Lanzerath Ridge

The 20-Year-Old Who Held Off 500 Germans with 18 Men: The Full Story of Lyle Bouck | Battle of the Bulge" It's midnight. December 17th, 1944. A Belgian café in the tiny village of Lanzerath. A twenty-year-old American lieutenant sits slumped against a wall, blood soaking through his pant leg. His runner, a nineteen-year-old kid named Bill James, lies next to him, his face torn apart by shrapnel. Blood from James's wounds has soaked through Bouck's field jacket. Bouck looks up at a cuckoo clock on the wall. The hour hand hits twelve. It's his twenty-first birthday. Before he left for the war, his aunt Mildred read his palm and told him: "If you live past your twenty-first birthday, you're going to have a good life." He's alive. Barely. His entire platoon has been captured. He believes he's failed. He hasn't. He just doesn't know it yet. What Lyle Bouck and his eighteen men did in the hours before that clock struck midnight would change the course of the entire Battle of the Bulge. But it would take thirty-seven years before anyone bothered to notice. This is the story they never told you