German Tanks Were Breaking Through — Then a 19-Year-Old American Found a Bazooka

It was still dark when the tanks came. Just before dawn on the 21st of December, 1944, in a freezing Belgian town called Malmedy, a 19-year-old American soldier crouched at a factory window and watched armor rolling up the street toward him. Steel grinding on cobblestone. Engines he could feel in his chest before he could see the machines that made the sound.

The men who had stood between him and those tanks, the anti-tank gunners, the crews of the guns built for exactly this moment, were already gone. Overrun, pushed back. The line that was supposed to hold had not held. Now there was a handful of soldiers in an abandoned factory, and there were German tanks in the street.

And then someone found a bazooka. It was leaning in a corner of the building, left behind by Americans who had pulled out before them. For 1 second, it must have looked like salvation. A shoulder-fired rocket launcher. The one weapon a man on foot could use to kill a tank. But when they checked it, the tube was empty.

 No rockets, no ammunition of any kind. A weapon that could stop a tank and nothing to load it with. The rockets were across the street in a vehicle sitting in the open, in the middle of a kill zone swept by machine gun fire and tank cannon. Between this 19-year-old and any chance of surviving the morning, there were 50 ft of open ground, several German tanks, and a house full of enemy infantry waiting for anything that moved.

His name was Francis Sherman Currey. And what he did in the next few hours would be written, word for word, into the highest citation the United States can give a soldier. Before we go on, if you love these true stories of ordinary men who did impossible things, take a second to subscribe.

 It tells us which forgotten heroes to bring back next. Now let’s go back to the beginning. To understand the man at that window, you have to understand how little the world had given him before it asked him for everything. Francis Currey was born in 1925 in Loch Sheldrake, New York, in the Catskill Mountains. He was not born into comfort, and what little he had did not last.

By the time he was 12 years old, both of his parents were gone. He was an orphan. He passed through the foster system and landed on a farm near a small town called Hurleyville, raised by foster parents, doing the hard plain work of a farm boy in the Depression. He learned early what it meant to depend on himself, because for long stretches of his childhood, there was no one else to depend on.

When the war came, Currey did not wait. One week after he graduated from Hurleyville High School, he enlisted in the United States Army. He was 17 years old. He was good. Good enough that the Army sent him to Officer Candidate School, and good enough that at 18, he completed it. He had earned a commission. He had earned the right to be an officer.

And the Army told him no. His superiors looked at this 18-year-old who had finished the course, and they decided he was, in their words, too immature to lead men. They denied him the commission. So, Francis Currey, who could have been a lieutenant, went to war as an enlisted man instead. He landed at Omaha Beach in the summer of 1944, weeks after D-Day, sent forward as a replacement.

Replacements were the loneliest men in the Army. Strangers fed one at a time into veteran units that had already bled together, and didn’t always learn the new man’s name before they lost him. In the autumn of 1944, Currey caught up with his unit in the Netherlands. Company K, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division.

The 30th was a hard, experienced outfit, a division that had fought across France and slammed on into the German border at Aachen. Curry became an automatic rifleman, the man who carries the Browning automatic rifle, the BAR, the squad’s heaviest, most punishing gun. He had trained on everything. The M1 Garand, the 30-caliber and 50-caliber machine guns, the BAR, and the bazooka.

Years later, that detail, that this farm boy from the Catskills knew his way around nearly every weapon an infantry company owned, would turn out to matter more than anyone could have guessed. Curry fought through Aachen and down into the Ruhr Valley. When people asked him later how a teenager survived that kind of war, he didn’t reach for anything grand.

 “I knew what I was doing,” he said. That was all. Then, on the 16th of December, 1944, the war changed shape. Along an 80-mile stretch of the Ardennes Forest, ground the Allies had written off as quiet, a place to rest tired divisions, Germany threw nearly everything it had left into one last desperate gamble. Hundreds of thousands of men, tanks by the hundreds, a counteroffensive aimed like a spear at the seam in the American line, driving for the Meuse River and beyond it, the port of Antwerp.

It became the largest and bloodiest battle the United States Army fought in the entire Second World War. History would call it the Battle of the Bulge for the great bulge the German advance punched into the Allied front. Before it was over, 19,000 American soldiers would be dead. The average age of the men who fought it was 19, the same age as Francis Curry.

When the offensive broke, the 30th Infantry Division was trucked south in a hurry, hauled down from Holland to plug holes in a collapsing front. Curry’s company was rushed to the area around Malmedy, and Malmedy mattered more than its size suggested. It sat on the northern shoulder of the bulge, on a road network the Germans needed.

If the north shoulder held, the whole German advance would be squeezed and channeled. If it broke, the door swung wide open. So, the Americans spread thin units across the approaches and told them to hold. “They spread us out pretty thin.” Curry remembered. And there was something else in the air at Malmedy. Something that put every soldier on edge.

