from a Philadelphia newspaper

CITY HERO BLOCKED GERMAN ATTACK

How Staff Sergeant William Lebenz(sic), 2083 E. Pacific st. kept a machine gun going when all the other men on a roadblock near Bastogne were wounded and, almost single-handed, halted a German attack until American wounded could be evacuated is told by the War Department Bureau of Public Relations.
     Sergeant Labenz, 33, and father of two girls and a boy, is back home for a furlough with his wife, Elizabeth, his mother, Mrs. Eva Labenz, and Evelyn, nine, Billie, six and Joan, three after seven months of almost constant combat on the western front.  He hold the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, the Purple Heart for a battle wound and the Combat Infantryman Badge for exemplary conduct in action against the enemy.
     Describing the action at a village near Bastogne in a War Department interview, he said:
     "The Jerries were advancing along two roads leading into the village.  We had been under heavy shelling and had suffered many casualties.  But that German advance had to be stopped until we got our wounded out for, as everybody probably knows now, the Krauts weren't taking any prisoners at that point.
     "I'm a machine-gun section sergeant.  I placed the guns where I thought they would do the most good.  The Krouts(sic), who were really fired up, drove toward us, spraying us with rifle, machine piston and automatic weapons fire.  Finally all of the men on the road block were wounded except myself.  So I took over a light machine gun and kept it hot.  I didn't know how long I'd last, but to tell the truth I wasn't thinking about that.  I was concentrating on killing as many Krauts as I could.  And finally they quit coming."
      He was wounded above the right eye by a shell fragment in the Allied break-through at St. Lo last summer, but managed to get the blood stopped and kept on fighting because "that was our first big chance to keep Jerry on the run and I surely wasn't going to let a little nick over the eye keep me from enjoying it."