Can you imagine how today’s media would have covered this?
Another reason was because Enigma, where we had basically reading the German military’s mail, wasn’t being used. They were using more secure landlines, due to the shorter communication lines, and the western Allies were blind.
Most German generals did not think much of this gamble. But some of the more fanatical Nazis initially thought they’d be able to recapture Paris. How’s that for being overconfident?
Unternehmung Wacht am Rhein was a desparate gamble, and probably shortened the War by a year. If the War had dragged on, Germany, rather than Japan, would have been the recipient of the first nuclear attack. It was just that much easier to destroy German Armor in the open. All of Germany's reserves of ammunition and fuel were expended in a month.
In August 1944, the Wehrmacht suffered more fatalities than the Americans did in the entire war, mostly on the Eastern Front, but the western Allies kept the Germans tied down trying to keep them out of Germany.
The face of war changes with new technology. But its essence remains the same, because human nature stays constant. A long-ago American victory can remind us that when such calamities strike, the status quo is not always equipped to rise to the challenge.Instead, our future saviors are often right in our midst, characteristically loud and underappreciated, but savvy and vital to our survival.
The Battle of the Bulge reminds us that when deadly enemies prove unpredictable, it is sometimes wise to have an even more unpredictable leader on our side.
The result was that Hitler’s last gamble in the West was as tactically brilliant as it was strategically imbecilic.
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Hanson says it so well. He is a great WW2 historian.
Popular histories paint the Bulge as an Allied defeat. It wasn’t as VDH points out in his usual way. It destroyed the Wehrmacht in the West and they had no way to reconstitute it. The battle hardened divisions were reduced to regimental size or smaller with little equipment and no fuel. The Volksgrenadier divisions that were raised as replacements were ill equipped and poorly trained. Think of them as the typical crowd at a NFL football game after a long morning of tailgating. Not the vaunted German soldier of 1942.
The only constraint on the U.S. Army was logistics, which is why the Germans picked Antwerp as the objective for their offensive. After the Bulge, the Germans spent all their energy on schemes to surrender to the Allies rather than face the Russians. One of our biggest problems was feeding the swelling POW camps.
We were surprised because no one could imagine that the Germans would be stupid enough to do what they did. Of course, they weren’t, with one exception: Hitler. The rational decision after the Bulge would have been surrender before the Russians raped and pillaged Berlin. Hitler chose to fight to the death instead.
23,000 reported missing.
Were they ever found?
Total failure of battlefield G2 intelligence. Concentration upon Hurtgen Forest meat grinder distracted all attention. Our troops were needlessly stretched thin due to suicidal Hurtgen Forest offensive with units in the midst of rebuilding from their previous losses and at low strength. Too many ticket punchers at the top of our chain of command in the area. We knew we had the war won and got sloppy.
Facing a severe shortage of medics, they lined up my father’s company at their army base in New Jersey. They had every fourth man step forward and summarily declared them combat medics, including my dad.
They landed in France Dec. 24 of 1944. He had stories to tell.
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great caesars ghost! What a hell of a thread.
So much expertise filling in blanks and expanding the story.
Thank you all.
Merry Christmas !!
Great post; thread and history lesson. HOORAY VDH. Thanks.
To think, Speaker Pelosi equated the Democrat “Impeachment” farce to the Battle of the Bulge. SMH. She’s a complete imbecile and a very evil person.
Probably sensing the current Democrat Party and their far-left ideology are losing big time, Pelosi’s mounting the equivalent of the German’s last ditch offense at the Bulge “the farcical Impeachment”. Democrats don’t care one bit how their head long dive to impeach Trump is tearing up this country. Everything is done to gain/maintain power.
Why on earth would any one support Democrats at this point? Unless you are the bureaucrats, dependent on the Deep State for your paychecks and/or welfare checks. And of course those who like to see USA taken down, TWANLOCs.
My Dad drove a supply truck in the 6th Armored Division. His unit was held up and didn’t make it to the battle. He said that saved his life. He said very little about it. Now with the 75th anniversary, I wished I knew more. Thanks for this thread.