December 21st, 1944. It was 6:12 in the morning. The air over Malmedi, Belgium, cut like broken glass. Each breath turned to mist, hanging in the dim blue light before dawn. Snow settled on ruins, shattered brick, broken factory windows, iron beams twisted by artillery fire. The war had transformed everything familiar into jagged silence. Inside the skeleton of an abandoned coal processing plant, a 19-year-old American soldier named Francis Sherman Curry crouched beside a blownout doorway. In his frostbitten hands, he held a singleshot bazooka, borrowed, untested, and possibly faulty.
slung over his back, a 30 caliber machine gun rattled against his gear with each movement. His position was fully exposed, barely 30 yards from a narrow bridge the Germans were expected to cross. No sandbags, no cover, no backup, just broken stone and a lastminute plan. Curry was not a hero in that moment. He was scared, he was freezing, and he was alone. The other American anti-tank teams had been wiped out or forced to retreat. German panzer tanks, thick-skinned steel beasts, were rolling toward him.
If they crossed that bridge, they would trap the wounded men behind him and punch straight through the American lines. Francis Curry could have run. Instead, he stayed. He set up his bazooka at what any officer would have called a suicidal angle. Too close to fire safely, too narrow to escape, too exposed to survive. He did not wait for orders. He did not expect to come out alive. And somehow for the next 3 hours, one 19-year-old gunner held the line.
Background and character. Francis Sherman Curry was born on June 29th, 1925 in Locksheldrake, a quiet town in upstate New York. He lost his father when he was just 12 years old. Raised by his mother and grandmother, Francis was the kind of boy who disappeared into the woods, built tree forts, and always seemed to be fixing things. He wasn’t a scholar. He wasn’t a fighter. When he tried to enlist at 17, the army turned him down too young.
But he waited and the moment he turned 18, he joined the United States Army. He was trained as a rifleman and in early 1944, he was sent to Europe with the 30th Infantry Division known as Old Hickory. By December, Curry had seen combat in France, the Netherlands, and Germany. He had lost friends. He had fired his weapon in fear, in anger, and in grief. But nothing could have prepared him for what was coming in the frozen forests of the Arden.
The German counteroffensive, later known as the Battle of the Bulge, was Adolf Hitler’s last desperate gamble on the Western Front. Over 200,000 German troops surged through the Arden forest under cover of snow and fog, aiming to split the Allied forces and capture the port of Antworp. The American forces stationed there were exhausted, undere equipped, and not expecting a major assault. Curry’s unit, Company K, of the 120th Infantry Regiment, was posted near the town of Malmmedi in Belgium.
Their orders were simple. Hold the line and protect the road network that led deeper into Allied territory. What none of them knew was that just beyond the tree line, elite German Panzer divisions, including battleh hardened SS tank crews, were rolling forward with orders to break through by Christmas. In the chaos of the first assaults, American anti-tank guns were destroyed. Communication lines were cut. Troops were scattered and forced to fall back. But Curry did not fall back. Instead, he found himself and a handful of comrades holding a weak defensive position in and around a ruined factory beside a critical bridge.
The Germans were advancing. The road was exposed, and there was no time to wait for reinforcements. As the snow kept falling, Francis Curry made a decision that would change his life and the fate of everyone behind him. First assault. At 6:28 in the morning, the silence broke. It began with the low metallic grind of treads, the unmistakable sound of German armor approaching. Then came the crunch of boots over ice, muffled German voices giving orders, and the rising tremble in the earth that only a tank column could produce.
Curry crawled to the edge of the shattered doorway. What he saw confirmed his worst fears. A column of German soldiers, infantry supported by tanks, was advancing down the narrow road that led to the bridge. The lead vehicle was a Panzer MarkV, its turret scanning left and right like a predator hunting in slow motion. There was no time to think, only time to act. Curry looked behind him. Inside the ruins of the factory, five wounded American soldiers lay pinned down by the collapse of a wall during the earlier artillery barrage.
They couldn’t move. They couldn’t run. If the German column crossed that bridge, it would roll right over them. He turned back to face the road. A full-on frontal assault against a tank column with a single bazooka was suicide. But there was one possible chance. Not to meet them headon, but to catch them from an angle just before they entered the bottleneck of the bridge. A place where the lead tank would be forced to slow down and expose its weaker side armor.
