333rd Field Artillery Battalion (United States)

Members of the 333rd FA Battalion as POWS December 1944

The unit arrived in the small village of Schönberg, near St. Vith, Belgium, in October. The Service Battery was situated west of the Our River while Batteries A, B, and C were located on the east side of the river to support the VII Corps.[3] The 333rd Field Artillery Group and the 969th were equipped with 155mm howitzers, and the 771st Field Artillery Battalion was equipped with 4.5-inch guns. They initially supported the 2nd Infantry Division and its replacement, the 106th Infantry Division.

At the onset of the Battle of the Bulge, the unit was about 11 miles (18 km) behind the front lines. In the early morning hours of 16 December, German artillery began shelling the Schönberg area. By the afternoon, there were reports of rapid German infantry and armored progress. The 333rd Field Artillery Battalion was ordered to displace further west, but the 106th Infantry Division artillery commander requested that Battery C and Service Battery remain in position to support the 14th Cavalry Regiment and 106th Division.[3]

By the morning of 17 December, the Germans had captured Schönberg and controlled the bridge across the river that connected to St. Vith. Service Battery tried to displace to St. Vith through the village, and was hit by heavy German armored vehicle and small arms fire. Many men were killed, and those that remained were captured. As the men were being herded to the rear, the column was attacked by an American aircraft. By the end of the day, the battalion had only five howitzers left, the rest having been abandoned in the retreat. The survivors of the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion were ordered to Bastogne, where they were incorporated into the 969th Field Artillery Battalion. Both battalions had provided fire support for the 101st Airborne Division during the Siege of Bastogne, for which they received the Presidential Unit Citation, the Army's highest unit award.[4]

Honor guard for the Wereth 11 in 2007.

50°20′55.14″N 6°13′55.37″E

During the ensuing confusion, 11 men escaped into the woods. They were by this time on the east side of the river, and had to sneak their way overland in a northwesterly direction, hoping they would reach American lines. At about 3 p.m., they approached the first house in the nine-house hamlet of Wereth, Belgium, owned by Mathias Langer. A friend of the Langers was also present.[3] Langer offered them shelter.[5] The area they were in had been part of Germany for hundreds of years, until it was annexed by Belgium after World War I, and three of the nine families in the village were known to be still loyal to Germany. The wife of a German soldier who lived in Wereth told members of the notorious 1st SS Panzer Division deployed in the area that black American soldiers were hiding in her village. The SS troops quickly moved to capture the Americans, who surrendered without resistance. The SS men then marched their prisoners to a nearby field, where they were beaten, tortured, and finally shot.[5] As prisoners of war, the American soldiers should have been protected under the terms of the Geneva Convention, of which Germany was a signatory. Therefore, this maltreatment followed by summary execution was a war crime.

The frozen bodies of the victims were discovered six weeks later, when the Allies re-captured the area. The SS troops had battered the black soldiers' faces, broken their legs with rifle butts, cut off some of their fingers, stabbed some with bayonets, and had shot at least one soldier while he was bandaging a comrade's wounds.[3]

Current research shows that the SS men responsible for the massacre were from a scouting party of Schnelle Gruppe Knittel, a unit commanded by Sturmbannführer Gustav Knittel. In 1946, Knittel was sentenced to life imprisonment at the Malmedy massacre trial for ordering illegal executions of several American prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge. Due to irregularities at his trial and with his confession, his sentence was later reduced to 15 years, then to 12 years. Knittel was released from prison in December 1953, and died of health problems in 1976.[6]

The troops killed were:

On 11 September 1994, Hermann Langer, son of farmer Mattias Langer who had attempted to help the soldiers, erected a small stone cross to remember the 11 murdered men. On 23 May 2004, a new memorial was built on the site of the executions and was dedicated to the 11 troops as well as all the African-American soldiers who had fought in the European theater. It is believed to be the only memorial specifically dedicated to African-American soldiers of World War II in Europe.[7]

In 2006, members of the Worcester, Massachusetts, chapter of Veterans of the Battle of the Bulge dedicated the first memorial to the Wereth 11 on United States soil. It was dedicated at the Winchendon Veterans' Memorial Cemetery on 20 August. [8]

In 2016, a memorial was erected in Miller Park, Bloomington, Illinois. Each soldier is named.

Because it had been overrun, the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion suffered more casualties during the Battle of the Bulge than any other artillery unit in the VIII Corps. Six officers, including the battalion commander, and 222 enlisted men had been either killed or become prisoners of war. Nine howitzers, thirty-four trucks, and twelve weapons carriers were lost. The 286 men that remained in the battalion were mostly reassigned to the 578th and 969th Field Artillery Battalions. The battalion was originally scheduled to be disbanded because of the heavy losses it had suffered and the difficulty in obtaining replacements, but in the interim, the few men remaining in the skeleton battalion performed guard and labor duties. Sufficient replacements did not arrive to reconstitute the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion until April 1945.

The 333rd Field Artillery Group served in the Rhineland and Central Europe campaign to the end of the war.