Bulge, Battle of the

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BULGE, BATTLE OF THE

BULGE, BATTLE OF THE, a German counter-offensive in World War II, named for the forty-mile-wide and sixty-mile-deep bulge created in American lines. As German armies retreated from France in late summer 1944, Adolf Hitler planned to regain the initiative by a winter counteroffensive in the semimountainous Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg, scene of German triumphs in 1914 and 1940. Over objections of his field commanders, who deemed resources inadequate for such a plan, Hitler aimed his thrust at the Belgian port of Antwerp, intending thereby to cut off to the north the British Twenty-first Army Group and the U.S. First and Ninth Armies; these forces eliminated, he hoped to gain a negotiated peace on the western front.

Through the autumn of 1944, the German commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, secretly massed more than 200,000 men and 1,200 tanks in the wooded Eifel region opposite the Ardennes. On 16 December three German armies struck along a sixty-mile front against seven American divisions of the First Army's Fifth and Eighth Corps. Surprise was total, but only at one point, north of Saint Vith, did the Germans achieve the swift breakthroughs they expected.

Allied lines held in the north against the onslaught of two Panzer armies. In the center the Twenty-eighth Infantry Division slowed a German drive across northern Luxembourg to the Belgian road center of Bastogne. In the south the Fourth Division and part of the Ninth Armored Division blocked the southern shoulder of the penetration. The German drive was thus contained at both shoulders and constricted by lack of roads.

On the second day, 17 December, the supreme Allied commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, and the Twelfth Army Group commander, Lieutenant General Omar N. Bradley, rushed reinforcements to the southern shoulder, in part to relieve the besieged U.S. forces in Bastogne. Other units began to build a line westward from the Elsenborn Ridge lest the Germans turn north toward supply depots around Liège. By the fourth day, 19 December, the Germans had severed communications between the southern and northern armies. This prompted Eisenhower to put Bradley's two northern armies under the Twenty-first Army Group commander, Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. American commanders would later take the opinion that Montgomery claimed undue credit for the German defeat.

Hitler hoped to anchor his south flank on Bastogne and drive north to encircle American troops near Aachen. Thus, the Germans surrounded the American forces at Bastogne on 20 December and laid siege to the town. On the twenty-third, the weather cleared, enabling Allied planes to attack German columns and drop supplies. Severe fighting continued at Bastogne, even after the Fourth Armored Division broke the siege on the twenty-sixth. The First and Third Armies, nevertheless, began to counterattack on 3 January 1945. The First Army came from the north; the Third Army from the south. On the sixteenth they converged on Houffalize, a juncture north of Bastogne, and precipitated a slow German withdrawal. The last of the "bulge" was eliminated on the twenty-eighth.

The Americans incurred about 80,000 casualties—19,000 killed and 15,000 captured; British casualties totaled 1,400. German losses totaled approximately 100,000. Each side lost 700 tanks. The counteroffensive delayed a final Allied offensive against Germany for six weeks, but in expending his last reserves, Hitler had crippled the defense of Germany on both eastern and western fronts.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cole, Hugh M. The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge. Washington, D.C.: Office of the Chief of Military History, Department of the Army, 1994. The original edition was published in 1965.

Dupuy, Trevor N., David L. Bongard, and Richard C. Anderson. Hitler's Last Gamble: The Battle of the Bulge, December 1944–January 1945. New York: Harper Collins, 1994.

MacDonald, Charles B. The Battle of the Bulge. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984.

Whiting, Charles. The Last Assault: 1944, The Battle of the Bulge Reassessed. New York: Sarpedon, 1994.

Charles B.MacDonald/a. r.