The 333rd Field Artillery Battalion was a racially segregated African-American U.S. Army unit that fought in Europe during World War II. Its lineage traced back to the 333rd Field Artillery Regiment, formed in 1917, deactivated after World War I, and later reconstituted before being activated as a segregated unit at Camp Gruber, Oklahoma, in August 1942, with white officers commanding Black enlisted men.
The battalion landed at Normandy in early July 1944 and fought continuously as corps artillery through the summer, including at the siege of Brest, before moving into the Ardennes sector as part of the U.S. VIII Corps. In October 1944 it took up positions near Schönberg, Belgium, supporting the 106th Infantry Division. When the Battle of the Bulge began on 16–17 December 1944, German forces rapidly overran the area. While most of the battalion withdrew west toward Bastogne, Service and C Batteries were ordered to remain behind to cover the retreat of the 106th Infantry Division. These units suffered heavy losses; many soldiers were killed or captured, and the battalion lost most of its howitzers and vehicles in the retreat.
During the chaos, eleven soldiers escaped into the woods and made their way to the hamlet of Wereth, Belgium, where a local farmer, Mathias Langer, offered them shelter. A local resident alerted nearby SS troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division that Black American soldiers were hiding in the village. The soldiers surrendered without resistance but were marched to a nearby field, beaten, tortured, and shot. Their bodies were found six weeks later when Allied forces recaptured the area, showing signs of severe torture, including broken bones and stab wounds. As prisoners of war, the men should have been protected under the Geneva Conventions; their killing has been characterized as a war crime.
Research attributes the massacre to a scouting element of Schnelle Gruppe Knittel, commanded by Sturmbannführer Gustav Knittel. Knittel was convicted in 1946 at the Malmedy massacre trial and sentenced to life imprisonment for ordering illegal executions of American prisoners of war during the Battle of the Bulge; his sentence was later reduced, and he was released in December 1953, dying in 1976.
The 333rd Field Artillery Battalion suffered more casualties during the Battle of the Bulge than any other artillery unit in VIII Corps, with six officers and 222 enlisted men killed or captured. Survivors were folded into the 969th Field Artillery Battalion, which helped defend Bastogne alongside the 101st Airborne Division and received the Presidential Unit Citation. The battalion was later reconstituted, and its lineage continued through subsequent Army reorganizations. Memorials to the Wereth 11 have since been erected in Belgium and the United States, commemorating the men killed and African-American soldiers who served in the European theater of World War II.
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