They Mocked His “Stupid” Grenade Trap — Until It Killed 23 Germans in 19 Seconds

Video Description

Discover the unbelievable true story of Corporal Daniel “Danny” Reeves, the twenty-year-old engineering student turned paratrooper who, during the siege of Bastogne, built what his own squad called “the Stupid Trap”—an impossibly complex web of fifty-seven grenades, twenty-three trigger wires, triple-layered redundancy systems, and overlapping kill zones that would become the most devastating improvised defensive weapon of the entire Battle of the Bulge. While freezing soldiers mocked his “Ridiculous Rube Goldberg,” sergeants threatened to dismantle it, and officers dismissed it as a waste of precious grenades, Reeves—son of a Pennsylvania mining engineer and trained in mechanical design—quietly applied principles of redundancy, blast geometry, failure tolerance, and probabilistic overlap to create a defensive system more advanced than anything in U.S. doctrine. And at zero four seventeen on December twenty-second, when a twenty-three-man German infiltration team stepped into the kill zone, Reeves’ contraption unleashed a nineteen-second cascade of explosions as fifty-four grenades detonated in perfectly sequenced waves, annihilating the entire assault element before a single American fired a shot. What followed became legend: German commanders halting attacks, intelligence units convinced the Americans had deployed new automated minefields, two more Reeves-designed systems killing forty-seven additional enemy soldiers, and officers from across Bastogne crowding into the frozen perimeter to study the carnage left by one corporal’s ingenuity. Drawing from after-action reports, captured German documents, engineering analyses that later shaped Claymore mine development, and testimonies from the very soldiers who once mocked him, this documentary reveals how Reeves turned standard-issue grenades into a synchronized defensive network that reshaped modern combat engineering—proving that brilliance often looks like madness until the moment it works flawlessly. Reeves’ “Stupid Trap” didn’t just save an exposed sector of Bastogne; it demonstrated that one soldier thinking systematically can alter the course of a battle, silence every critic, and change military doctrine for generations.