What They Carried: 9th Armored Battle of the Bulge

December 1944. Troops of the U.S. 9th Armored Division's 52nd Armored Infantry Regiment manned their positions in the Ardennes. The troops attempted to stay warm as one of the coldest winters on record had begun to set in, but the weather would soon be the least of their concerns. On the morning of the 16th, troops were taken by surprise when a fierce artillery barrage targeted their positions. They didn't know it yet, but the 9th Armored was about to be on the receiving end of Germany's desperate final offensive, known today as the Battle of the Bulge. Soldiers of the 9th repelled some initial assaults and delayed the enemy's advance as additional divisions raced to reinforce the front, but up against overwhelming numbers and firepower, they were fighting a losing battle from the start. Only three days into the German offensive, much of the 9th had been annihilated while surviving troops retreated to the town of Bastogne to regroup and set up defenses. Most of these soldiers in the 9th were young men who had never seen combat, but in the face of an overwhelming surprise attack, they fought bravely at great cost against experienced enemy troops, and this is what they carried. Welcome back to What They Carried. Today, I'll be covering the equipment that the 9th Armored Division relied on to survive during the Battle of the Bulge. These soldiers used a wide variety of gear, but today I'll be covering everything that I'm wearing to give you a representative example of what these soldiers utilized. I'm gonna let some of these replacements man the line while I pull back to the rear to show you guys my loadout. Alright guys, I just stopped back at HQ, got a nice hot cup of coffee and warmed up a bit. I also grabbed my pack and my overcoat here to stay warm and dropped off my rifle, so now I'm ready to go through all the stuff I'm wearing. As you might have guessed, the Armored Infantry Regiments were still infantry soldiers, but they were attached to the Armored Division so they could work hand-in-hand with the tanks. A lot of the stuff I'll show today would also be indicative of what you'd see an armored crew member wearing or something like that in the 9th Armored, but there are some differences in specific items that the infantry troops would have, so I wanted to make it clear to you guys that that's what I'm representing. Let me start by showing you guys my haversack here and unpacking that so you can see what I'm carrying. Alright guys, let me put my pack down so you can see what I'm working with here. Now, this is the standard M1928 haversack. Oftentimes, troops would clip these onto their cartridge belt and it kind of doubles as suspenders, but Armored Infantry guys were working hand-in-hand with vehicles, so it wouldn't be uncommon for them to throw their haversack on a truck or on the side of a tank or something like that so they didn't have to carry it and then just sling it over their shoulder when they needed to go somewhere on foot. Now, these troops would typically also have a blanket roll that would have a shelter half, a few blankets, maybe a sleeping bag, some stuff like that to stay warm. I showed that in my last What They Carried video, so I'm not going to show that again here. It'd be the exact same. Just make sure you check out that 83rd Infantry What They Carried video if you haven't seen it already. So, the first thing you might notice here is I have a blanket around my haversack. This is often called a horseshoe roll because it's in the shape of a horseshoe. You might see soldiers doing this. I did this here because if soldiers couldn't get their bed roll, they might carry one or two blankets or maybe even roll up their overcoat like this and tie it around their haversack. So, I wanted to demonstrate that here. All right. Next up, tucked under the flap of my haversack, I have my dismounted raincoat. You don't often see guys wearing these in super cold weather because they would typically wear their overcoat. These aren't super waterproof, but it's cumbersome to wear this and a rain jacket. More often, you see guys using these as ground sheets to sleep on or tarps, ponchos, stuff like that. Some guys might carry this tucked on the back of their cartridge belt or something like that, but oftentimes, this is something you'd see left with a soldier's pack. Next up, I'll empty my meat can pouch here. I forgot. I have a couple little packs of caramels here that it looks like have gotten nice and smushed, but I'm sure they're still delicious. And then, I have my meat tin or mess kit here. Depending on the situation these soldiers were in, they might have this mess kit in their pack like you see here, or they might use this room for something else and leave the mess kit in their blanket roll, their duffel bag, something like that where they couldn't access it. Or some groups would just collect all the mess tins in one area, and when they served hot food, they would just serve it in the mess tins and collect them again so that troops didn't have to carry them around. They would just stay on a truck