Battle at the crossroad Café
The Battle at the crossroads Café in Poteau de Harlange was an Alamo stand by ragtag remnants of the US 687th Field Artillery Battalion which helped slow the Wehrmacht juggernaut at the Battle of the Bulge.
Retreating from Wiltz and en route to Bastogne, the US 687th Field Artillery Battalion endured a night its men would never forget in tiny Poteau de Harlange. The country crossroads was the site of the chaotic firefight on December 19, 1944, between the US 687th and the German paratroopers of the 5th Fallschirmjaeger Division.
The precise location of the brief battle was a longstanding source of confusion until a GI-turned-amateur historical sleuth set the record straight. Many veterans and bookwrites placed the battle at Café Schumann. Bob Phillips, a veteran of the 28th Infantry Division's 110th Regiment wrote "To Save Bastogne" and also placed the battle at the Schumann crossroad. Les Eames,who, as lieutenant in the 687th, had played an integral part in the battle, got more and more convinced, that the official record was wrong. So in 1989 Eames returned to Luxembourg, using several maps and worked closely with aleading local expert. In this process, they established beyond a shadow of a doubt that Poteau de Harlange was the actual battle site.
Eames and the local expert then persuaded Phillips of this, and Phillips redressed the error in a subsequent version of "To Save Bastogne".
