The Battle of the Bulge – a broader look at the narrow perspective.

As I mentioned in an earlier blog entry, while Normandy stands as the Godfather of war tourism, there is a risk that subconsciously it is seen as THE inflection point that turned the tide of World War II. This of course is not true. There are countless other events that equally shaped the outcome of the war such as: the Battle of Britain, the North African campaign, the invasion of Russia, the Pacific theatre, the Italian campaign, the Market Garden operation, the Ardennes offensive or the various conferences between the Allies that redrew the map of post-war Europe.

Over the next month, I will focus on the events of December 1944 and January 1945 that have entered the public consciousness as the “Battle of the Bulge”, Hitler’s ill-fated attempt to divide the Allies and sue for peace on his terms. I will examine stories – some known, others less so – that emerged from the fighting in the Ardennes forests of Belgium, Germany and Luxembourg. 

The term “Bulge” was first coined by the American war correspondent, Larry Newman on 30th December 1944 following an interview with General George Patton. During their conversation, Patton had shown Newman, a correspondent for United Press International and International News Service, a series of maps that marked how the German offensive had evolved since it was first launched on 16th December 1944. The particular shape of the front line that had emerged as the Americans had been pushed back had struck Newman. Other news outlets were already referring to the outline of the battlefield feature shown on the maps as a salient but somehow Newman’s phraseology struck the right chord and became the established epithet.  

The landscape of this predominantly rural region remains pretty well much as it was eighty years ago. The lines of the forestry blocks and the hedgerows are much the same. The roads and lanes that lace the surroundings – albeit for the most part tarmacked today – present the same twists and turns that the combatants faced and the size of the towns and villages that are dissected by the key crossroads once so gallantly defended have not changed much. Perhaps the only discernible feature that hints at the scale of destruction unleashed upon the countryside is the modernity of the architecture in some places.

Today, it takes barely an hour to drive the fifty miles from Brussels to the small town of Celles, the western-most point of the German penetration during the offensive. To reach the northern shoulder of the Bulge at its widest point takes about two hours to cover the hundred miles to the Elsenborn Ridge which was heavily contested for about ten days. To the southern shoulder of the Bulge at its widest point, it takes a longer two and a half hours to drive the 150 miles, much of it through Luxembourg to Echternach, at the base of the salient. 

When you consider that the distance between Elsenborn and Echternach is barely fifty miles apart and that, at its apogee, the Germans had managed to thrust seventy miles deep behind the original frontline within eight days, it seems impressive. However, the strategy was flawed and ultimately proved fatal to the German war effort in the final months of World War II. The offensive proved to be a campaign of collapsed expectations on the part of the Germans for numerous reasons that are well documented. 

But, as we shall see, the initial brave stand in most places by four already shattered U.S. Divisions thinly holding a line that was considered to be a quiet area against three German armies numbering twenty-nine divisions blunted the offensive. This bought time for General Eisenhower to move his last reserves forward and into position from deep within France. 

Many of those plunging into the breach did so without the right clothing and equipment such was the rush to plug the widening gap, marching in to what was to prove the coldest winter on record at that time. By the time that the 2^nd Panzer Division reached Celles on 24^th December 1944 and the advance petered out, they were already a week behind schedule, had not secured the River Meuse crossings and were still ninety miles short of the final objective, Antwerp. 

The Allies eventually had to commit more than 700,000 troops to force the Germans back to the original point of departure by end-January 1945. This resulted in nearly 83,000 casualties to the Allies and the loss of significant materiel. Although German figures are lower, the U.S. estimates of German casualties exceed 100,000 as well as the loss of irreplaceable equipment for no strategic effect. An estimated 3,000 Belgian and Luxembourger civilians were to perish too during this phase of the fighting. I say “this phase” because one should not overlook the earlier clashes in September during which this region was first liberated by the Allies as the Germans were pushed back behind the Siegfried Line.

For the United States, responding to the German offensive proved to be the largest and bloodiest single battle fought in World War II and the third bloodiest campaign in American history.  

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Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers and Steven Spielberg’s 2001 miniseries inspired by it introduced the world to the men of Easy Company, 2nd Battalion of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division. Spielberg dedicates two episodes – Episode 6 entitled ‘Bastogne’ and episode 7 entitled ‘The Breaking Point’ – in that series to their critical role in the Battle of the Bulge. 

For those ardent followers of the Band of Brothers series, there may be a sense that the chief protagonists of the show single-handedly won the war. This risks losing sight of the fact that equally important events were taking place elsewhere. 

