At dawn 60 years ago

On Dec. 16, 1944, General Bradley came to my headquarters to discuss ways and means of overcoming our acute shortages in infantry replacements. Just as he entered my office, a staff officer came in to report slight penetrations of our lines in the front of General Middleton’s VIII Corps and the right of General Gerow’s V Corps in the Ardennes region.

Dwight Eisenhower, “Crusade in Europe”

It had started with the dawn: an unexpectedly heavy artillery barrage. How had the retreating Germans managed to mass so many guns? Was this just a local attack, or a feint to distract the attention from a major blow elsewhere?

Soon it became clear that the enemy had massed more than artillery. The 6th Panzer Army, a mobile reserve that had disappeared from the view of Allied intelligence, reappeared. When the barrage lifted, German armor came pouring out of the woods, headed for the seam between the British and U.S. armies.

Instead of sheltering behind the Siegfried Line, the “retreating” Germans were advancing through an only lightly defended 50-mile stretch of the Ardennes.

Allied intelligence had collected reports of a transfer of German troops from the Eastern to the Western front in the fall of 1944, and there was ample evidence that they were being reassembled in the Ardennes, but word never filtered up to headquarters. No one had connected the dots. (Sound familiar?)

The weather wasn’t on our side, either. The coldest, snowiest winter in European memory made Allied air superiority irrelevant. The panzers sped on, opening a growing wedge. Allied headquarters was compelled to sacrifice unity of command as the German advance split the British and U.S. armies; Eisenhower had to designate separate commanders for each sector of a crumbling front.

In the heat of battle, confusion reigned. Disguised as American MPs, English-speaking, American-accented Germans were sending relief convoys down the wrong roads, or into murderous ambushes. Just liberated French cities were exposed again, and Paris was jittery. The British press demanded that Eisenhower turn command of the land forces over to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery — or anyone else competent.

German Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt and his staff had taken everything into account except the sheer cussedness of the American resistance. The 7th Armored Division held onto the crossroads at St. Vith longer than anyone would have imagined possible. And at Bastogne, the key to the battle, the 101st Airborne Division refused to yield at all, and entered legend.

According to the German battle plan, Bastogne was to be overrun on the second day of the operation; it never was. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe’s one-word response to the German commander’s surrender terms would become a classic summation of American defiance: “Nuts.”

Forced to split up and go around isolated pockets of American resistance, the German advance slowed. Unlike 1940, there was no breakout. Methodically, the Allied command drew up new defensive lines, then held. And to the south, Gen. George Patton was turning the whole 3rd Army on a dime and hurtling to the rescue.

Before it was over, the Battle of the Bulge would involve three German armies, the equivalent of 29 divisions; three American armies, or 31 divisions; and three British divisions augmented by Belgian, Canadian and French troops.

More than a million men would be drawn into the battle. The Germans would lose an estimated 100,000 irreplaceable troops, counting their killed, wounded and captured; the Americans would suffer some 80,000 casualties, including 19,000 killed — that’s a rate of 500 a day — and 23,554 captured.

But the Allied forces held. And the war went on, moving across the Rhine and then into the heartland of the enemy. Against all bitter expectations, the conflict in the European theater would be over in four months.

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