Soldier who intercepted warning of the Battle of the Bulge

Born: November 2, 1924;

Died: August 22, 2017

HARRY Kulkowitz, who has died aged 94, was an army signals interceptor on the Ardennes forest frontline near Bastogne, Belgium, when just after midnight on December 16, 1944, he picked up a morse code message from a Nazi radio dispatcher. Most of Kulkowitz's intercepts got sent back to be decoded by the Enigma machine at Bletchley Park in the UK but this one was uncoded and he recognized the "fist," or distinctive sending style of the German radio operator.

"Prepare for a final battle for victory," was the German message. Kulkowitz, with the rank Tec5 in the 114th Radio Signals Company, passed it to his "trick chief," the sergeant who decided

which messages to pass on to the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) headed by US General Dwight Eisenhower. The sergeant decided that the German message was

disinformation since the Nazis were on the defensive, close to defeat and the allies were poised to push forward through Germany to Berlin. The message was never passed on.

At 5.30am the same day, all hell broke loose. German heavy artillery pounded allied positions, including the halftrack vehicle in which Kulkowitz operated, while hundreds of Panzer tanks, as well as hundreds of thousands of German troops broke through allied lines. The now-famous Battle of the Bulge had begun and Kulkowitz was perhaps the only allied soldier who was not surprised. The 40-day battle was seen as Hitler's last desperate attempt to defend Germany, the "Bulge" referring to the large gap the Nazis punched through allied front lines.

The battle was the bloodiest of the war for U.S. forces, which suffered at least 19,000 killed, 46,000 wounded and 23,000 missing. British forces lost 200 men, with a further 1,200 wounded, captured or missing. The Germans reported at least 67,000 casualties, dead or wounded. "Had my sergeant listened, I don't know, I think we could have saved thousands of lives," Kulkowitz said later.

Kulkowitz got no formal recognition for his work on that first day. In the blockbuster 1965 movie Battle of the Bulge, for dramatic effect, it was a fictional military intelligence officer (played by Henry Fonda) who warned that the Nazis were planning a counter-offensive

in the Ardennes but was not believed by his superiors.

Six months before the Battle of the Bulge, Kulkowitz had survived landing on Utah Beach on D-day. As a freighter dropped soldiers onto landing craft, the swell of the Channel was such that the two vessels often collided and some men scaling down ropes were crushed in the attempt or dragged down to the seabed by their 40-pound packs. "You had to time it just so,” Kulkowitz said, "but in the meantime the Germans were shooting at you and the guy above you was yelling ‘get going kid.’ For me that was the scariest time of the whole war. Everything else was anticlimatic.”

As he pushed out from Utah beach, Kulkowitz found himself behind a hedgerow when he heard, from the other side, the murmuring of what he assumed was an enemy soldier. Through the

hedge, he asked the voice to identify himself but it continued to make undecipherable sounds. He unloaded his Thomson sub-machine gun through the hedge and the "voice" went silent. Only at daybreak did he realize he had killed a cow.

As he pushed forward towards his objective, Saint Lô, U.S. Air Force fighters and bombers dropped smoke bombs to demarcate the Nazi frontlines. But winds drove the smoke backwards and the US planes later bombed their own US soldiers, killing many. When, many years later in the US, Kulkowitz met one of those Air Force pilots, his first reaction was "you bastard, you tried to kill me!" but the two D-Day vets remained friends for life.

On June 6, 2014, the 70th anniversary of D-Day, President Barack Obama made a speech on Omaha beach, not far from Utah beach, in which he referred to Kulkowitz by name: "Normandy was democracy's beachhead. And our victory in that war decided not just a century, but shaped the security and well-being of all posterity," Mr Obama said. "Think of Harry Kulkowitz, the Jewish son of Russian immigrants, who fudged his age at enlistment so he could join his friends in the fight. And don't worry, Harry, the statute of limitations has expired. Harry came ashore at Utah Beach on D-Day. And now that he's come back, we said he could have anything he wants for lunch today. He helped liberate this coast, after all. But he said a hamburger would do fine. What's more American than that?"

Harry Kulkowitz was born in the Bronx, New York, on November 2, 1924 to a tailor father and mother who had both fled eastern Europe, via Sweden, after the First World War. When the

US entered the Second World War, he enlisted six months before his 18th birthday in 1942, lying about his age. "As an American and a Jew, I felt it was my duty to enlist," he said.

After the war, Kulkowitz first opened a photographic portrait studio in New York and later opened and ran the Mad Batter Restaurant and Carroll Villa hotel in Cape May, New Jersey, now

run by his son Mark who continues to host get-togethers for vets. Harry Kulkowitz was awarded the French Legion of Honour in 2009 and returned several times to Normandy to a warm welcome from local officials and citizens.

Harry Kulkowitz is survived by his children Mark, Sigrid and Susan, as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

PHIL DAVISON