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For most viewers young and old alike, the opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan commonly has a profound impact. In the same way, so do the various ‘interviews’ with the veterans in the opening sequence of episode 6 of Band of Brothers. Who can forget the then 79 year old veteran J .B. Stokes recalling how “even today, on a real cold night, we go to bed and my wife will tell you that the first thing I’ll say is ‘I’m glad I’m not in Bastogne’”?  

This is where an interesting ‘compare-and-contrast’ can be made between the broader view of a battle offered by say a film like The Longest Day and the subjective points-of-view of Tom Hanks character, Captain Miller on Omaha Beach in Saving Private Ryan or the actors portraying the men of Easy Company in the frozen woods north-east of Bastogne. My point here is that it is not hard to become subjectively immersed in the event itself and to be oblivious of the ebb and flow of both strategic and tactical events taking place elsewhere  as a result of individual, often disconnected actions scattered across the battle space.

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In a previous blog entry, I mentioned George MacDonald Fraser’s remarkable memoir, Quartered Safe out Here about his experiences in the Burmese jungle in World War II. His soldier’s account of life in the jungle for a junior officer – who is but a small cog in the otherwise large machinery of armed struggle -serves as a perfect foil to say Field Marshall Bill Slim’s ‘Defeat into Victory’, which expertly covers the “big things”. The book in which MacDonald Fraser recalls having little sense or awareness of the great events, the politics or even the strategy taking place around him admirably captures the insignificant but deeply personal moments endured by a small cadre of soldiers fighting in the worst possible conditions. It is a book that concerns the human element as seen from the perspective of the small piece of real estate within the ordinary soldier’s limited field of view, the raw material of conflict upon which the industry of warfare revolves. 

In the same way that George MacDonald Fraser’s story described above is but one tiny vignette in the vast apparatus of Slim’s Fourteenth Army, the perspective offered by the men of Easy Company in Band of Brothers is similarly narrow. 

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When you stand on the ground around the foxholes used by Easy Company as they held the line in the Bois Jacques overlooking the tiny hamlet of Foy that featured in episode 6 of Band of Brothers, there can be no doubt of the sense of walking with their memory, particularly if the visit is in the winter. This is even if the former foxholes once occupied by Easy have recently been fenced off with limited access by ticket only due to the deterioration wrought by the growing number of visitors and re-enactors. Here, amongst others, you can identify the machine gun position manned by Corporal ‘Smokey’ Gordon who, many years later, was able to return and retrieve from his foxhole the tin mug he had been holding when he was shot in the shoulder by a sniper. 

Half a mile to the west of this position, it is quite something to stand in the tree line that served as the start-line for the attack on Foy portrayed in episode 7. Here, years later, Major Dick Winters – standing there with his wife – was able to bend down and find empty cartridge cases still lying in the grass beside the position where he had placed a machine gun giving covering fire to Easy’s assault. In the field behind is where the mortars were positioned that were supposed to be giving indirect fire support to the attack as it went in but the defending Germans had somehow tapped the phone lines and were themselves giving countermanding orders to the U.S. mortar teams to check firing. 

Walking through the village, it is possible to retrace precisely the footsteps of Lieutenant Ronald Speirs who, directly in front of the town’s defenders, ran back and forth across the main road between Bastogne and Houffalize to tell members of the Third Battalion’s ‘Item’ Company to stop shooting at Easy. Elsewhere, one can see the bullet-scarred window frame in which a German sniper stood before he was removed with a single shot from Staff Sergeant Shifty Powers. You can take up position in the same spot where Shifty had gotten a bead on the sniper whilst Company First Sergeant Carwood Lipton ran across the road to attract the sniper’s attention. 

Standing on the ground in Foy, you cannot help but be drawn to the bent bars on the tiny basement window of the house belonging to the family of Jules Koeune at the time that stands at the crossroads. Today it is a thriving guesthouse still owned by Jules’s grandson but back in 1944, some forty of the town’s citizens were using the basement of the Koeune house for shelter. At some point in one of the battles for the village, an 88mm shell fired from the direction of Noville to the north struck the basement window, passing between the bars before striking bags of produce stored in the room below without exploding. Those inside were miraculously unharmed. 

Less fortunate were the Gaspard family who lived in the house on the other side of the street. Legend has it that when their bodies were found in their barn once the town was finally liberated, they had been booby-trapped. Between this barn and the house used by the sniper shot by Shifty Powers is a small sheep croft that had been used as a medical aid station. Within these walls that still exist today, the bodies of between eight to fifteen wounded GIs were later found to have been executed after the Americans had been forced to withdraw during earlier fighting.

