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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/em> units with kids as young as sixteen, as the Third Reich began scraping the bottom of the barrel to hold the line. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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<\/em> for starters. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And another story that should <\/em>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<\/a> – 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First Ringer<\/a> and me have written<\/a> about the Battle extensively over the years, and we’re not done yet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72851","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history-and-its-making"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72851","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=72851"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72851\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":72852,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72851\/revisions\/72852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72851"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72851"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72851"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}