The following is a paper I wrote in college about the Battle of the Bulge.  I offer it on this Veteran’s Day as a thanks to my father and his friend Eric Wood, who served together in WWII, and to all veterans everywhere.  I also offer it as a reminder to those who think that this current war we’re in isn’t a battle for the survival of the nation every bit as much as WWII was.  I hope it doesn’t take the loss of an American city to get the people of this great country as united and dedicated to a cause as they were in 1941-1945.

Introduction

I chose to write about the Battle of the Bulge for several reasons.  One is a lifelong interest in WWII in general, and specifically in, among other areas, Allied troop movements following the Normandy invasion.  I had read extensively on these and other related subjects from a very young age, and so I already had a body of knowledge. My family had a personal involvement in this phase of the war, as I note in my report.  There are many other personal anecdotes from the Battle of the Bulge involving my father and his friends, and the men under his command.  There was the story of John Ford, whose wife came from New Jersey to wait with my mother at the house in Wayne, Pa.  John was one of the missing, and at 6’6”, his men knew he would be hard to miss.  As they searched for him one day, they came upon a very large grave.  Fearing the worst, they dug it up and found that it was indeed his body.

I find the subject of the Ardennes Offensive fascinating, and I was very disappointed that due to space limitations, I was not able to go into some of the more compelling stories of the battle itself, but was limited to an overview of the planning stages.  In point of fact, the planning itself could easily fill a volume.

As the Battle of the Bulge is a much-written about subject, research for my paper was not difficult.  I went to the nearby Rancho Cordova Library and picked out several books.  I also conducted interviews with my mother and some other friends and relatives in order to refresh my memories of the many stories about the war that I had heard over the years.

Operation Rhine Watch

The Plans for the Ardennes Offensive

It was December, 1944.  For two young women in the suburban Philadelphia area known as the Main Line, the usual joys of the Christmas season were tempered by the sobering knowledge that their equally young husbands were at that moment somewhere near the front lines of the largest struggle in world history.  The men were both 1st Lieutenants in the 106th Division, one in Artillery, the other in the Signal Corps.  They had just that week been sent to reinforce the Western Front in Europe.

As my mother tells the story, one morning the paper hadn’t come, and Pops, as we called my grandfather, sent her to the store to get one.  When she arrived there, the man behind the counter handed her a paper, and she froze in disbelief.  That morning’s Philadelphia Inquirer carried the headline, “106th Division Wiped Out,” subheaded, “2000 Men Wandering Ardennes in Snowstorm.” Pops later recalled with some amusement that the only thing my mother said when she got home was, “Damn, Bob hates cold weather.” As it turned out, her assumption that my father was still alive proved to be correct.  Her friend and neighbor Meg Wood was not so lucky, although as we shall see later, her husband Eric was one of the many heroes of the Ardennes.

The fighting to which the Inquirer referred became known variously as “Von Runstedt’s Offensive,” or “The Ardennes Offensive,” but eventually most people called it simply “The Battle of the Bulge,” with the 106th having the privilege of being the bulge.

The plan that hatched the largest battle of the war in Western Europe was born of desperation.  Through the summer and fall of 1944, Adolf Hitler had been getting nothing but bad news for weeks on end.  On the Eastern Front, the Russians had given the German Army the worst beating in its history.  In Italy, the Allies had taken Rome and were pushing the Germans back.  American and British forces in France had burst out of their beachhead in Normandy and were racing across Belgium and northern France on their way to the German border.  Another group of Americans and Free French were driving up the Rhone Valley from their landing point in the French Riviera.

In spite of the Wehrmacht’s demoralizing defeats, Hitler believed that the tide could be turned.  He reasoned that the Allies had advanced so quickly that they would soon have to stop in order to take a breather and let their supply lines catch up to them.  If the Germans could put up a strong defensive stand behind the Western Wall, Germany’s line of fortifications from Switzerland to Holland, they could buy enough time to set up a counteroffensive.

