At the head of the 8th Tank Battalion, 4th Armored Division, spearhead of Patton's Third Army, under Combat Command B, was 27 year old Polish immigant-born Major Albin Irzyk. The Nazi 5th Fallschirmjäger Division, was under the command of wily veteran of the Eastern Front and the Battle of Sicily, Generalmajor Ludwig Heilmann, who had once passed thru American lines disguised as a private.

At dawn on December 23, 1944, Combat Command B's lead convoy, under Major Irzyk's ground command, was on halt outside Chaumont when Heilmann's Fallschirmjagers attacked from both sides of the road. In the fury of the ambush, one or two jeeps and a light tank were destroyed, and most of their crews, including tank commander, 2nd Lt. James E. Bennett, lay dead.

CCB moved up the road and into Chaumont. With aerial support, artillery fire support from surrounding hillsides, and with heroic dogfighting -- by individual soldiers in house to house attacks on the Nazi gunner nests that fired constantly from inside the buildings that lined the only road through the village -- by dusk CCB had taken German-held Chaumont.

Or so it seemed until battle weary American soldiers were counter-attacked by Nazi forces. Under the command of Generalmajor Heinz Kokott, the enemy, with four monstous tiger tanks, bearing mobile 88-millimeter anti-tank guns, capable of destroying Allied tanks at long range -- and with heavily armed riflemen conveyed on German Mark III tanks -- descended along a forest screened trail. They knocked out 11 Sherman tanks, killed 70 American soldiers, retook Chaumont.

Two days later on December 25, 1944, under the command of Major Irzyk, the 4th Armored retook Chaumont with a series of heroic actions by individual American soldiers. Chaumont was now held by Patton's Third Army.