When This Gunner Stopped the German Army — They Sent a Tiger Tank After Him
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The One-Man Roadblock: How Sgt. José M. López Stopped an SS Panzer Assault at Krinkelt
At 06:30 on an icy December morning in 1944, deep in the Ardennes forest, one small, stocky machine gunner settled behind his Browning and single‑handedly altered the course of a German offensive.
Sergeant José Mendoza López was 33 years old, five‑foot‑five, 130 pounds, and already a hardened veteran of six months of combat. On December 17, near the Belgian village of Krinkelt, he found himself as the last functioning machine gunner in Company K, 23rd Infantry Regiment, 2nd Infantry Division. Facing him: hundreds of SS panzergrenadiers and the looming silhouettes of Tiger tanks crashing through the fog.
By the time the smoke cleared, López had killed over 100 enemy soldiers, held back a major assault, and bought the critical minutes that allowed his company—and eventually his division—to hold the key ground of Elsenborn Ridge. It was an act of raw endurance, cold calculation, and absolute refusal to quit.
And he did it carrying a gun that weighed almost half as much as he did.
The day before, on December 16, 1944, Hitler had launched his last great gamble in the West: the Ardennes offensive, better known as the Battle of the Bulge. Two hundred thousand German troops and nearly a thousand tanks drove into thinly held American lines, aiming to punch through to Antwerp, split the Allied armies, and force a negotiated peace.
The attack caught the Americans off guard. Inexperienced units broke. Veterans were overwhelmed. Chaos spread across snow‑choked roads and mist‑filled woods. In the northern sector of the offensive, one formation stood directly in the path of the 12th SS Panzer Division: the 2nd Infantry Division on Elsenborn Ridge.
For the German plan to work, they had to break through there.
Company K was a small piece of that defensive puzzle, covering about a quarter‑mile of frozen forest east of Krinkelt. Two rifle platoons and a weapons platoon—roughly eighty men—stretched thin across the snow and trees. German intelligence had pinpointed this exact sector as a weak spot. If they cracked Company K, they could roll up the American line and open the road toward the ridge.
The Germans knew where to hit. And they knew which weapons to kill first.
At 05:30 on December 17, a 90‑minute artillery barrage tore into the American positions. Shells walked methodically through the tree line, smashing foxholes, cutting telephone wires, blowing apart anything that resembled a machine gun nest. Company K lost 23 men in the first twelve hours of fighting. Eleven of them were machine gunners.
The Browning M1919 .30-caliber machine gun was the backbone of any American defensive line. Mounted on a sturdy tripod, it could spit out 500 rounds a minute, breaking up infantry assaults and forcing attackers to hug the ground. Germans had learned the hard way that if you didn’t knock out the Brownings, your infantry died in heaps.
By dawn on the 17th, Company K had one working machine gun left.
It was in the hands of José López.
He’d been told back in training that he was too small for the job. The M1919 weighed 31 pounds. The tripod added another 14. Ammunition belts slung across a gun team added 20 or 30 more. Normally, it took five men to move the weapon, ammo, tripod, and spare parts. López had insisted on the assignment anyway, and then proved every sergeant who doubted him wrong.
At Normandy, he’d kept his gun firing while his assistant gunner bled out beside him. On the Siegfried Line, he’d carried the Browning three miles through German artillery to reach a new position. His gun never jammed. He never slipped out of the line.
But the situation at Krinkelt was worse than anything he’d faced before.
When the German barrage lifted that morning, the fog in the Krinkelwald was so thick López could barely see the tree line 200 yards away. But sound carried. He heard the distinct clatter of Panzer treads, the cracking reports of Mauser rifles, and the harsh shouts of German NCOs driving their men forward. The 12th SS Panzer Division was attacking with overwhelming strength—around 300 infantry and at least four Tiger tanks in his sector alone.
Initially, López had been placed on Company K’s right flank, where German patrols had been probing for weaknesses. But at around 06:15, he heard trouble on the left. The pattern of gunfire changed—the deep bark of American M1s started to thin out, replaced by more and more German rifles. Voices were getting closer. The left flank was buckling.
If the Germans broke through there, they’d roll up the entire line.
López could have stayed where he was. That’s where he’d been ordered to be. That’s where everyone expected him to fight and, if necessary, die. Instead, he looked at his Browning, looked toward the collapsing left flank 400 yards away through open, snow‑covered ground, and made a decision that no officer had ordered and no manual had written.
He picked up the gun and ran.
The snow was 18 inches deep. The ground was rock‑hard beneath it. The fog reduced visibility to 30 feet. Every step he took across that open gap was a step a German sniper could have ended his life with. The Browning slammed against his hip. The tripod snagged on frozen brush. Ammunition belts tangled around his shoulders. He ran anyway.
He reached a shallow depression about 50 yards behind the left flank’s main foxholes. It wasn’t much—just enough of a hollow to get his legs below the level of the surrounding ground while everything from his waist up remained exposed. But it gave him a clear view of the routes the German infantry were using.
Normally, it took three men to deploy the Browning on its tripod in a combat situation. Under pressure, that team could do it in 90 seconds: unfold the legs, lock them, mount the gun, feed the belt, charge the weapon, check the field of fire.
