…in weather a lot like this, that the Battle of the Bulge started.

I thought about that yesterday, as I wrestled with a cold car; “how much more fun would this be if I’d spent the night in a three foot deep foxhole, with no sleep, wrapped in an overcoat and old newspapers?

Here’s an old Army newsreel of the battle, in that classic forties newsreel style.

The Bulge was such a huge story – even 65 years later, it’s hard to know where to start.  So much of it is well-known – the 101st Airborne (and 7th Armored) at Bastogne; Patton’s epic counterattack; the story of thousands of Americans, cut off from higher authority and on their own in atrocious winter conditions, adapting and persisting and eventually prevailing against the Nazi onslaught.

But there are two stories I usually return to, over and over.

One of the great stories of the battle – one that was more or less untold until the eighties – was that of Lieutenant Lyle Bouck and the Intelligence and Reconaissance platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment – eighteen guys with three machine guns and orders to hold an isolated hill near the Belgian village of Lanzerath, astride one of the huge gaps in the American lines. 

Lanzerath, and the monument to Bouck's platoon, today

An entire German airborne regiment was charged with clearing the hill to make way for the SS Panzergrenadiers of Colonel Joachim Peiper – the elite  stormtroopers who were going to be the tip of the spear that would drive all the way to Antwerp and, according to Hitler’s plan, divide the Allied armies and make victory over Germany impossible.

But the nineteen-man platoon held off the entire German regiment for 24 hours, killing hundreds of paratroopers, delaying Peiper’s breakthrough; not long enough to prevent Peiper from driving all the way to Dinant (the peak of the “bulge”), but long enough that the reinforcements that finally did arrive on the scene were able to hit Peiper’s flank rather than watch his dust (or blowing snow) disappearing in the west.

Bouck’s platoon were captured after they ran out of ammunition.  One man died; the rest spent four months in POW camps.  When released from the POW camp, Bouck was too ill to file an after-action report – and reportedly didn’t think they’d done anything especially notable anyway.  And so the events didn’t get formally commemorated until 1981.

Every single member of the platoon was decorated for their actions that day – making them the most-decorated platoon-sized unit of the entire war:

• PFC William James Tsakanikas (DSC)
• Tech. Sgt. William L. Slape (DSC)
• PFC Risto Milsovech (DSC)
• First Lt. Lyle J. Bouck Jr. (DSC)
• Pvt. John B. Creger (Silver Star)
• Pvt. Louis J. Kalil (Silver Star)
• Cpl. Aubrey P. McGeehee (Silver Star)
• PFC Jordan H. Robinson (Silver Star)
• Pvt. James R. Silvola (Silver Star)
• Pvt. Robert D. Adams (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Robert D. Baasch (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Sgt. William D. Dustman (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Clifford R. Fansher (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• T/3 James Fort (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Cpl. Samuel L. Jenkins (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Pvt. Joseph A. McConnell (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Cpl. Robert H. Preston (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)
• Sgt. George H. Redmond (Bronze Star Medal with V device for heroism)

Another of the stories – more mixed, in this case – was that the Battle of the Bulge was the beginning of the end of segregation in the military and, in turn, the United States.  Theretofore, most African-Americans in the Army served in labor units, digging ditches and building airfields and burying the dead.  Much of the work was crucial; most of the supply trucks that supported Patton’s blitz through France in 1944 had black drivers.  But it was the considered opinion of many officers, from Eisenhower and Patton to the US Army’s personnel director, General Robert E. Lee (not making that up) that blacks lacked the courage and intelligence to serve as good combat soldiers.

Pressure from the Roosevelt adminstration knocked a few cracks into the system; the Army Air Force trained 1,000 black pilots, including the celebrated “Tuskeegee Airmen”; the Marines, two segregated combat battalions; the Army, a number of combat and combat support units along with some of the traditional black “Buffalo Soldier” units, dating back to the Civil War; the white-led 92dn Infantry Division led the way in Italy, and the 761st Tank Battalion (immortalized in a fantastic book by none other than Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) spearheaded Patton’s relief of Bastogne:

A Sherman of the 761st "Black Panther" Tank Battalion

A black light-anti-aircraft battalion had the highest score of any AA gun unit in Europe.

But during the Bulge, the casualties spiked horribly; the replacement depots’ supplies of white replacement troops dried up.  The call went out to the labor, mechanics and truck units, looking for volunteers.  Thousands stepped up; while the plan was to keep them in segregated platoons.  But as the friction of combat ground the plans down, the platoons became squads mixed into white platoons, and soon black soldiers in squads with white troops.  By the end of the Battle, black and white troops were bunking together in confiscated houses. 

It’d be great to say the Army learned its lesson – but it wouldn’t be true.  Once the dust died down, the Army resegregated the troops; the white troops earned points for combat service, while the black ones plodded along through menial service jobs.  It took three more years before Truman desegregated the military. 

But the experience at the Bulge was one of the key experiences that discredited the institutional belief in the inferiority of blacks as soldiers.