with the field kitchen equipment. And then, I have my utensils here, a fork and a knife. My spoon is in my pocket because no GI would go without their spoon. I wouldn't want to leave that in my haversack so that I could eat my rations and stuff with it. The next thing I have here is my M1943 folding shovel. Again, depending on the situation, a soldier may move this to their belt so they could have it on their person if they were leaving their haversack behind, but that just depends on the individual soldier. Next, if I unwrap this, I have an extra scarf here. Again, you might wear this. You might throw it in your pack depending on your situation. Same thing with this Jeep cap. I'm wearing a tanker hood right now, but if I didn't have that, I would probably keep my Jeep cap on my person. Next up here, I have the most important item, dry socks. I don't want to say clean dry socks because they're not all that clean, but they are dry, and that's what's important. Then, I have a couple candles here. If I was set up in a foxhole or a building or something and grabbed my haversack, I'd probably light some candles just to have some light at night. Next up, I have some little paper materials here, a couple army service edition books just to read for entertainment, and then I have a couple post cards here from areas in France that the division would pass through along with a letter and some other things like that. I also have my toiletries. Some guys might just stuff their toothbrush and things like that in their pockets, but oftentimes guys would leave that in their packs. It wasn't as high of a priority as food or ammo or anything like that. So in here, I have some shaving cream, a toothbrush, some extra toilet paper, a comb, some double-edged razor blades here, and a safety razor along with my tooth powder and a couple other items. Next up, I have an extra pair of underwear just in case. Got to be prepared. I have some pencils just for writing things down, stuff like that. I've got a K ration in here, an extra meat unit from another K ration, and some friction tape, and that's everything for the pack. Everything else I would need is carried on my person. All right, now I'll start going through the stuff that I'm wearing, and just so you guys know, if you're interested in knowing where I got this stuff or where you can get some of this stuff for yourself, I created a full document with links to where you can buy all of this stuff right now, and it's uploaded on my Patreon. So consider becoming a Patreon member using the link in the description, and you'll get access to that full document, the document from my last what they carried video, and a ton of other exclusive perks. Okay, so the next item I have here are my leather palm gloves. These are the standard type of gloves that soldiers were issued. They're pretty warm, and like the name suggests, they have leather palms, which is good for working and things like that, but the rest of them is made of wool, so they do stay pretty warm. The next thing I have here is my overcoat. You don't often see guys wearing these on the move. They're bulky, and they're tough to move around in. The overcoat itself weighs over seven pounds, and that's when it's dry, so when you're running through the snow and kneeling down and stuff like that, and the bottom of it gets soaking wet, it weighs probably double that. For that reason, you do see some guys cutting off the bottom of their overcoat to make it a little more usable, so it's not dragging through the snow, and typically, you either see guys wearing their overcoats or stashing them in their bedrolls or something like that. Sometimes guys would tie it to their haversack. You really don't want to carry this thing around. It's heavy and bulky. It would take up your entire pack if you tried to fit it inside. It's just not ideal, but if you're sitting in one position for a long time, this thing is a lifesaver. I'll take this overcoat off so you guys can see the rest of my gear. All right, next up, I'll cover some of my web gear here, so as you can see, I have a M1 Garand Bandolier. This holds six end block clips for my rifle, so 48 rounds. Oftentimes, soldiers were resupplied with these bandoliers. They would come in a big box already packed. They would have lot cards inside them indicating what type of ammo it was and when it was made, and there were also cardboard inserts in the bandolier to protect the ammo and probably keep it from poking through the bandolier. This was definitely the most convenient way to get resupplied with ammo because you could just grab a full bandolier and throw it over your shoulder, then keep moving. That ammo, of course, is for my M1 Garand rifle. You can see here that my M1 is set up with a web sling, and to maintain my M1, I have a full cleaning kit, some grease, and a combination tool that are stored inside the butt of the rifle. I also have a Mark II fragmentation grenade here just to keep it easily accessible. All right, next up, I have my cartridge belt around my waist. It holds 10 eight-round end block clips for the M1 Garand. I also have my bayonet