No, this isn’t Facebook postings at a Weight Watchers convention. 
I knew the Battle of the Bulge was a winter battle. The photo of Bastogne, Belgium drives home just how much snow troops had to contend with.
The roofs of the Bastogne buildings are covered in thick snow.
This is a very interesting collection of photos from a pivotal battle in WWII. The color brings out so many details. The haggard faces of the exhausted men almost made me cry.
btw, you can click or press on a photo to start a slideshow.
It’s very phone friendly. Swipe to advance to next photo.
30 photos. Someone put in a lot of work colorizing this collection.
That’s really cool. My great uncle was there (and survived). The chances of him being in any of the photos is infinitesimal, but maybe he is.
Three guys breaking down a door. What does the middle guy have on his M1, a grenade launcher?
Yes, it looks like the M7 grenade launcher.
There were several grenade options, Anti-armor (M9), Fragmentation (M17), and smoke grenades (M22) were available for the M7.
A man who would have been my uncle died there in that battle. He was my father’s BIL. He’d been sent overseas after the death of his wife, my dad’s sister. He’d been held in the US while she was sick with Hodgkin’s disease. On her death she wasn’t “sick” so he was shipped out. And my cousin, an infant, was an orphan at less than a year old.
I find that when I see WW2 pix or footage of the right areas, I look for my dad =) I know that there is very little chance of actually seeing him, but he did get an award handed to him by Patton once, so there is a random chance of getting to see him with Patton.
And the colorization job is very nicely done.
Ace nailed the nomenclature. I would also label it a questionable tactical decision.
The frag grenade for the launcher was more powerful than a hand grenade and had a lethal radius of 10m. With no cover for firing from the door there better be a long line of site or bad things can happen. Then there is the other down side. With the launcher installed the rifle was no longer semi-automatic. The special blank cartridge to fire rifle grenades was more powerful and would damage the action other wise. Until that launcher got taken off the action on the rifle would have to be worked manually after every shot. That means either reduced effectiveness for the grenadier or delay in actually entering the room after he fired.
It makes me think that maybe the shot was staged.
I agree. It is kind of close for a grenade launcher. Although, one guy is moving and blurred.
Even worse, that is an M9A1 anti-tank grenade. That’s like using a bazooka for room clearing.
And, often, it would remain single-shot for one or two rounds after removal of the launcher as the valve screw would be gunked up with carbon, and stuck partially open.
I think if it were staged, the two with the M1s would have removed their grenade launchers, and the guy with the carbine would have held still, so as to not be blurry.
Other instances of this photo online describe the soldiers as being from the 117th Infantry in Stavelot, Belgium. They fought a Panzer Division there, so the choice of weapons makes perfect sense. My first guess would have been that these tank hunters were simply moving into the building to find a better firing position. But most captions mention the German sniper, though, so I’ll assume that their motivation for entering the building was, in fact, a sniper. In that case, they were either displacing into the building to get out of the snipers sights, or they actually were going into that particular building to take out the sniper inside. If the latter, it was simply a spur-of-the-moment action, and there was no time to reconfigure their weapons. As explained above, switching back and forth between grenades and rifle rounds wasn’t practical while in the fight. They were in the town to kill tanks, and a sniper started shooting at them, so they reacted. One of them has a carbine, so hopefully he got the job done.
It’s all just speculation, though.
Some of those are well known originally black and white photo’s, or movie stills, for example the iconic (staged) footage of 1. SS Panzer Division troops at the site where the US 14th Cavalry Group was overrun, (photo’s 17 and 18 if I counted correctly). Maybe all of these particular ones were originally B&W. But there are some original color photo’s of the Ardennes Offensive. For example this one of 40th Tank Battalion M4’s near St. Vith Jan 24 1945 appeared in books decades before colorizing was common (the link does not mention this, but AFAIK this is an original color photo, rare in WWII but they do exist)
https://www.reddit.com/r/TankPorn/comments/669umi/sherman_tanks_of_the_7th_armored_division_lined/