Cheneux, Belgium. No helmet. No body armor. No Sherman tanks or Hellcat tank destroyers to seek protection from. Yet here, on 21 December 1944, Walter Hughes of the 82nd Airborne Division, armed with nothing more than a Tommy Gun, is storming into a hail of fire in the Ardennes as his 504th Parachute Infantry takes on the Waffen SS of Kampfgruppe Peiper, a lethal armored force determined to break through to the Meuse River. This is one of the Battle of the Bulge’s classic images. And it remains one of the clearest and most impressive illustrations of naked courage to have come out of this epic and ferocious winter battle. Hughes, a Brooklyn native, survived the Battle of the Bulge and the war. In an interview in 2013 he said, “If I died today, I would have little regret. It’s been the real deal.”
