Audie waved him back. "Pull out of here with that radio! I'll contact the artillery by phone!" Audie had done artillery spotting before. He checked his map, estimated the enemy position, then rang the field phone. "Get me the artillery!" he snapped. "We're being attacked! Six tanks and a couple hundred infantry!" The American artillery opened up with smoke, shell, and then added high explosives, square on the German lines, scattering them like duckpins. Smoke drifted through the shattered trees. Audie stared down the road and then reached for the phone just as it rang. "How close are they?" came the question. Audie told them to keep firing between the Americans and the advancing enemy. Then the German tanks cracked through the woods and opened up almost at point-blank range on the outnumbered Americans. Audie cupped his hands about his mouth. "B Company pull out! We can't stop that armor with small arms! Pull out!" The men began to drift back. Out of the 128 men and seven officers who had entered those woods at the start of the drive were only forty men and one officer left. . . Audie Murphy. "What about you, sir?" yelled a non-com. Audie jerked an arm, pointing to the rear. "I'll stay with the phone as long as I can. Git!" The battered company slowly pulled back, leaving the scattered bodies of their comrades lying on the bloody snow. Audie called in some artillery corrections, then put down the phone to pick up his carbine. The Germans were a hundred yards or more from him. He shot carefully and began to drop one of the enemy after the other. It was too hot, though, for one lone American. Audie began to fall back and then he noticed the burning TD. A machine gun was mounted on it. He glanced back over his shoulder. The German tanks had veered off. The phone rang. "How close are they?" came the dry voice. Audie spoke quickly. "Just hold the phone and I'll let you talk to one of them!" He carried the field phone with him, dragging the wire after it until he reached the TD. He pulled the dead body of an officer from the burning vehicle. Then he jumped to the machine gun. It looked all right and there was plenty of ammunition. Audie cut loose with it at the line of advancing infantry. The heavy slugs chewed through the line and broke it. Something swished through the air and the TD seemed to ring like a bell. A direct hit! And another one! The phone rang again. Audie mouthed corrections into it. Then he threaded a fresh belt into the machine gun and opened up again. Smoke from the burning TD was so thick he could hardly see through it. But the smoke helped, for the bewildered enemy could not tell where the fire was coming from. Audie did not realize at the time that the tanks and infantrymen of the German forces were afraid of the gas and ammunition in the TD. If the flames reached them. . . The wind shifted and Audie saw a group of Germans crouched in the roadside ditch trying to figure out where he was. They found out too late. When the machine gun stopped firing, they were all dead. He reached for the phone. "Correct fire, battalion. Fifty over." he barked. "Are you all right, lieutenant?" came the anxious question. In a moment the American artillery opened up on the new range Audie had given them and the woods became a nightmare of crashing shells, flying tree trunks, and dense smoke. Audie stared through the smoke. The German tanks had had enough. They were lumbering angrily back toward Holtzwihr, but the infantry were still in the woods and advancing along the road, practically on top of the burning TD where Audie held his phone. He raised the phone. "Correct fire: fifty over; keep firing for effect. This is my last change." "But that's your position!" "Fifty over, sergeant!" It didn't take long. Audie Murphy's position was soon the center of his own barrage, and the Germans broke completely. Audie shook his head. The concussion had been terrible and something warm was running down his right leg. He had been hit by German mortar fire. He dropped from the TD and limped through the woods, all alone. He found the company, reorganized it, then started right back through the woods with them in a savage counterattack. Later, he called in artillery corrections and the accurate fire did the rest. On the plane that carried Lieutenant Audie Murphy back to the United States, he was the only junior officer among fourteen generals. But he had four rows of medals and campaign ribbons. The sharecropper's kid from Farmersville, Texas (Kingston, Texas), was famous. Among his twenty-three decorations, he had the Medal of Honor, the Distinguished Service Cross, the Silver Star with two clusters signifying that he had won that decoration three times, the Bronze Star, the Legion of Merit, and the Purple Heart with two clusters indicating that he had been wounded three times. He had been personally decorated by General De Lattre De Tassigny of France with the Legion of Honor and the Croix de Guerre. He was World War Two's most decorated soldier at the age of twenty years. The Fifteenth United States Infantry of which Audie Murphy was a member during World War Two had been stationed in China for many years. On the lower half of their colorful regimental insignia, they have a coiled Chinese dragon and below the dragon is the motto, "Can Do." Audie must have remembered that motto as he stood alone in the wrecked and burning tank destroyer near Holtzwihr, France, and watched six enemy tanks and over two hundred enemy infantrymen closing in on him. "Can Do!" (pp. 154-160, They Met Danger by Captain Gordon D. Shirreffs*, USAR (Retired), Illustrated by William L. Marsh, Whitman Publishing Company, Racine, Wisconsin, 1960) (*There was a Gordon D. Shirreffs who wrote Western novels and died in 1996)