It was not a defensible position. It offered no cover. It was exposed to the road with no path of retreat, but it was the only angle that gave him a clean shot. Curry chose it anyway. Dragging the heavy bazooka and a single rocket across the icy floor, he repositioned behind a collapsed beam near the road. He had maybe 10 seconds, maybe less, before the lead panzer would be close enough. His breath froze on the steel of the launcher as he adjusted the sights.
His gloves were torn, fingertips numb. He could barely feel the trigger. Then the tank appeared. It crawled into view less than 30 yards away. The sound was overwhelming. Curry aimed directly at the turret’s base. He squeezed the trigger. The rocket roared forward, trailing smoke and sparks, and slammed into the panzer’s flank with a deafening explosion. The turret jerked, then stopped. Fire erupted from the side armor. German voices screamed in confusion. Curry didn’t wait. He dropped the bazooka and sprinted back toward the building, zigzagging through debris as machine gun fire erupted behind him.
bullets kicked up slivers of ice and brick all around him. Inside, he grabbed a Browning automatic rifle and fired through the facto’s broken windows, cutting down German infantry as they scrambled for cover. Then, switching to a 30 caliber machine gun mounted on a damaged jeep outside, he sprayed suppressing fire across the road, keeping the remaining German troops from flanking. But the Germans regrouped quickly. A second Panzer rolled forward, angling toward the factory. Curry knew he didn’t have time to reload the bazooka.
So instead, he crawled through a hole in the wall, slid across frozen mud to a position even closer to the road, and retrieved another rocket from a fallen comrade’s pack. He jammed it into the launcher, set up behind a low pile of rubble, and waited. The tank approached, slower this time, more cautious, but unaware of his exact position. Curry’s heart pounded in his ears. He took a deep breath, held it, and fired again. Another direct hit. The second panzer shuddered and began to burn.
Now the Germans panicked. Without proper intelligence on American numbers, they believed they were under attack by a larger anti-tank force. Their column halted. Infantry ducked for cover. A third tank reversed down the road to avoid becoming the next target. For the moment, the advance had stalled, but Curry wasn’t finished. He crawled back into the factory where the wounded Americans were still trapped beneath rubble. Despite the risk, Curry used a metal beam to pry up the fallen masonry.
One by one, he dragged his injured comrades to cover, shielding them with debris and discarded doors. He gave them water from his canteen, checked their pulses, whispered that help would come. Above them, German mortars started to fall. The factory shook. Chunks of concrete rained down, but Curry stayed with them. Then, over the groan of engines, came a sound that made his stomach turn. The unmistakable wine of tank treads repositioning. A fourth Panzer was moving into place, attempting to flank the factory from the north side.
Curry looked around. No more bazooka rockets. No anti-tank grenades. No reinforcements. He had only one option. Outside near the bridge lay a destroyed American halftrack vehicle, abandoned during the earlier fighting. Mounted on it was a Browning 50 caliber machine gun. If it still worked, it could cut through infantry and damage even lightly armored tanks. But it was completely exposed. To get there, Curry would have to run straight into open ground in full view of the enemy. It was madness.
But Curry didn’t hesitate. He slung his rifle, took one last look at the men he had saved, and whispered to himself, “Let’s finish this.” Then he ran into the fire. Three hours of hell. Francis Curry sprinted through a nightmare. The frozen ground cracked beneath his boots. Bullets snapped past him, punching holes in metal, tearing through steam vents, ricocheting off debris. Behind him, mortar blasts sent geysers of earth and ice skyward, raining down shrapnel that hissed through the air like hornets.
He didn’t stop. The burned out American halftrack stood near the bridge. A wreck of twisted steel, scorched paint, and shattered glass. Its side armor had buckled from a direct hit, but the 50 caliber machine gun on its roof mount remained barely. Curry hauled himself onto the mangled chassis, the metal searing his palms through torn gloves. The moment his head rose above the hull, German infantry spotted him. A dozen rifles opened fire. He ducked, yanked the bolt of the Browning 50 cal, and prayed it wasn’t jammed.
