08/24/2026
African American Military History is American Military History
“We collect the white bodies first.” That was the sentence 12-year-old Hermann Langer later remembered hearing from an American truck driver as eleven Black American soldiers lay frozen in the snow near Wereth, Belgium.
The boy knew them because he had seen them alive weeks earlier at his family’s table on December 17, 1944. They had escaped a collapsing battlefield, walked roughly ten miles through snow, and reached the Langer farmhouse hoping for rest.
They belonged to the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, a segregated unit whose Black enlisted men operated 155mm howitzers in Europe. They fought for the United States while the Army still separated soldiers by race and denied Black servicemen equality.
The 333rd had come ashore at Utah Beach on June 29, 1944, and spent months supporting American infantry through France and Belgium. By December, its guns were positioned near Schönberg, close to St. Vith, in a sector many Americans considered quiet.
That ended before dawn on December 16, when German artillery opened fire and Hitler’s last major western offensive crashed into the Ardennes. Roads filled with retreating troops, vehicles, prisoners, and civilians as German armor broke through positions that had seemed secure hours earlier.
The men of the 333rd did not simply run when the line broke around them. Their gun crews kept firing for American infantry, helping soldiers escape even as German troops pushed toward their artillery positions, a job that meant remaining exposed while others moved west.
By December 17, much of the battalion had been shattered, with men killed, captured, or scattered. Eleven artillerymen slipped away from the German advance and moved northwest on foot, hoping to reach American lines before patrols found them.
They carried only two rifles between them across the snow, with no clear route and German patrols moving through the countryside. Cold, tired, and hungry, they reached Wereth at about three in the afternoon and approached the first house in a hamlet of only nine homes.
The farmhouse belonged to Mathias Langer, a Belgian farmer in a German-speaking region that had belonged to Germany before World War I and was transferred to Belgium afterward. Taking in American soldiers was dangerous, and doing so while German forces were returning made that danger obvious.
Mathias opened the door anyway. His family gave the eleven men food, drink, and warmth while 12-year-old Hermann watched strangers in American uniforms recover a little strength at the table.
The Langers were already taking risks against N**i authority. Mathias was hiding two Belgians who had deserted the German Army and had sent a draft-age son into hiding rather than let him be conscripted.
The soldiers had been inside for less than an hour when an SS patrol arrived. Someone in the area had apparently reported the Americans, and German troops suddenly stood outside the house that had become their refuge.
They did not open fire or turn the farmhouse into a battlefield. The Americans surrendered, were taken outside, and were forced to sit in the cold as the Langer family watched their brief safety disappear.
When darkness came, the prisoners were marched toward a nearby pasture. Later that night, gunfire carried through the winter air, and by morning villagers could see eleven American bodies near the edge of the field, only a short distance away.
Fear kept people from touching them while German forces remained nearby. Snow covered the bodies, and the men who had crossed an ocean to fight fascism disappeared beneath a Belgian winter near the house where they had last eaten.
When the bodies were examined, investigators found evidence of terrible violence. Official accounts recorded gunshot wounds, bayonet wounds, broken bones, and other injuries, while one man appeared to have been bandaging a wounded comrade when he died.
The indignity did not end there. Hermann later remembered standing near the dead when an American truck driver said, “We collect the white bodies first,” leaving the eleven Black soldiers while white American dead were recovered.
For a 12-year-old boy, those words became part of that winter. The men had worn the same American uniform, fought the same enemy, and died in the same war, yet even their bodies could be treated through the segregation they served under.
The Army opened a war crimes investigation into the killings. Investigators gathered evidence and testimony but could not positively identify the individual perpetrators, and the case closed without anyone being tried for murdering the eleven Americans.
Then the massacre almost vanished from the larger American story of the Battle of the Bulge. A 1949 Senate review examined German atrocities from the campaign, yet the Wereth killings were not included among the massacre sites it considered.
Other names from that winter entered textbooks, documentaries, memorial tours, and public memory. The eleven Black artillerymen remained known mainly to their families, veterans, people in Belgium, and those unwilling to let the pasture become the final record of their lives.
Seven were eventually buried at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium, while four were returned to their families in the United States. Their names were Curtis Adams, Mager Bradley, George Davis Jr., Thomas Forte, Robert Green, James Leatherwood, Nathaniel Moss, George Moten, William Pritchett, James Stewart, and Due Turner.
Their unit’s story did not end in that pasture. Survivors of the shattered 333rd joined the 969th Field Artillery Battalion and helped support the defense of Bastogne, where Black artillerymen contributed to one of the war’s most famous American stands.
The 969th later received a Presidential Unit Citation for its service at Bastogne. The recognition showed what Black artillerymen had proved under fire, even while the military depending on their guns still required them to serve in segregated units.
Hermann Langer carried his part of the story for half a century. In 1994, fifty years after the massacre, he placed a small cross bearing the soldiers’ names near the pasture where the men he had served at his family’s table were killed.
The memorial was modest, and for years people looking for it could struggle to find Wereth on Battle of the Bulge routes. Local Belgians and American supporters later raised money for a larger memorial, dedicated in 2004 to the Wereth 11 and Black American soldiers who served in Europe.
Official recognition moved much more slowly than memory. On October 16, 2017, the United States Senate agreed by unanimous consent to a resolution recognizing the service and sacrifice of the eleven African American soldiers massacred at Wereth.
More than seventy years had passed since they knocked on Mathias Langer’s door. By then, the boy who watched them eat had spent decades doing what official history had failed to do, keeping their names attached to the place where they died.
The easiest way to tell this story is to remember eleven victims in the snow, but that is not the whole story. They were artillerymen who kept fighting as their position collapsed, prisoners trying to reach American lines, and soldiers whose unit continued fighting at Bastogne.
There was also a Belgian family who opened a door when closing it would have been safer. And there was a 12-year-old boy who remembered six words for the rest of his life and answered them fifty years later by putting a cross in the ground.
“We collect the white bodies first” reduced eleven Americans to the color of their skin after death. Hermann Langer’s memorial did the opposite, restoring their names one by one so the soldiers left beneath the Belgian snow would not remain invisible forever.
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