The town had, for much of its history, belonged to Germany, and the Americans feared collaborators inside it. Worse, there were stories, true ones, of German soldiers dressed as Americans slipping behind the lines. Men in US uniforms, driving US jeeps, changing road signs, cutting telephone wires, posing as military police, and sending convoys the wrong way.

Nobody knew who to trust. A man in the right uniform, speaking the right language, might be the enemy. Those infiltrators were not a rumor. They were the work of one man. His name was Otto Skorzeny, and the Allies called him the most dangerous man in Europe. Skorzeny was an SS commando, Hitler’s personal favorite.

The year before, he had led a glider assault on a mountain top in Italy and snatched the dictator Benito Mussolini out of captivity. He had taken a head of state’s son hostage to keep a nation in the war. He specialized in the audacious, the deceptive, the thing no one believed he would dare. For the Ardennes Offensive, Hitler had given Skorzeny a special command, Panzer Brigade 150.

 On paper, it was an armored unit. In reality, it was a deception. Skorzeny had dressed his force up as Americans. He had taken German tanks, Panther tanks, among the most powerful in the world, and clad them in steel plate, painted them olive drab, and stenciled white American stars on their flanks, trying to make them look like American tank destroyers.

His men wore pieces of American uniform. His vehicles wore American markings. The mission had been to race ahead of the main attack and seize the bridges over the Meuse by trickery. But Skorzeny’s brigade got tangled in the same monstrous traffic jams that snarled the whole German offensive and the grand plan fell apart.

So, his disguised armor was handed a simpler, blunter job instead. Take Malmedy. What Skorzeny did not know was that his luck had already run out. A German deserter had crossed the lines and warned the Americans that an attack was coming. And the town Skorzeny’s infiltrators had once scouted as lightly defended had since been packed with infantry, artillery, anti-tank guns, and tank destroyers.

The Americans understood what Malmedy was worth. But understanding the value of ground and surviving a tank attack on it are two very different things. And in the gray dark of December 21st, the disguised Panthers came on. The German armor pushed toward the strong point where Curry’s third platoon was dug in.

The tank destroyers and anti-tank guns positioned to stop them were overrun in the assault. The big guns that were supposed to be the answer to enemy armor were swept aside and the tanks kept coming, grinding forward until they were right on top of the platoon’s position. After hard, prolonged fighting, Curry’s group was forced to fall back, pushed out of their position and into a nearby factory.

And it was inside that factory that they found the empty bazooka. This is the moment everything turned on. A teenager, a handful of cut-off, frightened men, German tanks in the street and German infantry holed up in a house just down the road with a clear field of fire across the open ground, the one weapon that could kill a tank with no ammunition.

And the ammunition sitting in a vehicle across the street in the open, under fire. Curry was the only one of them who really knew how to work the bazooka. So, the impossible job fell to him. He went out the door and into the street. He crossed that open ground under fire from the tanks and from the infantry in the house, reached the vehicle, and got his hands on rockets.

Then he had to get back. Back across the same killing ground, rounds snapping past him, to a position where he could use them. With a single companion helping him work the launcher, Curry aimed at the nearest tank. He fired one rocket, one shot. The rocket struck the tank where the turret met the chassis, the seam, the weak joint in all that armor, and knocked it out.

One bazooka round, one tank, dead in the street. But one tank was not the battle. There were more, and there was the house full of German infantry, and there were Americans in terrible trouble that Curry didn’t even know about yet. He moved to a new position and spotted three Germans standing in the doorway of an enemy-held house.

He brought up his automatic rifle, the BAR he’d carried all the way from Holland, and cut all three of them down. And then Francis Curry did something that, on paper, makes no military sense at all. He came out from cover, and alone, he advanced toward the house full of enemy infantry.

 He closed to within 50 yd of it. 50 yd, well inside the range where a single man in the open should simply be killed, carrying the bazooka, intent on tearing the building apart. With friendly fire covering him, he stood straight up in full view of the enemy, and he fired. The rocket smashed into the house and knocked down half of one of its walls in a spray of brick and dust.

It was from that forward exposed position that Curry finally saw them. Five American soldiers pinned down. They had been trapped for hours, caught in the open by fire from that house and from three German tanks, unable to move, unable to run, just waiting to be killed by inches. Two of them were already wounded.

Curry understood the math instantly. Those five men could not escape, not while the tanks and the enemy guns were still in the fight. As long as that armor sat there, his trapped comrades were dead men who simply hadn’t died yet. So, he went after the tanks. He crossed the street again to a vehicle and came back with an armful of anti-tank grenades.

 And then, under heavy enemy fire, out in the open, he began launching them at the German tanks. He couldn’t destroy all that armor by himself, but he didn’t have to. The grenades cracking against their hulls were more than the tank crews were willing to sit through. One after another, the tank men abandoned their machines, climbing out of their tanks and running for the cover of the house to get away from the teenager and his grenades.