It wasn’t. The weapon roared to life, thunderous and savage, drowning out the war around him. The barrel pulsed with fire as he swept it across the road, carving through advancing German infantry. Soldiers fell, vehicles reversed. A third Panzer, attempting to flank, slammed its brakes and veered off course, its crew abandoning it under withering fire. Curry had no cover. Every round fired in his direction sent sparks dancing across the half tracks ruined frame. The gun heated fast, steaming in the snow, but he kept firing.
Every fifth round, a tracer, red-hot streaks tearing through fog, cutting lines across the battlefield. He was no longer a target. He was the center of gravity. For the next 20 minutes, Curry held that gun, sweeping left, then right, forcing the entire German column to stall. The bridge behind him remained untouched. The five wounded Americans in the factory were still alive. Not one panzer crossed. Then the gun overheated. Smoke curled from the barrel. The mount jammed. Curry kicked the release lever, dropped from the halftrack, and ran.
He ducked into a frozen ditch, breathing hard, blood trickling from a cut on his neck. The smell of burning oil filled his lungs. In the distance, German officers barked commands. Curry heard tracks moving again. Another tank repositioning. They were regrouping, resetting, preparing to push again. His legs achd. His fingers were numb. His helmet was gone. But he refused to break. Over the next two hours, Curry fought like a ghost in a machine. He moved between collapsed buildings, ducking into basement, using broken doors for cover.
He scavenged ammunition from the dead. He found an M1 Garand rifle and used it to pick off advancing soldiers from upper windows. He hurled grenades at supply trucks. He shot out the tires of a Kubal wagon as it attempted to flank. One hour in, he located another rocket, just one inside a knocked out jeep. He dragged it back to the factory, mounted it into the same bazooka he had used earlier, and waited. Another panzer appeared, this one crawling forward more cautiously, its turret scanning windows.
Curry waited until it turned, exposing its side again. Then he fired. The rocket struck clean. Smoke, flame, a metallic groan. The crew bailed, some on fire, some crawling. Curry aimed his Garand and shot one of the fleeing officers in the leg, sending him sprawling into the snow. At that moment, the Germans realized the truth. There was no unit holding this factory, no battalion, no full anti-tank team, just one man. And yet they still couldn’t break through. By now his uniform was shredded, one sleeve torn.
Blood soaked his left leg from a graze he hadn’t noticed. His hands were burned from gripping overheated barrels. His voice was hoarse from shouting over explosions. But still he fought. One of the most surreal moments came when he paused behind a wall and looked up and saw a German soldier no more than 15 ft away, equally exhausted, equally frozen, clutching his rifle, but not raising it. They stared at each other for one second. Two, then both turned and ran in opposite directions.
War had momentarily broken under the weight of exhaustion. At approximately 9:15 in the morning, the Germans launched one last push. Three tanks in a staggered formation, infantry fanning out to either side, covering fire raining down from their rear. Curry had nothing left but his Garand and a few magazines. He crawled to a second floor window and opened fire, targeting the tank commanders who had their hatches open. He struck one in the shoulder. The man tumbled from the turret.
The tank halted. A moment later, American artillery began falling. Distant thumps signaling the return of heavy support. Curry had held the line just long enough. The German advance staggered. Officers pulled troops back to regroup. A fifth panzer reversed direction and retreated down the road. Infantry scattered into the trees. By 9:30, the road was clear. Curry limped back to the factory. His hands shook as he reached the doorway. The five wounded men were still there, barely conscious, but alive.
He sat beside them. Snow fell through a hole in the roof. For the first time in three hours, no one was firing. They had survived because one 19-year-old gunner had made a choice that morning to stay, to fight, and to stand alone. Turning the tide. When the smoke began to clear, Francis Curry didn’t feel like a hero. He felt like he was dying. His body throbbed with pain in his leg, his arms, his jaw. He had not slept in 36 hours.
He hadn’t eaten in nearly a day. The cold was biting harder than ever now that the adrenaline was wearing off. But the road was silent. For the first time that morning, no tanks growled. No boots thundered on stone. No mortars fell, only the soft hiss of snow landing on scorched metal. Curry looked out toward the bridge. It was still intact, unoccupied, unbroken, and more importantly, unreached. Behind him, the five wounded Americans he had shielded were alive. One had a shattered femur.
