     Fred McCollum, Joe Hollenbeck, Tim Buchanan, and Chris Higgins were stuck in Trois Ponts with a broken-down halftrack and a 57mm anti-tank gun when an officer with the 51st Engineer Battalion commandeered them. He wanted that gun for a roadblock.
     They set up their gun near an underpass in front of the main bridge. The gung-ho officer was wiring the bridge with what looked like a ton of high explosives. He wanted more time to finish the job. Three of his men were scattering mines on the road a few hundred yards up from the bridge.
     Suddenly the mine-layers came running down the road, screaming at the top of their lungs, "Krauts! Krauts!" The four gunners watched them run by and shook their heads. This whole unit was spooked. The three men reached the bridge and spoke frantically with the officer, who began shouting orders and dashing about frantically.
     "We got a bunch of damn..." Hollenbeck started to say, when they heard the deep rumble. Peering over the embankment, they saw the muzzle of a gun come around the corner. Their eyes widened as the barrel followed, growing longer and longer, and still there was no tank. When at last the tank's hull appeared, the four gunners were believers.
     The tank couldn't see them; they lay in wait until it reached the underpass, then they blasted it at point-blank range. The turret blew off the tank and it stopped, blocking the road perfectly. Now the other tanks began maneuvering, trying to get a shot at the hidden gun. For fifteen minutes the four gunners fought off every attempt. Then the bridge behind them blew up. A moment later, a Tiger tank found the range and blew Buchanan, Higgins, Hollenbeck, and McCollum to eternity.
/Bridge-Blowing
   Bridges occupy an important place in military operations. Because they use so much stuff (ammunition, food, weapons, etc.), modern armies must move on roads. Roads cross rivers at bridges. If you destroy the bridge, you have destroyed the road and stopped the army.
   There's a snag, though: how do you know whether you are blowing up your bridge or the enemy's bridge? If the enemy is coming down a road and you blow the bridge in front of him, then you've stopped him -- that's good. But what if you blow it too soon, thereby trapping friendly vehicles on the other side of the bridge? Worse, what if the enemy never tries to cross the bridge and you blow it up, thereby depriving your own army of a useful bridge for future operations?
   There's only one way to solve these problems: wire the bridge for demolition, wait until the last possible minute, then blow up the bridge when the enemy arrives. If you blow it up just as the first enemy tank starts to cross, nobody can blame you for acting prematurely.
   Of course, if something goes wrong with the wiring, you don't have any time to fix it. You get only one chance to blow the bridge -- and wiring mistakes were common. After all, the people laying the wire are 21 year old kids with six months experience, wiring the bridge under extreme time pressure and possibly under fire. Is it any wonder, then, that perhaps 10% of all combat bridge demolitions failed?
   Even if you do destroy the bridge, all you've done is slow down the enemy. Everybody brings bridging equipment with them. Depending on the size of the river and the height of the banks, combat engineers can rig a usable temporary bridge in 6 to 24 hours./