     At 4:00 PM on the 16th of December, Colonel George Descheneaux, commander of the 422nd Infantry Regiment of the 106th Infantry Division, assessed his situation. High in the Schnee Eifel, his regiment and its sister the 423rd Regiment jutted ahead of the American lines, well inside Germany itself. The attack that had started that morning did not seem to be serious; very few shells had fallen on his regiment. Telephone lines to Division were knocked out but casualties were low. He knew nothing of the other attacks, of the ferocious fighting going on in other sectors. For all he knew, the Germans were just softening him up.
     Of greater concern to Colonel Descheneaux was the likely performance of his men. This was their first real test under fire. The 106th was a green division. It had shipped out of the United States on October 20th. It had only moved into the front lines on December 11th. Everything had been quiet for five days. But now the shooting was starting; how would the men react?
     Still, the situation on the afternoon of the 16th seemed well in hand. There had been a few local attacks, and the Germans seemed to have gotten some men into Auw, a village on his left flank. That flank was being covered by the 14th Cavalry Group, which was spread thin. But overall, Descheneaux could see no cause for alarm.
     What Descheneaux didn't know was that the Germans were infiltrating all around him.
/Infiltration Tactics
     World War I was a slaughter. Millions of men died in a vain attempt to crack the central problem of trench warfare: how do you break through a trench line defended with machine guns and artillery? It seemed a perfect and invulnerable combination.
     The British came up with a technological solution: the tank. Here was a fighting machine that could cross no man's land, impervious to machine gun fire and all but a direct hit from artillery.
     The Germans solved the problem with infiltration tactics. They taught their soldiers to stay low, to crawl and sneak their way forward, seeking out the dead zones that could not be reached by machine gun fire and, above all, to avoid engaging the machine guns. These specially trained "StossTruppen" infiltrated past the machine gun nests and worked their way into the enemy rear, into the artillery zones, where they attacked the vulnerable artillery crews and neutralized the artillery. Then they took on the machine guns from the rear.
     In World War II,  the Germans combined infiltration tactics with the tank and the dive bomber and thereby invented the Blitzkrieg. They also expanded the idea to a larger scale. Instead of infiltrating around single machine gun nests, they learned to infiltrate past whole battalions, regiments, or even larger units. The method was simple: bypass centers of resistance, cut them off, and mop them up later./