How a U.S. Sniper’s “Coffee Cup Trick” Took Down 97 Germans in 6 Days

The Coffee Cup Ghost of Hürtgen: How One Sniper Turned Steam into a Weapon

November 14th, 1944. 05:30 hours.
The Hürtgen Forest did not wake up so much as relent—a slow loosening of night into a gray dawn that never quite became morning. The trees were shattered into spears. The ground was a soaked grave of needles and mud. Even the air felt heavy, like it had learned to resist breathing.

Somewhere deep inside that wrecked forest, Hans Müller, an Obergefreiter in the 326th Volksgrenadier Division, lay still behind a screen of branches and watched a single, stupid detail with more attention than most men gave to their own future.

A tin cup.

It sat on a fallen log roughly two hundred yards away. Steam climbed off it in thin, rhythmic curls—soft, confident, almost insulting in the cold. Müller had been staring at that steam for seventeen minutes through his binoculars, waiting for the moment the careless American beneath it would move just enough to become a clean shot.

He had seen enough fighting to recognize exhaustion when it showed itself. The Americans pushing through the forest had been grinding forward for weeks, paying for every yard in blood and nerves. Men stopped thinking clearly when they were tired. They forgot what they were taught. They did dumb things like heating coffee too close to the line.

And in the Hürtgen, dumb things got you killed.

Müller eased his Karabiner 98k into the pocket of his shoulder. He didn’t aim at the cup—only a fool aimed at metal. He aimed just beneath it, where the soldier’s head or upper torso would be if he was crouched low and trying to steal warmth from the drink.

At about 180 meters, the shot was routine.

He controlled his breathing, settled his sights, and squeezed.

The bullet struck exactly where he intended. The cup jerked and flipped backward, coffee scattering into the air like dark rain.

But Müller never saw where it landed.

Because in the same instant his rifle cracked, a .30-06 round struck him dead center in the chest—fired from sixty degrees to his left, from an angle Müller had not been watching, from a position he hadn’t even considered.

The forest didn’t echo the way open country did. Sound vanished into wet bark and ruined branches. Müller’s body collapsed without ceremony, and the cup’s steam kept rising as if nothing had happened.

In a different patch of shadow, Staff Sergeant James “Hrix” Hendrickx lowered his M1903A4 Springfield and made a small, precise mark in a notebook.

05:42. Confirmed kill #83.
Coffee cup decoy effective.

He didn’t smile. He didn’t whisper anything dramatic. He only shifted his weight, listened, and waited for the next German who would make the same predictable mistake.

A forest that made men into ghosts

The Hürtgen Forest was not the kind of battlefield that produced sweeping maneuvers and heroic charges. It produced slow attrition, squads shrinking into handfuls, maps turning useless, and nerves unraveling in the rain.

Tree bursts from artillery sprayed splinters downward like thrown knives. Visibility collapsed to fifty yards, sometimes less. Mud swallowed boots. Radios failed. Armor bogged down. Infantry moved like blind men through permanent twilight.

To conventional units, the forest was a nightmare.

To a sniper, it was a laboratory.

The constant artillery made individual rifle shots hard to locate. The dense terrain created endless hides. And the stress did something even better: it made soldiers fixate. When every branch might hide an enemy, the mind clings to anything certain—anything obvious.

A steaming cup of coffee on a frozen morning was certainty.

Hendrickx understood that. More than that—he built a method around it.

The ranch kid who learned the oldest trick in hunting

James Hendrickx came from Billings, Montana, born into winters so hard they taught children the difference between discomfort and danger. He learned to shoot not as a sport, but as a necessity—coyotes at long range, wounded game tracked through wind and snow, clean shots taken because wasting an animal was unthinkable.

His father—himself a veteran of the First World War—taught him a principle that didn’t appear in manuals.

“The best hunting isn’t about finding animals,” he told him.
“It’s about making them find you.”

It sounded backward until you understood it. Animals—like soldiers—didn’t move randomly. They moved according to expectation: where safety was, where danger wasn’t, where the world seemed to make sense.

You didn’t have to out-run them.

You had to out-think their habits.

When Hendrickx enlisted after Pearl Harbor, instructors quickly noticed he wasn’t merely accurate—he was strategic. While other trainees obsessed over concealment, he experimented with misdirection: leaving something behind to draw eyes, firing from somewhere else entirely, letting the enemy’s curiosity do the heavy lifting.

Most snipers are taught to vanish.

Hendrickx learned to control what the enemy saw.

And in the Hürtgen, where men craved certainty, that skill became lethal.

The decoy was never the cup—only the idea of it

The tin cup was common GI issue. But Hendrickx modified his—drilling small holes, looping wire through the rim so it could be hung from a branch or propped in a way that looked natural. He carried a tiny stove and fuel tablets that could heat water even in damp cold, producing steam long enough to tempt observation.

Then he did the part most men couldn’t do:

He waited.

He placed the cup where a tired American might reasonably crouch—behind a fallen log, near a busted stump, at the edge of a shallow depression that suggested cover. It wasn’t absurd. It wasn’t theatrical. It was plausible.

And plausibility was the trap.