on the side here. Now, soldiers would sometimes keep these on their haversacks, but if they were leaving their haversack behind on a vehicle or in a foxhole and going out on the move, they would probably put their bayonet and maybe their shovel, too, on their belt. Behind me, I have my canteen, and my canteen cup is pulled out and filled with coffee right now, but that would go in there, too. And then on the side here, I have my first aid pouch that would contain a Carlyle bandage and either wound tablets or sulfa powder to help disinfect a wound. I also kept a smoke grenade tucked in the back of my cartridge belt just in case. That's it for the web gear. Some troops may have more or less, depending on what they were doing. You might see troops at this time carrying a lightweight gas mask bag with their gas mask and other chemical protective gear, but it was also common for those to be held in reserved and only issued out if needed, so I don't have one in my kit. Next up, let me tell you about my helmet that I have here. This is just your standard M1 helmet from World War II, nothing super special about it, except you can see that it has this white coating on it. Once it started snowing during the Battle of the Bulge, troops had to find ways to start camouflaging their gear. Your helmet was probably the most important thing to camouflage because this is what the enemy would see if you were poking your head out of a foxhole or peeking around a corner, anything like that. The standard olive drab color that the helmets were painted when they were issued would stick out like a sore thumb in snowy conditions like this, so troops tried to turn their helmets white any way they could. Some troops painted their helmets white, that was a good short-term option, but then once the snow melts, you're stuck with a white helmet and you have to try to find green paint to repaint it or you're going to have an even less camouflaged helmet. Other troops used white fabric to camouflage their helmets, oftentimes any white sheets or doilies that they could find laying around. Other troops were issued snow camouflage suits, which I do believe came with a white helmet cover, but the method that I use here is called whitewashing. Helmets weren't the only thing that needed to be camouflaged, so the army put out instructions for creating a whitewash recipe that would make a white coating on tanks, helmets, anything you needed to turn white, but it could be washed off easily unlike paint once the snow melted. Let me show you how I whitewashed this helmet. I started by combining powder, lime, salt, and water in the proportions specified in the original World War II recipe. Then I mixed that together, painted it on the helmet, and waited for it to dry. And after using it for a bit and getting a little brown dirt on there, I think it really blends in with the environment even better than a pure white helmet would. During the Battle of the Bulge, you would see soldiers with whitewashed helmets along with all the other types of helmet camouflage that I mentioned, in addition to helmets that weren't camouflaged at all, helmets with helmet nets on them, all those combinations. I do think it was a bit more common for soldiers in armored divisions to have whitewashed or white-painted helmets because they were already camouflaging their tanks and vehicles to be white, so why not just slap a little on your helmet while you're at it? Alright, now I'll take my helmet off and set that with my other gear so I can tell you about the next item here, which is my winter combat uniform. This was a three-piece uniform, and as the name suggests, it was designed for winter combat. Now, just because it was designed in three pieces does not mean that all soldiers got all three of these pieces. Oftentimes, troops would only get the jacket or maybe some combination of items. People often call this the tanker uniform because it was very commonly issued to armored troops, but as the name suggests, this was meant for any soldiers who were in winter combat. So I'll start by telling you about the first piece of the winter combat uniform, which is the winter combat helmet. This is often called the tanker hood, and don't let the official name winter combat helmet throw you off. This is just a warming garment. It doesn't offer any protection like a steel helmet. Like I said, this uniform was used a lot by armored troops, and this hood has little straps on the back here to connect this to a tanker's helmet. These are used by infantry guys a lot too if they could get their hands on them. These are super warm and nice to wear, and they were in very high demand, and this even made an appearance on my list of soldiers' favorite pieces of gear during World War II for that reason. As a bonus, at least according to my friend Zeke, it makes you look like a medieval peasant. Next up is the winter combat jacket, often called the tanker jacket. This one is the second pattern jacket. The first pattern tanker jacket have a few differences, most notably the pockets. The first pattern jacket has patch pockets that are just kind of sewn