López did it alone in under two minutes, under fire, with German infantry closing in.
The first burst he fired cut down ten SS panzergrenadiers who were preparing to lay a base of fire on the American foxholes. He shifted fire to another squad working its way forward through the trees. Men dropped, scattering for cover they’d thought they wouldn’t need.
For the first time in fifteen minutes, Company K’s riflemen on the left heard the unmistakable chatter of their heavy machine gun. It meant one thing: they weren’t alone.
The Germans reacted immediately. They had practiced this kind of attack for years—suppressive fire, flanking maneuver, armor coordination. They began working around his position, trying to get a clear shot at the machine gun that had suddenly appeared where there hadn’t been one before. One of the Tigers swung its turret slowly toward López’s muzzle flash.
The Tiger wasn’t just a tank. It was a 54‑ton bunker on tracks, armed with an 88mm gun that could punch through any American armor at more than a mile and obliterate infantry positions like a sledgehammer crushing an eggshell. The tank’s commander had seen the risk: that single machine gun was shredding his supporting infantry.
The Tiger fired.
The 88mm shell hit the frozen ground six feet from López’s hole. The concussion blew him completely out of the depression, flung him into the snow, and showered his gun with dirt, ice, and splinters. His ears went dead. His nose started bleeding. For a moment he was half‑blind and deaf.
The Germans assumed he was dead.
He wasn’t.
He crawled back to the overturned gun, dragged it out of the blasted hole, and started moving again. Thirty yards to the right, behind a fallen oak, he dropped, cleared the receiver of packed snow, cycled the bolt, and opened fire once more—this time covering the gap between Company K’s center and right.
From this angle, he could see more of the enemy. Panzergrenadiers were advancing in disciplined, textbook formations—squad by squad, bounding forward under the shelter of their own fire. Three more Tigers loomed behind them, their commanders standing in open hatches, directing the battle through the fog.
Every move López made forced the Germans to adjust. Every new position he took created the illusion of a fresh gun joining the fight. As far as they could tell, the Americans had multiple machine guns and a stubborn line that refused to break.
In reality, they had one man.
The Tigers kept hunting him, swinging their 88s toward each fresh muzzle flash. Each time, he grabbed the Browning and sprinted before the shell landed, the blasts chewing apart trees and earth behind him. Each time, he found some new dip or fold in the terrain, threw the tripod down, slammed the gun onto it, and raked the advancing infantry once more.
While he fought on the left and center, German infantry at least forty strong slipped around the far right through dense forest, aiming to strike Company K from behind. It was the classic flanking movement any decent officer dreamed of. Catch an enemy between your frontal assault and a rear attack, and you turn defense into slaughter.
López spotted them moving.
He checked his ammunition. He had three belts left—roughly 750 rounds. He’d already fired more than 500 in less than thirty minutes. The Browning’s barrel was dangerously overheated. There was no spare barrel. No assistant gunner. No one to carry belts, swap parts, or take over when he dropped.
He pulled the gun off its tripod yet again and ran toward the forest where the flanking force was moving.
By 07:05, he had reached a natural bowl in the terrain about 75 yards behind Company K’s forward foxholes. It was, by any normal standard, a suicidal position—completely exposed, visible from three sides, with almost no hard cover. But it commanded the route the German flanking force had chosen.
When the panzergrenadiers emerged from the trees, they were moving loosely, confidently. They believed the American line in front of them was collapsing. They were expecting scattered riflemen and panicked stragglers.
Instead, a .30‑caliber Browning opened up from less than 100 yards.
In the first minute and a half, López dropped around twenty Germans. The survivors lurched back into the trees, stunned. Some tried to regroup. Others tried to find a path around his fire. Each time they showed themselves long enough to move, López scythed them down.
He was fighting an entire flanking force alone—and winning.
By this point, the physical demands were beyond reasonable. He had been hauling 65 pounds of weapon and gear through deep snow for nearly an hour, moving under fire, setting up and breaking down his gun repeatedly, all in freezing air that burned his lungs. His shoulders ached. His hands were numb. The barrel of the Browning glowed red. Steam hissed where snow struck the blistering metal.
Still, he kept his finger on the trigger.
His last belt ran dry at 07:12. In roughly 37 minutes of continuous combat, he had fired about 2,000 rounds from four different positions, against waves of infantry pressing from multiple directions. German observers, judging from the shifting muzzle flashes, must have assumed they were facing at least a platoon’s worth of machine guns.
They weren’t. They were fighting one man and one weapon pushed beyond its mechanical limits.
Company K, meanwhile, had managed something almost as difficult as holding: a fighting withdrawal. With Lopez’s covering fire shredding every push that tried to engulf them, the riflemen bounded back in controlled pairs and teams, dragging their wounded, maintaining unit cohesion, and establishing a new line closer to Krinkelt. They hadn’t broken. They hadn’t run.
They were still a fighting unit because one sergeant refused to leave his gun.
