Bastogne: The Story of the First Eight Days - US Army Center Of ...

FIRST ACTION AT MARVIE 105
it had come and Harper started to rally his men. Then he learned
that most of the party were Engineers and that only the mortar
squad from among his command had displaced. He told that
squad to get back into the battle and they moved at once.19 This
error in judgment is the only instance during the siege of Bastogne
when any American Infantryman is known to have left his
position under fire and without orders. 20
Colonel Harper, still outside the village, called Colonel Inman
on his radio. The executive officer of the 2d Battalion, 327th
Glider Infantry, Major R. B. Galbreaith, answered the call. He
said that both Colonel Inman and Captain Hugh Evans, commanding
officer of Company G, which was holding the village,
had been hit by a tank shell while making a reconnaissance just
as the German onslaught began. He did not know how badly
they were wounded. Harper asked him, "Are you still in the
village?"
"Yes," Galbreaith answered. "Yes, but the Germans are here
also. We expect to drive them out."
The close-in fighting continued into the early afternoon. Inman's
men stayed in their foxholes. Some died there, shot at ten
yards' range by machine guns as they tried to stop the half-tracks
with their rifle and tommy gun fire, their bodies almost cut in
half where the machine guns had ripped them through. Their
comrades found them later sitting stifHy at their weapons. Colonel
Harper himself inspected these positions. He noted that
every one of his dead was still facing forward as if trying to engage
the enemy.21 The bazooka men had likewise met the attack
head-on. Some of the German infantry, clearing away from the
half-tracks, had ducked into the houses. The glider men went in
after them and cleaned them out house by house. Within two
hours twenty Germans were prisoners and thirty were dead in
Marvie. First Lieutenant Stanley A. Morrison of Company G,
who had been captured when the Germans first came into the
village, was recaptured by his own men. Colonel Inman had lost
five men killed, each of them killed in a foxhole while resisting
the half-tracks. Fifteen men of Company G were wounded in
the action. II