Today that’s often taken to mean bravely foregoing a second croissant. Sixty-four years ago today, the term had a very different connotation indeed.
Having successfully lodged and expanded a beach head in Normandy in June of 1944, Allied forces spent the rest of that month and most of July trying to breakout through the French hedgerows – a brutal battle of attrition requiring on-the-battlefield innovation.
Once the German army had been thrust into the open they were subjected to repeated aerial bombardment and coordinated artillery fires. The P-47 Thunderbolts in particular harried the retreating Wehrmacht relentlessly, and an organized retreat towards the Seine River fell into a general rout. Men who had fought for years alongside friends they’d known from childhood found themselves among strangers.
General George S. Patton was as happy as a cavalryman could be, writing to a friend that he was charging about “with a pistol in each hand and a sabre in the other.” Omar Bradley was so sure of the war’s swift conclusion that he ordered winter gear stockpiled on the beach rather than sent forward. Plans for a redeployment of troops from Europe to the Pacific were drawn up.
So successful was the assault that the mechanized forces literally ran out of gas. German supply depots were no great distance to their rear, while Allied forces awaited fuel, ammunition and medical supplies from Normandy, hundreds of kilometers behind them, twenty hours away by truck.
Only one natural line of defense remained to the beleagured German forces: The Rhine River. Faced with the choice of turning west and securing resupply facilities in the port city of Antwerp, the Allied high command instead attempted a daring air assault known as “Market Garden”, designed to secure bridgeheads across the Rhine, strike to the east and end the war quickly. It was repulsed. A stalemate ensued, interrupted by hard fighting for the German city of Aachen to the east, with worse to follow in the Hürtgen forest.
Summer turned to fall, and what had been a disorganized mob with no real interest in defending Hitler’s acquisitions in France had crossed back into their fatherland, re-organized into an army, reinforced the Siegfried Line and turned about to face their foe. The weather changed in Germany’s favor, largely neutralizing Allied advantages in the air.
On 16 December, 1944 the Wehrmacht counter-attacked.
See, this is why an Army blogger like me comes here. Where else would you find a reminder of the largest battle the US Army ever fought, but on a blog started by a guy who aimed to tell some flying stories.
Mein Gott.
How anyone cannot be facinated by this history, so recent in the grand scale of the human march and yet so distant to a generation that thinks the act of mailing a letter is an archaic relect of an ancient civilization.
We won, of cource, but each time I read anything about this battle, or many other battles, I realize how very close we came to perhaps losing. That we won was, again of course because we have seen the end of the movie, was due to the overwhelming sacrifice of the GIs on the frozen ground, not in the winter clothing that was stored so far away on the beach.
Today in Dallas it is hovering a lot closer to 30 degrees than the Chamber of Commerce advertises as normal for this time of year. I bristle going back to the car and complain about the dampness in the air and how long the heater takes to come to life for the drive home. During this battle the mercury struggled to get to freezing, and that was during the daylight. And the men in the pictures dug in and fought, bled and died, not because they wanted to, or even because they were told to, but because they were there and they fought for each other that we, and millions more across Europe could escape the descent into barbarism that Hitler led.
And today some, indeed perhaps most, of the residents of those countries applaud when someone throws shoes at our President. And despite all that I am sure, that if the need arose for the United States to confront, in Churchill’s words, such a “monsterous tyranny” again. the decendents of this Greatest Generation would do so again.
Wait, we already are….
Thanks for helping us remember each and every day lest we forget the horror and sacrifice made daily that we so shamelessly take, too often, for granted.
[...] Army in World War II, The Ardennes, Battle of the Bulge, By Hugh M Cole. Neptunus Lex sums up events preceding the Bulge. A Bulge library with a wide variety of takes follows the art below, which is from a variety of [...]
A great uncle of mine, an army cook, was killed in the battle of the bulge. (Years before I was born) My only link to him is a field fashioned knife of 20mm shell casing and leaf-spring derived blade that was part of his personal effects. A fascinating simple object with a story that will be gone with the passing of my mother. I think this Christmas I’ll try to record an aural history of him from my mother’s recollections……
Thanks, Lex. You have done it again……….
Lex,
According to my old boat school 1/c history book, “Seapower, a Naval History” by EB Potter and Chester Nimitz (pg492 note2) The term Wehermacht is only properly used when referring to all three branches of the German armed forces. Their army was “The Heer”. Just a small bit of nonsense lost forever in historical recounts.
My glider pilot buddy, Jim Helinger, Sr, speaks of loading up the CG-4As with Jerry Cans of gasoline and flying them into Patton’s units. The reason: Once the supply train was diverted to keep Monty going, Patton’s staff noticed no one was paying attention to the employment of “Those damn glider pilots” as he told me they were commonly “named.” They got put to work.