Out of ammunition once more, López could have obeyed the obvious impulse: fall back, find a safer position, live to see another day. Instead, he ran toward the remains of the weapons platoon’s earlier positions, where dead American machine gunners still lay in the snow.
German infantry had stripped bodies for valuables and weapons, but heavy things—metal ammo boxes half‑buried in drifted snow—were often left lying. López found two 250‑round belts and hauled them back to a position from which he could cover Company K’s withdrawal route.
He set up behind a shattered farm cart, the wood splintered by machine gun fire, the metal wheels offering only a suggestion of cover. With those 500 remaining rounds, he gave his company something priceless: time.
For another eight minutes, he poured controlled bursts into the German pursuit, cutting down squads that tried to rush isolated American teams, slamming fire into groups attempting to slip around the edges of the retreat. Each short burst from the Browning bought seconds. Seconds accumulated into minutes. Minutes allowed medics to move the wounded, officers to straighten lines, sergeants to bark men back into formation.
When the final belt ran dry around 07:31, Company K was no longer teetering on the edge of annihilation. They had a new, coherent defensive line 200 yards closer to the village. Their wounded had been dragged to relative safety. Their retreat remained organized.
The Germans, however, were not done. Fresh infantry were feeding into the fight. Two Tiger tanks were maneuvering to blast the new American positions at close range. Artillery observers struggled to adjust their fire in the dense fog, shells crashing blindly into forest that held both friend and foe.
The order came to pull back further, toward final positions on Elsenborn Ridge.
López looked at his empty machine gun. He looked at the approaching Germans. He looked at his company—men he’d marched with from Normandy, through the hedgerows, across France, into Belgium—trying to make one more bound back under fire.
He stayed.
With no ammunition left, he set up the Browning in full view behind the wrecked cart and pretended to reload. German squad leaders, who had spent the last hour watching comrades shredded whenever they got careless, reacted with ingrained caution. Assault teams dove for cover. Commands were shouted. Suppressive fire poured in his direction.
Every round they fired at him, at an empty gun, was a round not aimed at withdrawing Americans.
Twice, when the German barrage on his position slackened, he rose just enough to make sure they saw movement behind the weapon. Twice, the reaction was the same: fresh storms of rifle fire, fresh delays, fresh hesitation.
Those stolen seconds and minutes were enough. By 07:42, Company K’s wounded were under cover. The new American positions had solidified. Artillery observers finally had coordinates they could trust and began walking heavy shells through the areas where German infantry had massed for a final push.
German commanders reassessed. Whatever was in front of them—a regiment, a battalion, a division, for all they knew—had made them pay dearly for every yard. Fog, resistance, artillery: the calculus shifted. The pursuit halted.
Sergeant José M. López was still behind the shredded farm cart at 08:15 when his comrades found him. He’d been under intermittent fire for more than half an hour with no ammunition. His uniform was in tatters from splinters and dirt. His hands shook from exhaustion and burns. His ears still rang from concussions.
He refused evacuation until ordered at gunpoint by his own officers.
In the clean, careful language of the Medal of Honor citation that followed six months later, the U.S. Army summarized all of this in a handful of sentences: that he moved his heavy machine gun repeatedly under intense fire; that he manned exposed positions; that he killed at least 100 enemy soldiers; that he single‑handedly delayed and disrupted assaults long enough for his company to withdraw and avoid encirclement.
What the citation couldn’t convey was the raw physical impossibility of what he did: a 130‑pound man carrying a 45‑pound weapon system and its ammo alone through deep snow; repeatedly outrunning Tiger tank fire; pushing a gun past its mechanical limits; turning his own small body into a roadblock in front of one of Nazi Germany’s best armored divisions.
The consequences of his stand echoed far beyond Krinkelt.
Because Company K held and withdrew in good order, the 2nd Infantry Division was able to consolidate on Elsenborn Ridge. Because the division held the ridge, the 6th SS Panzer Army—the sharpest tip of Hitler’s last offensive—never broke through to the Meuse River. They never threatened Antwerp. They never split the Allied front.
The grand offensive that Hitler hoped would change the war instead slammed against a line of cold, tired, stubborn American infantry who refused to yield that ridge. In the south, the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne” would become famous. In the north, the nameless line on Elsenborn Ridge would become something equally decisive.
At one critical point on that northern shoulder, in a Belgian forest where fog and snow swallowed all sound but the rattle of machine guns and the thunder of tank guns, a single sergeant from Brownsville, Texas, Mexican‑born, deeply religious, and stubborn beyond reason, chose to stand and fire until his weapon had nothing left to give.
He lived to see the end of the war, to receive his Medal of Honor in the ruins of Nuremberg, to serve again in Korea, to retire after three decades in uniform. He died in 2005 at the age of 94.
Most of the men he killed that morning at Krinkelt never knew his name. Many of the men he saved never fully understood how close they had come to being overrun.
But history, if it pays attention, knows this much:
On December 17, 1944, when a crack SS panzer division drove straight at a thin American line, the outcome at one crucial point depended not on tanks, not on generals, not on grand strategy, but on a single undersized machine gunner who picked up his Browning and decided the German army wasn’t getting through—not that day, not on his watch.
