Anthony Tucker-Jones - Hitler’s Winter: The German Battle of the Bulge

Contents

Foreword
By Professor Peter Caddick-Adams

The last winter of World War II was not only bitter but presented the Western Allies with the most unpleasant of surprises. Seemingly from nowhere, on 16 December 1944, German forces erupted out of the Ardennes regions of Belgium and Luxemburg in what became the Battle of the Bulge. At the end of the month, United Press International reporter Larry Newman was in Bastogne to interview the US 3rd Armys commander in Bastogne. It was cold as hell, he recalled. Patton was calm, cool, collected. It was war to him. What he had been brought up to expect he had served in World War I, and his grandfather and great uncle had been Confederate lieutenant colonels, killed in the Civil War.

Using his maps and reports, Patton described to Newman how the Germans had penetrated deep into Belgium, torn open a huge dent in the Allied lines, threatened to break through to the North Belgian plain and seize Antwerp. Several papers had already referred to the Axis salient in the Allied lines, but no one knew exactly what to call it. Although the battle was two weeks old, Newman, new on the scene, was about to file his first despatch about it. He needed a new angle. He began to toy with the words Patton had given him on his notepad, etched with his memories of battlegrounds, stories of heroism and sacrifice, flecked with grime and blood from other conflicts.

The phenomenon had been around for as long as military history itself. A precedent had been set already during World War I when the German front lines had curved in a giant arc around the Belgian city of Ypres throughout 191418, leaving an eastwards-facing fist, protruding from the British lines. In that war the Ypres area had been known as The Salient. Newman wanted something different, less formal, and more American. I named it the Battle of the Bulge, he remembered modestly.

Within a short space of time, Newmans term had become widely accepted shorthand for the battle. The very next day the US Armys newspaper, The Stars and Stripes echoed Newmans UPI report with its own banner headline: Retake 1/3 of Bulge. Larry Newman had made his enduring contribution to military history. However, as the Ardennes campaign was dying and the ink drying on Newmans headline, on 31 December, a second Nazi offensive was launched named Nordwind (North Wind). This was partly an attempt to exploit an American sector further south the Germans knew had been weakened in sending extra manpower to Bastogne. Less well-known than it should be, this second thrust from the Reich was likewise stalled by American units. In initiating not one, but two, major assaults, December 1944 to January 1945 was, indeed, Hitlers winter. Today, the US Army recognizes both attacks with their Ardennes-Alsace campaign streamer.

That 32 US divisions fought in the Ardennes, where the daily battle strength of US Army units averaged 26 divisions and 610,000 men, indicates the Battle of the Bulge was a far larger commitment for the US Army than Normandy, where 19 divisions fought, and much greater than the Pacific. Altogether, the US Army Ground Forces activated 91 divisions during World War II: of which all but three entered combat. The vast majority of these (61 divisions) deployed to Europe, including Italy, as opposed to the remainder, which deployed to the Pacific, to which should be added six US Marine divisions. In fact, we should not get carried away by the infantry, armored and airborne divisions: far more important in the isolating terrain of the Ardennes were the endless non-divisional units, cavalry groups and independent tank destroyer, artillery, tank, and anti-aircraft battalions, who played their role alongside the badged divisional units, swelling US numbers and firepower greatly.

This, then, was the largest battle fought by American forces during the war. It has been related many times from the Allied point of view, in print and by movie. The earliest volumes included Colonel S.L.A. Marshalls Bastogne (1946), Robert E. Merriams Dark December (1947), Charles B. MacDonalds Company Commander of the same year and his later memoir, A Time for Trumpets (1985). Later analysis of the Bulge included John Tolands Battle of 1959, other works by the US official historians Forrest C. Pogue and Hugh M. Cole, John D. Eisenhowers The Bitter Woods of 1969 and Gerald Astors A Blood-Dimmed Tide (1992).