By Michael F. Duggan
By December 1944, it looked as if the Germans were on back on their heels, although the Battles of Aachen and the Hürtgen Forest earlier that fall suggested otherwise.
On December 16, 1944-, eighty years ago this coming Monday, 30 German divisions with around 410,000 men, 1,400 armored vehicles, and 2,600 artillery pieces, broke through the Allied lines in the Ardennes Forest in Belgium, northern France, and Luxembourg, in an effort to make a beeline to take the port of Antwerp. The area had been a quiet sector (who would think of attacking through the thick forests of the Ardennes, as the Germans had done in 1940?), and the US First Army under General Courtney Hodges, was caught off guard. The Germans advance quickly and established a 60-mile deep salient, or “bulge,” in the Allied lines.
The 101st Airborne “Screaming Eagles” Division was surrounded in the crossroads town of Bastogne (and were know afterward as the “Battered Bastards of Bastogne”). When asked to surrender by the German general, the American acting division commander, Anthony McAuliffe, replied with a singe word: “Nuts!” The siege of Bastogne was relieved by Patton’s Third Army the day after Christmas, 1944. The paratroopers of the 101st said that they had not needed to be rescued, that they were surrounded and therefore had the Germans just where they wanted them.
Initially, bad weather prevent the Allies from capitalizing on their considerable air superiority and prevented air resupply drops. US soldiers were poorly equipped for winter combat, and it wasn’t until January 25, 1945 that the Battle of the Bulge finally ended.
With roughly 81,000 casualties, including 19,000 dead, The Bulge was the bloodiest battle the US would fight in Europe in WWII (keep in mind that the USSR lost an average of between 14,000 and 17,500 solders every day between 1941 and 1945, so the entire Ardennes Campaign would have been a bad Saturday on the Eastern Front).
In retrospect, the German Ardennes Offensive was a desperate, last ditch effort by the Wehrmacht in the west (and, also in retrospect, it would have been in Germany’s interest to let the Americans and British in before the Soviets). To the US soldiers in Bastogne and Malmedy, it was a frozen hell.