After the first run, where the Flight Officers were told to haul same cans to the jeeps/tanks/trucks, etc, (“You’re the only ones here without a job to do!”) they then flew in donkeys to pack the cans around.
He did mention something about being in the only all officer defensive line in WWII. He never talks of the combat, just the funny and technical stuff that he saw. I suspect he saw a lot, maybe that was during those desperate days.
Lex: coincidently, this battle came to mind when I saw the Nuremberg Laws on display at the Skirball Cultural Center last Sunday.
A very powerful reminder of just how important our victory in Europe was.
s’funny, when I think of the Fulda Gap, I never picture P-47s, just Hawker Typhoons. Bloody poms have me well and truely indoctrinated, struesbob!
The German Army was, and still is Das Deutsche Heer. The Nazi armed forces were Die Deutsche Wehrmacht. Where unified armed forces exist, it’s common practice to use its name as a blanket term, especially where the army is concerned. I tend to see more references to the IDF than the Israeli Army, for example.
Funny tale from my grandfather regarding the relief of Bastogne – he mentioned going into Bastogne w/ a gun jeep to plan relief & follow-on ops and when I asked how he could reach the surrounded 101st Abn, he replied “Well hell, the Germans weren’t holding hands around the paratroops.” Hehe…he also mentioned they [Paratroopers] would steal anything, including vehicles left running….but he qualified it saying, ” I don’t blame them, they went in with nothing.” Typical Armor/Cav guys…what would we do without ‘em?
Greetings:
Back in the last ’69, while I was on my all-expense- paid tour of the Republic of Viet Nam, I used to use the Battle of the Bulge as my personal motivation tool.
When the heat was up, the load heavy, and the jungle so thick that a 100 yards an hour was a speed march, I used to think to myself how much worse those guys had it, in the snow and cold.
Shoot. I know I shouldn’t rely on my faulty memory. The shell casing has stamped on it an “S” an “L” and “42″….more in the .50 caliber range. I have a 20mm bullet (drilled dummy) and the above isn’t 20mm. I gotta learn to fact check before “ENTER” entered.
Xformed, my dad was part of Patton’s relief Army at the Bulge (3rd Army if memory serves).
Like your buddy, Dad never spoke of combat, only some of the conditions and general experiences. He spoke very highly, and with great affection, for the people he met in the Low Countries, and said he did not hate the regular combat German soldier.
I still have a tourist type book of Dad’s autographed by some people from a town that he helped liberate (somewhere in the Netherlands). Was one of the few things from WWII that Dad kept.
Though Dad was from a farming family and an avid outdoorsman, he never went camping after he came home from the war – said he had enough of being cold.
Lex, wouldn’t airplanes like the P-47 or the P-51 still be good for close air support today? Cheap, rugged, could stay on station a long time.
Xformed @6– the fly boys weren’t the only ones driving gas to the front. My dad was with the 102d ‘Ozark’ infantry division. They went straight from NY to Cherbourg in Sept ’44. When they got off the ship some officer told them ‘Patton has run out of gas, all the trucks in the division will now be assigned to Red Ball.’ Since my dad knew how to drive a truck, he spent his first days in Europe running gas to Patton (his ‘day job’ was radioman for HHQ Co, 327 Combat Engr Batt).
I’m more than slightly glad that the German attack failed, since by December the 102d was in Ubach Germany and would’ve been cut off if the panzers had made it to Rotterdam.
Beachbum.
LOL My Dad was an enlisted type in the 1o2nd Ozark stateside 1940-41 prior to going to OCS School and eventually ending up as a Co Cmdr in the 42nd Rainbow. Still have the old Ozark Div Patch (was in 1st Big Red One as enlisted also .)
Ron, as a Navy guy I’m sure Lex is going to be partial to the great A-1 Skyraider (aka Spad or Sandy) for some serious ground attack creds.
Long loiter time, heavy payload, radial air-cooled engine. A major workhorse in ‘Nam. P-51s were vulnerable to ground fire with their liquid cooled engine – one hit in the cooling system and your gonna have a bad day. The radial engine of the P-47 and A-1 could tolerate major hits and still keep on running. BTW, the Navy’s F4U Corsair was heavily used in WWII and Korea for ground attack – also a radial engine bird.
I began working in the computer industry in 1978, and one of my first managers was a British expat who flew in 485(NZ) squadron, 2nd TAF, starting a bit before D-day.
He flew Spitfire XVI with the squadron through France, Belgium and Holland until just before the Battle of the Bulge started.
He said that, for him, the worst days were during the fight in the Falaise pocket, where the Germans lost so many horses to air attack and artillery that on hot afternoons you could smell them up to 10,000′ and higher.