A German sniper scanning for targets would see the steam and think: There. That’s the position. His training would kick in—range estimation, wind, angle, patience. He would settle into stillness. He would become a statue with a scope.

That stillness was the only thing Hendrickx needed.

Because while the German stared at the cup, Hendrickx stared at the German.

Not at the obvious spot, but at the places German doctrine favored: slightly elevated ground, positions with multiple escape routes, gaps between branches where a rifle barrel could rest without snagging. Hendrickx watched for unnatural geometry—a straight line in a world of chaos, a triangle of shadow that didn’t belong, a glint that wasn’t dew.

Then he waited for the most human moment of all:

The moment a man decides he has the shot.

A sniper preparing to fire becomes predictable. He stops shifting. He stops scanning. He commits.

And commitment, in a war of angles, is exposure.

A technique that multiplied itself

On that first morning, Müller wasn’t the only one.

By midday, Hendrickx had made multiple entries in his notebook—each one repeating the same grim sequence:

Enemy observes decoy. Enemy settles. Enemy dies.

He changed positions frequently, not because he feared being found—though he did—but because repetition was a language. Every time Germans approached an area and found only a cup and a trace of heat, their minds scrambled for explanation. The forest was already breaking them. Hendrickx didn’t need to break their bodies alone; he needed to break their certainty.

The rumor grew quickly and unevenly, like mold in damp wood.

Some soldiers called him the Coffee Cup Ghost.

Others gave it a harsher name—something like the Coffee Cup Devil—because the forest already felt cursed, and a sniper who killed you while you stared at steam felt less like a man than a punishment.

The German response began the way it always begins: with professionalism.

They sent better observers. They widened their scans. They tried to ignore the obvious bait.

Hendrickx adapted.

When he noticed a “Type-C” kind of opponent—patient, refusing to take the shot—he added a second deception: a tiny movement in brush, a subtle rattle of metal that sounded like a man shifting gear, a second cup placed just wrong enough to look like a mistake.

He wasn’t inventing new tricks. He was doing the oldest thing in warfare:

Using the enemy’s expectations against them.

When the enemy learns the trick, the trick becomes the bait

By the fourth and fifth day, the Germans began trying to deceive him back—helmets on sticks, abandoned gear positioned too cleanly, bait arranged with military neatness. The forest turned into a chessboard of false shapes and waiting eyes.

But Hendrickx had grown up hunting. He knew what real presence looked like: crushed vegetation, disturbed ground, the casual disorder of living men. The German decoys were too perfect.

He didn’t shoot the decoys.

He shot the men watching them.

That was the true violence of his method: it punished not only action, but attention. It taught German soldiers that looking too hard at anything could be fatal. It made them hesitate. It made them slow. It made them afraid of their own instincts.

Even when Hendrickx wasn’t firing, he was shaping behavior.

Patrols changed routes. Observers delayed decisions. Some units refused to advance through certain sectors. The forest became heavier—not because trees moved, but because minds did.

The last round

After nearly a week operating with minimal sleep, soaked through, hands stiff with cold, Hendrickx found himself with ammunition running low and his body running even lower. He spotted a German machine-gun crew setting up in a position that would tear apart American infantry later.

Three men. One weapon. A future problem becoming present.

He had one armor-piercing round left.

The wind was gusting. Vegetation was thick. Light was failing. Every condition argued against the shot.

He took it anyway.

He read the wind by watching branches at different distances. He compensated for cold powder burn, for barrel temperature, for angle. He exhaled halfway and held—his Montana method—then fired.

The round struck the ammunition box, penetrated, and triggered a violent chain of detonations. The weapon was destroyed. The crew died in the chaos of their own linked rounds.

Three casualties recorded with one bullet.

And then, with nothing left to spend, Hendrickx slipped away through the same brutal forest that had swallowed entire companies.

When he reached his lines hours later, half-frozen and barely coherent, his first words weren’t about glory.

They were about adaptation.

“Need more ammunition,” he reportedly said.
“They’re learning the coffee trick. Have to change tactics.”

What the steam really meant

The legend of the Coffee Cup Ghost isn’t ultimately about marksmanship, though Hendrickx had plenty of that. It’s about a deeper idea that makes commanders uncomfortable because it refuses to scale neatly into doctrine:

One person can change the texture of a battlefield by changing what the enemy believes is real.

In the Hürtgen Forest, the cup was never the weapon. The weapon was the enemy’s certainty that the cup meant something—that steam equals a soldier, that a careless American must be punished, that the obvious target is the real target.

Hendrickx didn’t need to be invisible.

He only needed to make the enemy look the wrong way.

And once you understand that, the story stops being only a wartime anecdote and becomes something colder and more universal:

In any conflict—military or otherwise—the strongest habits become weaknesses the moment someone learns how to predict them.

The steam rose from the tin cup like a signal.

The Germans read it as opportunity.

Hendrickx read it as a lever.

And in the gray dawn of a ruined forest, where men hunted each other through splintered trees and soaked silence, a simple cup of coffee became a lesson written in blood:

The deadliest camouflage is not hiding yourself.
It’s controlling what your enemy sees.