on the outside, and this second pattern one has these slit pockets that are very deep and a lot better in my opinion. Given that this was designed for winter combat, it has a number of features meant to keep soldiers warm while they were fighting. The jacket has a thick wool lining. It has a zippered opening with a flap behind it to really seal in the warmth, as opposed to some jackets which only had button closures. It has these elastic-like cuffs and collar, again to really seal in that warmth. It has that same stretchy material around the bottom here, which again helps keep you warm, but also holds the jacket tight to your body, which was loved by armored crewmen. They often didn't like some of the other jackets, like the M43 jacket, because it was big and bulky, and even though a lot of infantry troops like that due to the pocket space and stuff, when you're inside a tank, you don't want anything on that could get snagged on something or stuck. It also has a canvas exterior, which is, I would say, water resistant. It's not waterproof, but it does shed the snow pretty well. You can see I have my 9th armored patch sewn onto my tanker jacket. That was common for guys in the 9th. The pockets on this second pattern tanker jacket, I would say they're better than the M41 jacket, but not as roomy as the M43 jacket, since there's only two of them and they don't have button closures. Inside of my pockets here, I have some more caramels. Can't get enough of those. Another K-Ration meat unit. A C-Ration can. Now, this one's already been opened, but I've been stuffing some other stuff in here to kind of protect it from getting crushed. So in here, I have some candied peanuts that came in the C-Ration, along with my soluble coffee, some matches that I put in there to keep them a little bit more dry, some boiled sweets, and a few sugar cubes if I decide to make that coffee. And that's everything I have in my pockets here. If you guys haven't noticed the trend, I'm mostly carrying food, water, and ammunition on my person. Those were definitely soldiers' top priorities, and even something like a toothbrush was a lower priority item that they might leave in their pack on a vehicle. It just wasn't important as the stuff that would keep you alive. Alright, if I take off my winter combat jacket, you can see I'm also wearing the winter combat trousers. These are often called tanker bibs, and these are actually the first pattern. There was a second pattern that came after these. Now, you saw that I had my tanker jacket on on top of my tanker bibs. Sometimes, you actually see guys wearing the tanker jacket with the bibs pulled up on top of it. I think that was just a personal preference thing, and it seems like that was also more common among armored troops. Like I said, they didn't wanna have any loose items that could get snagged inside of their vehicles. So by zipping up their bibs on top of their jacket, it gave them a very streamlined profile and kept everything tight so it wouldn't get snagged inside of the tank. Like I mentioned, these are the first pattern tanker bibs. The second pattern had some really important improvements over these ones. These first pattern ones have a single pass-through here to access your pants pockets. The second pattern had two of those. I don't know why they didn't do that in the first place. I think it's pretty obvious you'd wanna be able to access your pockets. The first patterns also usually have these straps sewn on instead of having these rivets that you can pop off here. I don't know why these first pattern ones have rivets on them. Maybe they were repaired at some point or they were kind of an in-between pattern. The second pattern ones also had snaps at the bottom of the pant legs to help tighten them up around your boots. These first pattern ones have ties which can work, but even on this pair, some of the ties are ripped off from being used, so I think the snaps were a better idea. The most important difference, however, is that the second pattern tanker bibs have a small zipper down by your crotch so that if you needed to go to the bathroom, you didn't have to take off all of your gear to do that. Having to take off my jacket, my cartridge belt, everything else that I'm wearing just so that I can unzip this zipper to go to the restroom is really inconvenient, so I can see why they added that little zipper. All right, if I take those off, you can see here I have this five-button wool sweater. This is the standard high-neck sweater. There's nothing too special about this. This one that I'm wearing is a later pattern. It's a little darker in color than some of the early war ones, and this one is an original. It has tons of holes in it, so shout out to all the moths who chowed down on this before I bought it. Under the wool sweater, I just have my standard wool shirt and pants or my ODs as World War II soldiers typically called them. OD for olive drab, the color of the uniform. This is pretty much as standard as it gets. Basically, every soldier would have the wool shirt and pants in the European theater. A lot of the other items weren't