Early in the morning on December 18 1944 an American convoy of the 14th Cavalry Group was ambushed by SS-Kampfgruppe Hansen. With help from the heavy fog Hansen achieved complete surprise and forced the allies to abandon their vehicles and pull back to the town of Poteau. A couple of Waffen-SS war correspondents who arrived at the scene shortly after the attack, took some staged and posed shots for the benefit of the Deutsche Wochenschau that have gone down in documentary history.