| 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion | |
|---|---|
| Active | 1942–1945 |
| Country |  United States |
| Branch |  United States Army |
| Role | Artillery sound ranging |
| Engagements | |
The 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion was a United States Army unit that saw action in the Battle of the Bulge in World War II. Their main mission was to identify the location of enemy artillery using the "sound and flash" technique (sound ranging and flash spotting). [1]
On 17 December 1944, members of Battery B, 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion were traveling from Aachen, Germany to the Ardennes in Belgium when 120 of them were captured by Joachim Peiper's 1st SS Panzer Division at Baugnez, lined up in a nearby field and mowed down with machine gun fire in what became known as the Malmedy massacre. [1]
The Malmedy massacre was a German war crime committed by soldiers of the Waffen-SS on 17 December 1944 at the Baugnez crossroads near the city of Malmedy, Belgium, during the Battle of the Bulge. Soldiers of Kampfgruppe Peiper summarily killed eighty-four U.S. Army prisoners of war (POWs) who had surrendered after a brief battle. The Waffen-SS soldiers had grouped the U.S. POWs in a farmer's field, where they used machine guns to shoot and kill the grouped POWs; the prisoners of war who survived the gunfire of the massacre then were killed with a coup de grâce gun-shot to the head.
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