Eighty years ago, on December 16, 1944, Hitler’s last-ditch effort to stave off defeat in World War II got underway. Using the same trick Germany had used twice before (1914 and 1940), they launched a massive offensive push through the Ardennes that came to be known as the Battle of the Bulge. To quote Wikipedia, the source of all vaguely accurate knowledge:
The Germans’ initial attack involved 410,000 men; just over 1,400 tanks, tank destroyers, and assault guns; 2,600 artillery pieces; 1,600 anti-tank guns; and over 1,000 combat aircraft, as well as large numbers of other armored fighting vehicles (AFVs). These were reinforced a couple of weeks later, bringing the offensive’s total strength to around 450,000 troops, and 1,500 tanks and assault guns. Between 63,222 and 98,000 of these men were killed, missing, wounded in action, or captured. For the Americans, out of a peak of 610,000 troops, 89,000 became casualties out of which some 19,000 were killed. The “Bulge” was the largest and bloodiest single battle fought by the United States in World War II and the third deadliest campaign in American history.
Though well-planned and executed, achieving the element of surprise against outmanned and outgunned American forces, German forces soon bogged down due to harsh weather conditions and fiercer-than-anticipated resistance. In particular, the town of Bastogne, through which all seven main roads in the Ardennes highlands converged, was supposed to fall early in the campaign, paving the way to the Meuse River and the ultimate objective of Antwerp beyond. Instead, American forces held off the Germans just long enough for the 101st Airborne and other forces to mount a perimeter defense around Bastogne.
Surrounded on all sides, outnumbered 5-1, low on supplies and ill-equipped for cold weather fighting, American forces were asked to surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe answered with one of the most famous replies in the history of warfare: “NUTS!” American forces would stave off repeated attacks, until a resupply airdrop on the 26th and elements of Patton’s Third Army arrived on the 27th to lift the siege of Bastogne.
Another hard month of fighting lay ahead (aided by better weather and America’s overwhelming air superiority) until the “bulge” was entirely eradicated, but after Bastogne, Hitler’s last great gamble had failed.
Here’s the Simple History video overview:
The Battle of the Bulge produced 21 Medal of Honor winners.
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Tags: Battle of the Bulge, Congressional Medal of Honor, Military, video, World War II
Back in the 1960s my kid brother and I always observed Dec 16 by playing a game of Avalon-Hill’s Battle of the Bulge.
My dad was a veteran of the battle. His closest thing to hand-to-hand combat there was exchanging obscenities over the radio net with his German counterparts. He was in the Signal Corps, operating a battalion radio net for the 82nd Airborne. (No – he wasn’t jump qualified. They were short radio operators so they put him in as a replacement after Market Garden.)
While they both only focus on the 101st, Battleground and Band of Brothers give a good (if dramatized) picture of how bad things got in the Bastogne perimeter.
The offensive was poorly planned and disowned by the senior German command. The Germans used their last reserves to fulfill Hitler’s fantasy. The objective was Antwerp and the encirclement of an entire army group. This was to be accomplished with newly raised, poorly trained troops who were badly supplied. Most of the German mortized formations lacked significant numbers of vehicles and were reduced to the use of bicycles. Shortages were so bad that an essential part of the plan depended on the seizure of Allied POL. German plans for the use of airborne troops collapsed because their weren’t sufficient trained parachutists left nor troop carrier pilots for such airborne tactics.
Worse when an operation depends on bad weather to prevent the use of Allied air forces you get an idea of what German chances actually were. Slim and none. Had Bastogne fallen how much further could the Germans have advanced before they were crushed? Probably ten-thirty miles beyond the Meuse and then the inevitable counter attacks and airpower would have crushed the Germans.
These resources deployed in the East could have made a major difference against the Russian January Polish offensive. Hitler’s fantasies actually shortened the war by six months.
Hitler had all the strategic genius of an average corporal, just as Victor Davis Hanson has said. Heedlessness of risk might gain you a few undeserved victories, but is a very poor way to run a war.
I’ve read that the divisions held back until the Ardennes Offensive were earlier earmarked for Operation Tannenbaum, the on-and-off again invasion of Switzerland. (Why? Because, Hitler.)And that if they had done that they would have beaten down the Swiss, who would have fought hard, but then those divisions would have been depleted and unusable for something like the Ardennes Offensive. “Every Swiss a marksman,” was true in those days. I’ve seen pictures of elderly Swiss bankers in topcoats and top hats walking around Zurich, all with their k31s (the best rifle that never went to war) slung over their shoulders ready for 24-hour national mobilization.
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My Dad who was born in 1930 was too young for the war but he loved reading military history and watching war movies. His favorite was Battleground about the Bulge and a one squad of the 101st. I wasn’t that impressed with it, I thought Pork Chop Hill was superior (he liked that one a lot also).
But I recommend this YouTube video on the making of the film: https://youtu.be/ydlLCxmZaZs?feature=shared
It made me appreciate that it was a groundbreaking film and for its time very impactful.
My dad, born in 1923, spent ‘42 and a good part of ‘43 as part of the Army Special Training Program (ASTP) at East Texas State Teachers College (now East Texas A&M) training and studying to be an engineer. Then in late ‘43 the call came from the War Department that what the army really needed was infantry so the ASTP programs were disbanded and the guys at Commerce, Texas were incorporated into a Pennsylvania National Guard unit, the 99th ID.
Skipping ahead several months, the 99th ended up in Luxembourg/Belgium in the Ardennes.
