He was wounded in the leg at some point during this stand. He kept firing.
The German infantry, unable to advance with effective machine gun fire coming from an obscured position, fell back toward Holtzwihr. Without infantry support, the German armor also withdrew. The combined effect — Murphy’s fire, the artillery he had directed, and the withdrawal of the German infantry — ended the counterattack on Company B’s position.
Murphy stayed on the M10 until his ammunition ran out. When the gun was empty, he climbed down, bleeding from his leg wound, and walked back to his men in the forest. Shortly after he left the vehicle, the M10 exploded.
## The Counterattack
Murphy refused immediate medical treatment. He organized his eighteen men and led them in a counterattack that restored Company B’s original forward positions at the south edge of the Bois de Riedwihr.
The counterattack with eighteen men, following a defensive stand against six tanks and 250 infantry, is the second half of the January 26 action. The first half was the defensive stand; the second was the reassertion of the company’s position. Murphy would not accept the defensive outcome as the final one.
The men spent the night of January 26-27 among the dead near the Colmar Canal — the specific notation in the HistoryNet account that places the aftermath of the action in the physical context of what a defensive position that has just been fought over looks like.
On January 27, the 3rd Battalion of the 30th Infantry Regiment, reinforced with replacements, retook Holtzwihr. By January 28, the areas east of the Ill River and north of the Colmar Canal were clear of German forces. The tactical objective that Company B had been holding the approaches to had been secured.