Temps Passés: The short but bloody Battle of the Bulge ended 80 years ago today
Part of the "Past Times" series of posts about historical, memorable, or tragic events. The Battle of the Bulge was all three.
SUN TZU BELIEVED “the line between disorder and order lies in logistics,” and nowhere was that more true than during the Battle of the Bulge, the immense but ill-fated last effort of the Wehrmacht to keep the Allies out of the homeland.
The advance across Europe was swift; by December, six months after Normandy, Paris and much of France had been liberated. Eisenhower had decided to use the Ardennes Forest as an R&R site for his exhausted troops. They were on the very doorstep of Germany, preparing for the final push. (Map below the fold.)
By December, it was clear to Hitler that time was running out. Supplies were low (Tiger tanks were notoriously thirsty, and gasoline supplies were hard to come by). Low winter clouds meant what was left of the Luftwaffe could not fly, nor could the Allies.
He decided to launch Operation Watch on the Rhine with four Armies. His generals believed they had only enough fuel to make it halfway to Antwerp, so stretched were their supply lines, and beyond that would have to depend on supplies captured from the Allies.
He also had to worry about the Russians, who were closing in rapidly from the east. A month after he launched the Battle of the Bulge, the Russian threat forced him to abandon his Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia.
The Wehrmacht succeeded in its goal of total surprise, which succeeded and was very expensive in Allied lives. The cold was brutal; wounded soldiers froze to death before they could be treated. Weather had to be miserable, with low clouds that would keep the Allied air forces on the ground and away from what was left of the Luftwaffe, and it was.
The attack came on December 16. The Allied line bent (bulged) but did not break, and the standoff that followed led to the stories that have enlivened literature and movies since. McAuliffe and his “Nuts” reply at Bastogne when he was surrounded. Patton’s determination to march overland from his position not far from Verdun to raise the siege, once again confirming Verdun’s rank in the pantheon of war. The massacres at Malmedy, Wereth, and Chenogne, and others known and unknown. The English-speaking Germans who posed as Americans and sowed chaos at Allied checkpoints, at one time causing Omar Bradley to be detained because he told the guard the capital of Illinois was Springfield. To the soldier the logical answer to the challenge should have been Chicago, which it isn’t but perhaps should be.
The Bulge was a brutal and costly fight and, as such events tend to do, caused finger-pointing and revisionism, most prominently claims by Montgomery that appeared to puff up the British role, to the detriment of the Americans. The blowback become so hostile that Churchill had to tell Parliament, “Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British Army an undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory.”
Operation Watch on the Rhine failed for the same reasons the Wehrmacht thought it would succeed—winter, logistics, bad roads, lack of personnel. It was truly the first step of the final act, on which the curtain would fall in May 1945, when the German army surrendered, ten days after Hitler’s death in the bunker.
Links
National WWII Museum, New Orleans: https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/battle-of-the-bulge
Wikipedia (including good maps): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
Holocaust Encyclopedia: https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/battle-of-the-bulge
History.com: https://www.history.com/news/8-things-you-may-not-know-about-the-battle-of-the-bulge (includes a remarkable series of photographs)
Wereth: https://be.usembassy.gov/remembering-the-sacrifices-of-the-wereth-11/
Map
Credit: Dymetrios - Wikipedia Commons
Thanks for reading.
My novel Treasure of Saint-Lazare was chosen by Readers’ Favorite as the top historical mystery of its year. In it, a king's ransom in valuables is stolen during the War and starts to reappear decades later, stirring murder and mayhem.
My most recent, The Final Heist, takes the story of the treasure to its end.
See the entire series.
John Pearce
Washington, DC
Given the 80th anniversary, I have been thinking a good deal about the Battle of the Bulge. One of the interesting things, to me, is the efforts of the Americans to deny the Germans gasoline, and frequent references to the German need to capture gasoline in order to keep the offensive going. But as far as I know, German tanks ran on diesel, not gasoline. Indeed, one of the drawbacks of American Sherman tanks was that they were powered by radial engines derived from aircraft powerplants, meaning that they were gas powered, and so were much easier to set afire. Indeed, American crews called them "Ronson lighters," after the cigarette lighter whose slogan was, "Lights the first time, every time."