This episode of the Hardman podcast is brought to by Joe Garrison with Backwards Planning Financial.

By our friends at Alpine Gold, MaxD. trailers, Forgebeard Company, salt and strings butchery, premier body armor,

Reformation Heritage Books, Bonifist Business Solutions, White Tree Solutions, and by our supporters at patreon.com.

The thermometer by the commander's tent stood at 25 degrees below zero at dawn when the first men tried to dig graves.

Their picks were useless in the iron-hard earth.

Dynamite crews set off blast, but the earth heaved up in enormous black blocks of ice.

The commander halted them.

More than a hundred bodies waited in a row of tent stiffly frozen stacked like cordwood.

They'll stay like that until the spring thaw, the commander said,

but we can't leave them to the wild dogs.

Blast out those potato cellars.

When the holes had been open, the officer called in a battalion of tanks for the burial,

but there's no other way.

The beams of the headlights were lost in the swirling snow,

and the roaring of the motors was carried away into the wind as the tanks made to graves,

back and forth, crunching icy blocks of earth upon the frozen

bodies. The tanks buried the dead. The commander was Colonel Lewis Burwell Puller, 52 years old,

32 years a U.S. Marine. He was in the process of winning his fifth Navy Cross, the nation's second

highest military award.

No other Marine had won so many.

He was not a large man, but his slight spare frame was erect to the limit of its five feet,

ten inches.

...