Meanwhile, Hitler knew that even the best defense couldn’t hold off the Allied forces indefinitely.  He decided to launch a major counterstrike, one that would take the Allies completely by surprise, a blitzkrieg that would bring back the glorious days of 1939-1940 when the Wehrmacht overran most of Europe.  His enemies in the west would be sent reeling back in defeat, and he could then turn his attention to the east, where he could smash the next Russian counteroffensive.  According to the Fuehrer’s vision, his enemies would be forced to sue for peace.

Hitler saw the Allied forces as the strangest bedfellows in the history of war.  As he would describe his enemies to his generals soon before the offensive, they were “…ultra-capitalist states on one side, ultra-Marxist states on the other; on one side, a dying empire—Britain; on the other side, a colony—the United States, waiting to claim its inheritance.” They were all, he said, determined “either to cheat the others out of something or get something out of it.  A great victory on the Western Front will bring down this artificial coalition with a crash.”

As Hitler saw it, it made no sense for the Americans and Brits to fight a war which would make it possible for the Communists to seize territory in Europe.  Furthermore, if he could destroy the British and Canadian forces on the Continent, the British would be unable to replace their forces and the Canadians would be unlikely to send more to the slaughter.  The United States itself was in no danger.  Would they fight on without their Anglo counterparts?  This idea of destroying the British and Canadian forces became the guiding obsession in Hitler’s plans for the offensive, and gave him the logical first objective for the operation:  Antwerp.

The British and Canadian forces were in the north, mainly in the Netherlands.  While the Germans had withdrawn from the port city of Antwerp, they had been ordered to hold the Schelde Estuary, which controlled the entrance to Antwerp.  However, it could be expected that the Allies would try to open up Antwerp and make it their main base for supplying the troops in northern Europe.

The shortest distance to Antwerp was in the north, through Aachen, but the extensive network of canals and rivers would make it to difficult for the tanks to get through.  The route to Antwerp through Alsace or Lorraine was far too long.  The only real option left was a route through the Ardennes Forest of Belgium and northern France.  This route appealed to Hitler for a number of reasons.  It had been used as a successful attack route by German armies in 1914, and again in 1940.  It could be reasonably expected that the Allied commanders would, like their counterparts in 1914 and 1940, consider the Ardennes far too dense and compartmented to accommodate a large offensive.  It followed then that a German attack might be expected to hit a weak point in the Allied line if General Eisenhower shared this point of view.

In order for the attack to be successful, Hitler needed time to beef up the German forces and materiel.  This worked out well for two reasons.  First, the Allies had indeed outrun their supply lines, and there was a momentary stalemate.  Second, by the time the Germans were ready to strike, they would be able to take advantage of protracted bad weather conditions which would inhibit Allied air support.

Hitler was prepared to take extraordinary measures to reinforce his personnel.  Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels was tapped to draw all surplus workers out of business and industry.  He announced that the German work week would increase to 60 hours, that schools and theaters would be closed, and that government bureaus would be stripped of all nonessential personnel.  The Army was ordered to transfer all non-combat troops to the new divisions that were being formed, and many airmen and sailors were transferred to the Army.  The age range of eligibility for military service was declared to be 16 to 60 years.

Hitler called his new divisions the Volksgrenadiers, or people’s infantry.  They were considerably smaller than traditional German divisions, and to make up for this they were equipped with large numbers of automatic weapons and Panzerfausts, which were particularly nasty little hand-held anti-tank rocket launchers.

German industry had been able to maintain a remarkable rate of production in spite of the massive bombardments inflicted by Allied planes.  In fact, German production didn’t peak until the fall of 1944.  That fall, German industry produced a million and a quarter tons of ammunition, three quarters of a million rifles, a hundred thousand machine guns, and nine thousand artillery pieces.  The ten new Panzer brigades created by Hitler were given priority for the new Panther and Tiger tanks coming off the assembly lines in record numbers.

Lastly, about 100 so-called fortress battalions were formed.  These were made up of older men of presumably lower fighting quality, and would be used for defensive service on the West Wall.