Strategy Page has this Youtube up:
http://www.strategypage.com/military_videos/military_photos_2008121693521.aspx
Production of the US Army Signal Corp on the Bulge. Good video, with interesting audio in the start – implies there were complaints and whining on the home front at the time.
George V.
Thanks for the information RJ; yeah, I’ve no bias for an aircraft used by a particular service branch. Just seems to this layperson that the airplanes typified by the P-47, P-51, A-1, F4U would still offer a big “bang for the buck” to our troops. The liquid vs air cooling makes sense.
Currently, the A-10 seems to be the best platform out there. Also seems to a number of people who would like to get rid of it. Kind of like the BUFF
Might not be either “cool” enough or put enough money in the policiticans pockets though.
Sigh.
Virgil,
Your dad was enlisted then became an officer, well, my dad was the opposite– sort of.
He signed up right after Pearl Harbor, because he figured that volunteers might have more say in where they went vs draftees (just 6 months out of high school, he knew he was going to end up in a uniform, one way or the other). Took an intelligence test, and the Powers That Be sent him to Purdue, for ROTC. Yep, early ’42 he was a Boilermaker, studying engineering (and chasing coeds, for all I know).
This happy state of affairs lasted only one semester, when the Powers That Be decided that they needed more soldiers than college boys. Out of Purdue, off to the 102d. As a consolation prize the college boys all became instant sergeants. My dad ended up a radioman because he had a technician-class Ham license as a teenager and he already knew Morse.
Whenever I ask him about it, he’ll tell me pretty much everything, but he freely admits that he and his buddies were never in any real fighting. He says that as far as he knows, nobody ever aimed a gun at him personally and pulled the trigger. He was on the receiving end of a few random artillery barrages, but that was about it.
I asked him if he ever had to sleep in the snow, or stuff like that, and he said that in the HQ company, they would take over whatever houses were still standing.
It just hit me yesterday, my dad was a rear echelon type (and yes, I know the acronym, but I choose not to sully the fabled halls of Chez Lex).
My favorite book on Patton was written by Col. Robert S. Allen, Patton’s G2. It’s titled “Lucky Forward”, Patton’s army was called “Lucky”. Patton had begun to turn his army north to Bastogne before he was ordered to. It’s a good read if you can find it.
Rivet Joint, Ron:
There was serious consideration given to taking F-47s (as they were by that time) out of stateside ANG units and sending them to Korea, as the F-51 was proving vulnerable to groundfire. The USAF brass was rather non-plussed at this idea, as they were already having to put up with one old piston engine figter type, and didn’t want another stealing attention from the shiny new jets. As it was, the B-26 Invader and the F-51 did carry a considerable load throughout the war, although the F-86F wound up replacing almost all piston-engine fighters by the end of the war.
As for today, would a radial engine CAS aircraft still make sense for low-intensity COIN roles? Probably. Would such an aircraft ever be funded for production again? No way.
A few months ago, I read a small book on the Battle of the Bulge by a member of the US Army Historical Staff that was attached to SHAEF HQ. I’ll try to post the author’s name later, it’s well worth reading, as it gives a very concise history of the Battle. One of the most prominent factoids I learned from this book is the role that many small, non-combat units played in halting or seriously delaying the German advance. Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army had a very powerful formation known as Kampfgruppe Peiper, commanded by Joachim Peiper. This unit was essentially a reinforced brigade and was the main maneuver element of the 1st SS Division Leibstandarte, and was well equipped with numerous Panther and TigerII tanks. Kampfgruppe Peiper broke through the American lines and proceeded to try to advance to the Meuse River to gain a bridgehead across it. In the very hilly, wooded terrain, the Kampfgruppe was limited in the routes it could travel, and a single US engineer battalion, not normally a front line combat unit, kept beating the Kampfgruppe and succeeded in blowing the bridges for various river crossings, literally in the face of leading elements of the Kampfgruppe, at least three times, and maybe several times more. As a result, Kampfgruppe Peiper got stuck in the Ardennes forest, never got close to the Meuse River bridgeheads (which the British XXX Corps had by then well defended), and eventually wound up surrounded and forced to abandon its equipment and walk back to German lines.
I found that amazing – a rear-echelon engineer battalion foiling one of the most elite, powerful units of the Heer by not panicking, doing what it could, and remaining in the fight. As others have said, where do we get such men……..
Larry,
I believe the book you refer to is called : “The Damned Engineers” and I think it was written by their BC- LTC Pergrin. There are other really good books on that battle, Charles B. MacDonald’s “A Time for Trumpets”. I have always maintained that an Army Officer (or any US military officer for that matter) should study a battle in history in detail and become a SME on that battle. BOB was one I chose. Since it was the largest land battle the United States ever fought one book can’t cover it. I must have 30 books in my library on some aspect of the Bulge. Mac Donald’s other famous book was “Company Commander” where he was a 21 year old replacement company commander in the 2nd Infantry Division in the ETO. Both of his works I highly recommend.