Another was missing part of his hand, but all of them would make it out. And most of all, so would the division. Curry’s actions had prevented an armored breakthrough at a critical choke point near Malmedi. German panzers had been ordered to seize the bridge and advance westward, cutting off supply lines and encircling American forces trapped in the bulge. His resistance had delayed them long enough for reinforcements to arrive from the rear. According to post battle reports, the German column that attacked Curry’s position was forced to divert south, where it was later pinned down and destroyed by American artillery and air power.
The time Curry bought those three agonizing hours helped collapse one of the last aggressive pushes of Hitler’s winter offensive. He did not know that, of course. Not yet. At that moment, all he knew was that they were alive. He collapsed beside the others, too tired to speak. For a few minutes, they just sat there, leaning on each other, shaking from the cold, the fear, and the incredible weight of survival. When an American patrol finally reached the area, they found Curry on his feet, rifle slung low, face stre with dirt and dried blood, giving water to one of the wounded men.
The officer in charge asked, “Who’s in command here?” Curry answered simply, “I don’t know. I was just trying to keep them alive.” That humility would become a hallmark of his legacy. Later, officers would piece together the sequence of events. The destroyed tanks, the recovered rocket launcher, the German retreat. Eyewitnesses confirmed the scale of what Curry had done, taking out multiple enemy vehicles, rescuing wounded under fire, holding the bridge alone. But Francis Curry never spoke of it in dramatic terms.
To him, it had just been what the moment demanded. The men he saved would go on to recover and rejoin their families. That patch of road, just a few hundred ft of frozen Belgian stone, would remain in Allied hands for the rest of the war. Curry’s stand hadn’t just saved lives. It had stopped the enemy cold in every sense of the word, and it had proven something far bigger. That in the chaos of war, with nothing left but instinct, grit, and resolve, one 19-year-old American kid with a borrowed bazooka could hold off a panzer advance and win the echo of heroism.
Word of Curry’s actions traveled fast. In the hours following the engagement, his superiors compiled field reports and witnessed testimonies from the few surviving soldiers who had seen what happened. The wreckage of the battlefield spoke for itself. Multiple disabled German tanks, scattered weapons, scorched armor, and the unlikely survival of five wounded men in a position that should have been overrun. Commanding officers quickly realized they were dealing with an act of extraordinary bravery, one that stood out even amid the chaos of the Arden.
A formal citation was written documenting every verifiable detail that Curry had used a bazooka to destroy at least one enemy tank, fired a Browning automatic rifle and a 50 caliber machine gun at exposed positions under direct fire, rescued five wounded comrades, and single-handedly disrupted an enemy armored assault. Less than six months later, on July 27th, 1945, President Harry S. Truman awarded Francis Sherman Curry the Medal of Honor, the United States military’s highest decoration. The official Medal of Honor citation reads in part, “Sergeant Curry’s conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond
the call of duty are in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service and reflect great credit upon himself, the 30th Infantry Division, and the United States Army. ” Curry was just 20 years old. He returned to the United States not with a hero’s swagger, but with the quiet bearing of someone who had done what needed to be done and never expected a reward for it. In interviews, when asked about that day, he was reluctant to glorify his actions.
He once said plainly, “I just did what had to be done. ” After the war, Curry settled back in New York. He worked for many years at the Department of Veterans Affairs in Albany, dedicating his life to helping other servicemen readjust and heal. He stayed out of the spotlight, declining many of the honors and parades that others might have embraced. And yet, his story endured. In 2009, his hometown honored him by naming the local post office in Hurleyville the Francis S.
Curry Post Office. A statue of him was later erected in Kasanovia Park in Buffalo, depicting the moment he fired his bazooka under fire, a tribute cast in bronze to the courage of a 19-year-old who held the line. Curry remained one of the youngest Medal of Honor recipients from World War II and among the last living by the early 2000s. He passed away on October 8th, 2019 at the age of 94. To the end, he carried himself not as a legend, but as a veteran, as someone who understood the true cost of war, not in medals or monuments, but in the names of the friends who didn’t make it home.
