Germans Never Imagined American Proximity Fuses Would Detonate Shells 70 Feet Above Panzers

Germans Never Imagined American Proximity Fuses Would Detonate Shells 70 Feet Above Panzers

December seventeenth, nineteen forty-four. Zero six thirty hours. Three kilometers southeast of Malm��dy, Belgium. SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Otto Skorzeny crouched behind a stone wall, watching the predawn sky. His Panzer Brigade one fifty had been attacking American positions for eighteen hours. The advance had stalled. Something was wrong with the American artillery.
The shells were detonating in midair. Not hitting the ground. Not burying themselves in the frozen earth before exploding. Just bursting overhead, thirty, forty, fifty feet above his men. Showering shrapnel straight down. There was no cover. Foxholes offered no protection. Men died in trenches that should have kept them safe. Communication wires snapped from fragments that fell like steel rain.
Skorzeny had commanded special operations since nineteen forty. France, the Balkans, the rescue of Mussolini. He knew artillery. Every type. German. Soviet. American. He understood how timed fuses worked. Gunners calculated distance and velocity. Set the fuse. The shell exploded at a predetermined time after firing. Skilled crews could achieve airbursts, but it required perfect calculations, forward observers with clear sightlines, constant adjustments. And the weather was terrible. Heavy clouds, snow, zero visibility.
The Americans should not be able to achieve accurate timed airbursts under these conditions. Yet here they were. Shell after shell exploding precisely overhead. No craters. No wasted explosions in empty ground. Just perfect airbursts, every single time, regardless of terrain, regardless of visibility, regardless of weather. His officers reported casualties mounting. Not from direct hits. From fragments. Men wounded in the back, the top of the head, the shoulders. Wounds that came from above.