dramatic elements: the German tanks, the fighter bombers, the siege itself.
But many professional soldiers studying the battle concentrated on something less glamorous.
Systems.
Hill 314 demonstrated what happens when communications, artillery doctrine, air superiority, and disciplined infantry operate together under pressure.
The Germans at Mortain still possessed formidable tactical skill.
Their Panther tanks remained dangerous.
Their infantry veterans were experienced and aggressive.
Yet tactical skill alone was no longer enough against an enemy able to integrate firepower so rapidly and flexibly.
The Wehrmacht of 1944 increasingly fought isolated battles.
The American army increasingly fought interconnected ones.
Hill 314 became a symbol of that transformation.
In the years after the war, the battlefield slowly returned to quiet.
French farmers rebuilt damaged stone walls.
Burned vehicles were hauled away for scrap.
Orchards grew back across slopes scarred by artillery craters.
Grass covered many of the foxholes.
But the memory remained strong in Mortain.
The civilians there had witnessed the battle at terrifying proximity.
Families hid in cellars while artillery rolled overhead day and night.
Farmers discovered dead soldiers in their fields after the fighting moved on.
Children remembered the wrecked German armor for years afterward.
Some local civilians later said the ground smelled of burned metal and explosives long after the battle ended.
The American veterans who returned decades later found the landscape strangely peaceful.
Birdsong replaced artillery.
Cows grazed where tanks once burned.
Quiet roads crossed valleys where convoys had died under bombardment.
Yet many veterans admitted that standing on the summit brought memories back with startling clarity.
They could still identify where machine guns had been positioned.
They remembered where wounded friends had lain under ponchos.
Some could still point out the exact rock where they had sheltered during shelling.
Memory fixes itself to terrain in war.
One veteran reportedly stood silently near the monument for several minutes before finally saying, “It seemed much bigger back then.
”
That sentence captures something profound about combat memory.
Battlefields shrink after wars end.
Distances that felt immense under fire become short walks in peacetime.
Hills that seemed like entire worlds become patches of countryside again.
But for the men who fought there, the emotional scale never entirely disappears.
Hill 314 became enormous because life and death had once depended on every yard of it.
Robert Weiss understood that better than anyone.
When he wrote “Fire Mission” decades later, he avoided exaggerated heroics.
The tone remained remarkably restrained.
He described confusion, exhaustion, fear, and duty with the matter-of-fact clarity of someone still trying to understand what had happened to him as a young lieutenant.
That restraint gives the memoir much of its power.
The battle does not need embellishment.
The facts themselves are extraordinary enough.
A few hundred infantrymen isolated on a rocky hill.
Surrounded by multiple German armored divisions.
Cut off for six days.
Sustained largely by artillery directed through two fragile radio sets.
Holding the key observation point of Hitler’s last major offensive in Normandy.
Stopping it.
Modern military historians often argue over whether Hill 314 alone determined the failure of Operation Luttich.
Strictly speaking, no single battlefield position decides an entire campaign by itself.
Allied air superiority, German fuel shortages, Ultra intelligence, and broader operational realities all mattered enormously.
But Hill 314 magnified every German problem.
As long as the Americans remained on that summit, German movement near Mortain became painfully visible.
Artillery disruption compounded logistical chaos.
Delays accumulated.
Momentum vanished.
The hill did not win the Normandy campaign alone.
But it helped make German defeat irreversible.
That is why the battle still matters.
Not simply because it was dramatic, though it was.
Not simply because the defenders suffered terribly, though they did.
The battle matters because it reveals how wars are often decided not only by grand strategy or famous generals, but by exhausted people holding critical ground under impossible conditions.
The men on Hill 314 were not trying to become legends.
Most were ordinary National Guardsmen from southern towns and farms.
They were clerks, students, mechanics, teachers, laborers.
Then history placed them on a hill in Normandy and asked them not to break.
And they did not.
Even now, more than eighty years later, military academies still study Mortain because the battle compresses so many truths about modern warfare into one brutal week.
Terrain matters.
Communication matters.
Logistics matter.
Morale matters.
Leadership matters.
Air power matters.
Artillery matters.
And sometimes the survival of an entire defensive position can depend on something as fragile as a few nearly dead batteries warming in the August sun.
Today visitors who climb Hill 314 find a quiet memorial overlooking green valleys and narrow Norman roads.
The countryside appears almost impossibly serene compared to the violence once unleashed there.
Yet if you stand long enough beside the monument and look east across the fields, it becomes possible to imagine the fog rolling through the valleys before dawn on August 7th, 1944.
You can imagine the distant sound of engines.
You can imagine frightened infantrymen tightening their grips on rifles in the darkness.
You can imagine a young artillery observer lying beside a radio, waiting for the first target to appear.
And somewhere in that imagination, faint beneath the wind moving through the trees, you can almost hear the calm voice of Robert Weiss speaking into the handset one more time.
“Fire mission.
”
