The Case of the Walking Tree: Shifty Powers Outside Bastogne

On December 29, 1944, Easy Company was still holding the same stretch of the Bois Jacques it had occupied for over a week, with a clear view of Foy below and Noville roughly two kilometers north.

Darrell "Shifty" Powers came in from an observation post and told 1st Sergeant Lipton that a tree near Noville hadn't been there the day before. Lipton studied the spot through binoculars and, at first, saw nothing out of place among the dozens of trees lining the road.

Powers held his ground, and Lipton eventually caught movement near the base of the tree, then gun barrels, an 88mm battery the Germans had camouflaged in among the real trees. A forward observer confirmed it and called in a battery of 105s from Bastogne. Within an hour, the German position was abandoned. Powers, a Virginia hunter before the war, was known throughout the company for having the sharpest eyes anyone had ever seen, and Bastogne is where that reputation earned its clearest proof.

One thing that becomes clear when you visit the Bois Jacques is what kind of attention it took to notice something like that. The woods are dense and the sightlines are long, and Powers had memorized the treeline well enough to know exactly what didn't belong in it.

Today, the Bois Jacques still stands outside Bastogne, and the foxholes the men dug are still visible in the forest floor. Walking the treeline toward Noville, it's easy to understand why Lipton needed binoculars to see what Powers had already spotted with his own eyes.

Many of the places where Easy Company fought during the Battle of the Bulge can still be visited today. The villages, roads, and fields around Bastogne remain much as they were in the winter of 1944.

If you're interested in exploring more of the real locations connected to Easy Company, you can continue discovering them here:
https://bergsandburgs.com/pages/band-of-brothers-trip