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By 1530 2nd Battalion had crossed the field and was snuggled up to the underside of the shoulder. By dark it had worked its way around to a draw on the southeast corner of Cobru.
Speirs held a meeting of the officers and 1st Sergeant Lipton. He outlined the plan of attack for the morning, up the draw to Noville, with 2nd Platoon on the left, 3rd on the right. Friendly tanks were supposed to be coming up on the right in support on the Foy-Noville road. After the meeting Speirs told Lipton to lead the 2nd platoon in the attack.
Lipton pulled 2nd platoon together to brief the men. Winters stood to the side, listening. Lipton told them the distance to the town was about 800 meters, that they should move quickly to get down the road and into the shelter of the buildings, that they should clear out the buildings working together as teams with rifles and grenades, that the mortar men should be ready to drop rounds on German strong points, that the machine gunners should set up and lay down a base of fire in support, that they should not bunch up, and so on. Winters' sole comment was that the distance was more like 1,000 meters.
As the meeting broke up, the men could hear tank motors starting up and tanks moving around. It was not possible to determine if it was Germans pulling out or Americans coming along the Foy-Noville road.
Winters remembers the night as the coldest of his life. There was little shelter, only hastily dug foxholes. The men had worked up a sweat getting to Cobru. They shivered through the night. They would lie down and drift off, only to be awakened by intense shivering in their now-frozen clothes. Most gave up on trying to sleep. It got so bad that at one point Winters thought about ordering a night attack, but decided against it because of the danger of shooting each other in the confusion.
Lipton was uneasy about leading 2nd Platoon on an attack without knowing what was up ahead, so he decided to go forward with a radio man to scout the situation in Noville. The two men came to a barn on the outskirts of the village, entered it by a door in the back and felt their way through to a door that opened into a courtyard near the main road through Noville. Everything was quiet. Lipton called Speirs on the radio to tell the C.O. where he was and to request permission to scout the town. He said he could see some Sherman tanks up ahead and asked if Speirs knew if American armor had already taken the town. Speirs did not know and told Lipton to look around.
Lipton moved silently forward to the tanks. They were knocked out. American bodies lay frozen and strewn around them. They had been left there when Team Desobry had withdrawn from Noville on December 20, almost a month earlier. The Germans still held the town. Lipton and his radio man withdrew.
The attack jumped off at dawn, January 15. There was resistance, strongest on the right hand side of the road against 3rd platoon. The 2nd platoon quickly got into the center of Noville and up to the burned-out Shermans. The 3rd platoon got into a burned-out building and set up a CP. Over the radio came a message, "Friendly armor on the right."