Bulge, Battle of the

Bulge, Battle of the (1944–1945).In mid‐December 1944, as the Allied armies stood poised to invade Germany, came Adolf Hitler's last, desperate gamble for victory in World War II, a thrust through the Ardennes Forest in Belgium intended to split Allied forces and retake the port of Antwerp. Hitler hoped that the American home front would crack after such a crushing defeat. With bad weather preventing U.S. air reconnaissance, German forces under Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt achieved surprise along a fifty‐mile front on 16 December, as fourteen infantry divisions, backed by five panzer (tank) divisions, crashed through the Allied lines and created a huge “bulge” toward Liège and Antwerp. English‐speaking German commandos wearing U.S. uniforms and dog tags disrupted communications and panicked GIs unable to distinguish friend from foe. Some 7,500 men in the 106th Infantry Division surrendered, the largest U.S. surrender in the European theater. German SS troops later massacred American soldiers captured at Malmédy.

The heaviest fighting was around Bastogne, a vital road junction. Defended by General Troy Middleton's Eighth Corps and General Anthony McAuliffe's 101st Airborne Division, some 18,000 Americans held off superior German forces for over a week. With stormy weather preventing aerial reinforcement, the American position appeared hopeless, but on 22 December, McAuliffe made his memorable reply to a German surrender demand: “Nuts!” Clearing weather the following day enabled planes to drop supplies. Meanwhile, responding to General Dwight D. Eisenhower's orders, General George S. Patton Jr. made a “left turn” of his 250,000‐man Third Army, then on the Moselle River eighty miles away, and drove northward; Patton's Fourth Armored Division broke through the German encirclement on 26 December and saved Bastogne. Finally, after constant urgings from Eisenhower, the British general Bernard Montgomery mounted a counterattack from the north that flattened the “bulge” by early January.

The war's largest single battle on the Western front, the Battle of the Bulge cost the United States. Nearly 70,000 soldiers were killed, captured, or wounded. At a cost to Germany of 30,000 battle deaths, 40,000 wounded, 30,000 prisoners of war, 277 planes, and most of its remaining armor, the offensive delayed the Allied advance for a month. By concentrating his reserves in the west, Hitler enabled the Soviets—advancing in the east—to capture Berlin. “The failure of the Ardennes offensive,” the German armaments minister Albert Speer later wrote, “meant that the war was over.”

Bibliography

Russell F. Weigley , Eisenhower's Lieutenants, 1981.
Charles B. MacDonald , The Battle of the Bulge, 1984.

J. Garry Clifford