The crews of the tanks pinning down those five Americans gave up their armor and fled. That is the truth behind the legend. Behind any title that says German tank crews learned to fear this man. They did not know his name. But on that street, on that morning, the crews of German tanks chose to leave their own tanks behind rather than face what one 19-year-old was doing to them.

Curry was not finished. He climbed up onto a half-track, in full view of the Germans, completely exposed, and opened fire with its mounted machine gun, raking the house. Then he shifted again, found yet another machine gun whose entire crew had been killed, and took it over himself. And under the covering fire of that dead crew’s gun, worked by a teenager who would not stop moving, the five trapped Americans finally got up and ran.

All five made it back to safety, two wounded, none dead. The German attack came apart. Deprived of their tanks with heavy casualties among their infantry, the enemy was forced to withdraw. The assault that had threatened to roll up the flank of Curry’s entire battalion, broken in large part by one automatic rifleman who refused to accept that the situation was hopeless.

When night came, it found Curry and his squad still trying to get back to American lines. Two of their men wounded. They came across an army jeep fitted with stretcher mounts. They loaded the wounded onto it. And Francis Curry, who had crossed that street again and again, who had knocked out a tank with a single rocket and driven crews from their armor with grenades and stood up in the open to fire a machine gun at a house full of the enemy, climbed onto the jeep’s spare wheel, his BAR across his knees, and rode shotgun

back toward his own lines, watching the dark for the enemy the whole way in. Malmedy held. The northern shoulder of the bulge did not break. Skorzeny’s disguised brigade, his Panthers dressed as Americans, his commandos and his tricks, they made their try at Malmedy, and they failed. It was the only serious attempt the Germans made to take the town in the entire battle, and it was thrown back.

Within days, Panzer Brigade 150 was pulled from the line and not long after disbanded. The disguises came off. The trick was over. The town held, the shoulder held, and the great German gamble in the Ardennes ground slowly to a halt and then to ruin. On the 27th of July, 1945, near Reims, France, Major General Leland Hobbs, the man who commanded the 30th Infantry Division, pinned the Medal of Honor on Francis Sherman Curry.

He was 20 years old. His citation reads like a list no one would believe if it weren’t sworn and documented. The bazooka, the single shot that killed a tank, the automatic rifle, the lone advance to 50 yards, the wall knocked down with a rocket, the anti-tank grenades that drove crews from their tanks, the machine gun fired from atop a half-track in full view of the enemy.

The dead crew’s gun taken up to cover five men’s escape. It credits him with inflicting heavy losses on the enemy in men and material, with rescuing five comrades, two of them wounded, and with stemming an attack that threatened his whole battalion’s position. It was not all he earned. After the Battle of the Bulge, Curry became a squad leader and was awarded the Silver Star for gallantry.

Over the course of the war, he was wounded enough times to receive the Purple Heart three separate times. The third for being shot while disarming German soldiers after the fighting in Europe was already over. He had landed as a frostbitten replacement with no winter gear, a kid the army thought was too immature to lead, and he came home a sergeant with the nation’s highest decoration around his neck.

But here is the part that tells you who Francis Curry really was. For the rest of his long life, he refused to make it about himself. “We don’t wear it for ourselves,” he said of the medal. “We wear it for them that were with us.” And then simply, “I couldn’t have done it alone.” He went home to New York. He spent 30 years working as a counselor at a Veterans Affairs Medical Center, sitting across from other men who had been to war, helping them carry what they brought back.

When he retired, he started a landscaping business, and he coached Little League. And he lived the kind of quiet, decent life that the loud history books tend to skip past. In 1998, he became the first Medal of Honor recipient ever modeled as a G.I. Joe action figure. A small plastic likeness of the orphan farm boy from Hurleyville, sold in toy stores to children who would never know what the real man had done at 19.

His face was printed on a sheet of United States postage stamps honoring the Medal of Honor. Francis Sherman Currey died on the 8th of October 2019 at the age of 94. He was the last surviving World War II Medal of Honor recipient in the state of New York and in all of New England. When he passed, only a handful of the World War II living remained and now they are nearly all gone and soon there will be none.

So remember the window and the dark and the tanks coming up the street. Remember the empty bazooka and the 50 ft of open ground and the boy who decided the open ground would not stop him. Remember that the men who came home and never bragged were often the men who had the most to be silent about. Francis Currey was a child the army didn’t think was ready.

At 19, alone in a Belgian street, he proved he was ready for something almost no one ever has to be ready for and five men lived to grow old because of it. That is the whole point of remembering not the medal the men behind it. If this story moved you, do the one thing that keeps these men from being forgotten.

 Subscribe to the channel, give this video a like and hit the bell so the next story finds you. There are still thousands of them out there, ordinary men who did the impossible and then went quietly home. We’ll keep bringing them back one at a time. Thank you for watching and thank you for remembering.