What was battle of the bulge

Department of Defense , 1 million-plus Allied troops, including some , Americans, fought in the Battle of the Bulge, with approximately 19, soldiers killed in action, 47, wounded and 23,plus missing. About , Germans were killed, wounded or captured. Eisenhower, in his book, The Bitter Woods.

For it was here that American and German combat soldiers met in the decisive struggle that broke the back of the Nazi war machine. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Subscribe for fascinating stories connecting the past to the present. Dunkirk is a small town on the coast of France that was the scene of a massive military campaign during World War II. The Battle of Midway was an epic clash between the U.

The U. From July 10 through October 31, , pilots and support crews on both sides took to the Army and U. Marine Corps troops descended on the Pacific island of Okinawa Live TV. This Day In History. History Vault. The Battle of the Bulge cost the Reich some , casualties and tremendous losses in military equipment.

The Battle of the Bulge was the last major German military offensive in western Europe. The German offensive in the Ardennes region of Belgium was only temporarily successful in halting the Allied advance.

During the fighting, captured American soldiers and Belgian prisoners were murdered by Waffen SS units. As the Allies attempted to penetrate across the western border of Germany in late , the Germans tried one last gambit to reverse their fortunes. Battle of the Bulge: Photographs. Attacking through the Ardennes Forest in eastern Belgium on December 16, hundreds of German tanks and several hundred thousand German troops broke through the thinly held American lines.

Although the Germans advanced as much as 50 miles in some areas, the Ardennes offensive was short-lived. Despite taking dreadful losses, US forces managed to delay the enemy sufficiently to permit reinforcements to be moved into position to halt the German drive.

By December 26, it was clear that the German advance had been halted short of its objective, the Meuse River. In some sectors, such as the vital Elsenborn Ridge, German troops failed to make significant progress at all. On that same day, December 26, , US armored troops reached the beleaguered defenders of a vital road junction in the town of Bastogne. In large part, it was the tenacious defense put up by American soldiers, fighting in small groups in sub-zero cold and snow that stopped the German advance.

One of the key aspects of the battle is the speed with which he can reorientate his Third Army, which is to the south of the Bulge, and get them to counterattack the Germans by moving north. To turn a whole army around on its axis by 90 degrees and move north in the middle of winter at almost no notice is almost unheard of.

But Patton achieves this within a couple of days—much to the amazement of the Germans and even more to the amazement of his fellow Allies.

He says he will do it. Most people don't believe he can. Yet, my goodness me, he delivers, and delivers in spades. On the other side, one of the most compelling characters is the German Panzer commander, Joachim Peiper. He was nasty bit of work, wasn't he?

Joachim Peiper was a year-old true believer in the Nazi faith. His whole life had been acted out in the shadow of Hitler and the Third Reich. He'd come to prominence early. He was a colonel in the Waffen SS and worked as an adjutant to Himmler. He was involved in a whole series of war crimes on the eastern front, where he taught his men to regard Russian lives as being worth nothing. He and his men bring this mentality to the western front when they fight in the Bulge in , and it's they who perpetrate the famous massacre just outside the town of Malmedy.

I also wanted to try and strip the gloss off Joachim Peiper as a brilliant military commander. One of the points I make in the book is that he had passed his best in a military sense. His performance wasn't nearly as good as he claimed it to be. When I went back through the records, I found he'd lied about the progress he'd made during the Battle of the Bulge.

One of the things that most surprised me was your contention that the use of crystal meth was widespread in the German army. The Germans routinely encouraged their soldiers to take what we would now call crystal meth before battle. It would whip them up into a fury and may explain some of the excesses they committed.

It's a way of motivating scared young men. And some of the Germans are very young indeed. I found lots of evidence of year-olds being put into uniform and sent into battle. So I think you're reaching for every possible technique to exaggerate your soldiers' combat performance.

This wasn't just an SS thing. The German army was not below stooping to use drugs to increase its soldiers' effectiveness on the battlefield. What are the most important lessons, militarily and personally, you took away from studying the battle? Writing military history is fascinating because you never end up where you think you will.

One of the things I took away was how much the Allies deluded themselves as to the situation of their opponents—how much they believed, because they wanted to believe, that the Germans were a spent force. The Battle of the Bulge proved exactly the opposite. And we do this time and time again. We under-appreciate the effectiveness of our opponents even today.

Personally speaking, I was fascinated and humbled by the resilience of the soldiers, particularly the Americans, I met, whether personally or through their letters and diaries. I have seen action in combat zones myself. But I could have no conception of the horrific, freezing conditions that the American soldiers coped with and overcame. What I took away is that soldiering is not about planning.

It's all about how you react when something goes wrong, when the wheel comes off—how quickly you can turn things around, how resilient and deep your resolve is. That was demonstrated in spades by the U. Army at the Bulge. And that is deeply humbling and very instructive.

There are precious few. Of the several hundred thousand that took part in the Battle of the Bulge, only a couple of thousand are now left with us. Most of those are fading fast, which is one of the reasons I wanted to write the book for the 70th anniversary. I knew that if I left it any longer, there'd be no one left around to say, "Yes, that's how it was," or "No, the author's talking a load of rubbish.

Simon Worrall curates Book Talk. Follow him on Twitter or at simonworrallauthor. Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that the Battle of the Bulge lasted months. The story has been changed to reflect the correct duration, which is 6-weeks.