The Battle of the Bulge is considered the U-S Army's greatest struggle for victory during World War Two.
It’s estimated just two to three percent of the veterans from that fight are alive today.
99-year-old Joe Hucke, of Billings, is one of them.
He reminisced about his time as a fighter pilot and prisoner of war with Yellowstone Public Radio’s Orlinda Worthington.
A dive bombing was kind of, uh, an emotional thing because you, you were blacked out part of the time and you'd be coming back out of your bomb run and well, it was scary. There were anti-aircraft guns,all of them shooting at you. I was shot down and then it was after we got hit, I bailed out. I landed, I landed kind of on the hillside and it was a tree there, caught my fog so that I only dropped out about three or four feet from the ground.
And it was still the, you know, the battle was going on. Of course, I wasn't going anywhere because I had this fractured leg
I sat on his hillside and threw away my charts and things like that that I thought were important, but, and then the Germans came in and they got my wristwatch and they took my gun and took my maps and everything.
I was taken into prison after that. So that was a prisoner of war camp at Heim, Germany, and there were quite a few Americans that had been captured during the Battle of the Bulge.
And they were there until, until the end of the war for four or five months. It was an awful cold time of year, and I was in a hospital bed and it was cold and dirty and I was 21. My leg was fractured and so they decided to take it, look at my leg, gave me ether, and put me out. And when I woke up, I looked down and I still had my leg. So I felt pretty good about that. That's the way combat is, you know, and people are going to get hurt and that's the way it is.
After we were liberated, then we went to Paris to kind of wash us up and feed us. They put us on a DC six and flew us into New York, and that was the first time I'd, my mother had known that I was still alive.
The worst people are the poor mothers that are home and they don't know where their kids are. They gave me a cast and they sent me on leave for a little while. Then that's when I saw my mother, you know, it was, it was, it was sure good to see her.
I was a good military, but it, but we were in a war that we weren't really, weren't prepared for or. The people that were left behind, uh, both sides, you know, I dunno how many thousands of graves over there. The American Graves and their Russian graves and their French graves, and you know, they're the people getting killed. And that's what Memorial Day is to celebrate those people. And, and you got it, it's humbling. It really is. Yeah. We all forget about it.
My thanks to Joe for sharing his story and to all those who serve, we will not forget.
