TOMORROW IS the 50th anniversary of the start of World War II's Battle of the Bulge, which is said to have been the largest and bloodiest battle involving the U.S. military.
By December 1944, it appeared that the Allies would win the war. In the quiet of mid-December, the Americans thought they were settling in for a slow advance into Germany. But Hitler, desperate for at least a political victory at home if not a military one, launched this last-ditch measure that was designed to split the Allies.
Before the battle ended in mid-January 1945, 600,000 U.S. troops would be committed. Of that number, there were 81,000 U.S. casualties (19,000 were killed); some 24,000 were captured by the Germans in the first stage of the winter offensive that took the Allies by surprise. Some 1,400 British soldiers were killed and 800 Allied tanks were lost.
Hitler scraped the barrel of Germany's remaining manpower reserves to commit 500,000 troops for the attack. Some 100,000 Germans were killed or just wounded, and 800 tanks, which the fuhrer could not afford to lose, were destroyed.
Postwar historians have criticized Hitler's offensive as a senseless gamble; top German commanders told Hitler essentially the same thing. But those commanders also had told Hitler that he wouldn't beat the Allies in that same region in 1940. Then Hitler managed to crash his armored tanks through the Ardennes Forest to split the Allied forces, driving the British Expeditionary Force into the sea at Dunkirk and defeating France in six weeks.
With this big gamble, he hoped to replicate his famous victory by driving a wedge again between the Allied armies, and by taking the port of Antwerp, through which the Allied ground forces received much of their supplies. Hitler dreamed of defeating the Western Allies and convincing them to join him in fighting the Soviets.
Hitler rightly predicted that bad weather would keep the all-important Allied air forces grounded. He also gambled that the Allied High Command -- Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley and British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery -- thought that Germany was already beaten; he was right. The Allies were overconfident.
The term "bulge," came from the dangerous incursion made into the Allied front in Belgium, as the 6th SS Panzer Army lunged for Antwerp and the 5th and 7th Panzer armies drove on Brussels. The "ghost front" in the Ardennes was lightly held by six American divisions, three had never been in combat and the others were recuperating from earlier battles.
At 5:30 a.m. on Dec. 16, 1944, on a 60-mile stretch along the border of Luxembourg and Belgium, 30 German divisions crashed through the Allied lines across Snow Mountain. In the first five days, the U.S. troops suffered their largest defeat since the fall of Bataan in 1942. "We can still lose this war!" thundered U.S. Gen. George Patton to Eisenhower.
Hitler is said to have been confident of victory in this the last major German counter-offensive of the war in the west. "Everything has changed in the west. Complete success is now within our grasp!" Hitler reportedly said. But, alas, the resolute GI, who held out when surrounded and fought on until relieved, turned the tide against Hitler.
With its junction of seven paved roads, Bastogne, Belgium, was the key to the Nazi's resupply line. There, the German demand for a U.S. surrender was met by Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe with one famous word: "Nuts!" Eventually, Patton's men would relieve the embattled American paratroopers besieged at Bastogne, reversing the tide of the war. A second, lesser-known but important German offensive -- Operation North Wind -- would also be defeated by U.S. ground forces, which were aided by the Allied air forces once the weather cleared.
More than 70 Allied divisions counter-attacked in early 1945 in the bitter cold and snow drifts of the hardest European winter in years. The German Army retreated, its tanks gone and the air force finished. Thus, the war in Europe ended on May 8, 1945. The Battle of the Bulge actually shortened the war by months, as the Allies had expected to be fighting late into 1945 or even early 1946.
The fuhrer had failed, defeated by a man called GI Joe.
Blaine Taylor writes from Towson.