One of the casualties of my neglect for blogging in the last 7 or 8 years is my history posts. I was quite committed to my Civil War commemorations; I managed to keep up the appearance through the WWI anniversaries - but never tried anyhting like that with WWII. Granted, WWII didn't have as good an anniversary to base posts on as the 150 and 100 for those other wars - but 80 would have worked. I did some 70 and 75 year anniversaries. If I hadn't given up on writing, I might have tried it.
But here it is, December 2024, 80 years since the Battle of the Bulge - and I figure I should give it a shot again. The battle itself began on December 16, 1944, and lasted through the end of January. The Germans launched a surprise attack on American lines in the Ardennes forest of Luxembourg and Belgium, hoping to punch through this poorly defended area, get into the Americans' rear, drive to Antwerp and cause the US and UK to either abandon one another or abandon the USSR. It was complete folly, but Hitler was well gone by that time, and didn't put up much resistance to his pipe dreams. The end of 1944 was an interesting time in the war - the Allies had basically had their way all summer, once they broke out of Normandy; but things were starting to go sour in the fall. Operation Market Garden, an ambitious and misguided attempt to cross the Rhine in the Netherlands with a massive parachute drop, went very wrong; fighting on the borders, the Battle of Aachen, or in the Hurtgen Forest or the Vosges mountains, bogged down significantly. Punching into Germany was not going to be easy. While the allies prepared for the next stage of fighting, they left the Ardennes somewhat under defended. Divisions mangled in the Hurgen forest, or brand new on the front, were there, resting, training, waiting. They did not expect trouble in the Ardennes, a mountainous, wooded area full of river valleys and bad roads, very difficult for armies to move through. Which is why that is where the Germans attacked in 1914 and 1940, and now again in 1944.
When the attack came, it was a complete surprise. The German forces shattered the American fron lines - thin and patchy as they were - and threatened to get out fo the woods and out where they could cause trouble. But the Americans fought desperately to save the situation. They defended every post card village and miserable crossroads with all they could find. Their leaders, Ike and company, reacted far faster than Hitler imagined, immediately ordering reinforcements into the area, ordering Patton to utrn north and cut thins thing off. The Germans still punched deep into Belgium - but it took longer than they hoped, and they never did break through in the north, where they were expecting to make a big breakthrough. They got stuck for days trying to take crossroad towns like St Vith; they never did manage to take another town, Bastogne. Panzer divisions drove past, leaving these places isolated in their rear - but doing that, with Americans still parked on the best roads, meant they couldn't get a strong enough force forward, and more importantly than that, they couldn't get supplies forward - they couldn't get gasoline forward. They ran out of gas; the allies counterattacked an drove them back, often in long drawn out slogs through woods and hills - the kind of thing that made the Hurtgen forest such a nightmare.
But in the end - it's hard to say whether this battle delayed the end of the war or accelerated it. A lot of Germans died, a lot of equipment was ruined, the luftwaffe was pretty much crippled after trying a massive surprise attack on January 1, 1945. They did not have the resources for any of this stuff. It they had dug in and fought it out 0on the borders the whole time, they may have dragged things out a lot longer. Or, if they had held the west with the least they could manage, and done everythign they could to hold off the Soviets in the east - they might have extended the war a while. Even more people may have died. But the results weren't going to change. So it's hard to say there was any point to any of it, other than dying in Belgium instead of Germany.
On the other hand - the Battle of the Bulge made a hell of a story. It was a fascinating, dramatic battle. The fighting in the fall of 1944 was ugly stuff: grinding through dense woods, one German emplacement at a time - it was getting back to the meat grinder horrors of WWI. But the bulge was mobile, complicated, with forces scattered all over the map, desperate fighting for towns and crossroads and lonely hills, without a lot of contact with anyone else. Fights for Clerveau, St Vith, the Elsenborn Ridge, Wiltz, Bastogne, places like Hotton and Marche and Stavelot all happened on their own, the men attacking or holding cut off from the rest of the battle. This, I imagine, is mostly a function of the terrain - narrow roads through heavy woods, so that fights were concentrated on the towns, the open places, the river crossings and so on. It made for fantastic stories.