as universal like the tanker jacket. You might see some variety there with soldiers also wearing M41 and M43 jackets, but the wool uniform is pretty ubiquitous. Let me show you what's in the pockets of my wool uniform. In my breast pocket here, I have some more toilet paper. Gotta keep that on you. A Bible. If you were religious, you almost always had one of these on you, and I also have a little vial of halosone tablets to purify water if needed. In my other pocket, I have some more matches here. A spoon. Like I said, no soldier would go anywhere without their spoon. You gotta be able to eat, even if your other utensils were left in your pack or something. And I have some more paper items like postcards, letters, all kinds of stuff like that. These breast pockets are nice since they have button closures, and also since they're typically under your jacket, you can keep things in there that you want to stay relatively dry. The only thing is, in my experience, you don't want to put anything too heavy in these pockets because it can start to weigh them down and pull the collar of your shirt up against the neck, which makes this even more uncomfortable than it needs to be. The wool trousers also have really nice pockets. They're pretty much the same pockets you would see on a modern pair of jeans, but they're even a little bit deeper. So in this first side pocket here, I have a TL-122B flashlight. Not every soldier was issued one of these, but these were in high demand, so if soldiers could get their hands on them, they would. A lot of soldiers carried pocket knives. Oftentimes it was a lineman's knife, an engineer's pocket knife like this, or some other type of private purchase knife. In my other pocket, I have a few pieces of gum, as well as another packet of instant coffee and some more sugar. And in my back pockets, I just have a little sewing kit that I can use to repair my gear if needed. And for my base layer here, I have wool underwear. This is a wool undershirt and wool long johns. These lighter color ones are the earlier version. You would probably see a mix of these and the olive drab colored ones being used at this time. They make for a pretty good warming layer, but they are mostly made of wool, so they don't really wick the moisture off your skin. In my experience, once you start moving around with all this warm clothing on, no matter how cold it is, you'll start sweating pretty much instantly. Then once you stop moving, you're wet, and that just makes you even colder. Thankfully, the wool does still do a pretty good job of keeping you warm, even when it's a little bit damp. Now underneath this, I... Nah, I'm just kidding. Not today. And the final thing I'll show you here is my double buckle boots. You might be able to tell these are made with rough out leather, and soldiers would dub them with a dubbing compound to keep them waterproof. That dubbing compound was like an oily, waxy substance that would get soaked into the leather to help repel water. But even after they were dubbed, soldiers complained that they weren't super waterproof. A lot of troops, if they were lucky, received overshoes, which were big boots that you'd wear on top of your normal boots. That extra layer helped to keep your feet a little more dry and warm than just these boots would. I think the shoe packs were even better. Those were kind of like a modern duck boot, but most soldiers didn't receive those until just after the Battle of the Bulge. Well, guys, that's everything. I tried not to spend too much time focusing on things that I covered in depth in my last What They Carried video, so if you haven't already seen that one, definitely go check it out right now. Before I wrap up, a few quick thank yous are in order. First, I'd like to thank my friend Tommy Dilger for shooting the intro shots for this video. He shot that for me while he was filming his upcoming documentary at a recent reenactment event. He's currently fundraising for his documentary, and you can help support his project through the GoFundMe link in the description. Next, I want to thank my buddy Daniel for hooking me up with that tanker hood. You can check out the U.S. Navy WWII reenactment group he's a part of on Instagram at Pacific Fleet WWII. They do reenactments on real WWII ships in California, and they're recruiting if that's something you're interested in. Finally, I'd like to thank my hotshot tier supporters on Patreon this month. Corey Mahler, Emily Hensley, Mark, YeechiNC, NCR Trooper Scout, and Rocco D'Zaro. Thank you guys so much for your support. You made it possible for me to be able to buy the gear that I showed in this video. If you're not already a member of my Patreon, please consider joining right now using the link in the description. When you do, you'll get access to the full document showing you where you can buy all of the items that I showed in this video, along with access to my members-only WWII Discord server, regular updates and behind-the-scenes info from me, and exclusive unreleased content. Thanks so much for watching, guys. I'm gonna go warm up, but I'll see you in the next one.