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

CHAPTER 7
TEAM DESOBRY AT NOVILLE
THE CONTEMPORARY accounts which attempted to apportion
the credit for the saving of Bastogne had much to
say about the lOIst Airborne Division and relatively little about
any other units. There was irony in the fact that a paratroop
outfit which had already done equally brilliant work in Normandy
and Holland won world recognition for the first time,
and in so doing eclipsed the splendid help given by the other
victors, at Bastogne. It was the belief of the commanders at Bastogne
that the 28th Infantry Division had absorbed much of
the shock of the attack before the enemy reached their front on
that first day, and that the harassing of the German flank and rear
by the armored forces that had gone out the Longvilly road
further lightened the burden upon their own men of the 101st
Airborne Division. 1 In those critical hours the armor out along
the roads leading north and east was to the infantry in Bastogne
like a football end throwing himself in the path of interference
so that the secondary defense can have a clean chance to get at
the man with the ball.
One of the most desperately placed of these small armored
forces was Team Desobry which assembled in the Noville area
at 2300 on December 18. The town of Noville (Map 8, page 52)
is on relatively high ground. Yet it is commanded by two ridges
from about 800 yards, one in the southeast and the other running
from north to northwest. Because the team arrived in the darkness,
full advantage of the natural defenses of the area could
not be taken immediately. Major William R. Desobry (Commanding
Officer of the 20th Armored Infantry Battalion, lOth
Armored Division) set up a perimeter defense of the town under
Captain Gordon Geiger of Battalion Headquarters Company. He
sent forward three outposts, each consisting of a depleted platoon
of infantry and a section of medium tanks. One went east on
the Bourcy road, one went northeast on the Houffalize road and
the third set up its roadblock at some crosstrails on the road to
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