The fight for Bastogne gets most of the attention - got the press at the time, got one of the great World War II movies, in Battleground. It was a good story - a crucial position, surrounded, held by a famous elite unit (the 101st Airborne), in a well known town - there were spectacular air drops and a daring rescue mission by Patton's tanks. And it produced one of the definitive quotes of the war - "Nuts!" - Anthony McAuliffe's answer to demands from the Germans to surrender. And there is the fact that it held - that the Americans won the fight, tactically as well as strategically. It was a perfect focal point for talking about the Battle of the Bulge.
But it was not the only crucial fight in the battle. Other towns, especially St Vith, another major road hub, saw equally desperate fighting north of Bastogne. St Vith fell, in the end - but the battle there held up the Germans for days, blocked the roads west for days, and was almost as important in disrupting the overall attack as Bastogne. Many other towns and villages - Clerveaux, Hotton, the twin villages of Rocherath and Krinkelt, saw desperate stands of their own, that held up the Germans, bought time, even when they did not hold. And the last of those - Rocherath-Krinkelt was part of what was, in the end, probably the most important fight in the Battle fo the Bulge - the decisive moment, the battle of Elsenborn Ridge. This was the very northern edge fo the battle - this is where the Germans expected to break through most decisively, with their best divisions, their best equipment, the works. And here, the 99th and 2nd infantry divisions held. They held out for days in places like Rocherath and Krinkelt, before falling back to a solid defensive position on the ridge itself. (Joined there by several other divisions.) And this line held. Some of the Germans got past them, and made trouble to their west - but they were isolated. The main line held, and the Germans finally had to shunt their tanks south, to try to take the long way to Antwerp. Past St Vith and Bastogne, which held long enough to make those roads difficult. So it went.
It is all very fascinating. And here I have to turn to a bit of autobiography. Back when I was a wean, I was a terrible military history nerd - I'd say teenaged history nerd, but this started long before that. It started in fifth grade - I got the present of Bruce Catton's history of the Army of the Potomac - I read that and I was hooked. I promptly emptied the school library of everything they had about the Civil War, then any other history I could find. When the school library was exhausted I cleaned out the town libraries. That is where I found a host of popular military histories, mostly of WWII. This might have really started when Reader's Digest published an abridged A Bridge Too Far - but it went from there. All those writers: Cornelius Ryan, Walter Lord, John Toland, their books - The Longest Day, Day of Infamy and Incredible Victory - and the hero of this story, John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge.
I loved that book. I was probably in 6th or 7th grade when I read it, and it hit hard. Of all those books, it's the one I go back to (along with Catton's). I still read it almost every December. I can see the reasons - the battle itself was fascinating, and the setting, those woods and hills of the Ardennes, is part of it. I've seen pictures of the place - take away the castles and I see Vermont and Western Maine in those hills and woods and narrow river valleys. I could imagine what the battle looked like. And the situation is very evocative: the surprise attack, the desperate scramble to hold off the Germans long enough to bring things back to normal. The best war stories are underdog stories, and this is one of the rather few times when Americans really the underdogs in WWII - at least for a week or two. And while I don't know if Toland's account is necessarily the best it could be - it seems very spotty, probably because he was a journalist and wrote it from the interviews he could get, emphasizing the stories, and concentrating on the best accounts he found. But that is also its strength - because it is so rooted in the first hand accounts he obviously relied on, it is very visceral, it conveys that sense of desperate struggle. There are accounts in there: Hurley Fuller at Clerveaux; Don Boyer and Bruce Clarke at St Vith; people like Jesse Morrow at the twin villages; Sam Hogan in Hotton, on the western edge of the battle, that have buried themselves in my soul. They are extraordinarily evocative, of the confusion, horror, heroism, madness of war.
I suppose I should note - Toland's access to interviewees shapes what he wrote about, it is pretty obvious. Those fights are all vitally important, and he had sources; another battle - something like Noville, north of Bastogne, where the 10th Armored division and elements of the 101st held off a German division for a day or so are just as crucial, just as evocative - but his account is looser there. I imagine this is all a matter of sources. And overall, it does warp his account of the battle - which is too reliant on those eye-witness accounts, and sometimes lets the broader picture slip by too quickly. But that's a nit pick, and after all - it is the source of the books power too, so - I can live with it.
And so: 80 years ago, this month, all this happened. It is a very resonant story, one I go back to almost every year. And one I wanted to write something about.