While standing there, it is deeply moving to consider the ferocity of the fighting required to finally retake this one small village and liberate its population of 100 on 14^th January 1945. 

Consider too the well over 1,200 casualties that were sustained on both sides as Foy changed hands four times over the course of the four weeks of the campaign. Beyond that, imagine as well the toll on lives and human wellbeing as units moved on to do the whole thing all over again in the town of Noville just two minutes drive up the road today and so on and so on. And lastly, consider too the civilians left behind to pick up the pieces of their lives as the war moved on.

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Given the level of attention afforded to it, one could be forgiven for thinking that it was the seven-day defense of the strategically important crossroads town of Bastogne that saved the day and that it was the actions of the 101^st Airborne alone who held the line whilst other units broke. It is therefore perhaps not surprising that, as a result, this small market town and the positions held by Easy Company have inevitably become magnets for those tourists inclined and able to venture this far into the theatre of operations. The legend has understandably built up around that narrative. The veterans of that extraordinary defense while completely surrounded would also have you believe that they never needed relieving when elements of Patton’s Third Army lifted the siege of Bastogne on 26^th December 1944.

It is a truism that those that manned Bastogne’s perimeter from the 19th December encountered stragglers flooding back from U.S positions forward of Bastogne in a state of disarray and disorder. However, as relayed in John C McManus’ excellent ‘Alamo in the Ardennes’, this ignores the bloody delaying actions fought in the days before the 101^st Airborne Division were able to take up their positions. It overlooks the fact that outnumbered and outgunned 10:1, the men of the 28th Infantry Division and other smaller supporting units had held a series of small outposts and choke points along the network of roads lacing the terrain and had made the attackers pay for every icy inch of ground they gained. Sufficient time was thus bought through the accumulation of multiple actions by handfuls of gallant defenders. Time for the 101^st Airborne to reach and fully occupy Bastogne and prepare for the ferocious attack to come. 

But, this again places too much emphasis on the defense of the southern shoulder of the Bulge against the extraordinary legacy of determination, tragedy and valor that concurrently took place in the centre and along the northern shoulder of the Ardennes offensive. 

The dogged defense of Bastogne has become a symbol of resistance vividly portrayed in the Band of Brothers mini-series. However, across the entire battlefront, it is important to understand that by the time the siege of that town began in earnest on 20^th December, the attacking forces’ timetable was already three days behind schedule and the whole offensive drastically off track. 

So, while some veterans of Easy became uncomfortable heroes in households across the globe, it is possible to overlook that Easy Company was one of three companies in the Second Battalion and one of nine in the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment. It was also one of thirty-six rifle companies in the 101st Airborne Division – excluding the attached and detached elements – that fought amongst the ninety Allied Divisions under General Eisenhower’s command across Western Europe until the eventual German surrender on May 7th 1945. 

As so vividly portrayed in the show, the men of Easy Company did their jobs defending the north-eastern outskirts of the town of Bastogne, so central to the defense of the southern shoulder of the Bulge. They deserve our attention as well as our gratitude for their bravery and sacrifice, as do other units who equally performed their duties and deserve mention for their contribution towards blunting the German offensive.

I should add here by saying that these forthcoming blog entries are by no means an attempt to diminish or demean the feats of those extraordinary men who have become such household names. Both the book and the miniseries created a surge of interest in the fortunes of the men of Easy such as Lewis Nixon, Joe Toye, Bill Guarnere, Dick Winters, Buck Compton, Carwood Lipton, Don Malarkey and Eugene Roe amongst countless other familiar names. I want simply to widen the lens and encourage the reader to recall that equally important events were taking place elsewhere. 

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In amongst the remarkable stories I will share, one should not ignore that tragedies and atrocities occurred. I can commend Peter Schrijvers’ book ‘Unknown Dead – Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge’ which carefully details the experiences and, in many cases, the fate of civilians both during and, as importantly, in the months and years following the battle. 

One such was the massacre of eighty-five U.S. Servicemen at Baugnez, close to the town of Malmedy on 17^th December 1944. This was not the only such occurrence but it remains the most notorious and news of what happened spread quickly amongst troops once the information was released stiffening the resolve of defenders across the battlefront not to surrender fearing a similar fate. 

