Dan Snow's History Hit - The Battle of the Bulge

Episode Date: January 3, 2025

In the dead of winter, 1944, the frozen forest of Ardennes erupted in chaos. In a desperate, last-ditch attempt to turn the tide of the war, Hitler threw his armoured divisions at the thinly spread Allied frontline. The battle that followed was the bloodiest fought by the Americans in the war, and their determined defence helped to seal the fate of Nazi Germany.For the latest instalment in our 'D-Day to Berlin' series, Dan is joined by Professor John C. McManus, author of 'Alamo in the Ardennes'. They delve into this fierce German winter offensive in terms of its strategic significance, and the tenacity of the American soldiers that thwarted Hitler's plans.Written by Dan Snow, produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.To hear more of our 'D-Day to Berlin' series, you could check out:Operation Market Garden - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/operation-market-gardenThe Battle of Arnhem with Al Murray - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/the-battle-of-arnhem-with-al-murrayThe Other D-Day: The Eastern Front - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/the-other-d-day-the-eastern-frontThe Falaise Pocket: WWII's 'Corridor of Death' - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/the-falaise-pocket-wwiis-corridor-of-deathD-Day: The Land Invasion - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/d-day-the-land-invasionSign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.

When the schoolteacher returned to his classroom, he found only destruction. The village school had become an unlikely military stronghold. Windows blown out, shards of glass littering the floor, walls pot-marked with rounds. The surrounding area smashed, scarred by war. World War II could do that to a place. One minute, it's just a quiet corner of Europe, Asia, Africa, the Pacific. The next minute, it's thrust like a slide under a microscope lens into the crucible of war. The focal point of the giant global struggle for the future. Iwo Jima, Dunkirk, Kahima, Caen, Kharkiv.

War came like a tornado, ripped everything apart. And then it would lift. It would shift to torment another place and other people. So, now in the midwinter, December of 1944, that storm had come to the tiny village of Champs, just north of Bastogne in Belgium. The school, more accustomed to the shouts of children at play, had briefly been the setting for terrible violence. Young men shrieking in fear, in pain. Crying out for mothers like those children they had so suddenly replaced. But instead of scratched knees from football, it was from bullets and shrapnel that tore deep inside and foretold of death. Amidst the detritus, the schoolteacher noticed something extraordinary.

There was writing on the blackboard. Not mindless graffiti, but something fluent and coherent. He noted it down for posterity. May the world never again live through such a Christmas night. He noted it down for posterity. or children of their father. Life was bequeathed to us in order that we might love and be considerate to one another. From the ruins, out of the blood and death shall come forth a brotherly world. And it was signed.

A German officer. It was a prayer from the midst of battle. It was a message sent to us from the heart of Hitler's last serious attempt to turn the tide of the war in December 1944, 80 years ago. It was chalked up on that blackboard during the Ardennes Offensive, or the Battle of the Bulge as we often call it in the West. And today we're going to talk about the bulge right here on Dan Snow's History Hit. Here to set me straight is the very brilliant John C. McManus. He's Professor of US Military History at the Missouri University of Science and Technology.

He's the author of numerous fantastic military history books focusing on World War II, including Alamo in the Ardennes, the untold story of the American soldiers who made the defence of Bastogne possible. He's also the host of Someone Talked and the We Have Ways USA podcasts. This, friends, is the Battle of the Bulge. It can be hard to believe that D-Day was just six months before. Sometimes history feels concentrated, compressed.

A lot can happen in six months. The weeks following D-Day had seen a titanic clash in Normandy, casualties on a par with the great battles of the First World War, a savage attritional struggle in which men and machines had been ground down at an unforgiving front. Now, the Allies could afford to lose those units. The Germans could not. In the summer of 1944, the Americans had broken through, they'd broken out of the Normandy bridgehead, they'd swept through untouched countryside, and they restored movement to the battlefield. The Germans reeled back. There was a vast encirclement in the Falaise pocket, where something like 50,000 German troops were captured.

It looked as though, perhaps, perhaps, the Germans were done. The heart had been torn out of German armies in the West. Paris was liberated in short order. The Allies pushed the German frontier. They crossed into Belgium. There was talk, by some optimists, of Berlin by Christmas. And what a different world that would have been. How many millions would have lived or been spared monstrous suffering?

