   It was late afternoon on the 26th of December. Corporal Gerd Schenklauer was marching down a road with about 150 other men of the 277th Volksgrenadier Division. They'd been at the rear when the offensive started and had spent days struggling through the icy mud, manhandling wagons, guns, and trucks down the winding roads. Now at last they were approaching the front.
   The company commander seemed confused. He was just a lieutenant; the captain had been killed by a mine four days ago and his replacement had not yet arrived. The lieutenant stopped the company while he consulted his map. Several others argued with him but he folded up the map and made his decision.
   They had gone only a kilometer further when they saw a halftrack on the road. Once again the company halted. Corporal Schenklauer eyed the halftrack suspiciously; it didn't look right that it was standing there on the road, doing nothing. The lieutenant called out to the halftrack commander, who called back and waved at them. They couldn't make out what he was saying but he seemed happy to see them. The lieutenant waved the company forward.
   When they were only 20 yards from the halftrack, its 50-caliber machine gun opened up, pouring fire into the men. Schenklauer was in the ditch in an instant; a cascade of bodies rolled over him. He struggled to free himself and bring his rifle to bear. But then, realizing that the firing had stopped, he paused and listened. There wasn't a sound coming from the German side save the groans of the dying. Nobody else was shooting back. He was the only survivor. 
   He lay there for an hour, by which time it was dark enough for him to creep away undetected. That was the Battle of the Bulge for him: ten days of marching, followed by three seconds of action.
/Halftracks
   To understand a halftrack, start with a simple idea: wouldn't it be nice to transport infantry around the battlefield in trucks? Infantry can only march maybe two or three miles per hour, but in trucks they can go just as fast as tanks.
   Great idea! But there are a few problems. First, tanks have tracks and can go cross-country, while trucks have to stay on roads. Obviously, we need to have tracked vehicles for our "infantry trucks", but these trucks won't be as heavy as a real tank, so they don't need to be fully tracked. If we use tracks for the rear wheels only, we can still use the front wheels to steer the vehicle. That keeps everything simpler and cheaper.
   Now for another problem: the infantry won't fight from inside the truck, but there will still be some danger: occasional rifle and machine gun fire, and maybe artillery shrapnel. So we need to put some armor on this truck. Not enough to make it an armored fortress, but enough to withstand low-grade threats. That will increase the weight to about three tons.
  So here we've got this really great fighting vehicle: it can carry infantry, it can go cross-country, and it's got some armor. Why not give it a gun? No heavy firepower, mind you -- remember, this truck has got to be cheap so we can afford to make a zillion of them. How about just a heavy machine gun? That's more firepower than an infantry squad can carry.
   That's how we ended up with halftracks. The Americans and the Germans both made them. The Americans called their half-track the M-3. The Germans called theirs the Sonderkraftfahrzeug 251, or SdKfz-251 for short./