Most of the senseless barbarity against both combatants and civilians alike occurred at the hands of the 1st SS Panzer Division (aka the “Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler”) on its march across the northern shoulder of the Bulge. Some sources say as many as 749 were senselessly murdered whilst official U.S. sources state that 308 captured Americans and 111 civilians were killed by this unit alone in places such as Honsfeld, Büllingen, Ligneuville, Vau Richard, Cheneux, Stavelot, Trois Ponts, Stoumont, Wanne, Lutrebois and Petit Thier as they passed through.  Elsewhere, atrocities are today remembered in Fouhren, Tandel, Verdenne, Bande, Hodister, Noville and Bourcy. 

Inevitably, blame and responsibility lies on both sides although none of the perpetrators from the U.S. 11th Armored Division for what became known as the Chenogne Massacre on 1^st January, 1945 of eighty members of the Führerbegleitbrigade and 3rd Panzergrenadier Division were brought to account. General Eisenhower ordered an investigation and General Patton even recorded the affair in his journal but no report ever came to light.

Perhaps one of the saddest tales is that of the eleven African-American soldiers of the 333rd U.S. Field Artillery Battalion tortured and killed in Wereth on 17^th December 1944. Unlike the extensive investigation into the massacre at Malmedy and the high profile prosecutions that followed, the U.S. Army invested just two years investigating the so-called “Wereth 11” massacre. 

The investigation was given a “secret” classification and passed to the War Crimes Investigation unit although no positive identification could be made of the murderers other than that they belonged to the 1st SS Panzer Division. The families of the victims only knew that their loved ones had perished in the fighting.

Without conclusion, the file was closed in February 1947. In 1948, the “secret” classification was removed and the report filed away. It lay unopened for another 50 years until a local resident, Hermann Langer who had seen the men being marched to their deaths back in 1944 and unable to shake the memory, had placed a small cross on the site where the soldiers were brutally murdered next to a cow pasture. This prompted interest amongst local amateur historians and the search began, with mounting curiosity around the world, to uncover what had taken place.

Historians still disagree over whether the men were tortured or the file subsequently closed because of their color. The torture and disfigurement of the bodies suggests that race may have had something to do with it given the Nazis racial ideology. It is perhaps easy to speculate too that the lack of subsequent investigation reflected America’s racial tensions and attitudes common to that period. Alternatively, there may have been different motives. We shall likely never know. 

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With the eightieth anniversary now upon us, the strategic ebb and flow of the Battle of the Bulge has been described in detail many times and readers are directed to the plethora of fine books and podcasts that cover this subject should they want to understand more of the wider campaign. The aim of these blog entries though is to breathe life into the stories of the men and women, the civilians, the medics, the engineers, the logisticians, the cooks, the clerks as well as the frontline soldiers and airmen – the people who threw grit into the machinery of warfare and contributed to it grinding to a halt. 

These events by themselves make for interesting stories. However, when aggregated, one can see how they have become very much part of the legend of this bitterly contested campaign, each vignette in effect being a beat of the butterfly’s wing.

As to the veracity of each, some stories have proven harder to authenticate fully particularly now that almost all witnesses-to-the-fact have passed on and only those that were there really know. Indeed, often the deeper I have gnawed away at some stories trying to distinguish fact against fiction, the more clouded I have found the narrative to become. But of course, there are many perspectives and, be the subject General Dwight D. Eisenhower or Private First Class Edward “Babe” Heffron, one can never be sure theirs is the right one.

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And lastly, I would call on the reader to consider why the stories of these heroes continue to enthral and inspire us. Their stories, particularly if they have proven to be unlikely champions that may have overcome adversity or found redemption or, more simply, unexpectedly risen to the occasion when required to do so raises an interesting question about the human condition. Regardless of whether it is fact or fiction, myth or legend, when furnished with the details, I defy you not to stand on the ground where history was made and ask yourselves how you would have behaved if found in similar circumstances.  

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As the “Greatest Generation” is finally consigned to the history books, visiting these sites should encourage us to reflect as well on the meaning of values, on our own behavior and our own responsibilities in today’s turbulent world. At a time when the liberal international order is again under threat, by examining the narratives of the larger-than-life figures that feature in these stories, their actions symbolize all the sacrifice, selflessness, courage and effort required to secure liberty.  

It is my sincerest hope then that this entries should also serve as reminders to recall the debt of gratitude we owe – or should owe – to those who sacrificed their youth upon freedom’s altar and that, “for our tomorrow, they gave their today”.