The logistics involved in moving tremendous amounts of men and materiel to the Ardennes area without drawing attention to them were daunting, and caused several postponements of the attack.  The original attack date was November 1.  It was moved back to November 25, then December 10, December 15, and finally December 16.  The surprise with which the attack caught the Allies, however, is testimony to the success of that endeavor.  It was, in fact, one of the most amazing feats of the war.

The strike was named “Watch on the Rhine” in order to give the impression that it was a defensive operation designed to prevent the Allies from crossing the river.  Part of the attack force was conspicuously assembled near Cologne, which would be a logical place from which to defend the Rhine.  They would move south during the night and join the main force just before the attack.

Troops had to be transported from as far away as Denmark and East Prussia, mostly by rail.  Moving by night, the trains would hide in forests or tunnels during the day.  Air-raid posts were set up around the assembly areas, and if Allied planes were headed that way, the trains would be moved into tunnels.

An elite panzer unit commanded by Lt. Colonel Otto Skorzeny was organized for the sole purpose of sowing confusion and dissent among American troops.  Dressed in captured American uniforms and driving captured American Jeeps, they would head for the Meuse river to capture bridges, commit sabotage, and create general confusion.

As expertly as the Germans were covering their tracks, no operation of that size could go forward without dropping some clues somewhere, and drop them they did.  Unfortunately for the Allies, the only person to guess correctly and sound the alarm was deliberately muzzled by the U.S. commanders.

Colonel Benjamin A. “Monk” Dickson, head of G-2 for the First Army, and graduate of West Point and MIT, was worried.  He had already been concerned about German troop movements, and had issued a report on December 10 correctly foreseeing the German capability for a major counteroffensive.  Going with the current thinking however, he thought that it would come in response to Allied crossings of the Roer River.  Over the next several days, Dickson became apprehensive about the Ardennes front.  On December 14, he saw a report that stopped him cold.  It was the statement of a German woman thought by VIII U.S. Corps to be reliable.  She had seen many vehicles, pontoons, and river-crossing equipment moving toward the Ardennes.  In Bitburg she had overheard soldiers saying that it had taken them three weeks to get there from Italy.

That night at a staff meeting, Dickson slapped the operations map and exclaimed, “It’s the Ardennes!” The next day, thinking that Dickson should be toned down a little, SHAEF (Allied Command) sent him to Paris for a four-day leave..  The following morning was December 16.

Ironically, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander Allied Forces Europe, learned about the offensive in much the same way as my mother had.  Instead of a newspaper, however, Ike was handed a note by a staff officer in the middle of a meeting with General Omar Bradley.

The way in which Eisenhower and his staff reacted to the crisis was perhaps the most critical component in the outcome of the battle.  Hitler was counting on two things from the Allied Command.  One was surprise at the attack, coupled with the fact that since the Allies didn’t believe that the Germans had the capabilities to launch a major offensive, there would be a possibly fatal delay in bringing up sufficient reinforcements.  The other was that there would be political wrangling among the Allies over command structure, again delaying their reaction.  The fact that Ike was given a free reign, and that he reacted swiftly and decisively was a major factor in the final result.

The fighting that ensued was among the bitterest of the war, with the Allies eventually turning the tide after a number of defeats.  Out of these battles came some of the war’s best-known stories of both heroism and duplicity, including General McAuliffe’s famous reply of “Nuts!” to the German surrender demand at Bastogne, and the despicable S.S. massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy.

One of those stories involved our friend Lt. Eric Wood.  His body was found in late January near St. Vith with seven dead Germans close by.  Apparently, after being separated from his unit he had conducted a small-scale guerrilla action with several other American stragglers and local partisans in the woods between Schoenberg and St. Vith, ambushing German work parties and preying on supply columns.  The grateful locals erected a monument to him in the forest where he died.  His posthumously awarded Silver Star was a small consolation to his widow Meg.  A week after she got her Silver Star, my mother welcomed home my father, one of the lucky survivors of a battle that turned the tide of history.