Los Angeles Times | Feb 20, 2015 | by Tony Perry
In the first desperate hours of the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944, a young Army lieutenant was given an order that seemed impossible: stop a fast-moving column of German tanks from advancing.
The three soldiers assigned to the lieutenant were not trained in anti-tank warfare. The only artillery piece available was designed to bring down airplanes, not tanks. And the firing position provided no cover if the tanks returned fire.
A battlefield dispatch from The Associated Press described what happened:
"Anti-aircraft gunners, who stayed behind when the infantry withdrew, played a vital role in preventing a major German breakthrough in Belgium. ... One battery, commanded by Lt. Leon Kent of Los Angeles, knocked out five tanks, including one King Tiger tank, in two hours."
The three soldiers received Silver Stars for bravery. Kent, who stayed beside his men during the fight, was meritoriously promoted to captain. He was supposed to receive a Silver Star, but the paperwork was lost. In 1998, at the nudging of a congressman, the oversight was corrected and the award bestowed.
Kent, who returned to a career as a lawyer and bowling alley owner after the war, died Feb. 12 in Beverly Hills, his home for several decades. He was 99 and had pneumonia, his family said.
He always downplayed any sense that he had acted bravely during that attack. But he never dismissed the danger that his soldiers faced from German tanks.
"If they got one shot at us, we were dead," he told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. "I remember thinking: Do the shells go through you or do you go up in pieces?"
By stopping the German column, Allied troops who had retreated were able to regroup and begin countermeasures.
"What Capt. Kent showed was extraordinary leadership," retired Army Maj. Gen. John Crowe said before a 2011 ceremony at the December 1944 Historical Museum in La Gleize, Belgium. "He wouldn't ask his troops to do anything he wouldn't do himself. That's the kind of leadership that inspires troops."
After the war, local residents erected a plaque that, in French, reads: "Here the invader was stopped."
Leon Earl Kent was born June 23, 1915, in New York. He graduated with honors from Dartmouth College in 1935 and Yale Law School in 1938. He moved to Los Angeles in 1939 to practice law.
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