So on 16 Dec my dad was walking company area patrol when the I SS Panzer, the spearhead of the Sixth Panzer Army decided to light up the country side. When the artillery subsided my dad was ordered to take a patrol to go check on the platoon outpost. As he described it, about halfway to the outpost, “we got into one hell of a firefight.” In an exchange in the woods my dad got separated from his guys and coming around a corner he came face to face with a guy in feldgrau who got off the first shot. That round passed through his left hand, entered the stock of his Garand, traveled down and exited the trigger housing which cut the skin between the middle fingers of his right hand and the impact knocked him down. The German jabbed with his bayonet but “I was wearing so many clothes he couldn’t find me.”
For the next several hours my dad played Indian in the woods until he found an American from another company. They started trying to find friendlies until late the next morning they stumbled into a German patrol and became Kreigsgefangener and got relieved of his galoshes. Spent several days walking east under guard and ended up at a POW camp near Regensburg where he stayed until early April.
The 99th fell back to Elsenborn Ridge and along with the 2nd ID held the north shoulder of the Bulge.
Never heard that story until I went on a battlefield trip in 1988 with my Dad. When we got back to Texas I asked him to write it down.
The Bulge holds a special place to me. Except for the wood and steel of a wrecked Garand I wouldn’t be here in my 71st year.
My dad, born in 1923, spent ‘42 and a good part of ‘43 as part of the Army Special Training Program (ASTP) at East Texas State Teachers College (now East Texas A&M) training and studying to be an engineer. Then in late ‘43 the call came from the War Department that what the army really needed was infantry so the ASTP programs were disbanded and the guys at Commerce, Texas were incorporated into a Pennsylvania National Guard unit, the 99th ID.
Skipping ahead several months, the 99th ended up in Luxembourg/Belgium in the Ardennes.
So on 16 Dec my dad was walking company area patrol when the I SS Panzer, the spearhead of the Sixth Panzer Army decided to light up the country side. When the artillery subsided my dad was ordered to take a patrol to go check on the platoon outpost. As he described it, about halfway to the outpost, “we got into one hell of a firefight.” In an exchange in the woods my dad got separated from his guys and coming around a corner he came face to face with a guy in feldgrau who got off the first shot. That round passed through his left hand, entered the stock of his Garand, traveled down and exited the trigger housing which cut the skin between the middle fingers of his right hand and the impact knocked him down. The German jabbed with his bayonet but “I was wearing so many clothes he couldn’t find me.”
For the next several hours my dad played Indian in the woods until he found an American from another company. They started trying to find friendlies until late the next morning they stumbled into a German patrol and became Kreigsgefangener and got relieved of his galoshes. Spent several days walking east under guard and ended up at a POW camp near Regensburg where he stayed until early April.
The 99th fell back to Elsenborn Ridge and along with the 2nd ID held the north shoulder of the Bulge.
Never heard that story until I went on a battlefield trip in 1988 with my Dad. When we got back to Texas I asked him to write it down.
The Bulge holds a special place to me. Except for the wood and steel of a wrecked Garand I wouldn’t be here in my 71st year.
The thing about evaluating Hitler as a military leader is that you have to separate the various pieces of it all out.
Absolutely, he got a hell of a lot wrong and there were cases where he should have listened to his military professionals. On the other hand, those “military professionals” were wrong on several occasions where Hitler was more right than they were…
In the early days of the war, Hitler could “do no wrong”, and that was basically down to shitty Allied leadership that backed down from confronting him, every time. If the French and British had had the balls to shut him down during the various preparatory steps to the war, then there’d have been no damn war at all. Hitler’s generals were terrified that they’d trigger French response when they re-occupied the Rhineland, and when the French/British let them do it…? That gained Hitler a lot of credibility with them. His feel for the enemy’s political will was exponentially better than their feel for his, and since he had more willpower…?
I’ve always said that WWII was basically an insane event, on the face of things. The Germans had no business starting a war against the combined resources that they faced; yet… They came a hell of a lot closer to winning than they really had any right to. Which you can blame on inept and feckless Allied leadership, more than anything else. If Hitler’s Nazi Germany had won WWII, it wouldn’t have been because of any unique military virtue they had; it would have been because of utter incompetency on the part of the Allies. None of whom could prioritize or figure out what the reality of that war was. Had, for example, the Allied bombing campaigns gone after the German electrical switching system and the oil refineries from the beginning…? War would have been shorter by years. The idiotic idea of attacking the cities and the factories was just that… Idiotic. The city attacks didn’t work during the Blitz, when it was the Germans bombing the British, so why did anyone think that the idea of going after civilians would work when it was the other way around?
The root problem was the same as we have right now: Idiots are selected and elevated to high positions of authority in governance, and they then proceed to munge everything up.
The list of strategic errors that we’re making, right now? LOL… Don’t get me started. From the Navy’s inability to build ships or man them, the Army and its oblivious inattention to drones and the conduct of modern all-aspect war? It’s insane. We do not learn; they are incapable of it. Even after witnessing the effect of non-linear war, they persist in operating as though there are such things. The next major war we fight is going to be fought here in the US, on the streets and around the bases, as well as overseas in whatever theater we get ourselves sucked into. They’re totally unprepared for the implications of the last thirty years of open borders; they think that we’re still in WWII and Korean War conditions, wherein “the Homeland” is somehow magically secure. It ain’t. They’re going to learn that the hard way when a bunch of key and critical personnel get snuffed along with their families living off-base in unsecured housing. That’s coming, whether you want to admit it or not.