Posted on 11/13/2021 10:51:18 PM PST by ammodotcom
“The Germans had conjured 26 divisions seemingly out of thin air,”
Patton’s own intel guys kept seeing some of the best Panser divisions getting pulled out of action and suspected they were doing that to amass them for a secret attack. They even correctly guessed the staging area from air recon tells.
I recommend historian and author Charles Whiting.
:^) The intel from scouting detected staging areas loaded with armor and such, but besides Patton, everyone decided it was misIDed or otherwise just not worth concern.
The Ardennes? Sure, the Germans have run invasions through there twice in the 20th century and once in the 19th, but there’s no way they could do that again... ;^)
Hmm, sez here (wiki) that the freakin’ Vikings used Roman roads in the Ardennes in their pillaging in 881 and 882. :^D
The Germans were never able to take Bastonge. Primarily because even though they did surround the town they never just poured in from all sides. They would attack at one point, be repulsed and then would try attacking from another location.
The Germans did however briefly seize St. Vith. It was in retreating from St. Vith that my Uncle Bill was wounded.
However the Wehrmacht wasn't involved in the fighting.
The Allies had the rotten bad luck of landing in an area occupied by two Waffen SS panzer divisions. It was these two divisions that the Allies went up against.
Yes sir...wherever Peiper tried to turn his panzer kampfgruppe he found the engineers had been there first, blowing bridges.
His tanks were critically low on fuel when a group of engineers blew a bridge literally in his face. That was when he screamed “Those damned engineers!”
Peiper eventually had to abandon his vehicles and walk back to German lines.
After the war Peiper was convicted of war crimes for the Malmedy massacre and sentenced to death. The death sentence was commuted to “perpetual prison.” He was eventually released from prison and ended up in France working as a freelance interpreter.
When he was outed as a Waffen SS war criminal in 1976 some French citizens burned his house down. With him in it.
The casualty count depends where the line between battles gets drawn. The US Army had been engaged in the inconclusive Battle of the Hurtgen Forest right up until the German attack in the Ardennes.
December 16 is both the end of Hurtgen and the beginning od Ardennes. Really it’s one continuous battle with the Wehrmacht counterattacking just to the south.
The US had a superior artillery network they could call upon. Plus they had just fielded radio proximity fused mortar rounds that were deadly to dismounted infantry or panzer grenadiers riding in open top trucks and half-tracks.
Artillery, King of Battles.
Had a great uncle that served on LSTs in the coast guard Stukas rolled in on them wile they were tied together awaiting unloading. Totally loaded with AvGas. On hot fragment and the entire line of ships would have gone up. Fortunately between the Navy’s AAA & some smoke over the harbor the German pilots missed entirely.
yes, correct.
Hohenstaufen and Frundsberg
I was referring to the German armed forces in general.
Offensive operations ended in Hurtgen on Dec.14, 1944.
Two days later the Germans attacked in Ardennes.
That whole operation did nothing to shorten the war. In the end it was the Dutch people who suffered the most.
The Germans blockaded food supplies to Holland leaving to the Dutch to starve in what they called “The Hunger Winter’’. Thousands more were hauled off to concentration camps.
The Germans didn’t surrender the city until May 8, 1945.
That's why Audrey Hepburn was so small. She was a victim of the Hunger Winter.
Yup. Poor kid almost didn’t make it.
Montgomery was an asshole, plain and simple.
He called Market-Garden ‘’an unqualified success’’.
At the time, the 33 year old Dutch Regent in exile Prince Rupert said “My country can never again afford the luxury of a Montgomery success’’.
The most important part of any rifle is the man firing it.
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