Lieutenant Alexander Mur­dock ROSS was Gun Posi­tion Of­fi­cer of F Troop.

About 0030 hours 17 Ap­ril 1945 the en­emy moun­ted a bri­gade at­tack on the town in an ef­fort to break thro­ugh to re­join his main for­ces.  Un­der cover of a heavy wood the en­emy suc­cee­ded in get­ting into the troop com­mand post.  Ap­pre­cia­ting that he could do noth­ing for his troop from an en­emy oc­cu­pied house, Lieu­ten­ant Ross suc­cess­fully cov­ered his com­mand post staff while they got out of the house and on to the gun po­si­tion, where they dug in, pre­pared to fight the guns to the bar­rel.  The gun po­si­tion was be­ing heav­ily mor­tared and soon was sub­jec­ted to me­dium ma­chine gun fire from both flanks as well as the front.  In spite of this cone of fire, Lieu­ten­ant Ross went to each gun de­tach­ment in turn to is­sue clear and con­cise or­ders that the po­si­tion would be held and that ev­ery round of small arms am­mu­ni­tion would be used only for a sure hit.

As a result, when the en­emy ar­rived in strength, only vi­si­ble tar­gets were en­gaged, that is at about four feet.  Soon the troop was com­pletely sur­roun­ded and cut off; it was as­sumed that all ranks had been ei­ther kil­led or cap­tured.  But such was far from true.  This of­fi­cer with his troop, for six and one-​half hours, beat off at­tack after at­tack and de­fen­ded the guns suc­cess­fully un­til af­ter first light when as­sis­tance ar­rived to find the men clean­ing up and ha­ving break­fast.  Dur­ing the night he made two trips across 300 yards of open coun­try swept by me­dium ma­chine gun fire to con­tact the in­fan­try be­hind him to get a mes­sage to his bat­tery com­man­der at bat­tal­ion head­quar­ters to pro­duce fire from one of the other bat­ter­ies.

In spite of the fact that Lieu­ten­ant Ross is trained as an ar­til­lery offi­cer and has always been em­ployed as such, his calm, cool, stout­hear­ted de­vo­tion to duty would be ex­cep­tion­ally out­stan­ding in a trained, bat­tle-​tried in­fan­try bat­tal­ion.