GEO6
Larry:
If that Engineering Battalion was a Combat Engineering one, then they were hardly a rear echelon outfit. Combat Engineeres were just what the name implied–right up there in the thick of it. My Dad, a Co. Cmdr in the Inf in the ETO , had nothing but praise and admiration for those guys. Think of it; trying to build a bridge or rig a bridge to blow PLUS fight off the Germans in the middle of it all. Either job is tough enough–but both simultaneously?
(Hey, I’m an Air Force guy, where are all the Army types to set us straight?)
VX,
That battalion was the (IIRC) the 291st Engineer Battalion and was either a Corps or 1st Army Combat Engineer asset. Their mission on 16 December was to operate some saw mills and maintain the roads behind the front line divisions which were I believe the 99th Inf Div and the 2nd Infantry (which had been pulled off the line to attack thru the 99th.) MacDonald commanded a company in the 23d Infantry Regt of the 2d Inf Div BTW). The 291st happened to be directly astride the route of advance of Kampfgruppe Peiper, the lead elements of the 1st SS Panzer Div and the 6th SS Panzer Army. Elements of the 291st did, in fact blow some of the key bridges up right in front of Peiper. Does that answer the mail?
GEO6
Geo6 –
You answered the mail. That’s precisely what I read in my book. I forgot to check on the author, but the book’s title is “The Battle of the Bulge,” and it’s a general history of the battle.
Thanks for refreshing my memory.
I totally concur with GEO 6 on the book selections and the study of the Ardennes Campaign. I too have an extensive library on the battle and can find no single volume better than MacDonald’s A Time For Trumpets. Got it as a Christmas gift in 1984. I have a little ceremony I do every 16 DEC…I pull put the book and reread. At the same time I open a brand new bottle of Old No. 7 to sip along with my reading.
Thanks, Lex, for the honor you do to their memory
VX,
Do you happen to know which unit your father was in?
GEO6
A Time For Trumpets is one of my favorite books also. In one chapter MacDonald detailed how all of the artillery in the northern side of the bulge were put under a single commander and then used in massive fire missions to break up German attacks. I forget the number of gun tubes, but it was huge, and appalling to contemplate being on the receiving end. This tactic stopped numerous panzer attacks cold. Between this and the “damned engineers” (that name came from Peiper himself, after about the 3rd bridge blown up in his face), 6th Panzer Army was doomed.
I missed this post. Thanks Lex. Good comments. Geo6 is awesome. He is an Army WWII, especially airborne, walking encyclopedia.
My father’s division, the 82nd, was in some highlands about 30-35 north of Bastogne if that map in Wikipedia is correct. The northern edge of the Bulge. They arrived after the initial assault by the Germans. He got bad frostbite on the tips of L. thumb, index and middle fingers that had to be “trimmed”, post battle. He was 19.5 years old.
As a kid I can remember he didn’t like the cold much and we always had a warm house.
b2
B2 –
Thanks for the kind words but the truth is I have always wanted to be like you, Nose, Lex and even Skippy when I grow up. That’s why I fly a t-craft bugsmasher in my old age.
GEO6
Geo,
Yeah sure, but remember, you’re still flying. At least Nose is ‘sorta flying’ by flying airships hauling obnoxious from Jersey, Lex is manueuvering for $$ at 1G (what a part-time job!) and Skippy is flying solo (pun intended)!
Me? I haven’t touched a stick on an airborne aircraft since the mid-90′s! Too scared. I know too much now about what can go wrong.
Be safe in that bugsmasher.
b2
B2-
Wilco on the bugsmasher. Scaring the $#!t out of myself defeats the whole purpose. It is purely therapudic.
BTW, He is a link on Amazon for a book on your old man’s regiment. They have 3 copies left. Hope you will go for it as it would be a good Christmas present to yourself.
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/2840481642/the504thpir
Ignore the line number as the title of the book is the 507th Parachute Infantry : The Forgotten Regiment. It is entirely possible you might find a picture with your Dad in there. Haven’t read it myself. Yet. The author is a Frenchman. Maybe Lex knows him.
Best,
GEO6
Geo6- thanks! I’ll read it.
Did you ever read this guys book? My brother ran into him at the DFW airport several back and bought his book. He’s a character. It’s pretty good. Warrior plus:
http://allthewayto.wordpress.com/about/
b2
Read it. Megellas is a Legend in the 82d. BTW, I knew the guy standing next to him when he was a 1st LT. Thanks!