The battalion operated in northern France with Third Army in 1944, where it fought in Brittany at the capture of Brest, and then along the Moselle River, reaching Germany at the end of the year.

[1] The 705th, under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Clifford D. Templeton, was ordered by Ninth Army to move south in the evening of 18 December, and join VIII Corps at Bastogne, a town on a critical road junction in the southern Ardennes.

[8] A platoon was sent north from Bastogne on the early morning of the 20th to help relieve Task Force Desobry, defending the northeast approaches to the town.

The platoon, accompanying a battalion of paratroopers, blunted the attack of the 2nd Panzer Division, destroying a number of German tanks.

[10] The battalion was formally attached to the 101st Airborne Division, the formation holding Bastogne, on 20 December,[4] and was engaged throughout the siege, fighting a number of small actions.

[1] It provided a major part of the 101st's combat capabilities; on the 21st, the total armoured reserve available other than the 705th amounted to about forty operable medium tanks.

[13] On the 25th, Christmas Day, it was engaged in the thick of the fighting; an attack by eighteen Panzer IVs of 15th Panzergrenadier Division was broken up by M18s of the battalion.

One half of the attack was caught in a close-range action by units of the 502nd PIR and a platoon of B Company; two M18s were knocked out at the start of the engagement, but the other pair quickly accounted for three Panzer IVs.

The 705th crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim on 29 March, and continued to advance across southern Germany in April, seeing action in a number of small engagements.