77 years ago last month, World War II went into a brief run of extra innings, as German troops launched a surprise attack, trying to drive a wedge between the US and British armies and take the port of Antwerp, robbing the Allies of their main logistics hub on the continent. We know it as the “Battle of the Bulge”.

In a strategic sense, the attack was doomed before it started. It may have cost the Germans more than it ganed them, burning through their last supplies of fuel, ammunition and fresh vehicles, to no gain that they were able to hold for more than a month.

But that was little comfort to the GIs on the ground – many new to the front in brand-new divisions, many more exhausted after six months of constant battle and resting in the “quiet sector” of the Ardennes, and the corner of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany.

The GIs fought on – some of them famously surrounded, others who just happened to be at the wrong place at the right time, still more who rushed to the scene to hold lines in the snow that could not be passed.

They fought an enemy that was exhausted and morally shaped by five years of total war, including troops – the Waffen SS, who had made war crimes part of their “mystique” since the fall of 1939. One SS battlegroup had left a trail of war crimes, including the massacre of a group of combat engineers at Malmédy, Belgiuim, and a smaller and more obscure but perhaps even more gruesome slaughter of African-American troops at Wereth – two of a number of real shootings of American POWs, and dozens more rumored mass killings.

It’s no secret to those who read military history; at times, after hearing news about the GIs gunned down at Malmédy in particular, that GIs – cold, often cut off from higher authority, thousands of miles from home, fighting for people they largely didn’t understand, in a war none of them asked for – took rough revenge. The history of “The Good War” is not void of stories of American troops gunning down Germans, and especially Japanese, without worrying too hard about the rules of war. Americans and Brits were less likely to throw the rules of war under the treads of the passing tank than the Russians or French – all of whom took “take no prisoners” pretty literally – but war, being famously “hell”, brings the worst out of everyone at times.

Suffice to say – while the typical 18 year old American draftee was on balance, as Stephen Ambrose called him, “the. best thing that could have happened to a conquered Germany or liberated France, Luixembourg and Belgium”, some of them, sometimes, had their breaking points. It wasn’t taught in high school history class – which, when I was in school, was still being taught by some of the men who’d been there – but you don’t have to dig too far into history to find honest portrayals by GIs who, as the years rolled on, talked it out (including at least one infamous episode from Band of Brothers itself).

It’s not news, suffice to say.

If you read your history.

But this is 2022. And most Americans, including most of today’s generation of “news” reporters, never read history, or at least nothing before 1960.

“The Reveal” is an NPR ‘Investigative journalism’ program, hosted by Al Letson. This past Sunday’s episode focused on the groundbreaking investigation of a massacre of 80 German POWs in Belgium by members of the 11th Armored Division.

I listened so you don’t have to – but here it is, anyway:

So what’s. the purpose of this “investigation?”

To prove that World War II a reductionist battle between good-hearted, white-hatted GIs and cartoony black-hearted Nazis, and that some Americans did some horrible things?

Again – it’s not news.

To bring out a story that has been hidden by history?

As the story itself points out, the episode was common knowledge among people who follow the war.

That George Patton and other Army brass, at the time and during the telling of the story of the war, found it expedient to either “not publicize” or “cover up” the details of the massacre, to a people who were becoming weary of war and who were shocked by the late-campaign bloodshed? Leaving aside the whole “what the hell do they expect?” angle – who do they expect to hold accountable? 95% of the GIs are gone; all the senior officers who set the policy had passed on forty years ago.

To undercut and sandbag a key part of the American self-image? To throw crap on the notion that America has had, and acted upon, and sacrificed mightilly, for noble ideals that didn’t strictly benefit us? To liberate people we had no moral obligation to sacrifice for?

I think I’m getting warm.

A former teacher, who has drifted far to the left since I was a student, once said “the Walt Disney version of history doesn’t tell the whole story” – to which I replied “either does the Ingmar Bergman version (I suppose I could have said NIkole Hannah-Jones, as well).

Either way – when it comes to piddling on any shred of American exceptionaism, to say nothing of nobility, there is no statute of limitations.