Humility and legacy. After the war, Francis Curry could have taken a victory lap. He could have toured the country, given speeches, written a book. He could have made a name for himself, cashed in on his medal, and lived in the glow of national attention. But he didn’t. Instead, he returned to the quiet towns of New York, first Hurleyville, then South Bethlehem, and lived the kind of life that doesn’t make headlines, but shapes communities. He worked for the Veterans Affairs Department for more than 30 years, helping fellow soldiers navigate the maze of post-war benefits, rehabilitation, and recovery.
He did not speak much about the war, not because he was hiding from it, but because he believed his role was to serve, not to shine. People who knew him remember a soft-spoken man who carried his Medal of Honor in a drawer, not on his chest. A man who never referred to himself as a hero. A man who could smile at a child, help an old veteran, fill out paperwork, and speak plainly about life and death, and what it meant to stand for something when it really counted.
His humility was his strength. In a time when celebrity often overshadows service, Curry’s life reminds us of a different kind of greatness, one rooted in quiet action, not public praise. His heroism was not a brand. It was a decision made in freezing mud under enemy fire for reasons that had nothing to do with recognition. There’s something profoundly American about that. His story has been used in classrooms, militarymies, and leadership courses to illustrate not just courage but integrity.
the kind that endures after the headlines fade. To students, he became more than a figure in a textbook. He became a symbol of responsibility, of the choice to act when no one else will. And there’s a deeper lesson here. Francis Curry didn’t win a battle by being the strongest, fastest, or most heavily armed. He won by being prepared, by staying calm in crisis, and by never losing sight of who he was fighting for. Not for glory, not for revenge, but for the men beside him.
In a world hungry for role models, Curry gives us one grounded in substance. He shows us that leadership does not always say look like command. Sometimes it looks like crawling through debris to pull someone else to safety. Sometimes it looks like standing your ground with no promise of success simply because it’s right. And sometimes it looks like a 19-year-old kid refusing to run when running would have been the easiest choice in the world. In his later years, when asked about that day in Belgium, Curry offered no sweeping speeches, no dramatics, he said, “I just did what had to be done.” And maybe that’s the legacy.
Because in that one sentence is the core of everything he represented. duty without ego, courage without applause, and the understanding that history isn’t made by those who seek to be remembered, but by those who choose in the hardest moment to do what must be done. What would you do? We live in a time of comfort, of distractions, of options. Most of us will never face what Francis Curry faced on that December morning in 1944. Most of us will never stand alone in the path of tanks, wounded men behind us, enemy fire in front with nothing but seconds to decide what kind of person we are.
And yet his story asks a question that echoes beyond the battlefield. What do you do when no one tells you what to do? What do you do when it’s easier to run? When everything in you wants to run, but the moment demands you stay? Francis Curry didn’t hold off a panzer advance because he was the best trained soldier on the field. He didn’t hold the line because he was fearless. He held it because he made a choice.
And that’s what’s worth remembering. We all face moments, maybe not with rifles and rockets, but with responsibilities and risks, where no one’s watching, where there are no instructions, no applause, and no guarantees. Moments where someone needs to step up and there’s only you. Curry’s suicidal angle wasn’t just a position on a battlefield. It was a metaphor for every decision that seems doomed, dangerous, or impossible, but still must be made. That’s what gives this story power. Not just the scale of his actions, but the simplicity of his reason.
He saw five wounded men behind him. He saw German tanks ahead. And he decided, “No one else is coming, so I will stay.” We often think of courage as loud, as explosive, as cinematic. But sometimes it looks like a 19-year-old private kneeling in the snow, holding a secondhand bazooka, knowing full well he probably won’t survive the next 5 minutes, and still choosing to pull the trigger. That’s courage. That’s character. And that’s why this story matters not just to students of war, but to anyone who wonders what difference one person can make.
So now the question passes to you. If you found yourself in that factory, if five lives hung behind you, if everything in front of you looked like death, if you knew the odds were impossible, would you stay? Would you fight? Would you choose the suicidal angle? What shocked you most? What would you have done in Francis Curry’s place?
