Today is the 75th anniversary of the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge – Hitler’s last great counterattack in the West in World War 2.
The winter of 1944 had been one of the coldest on record – cold enough, said Steven Ambrose, to impress even the kids from North Dakota and Montana.
The Ardennes Forest was and remains a densely-wooded area near the confluence of the German, Letzenbourgisch and Belgian borders. Sparsely populated, with a limited road network, it seemed like the last place that an army would launch a major offensive (notwithstanding the fact that the Germans had launched offensives through the forest in 1870, 1914 and 1940), much less in the dead of winter.
And so the Americans used it as a rest assignment for units that’d been bloodied in other battles to recuperate (like the 2nd Infantry Division) or for new, barely-trained units like the 106th Infantry, fresh from the US, with almost no training, to learn the ropes before getting assigned to more dangerous areas.
But the Germans, using the sort of guile and stealth they’d needed to learn on the Eastern Front, amassed a fair-sized army – a mixture of experienced troops with years of action on the Eastern Front, and new, untried Volksgrenadier units with kids as young as sixteen, as the Third Reich began scraping the bottom of the barrel to hold the line.
HItler’s plan was to drive through the Ardennes – again – and seize the main allied supply transit point at Antwerp, Belgium, splitting the US and British forces on the continent and possibly forcing a truce that’d allow him to refocus on stabilizing the rapidly collapsing Eastern Front.
The story of the next few weeks was the stuff of legends; the 101st Airborne (and about half of the 7th Armored) divisions holding Bastogne against parts of seven German divisions that surrounded them, immortalized for a new generation in Band of Brothers for starters.
And another story that should have gotten a movie of its own – the Battle of Lanzerath Ridge, in which a single platoon of 19 scouts held off an entire German airborne regiment – 2,000 men – for 16 hours. It delayed the breakthrough of the German spearhead, the SS battlegroup of Joachim Peiper, for almost a day – which turned out to be the first of many delays that led to the attack bogging down before New Years, out of fuel, men and equipment.
First Ringer and me have written about the Battle extensively over the years, and we’re not done yet.
And so the Americans used it as a rest assignment for units that’d been bloodied in other battles to recuperate (like the 2nd Infantry Division) or for new, barely-trained units like the 106th Infantry, fresh from the US, with almost no training, to learn the ropes before getting assigned to more dangerous areas.
My Grandpa was in the latter category and from stories my Mom and Aunts and Uncles I dont think he ever forgave the US Government. Then he went to work for the USPS for 40 years. God I wish I could have talked with him about the time but I dont think he ever did, not even with his wife. And he died back in 2005 so I only have stories to go on.
I might add that “Diese verdammten Pioniere!, Diese verdammten Pioniere!” (“Those damned engineers! Those damned engineers”) in the words of Joachim Pieper, the 291st Combat Engineers, continually thwarted his movements by blowing up bridges.
Another great documentary on the “Against the Odds” series on American Heroes Channel, gives a great perspective on this unit.
Reading the reports from Lanzerath Ridge, it strikes me as very interesting first of all that soldiers of both sides bothered to learn the other’s language–one might infer that they wanted to do as little killing as possible, and communicating might prevent that. OK, you’ve got the fact that many Americans of German descent still spoke the language, too, but still, very interesting.
It also strikes me as very interesting that the Wehrmacht soldiers made it very clear that they were soldiers and not SS–one might guess that at least a portion of the Wehrmacht knew that the SS were a special kind of sick–and that if their motives were mistaken, an ordinary, quiet capture of prisoners could go malignant very quickly.
On the flip side, I remember talking with one of those 16 year old recruits when he was an older man in 1989, and his story was that he’d innocently signed up to protect his family from the Soviets, and learned about the SS and Nazi atrocities when he was captured by the Americans. I have to wonder if part of the reason for putting all those kids into battle was they hadn’t “had their fill” of Naziism already like the adults.
bike;
A customer of mine a few years ago, had been captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. He said that the Wehrmacht soldiers running the camp, were pretty good to them. It might have been partially due to the fact that he was captured a few weeks after the Malmedy massacre was communicated through the Allied lines.They, too, wanted to make sure that the prisoners knew that they were not SS. They also knew that Germany was losing the war and some said privately, including the assistant commandant, that Hitler was a mad man that had destroyed their country.
Boss,
I doubt that was an uncommon opinion of the average grunt soldier for Germany back then. Hitler made so many tactical errors and wouldnt listen to his generals that it is almost something of a miracle that the allies ended up freeing Europe.