How many European cities would have survived? How many architectural treasures would have endured? Instead, it was a very different Christmas in reality. German units hardened. An Allied thrust north from Belgium into Holland to try and cross all the branch of the River Rhine and get into the northern plains of Germany ended in defeat as armoured spearheads fell short of the bridge at Arnhem. Now that's despite the heroic tenacity of British airborne troops who'd seized and held one end of that bridge and fought off tanks with pistols till their ammunition ran out. The Allies by the fall, by the autumn of 1944,

struggling terribly with supplies. They'd been hoping to use the port of Antwerp. It was an ideal port, but the approaches to it, if you look at a map, Antwerp is quite inland and you have to go along waterways through Holland and parts of Belgium. And the shores of lots of those waterways are still in German hands. So ships couldn't get through to Antwerp. And that meant supplies are still being delivered to the channel ports in Northern France and then trucked across the whole of France. The roads were terrible. They didn't have enough vehicles, fuel, ammunition, other supplies were not getting in large enough volumes to the front line. And war in the industrial age needs oil and steel and cans of food. And there weren't enough of those things.

So the war is no longer one of striking advances, but of inching forward. There's a continuous front that stretches from the Alps to the Channel. Let's bring in John McManus here for his strategic overview. The Germans have proven much more resilient maybe than the Allies had thought. There was a great deal of hope that maybe in the wake of the attempt on Hitler's life in July, that maybe the Nazi regime is on the verge of a total collapse. Of course, this was over-optimistic. The Germans were resilient enough and tough enough to hang in there. But also, the Allies were running into serious logistical problems. It wasn't that they didn't have the stuff, but they couldn't get it to where it needed to be on the front because the road net was so damaged in northern Europe.

And the port cities, whatever few we controlled, were too far away from the battle area. And so, you know, that robs the armies of some level of momentum, plus the losses have been pretty heavy and would continue to be so. So it's always harder to fight an offensive battle than a defensive battle. And so I think the Germans kind of take advantage of that

by the latter part of the fall. So the Allies were up against it and Hitler felt that there was at least a sliver of opportunity. In late 1944, he had three choices. He could surrender, which meant that he would end up imprisoned, on trial, and hacked. He could fight a defensive battle. It might prolong the eventual outcome of the war, but probably wouldn't change it. Or he could attack. And he did have offensive tools.

100,000 panzer troops, so armoured troops, these are people that either drive armoured vehicles or panzer grenadiers, infantry that used to fighting alongside armoured vehicles, they had escaped the Battle of Normandy. They escaped the net in Falaise. And through the miracle of Albert Speer, his armaments minister, through the miracle of his armaments programmes, Hitler had managed to re-equip two panzer armies. So two armies with tanks, self-propelled guns, trucks for infantry. These two formidable strike formations were back on the chessboard. Now nearly all his generals begged him, for goodness sake, leave these armoured units in Germany proper. Leave one panzer army behind the Rhine in West Germany and one

behind the Vistula in East Germany. That way, when the Allies crossed those rivers, the Soviets from the East, the British, French, Americans, Canadians from the West, these two panzer armies could rapidly counterattack and drive those bridgeheads back into the rivers. Many of Hitler's generals believed that the real threat to Germany lay on the Eastern Front, where the Red Army was making massive advances and bringing murder, criminality, violence, looting in their wake. But Hitler perhaps was influenced by history. Perhaps all the way back to 1914, Hitler wanted to pull a move that reminds you a little bit of the Schlieffen Plan in 1914. He thought, what if I strike hard at the Western Allies? What if I batter them and then use my interior lines of communication

to pivot round and deal with the Soviet menace? That's what the pre-war planners had come up with in Germany in 1914, and Hitler thought it might be applicable in 1944. Particularly because he thought he'd found a strip of that front line which was being held thinly by Allied troops. And the Allied troops that were there were second rate. They were either divisions that had been battered by the summer's fighting and they were there to resupply, to recover, to replenish, or they were green units. They were freshly delivered over from the USA

and they needed to train to work themselves up until they were combat ready. Hitler had a generally low opinion of the Americans. He thought they would panic and flee at the first onslaught. And so it was that Hitler's gaze fell on these American units at this very particular place on the Western Front. It was a place that also meant a lot to Hitler for another reason. It was the Ardennes. It's a very beautiful part of the world. It's very strange to visit there. It's magical. I highly recommend it. After you drive across this densely populated flat ground of northern France or Belgium, and you suddenly find yourself in what feels like a very alpine environment. You drive up onto these windy roads, and you come across alpine villages nestled in amongst mountain peaks and valleys. It's thickly forested. There are pine trees. There are ravines scoured out by rivers that still

rage along the valley floors. The tight bends of those rivers have beautiful medieval castles on them and little settlements clinging around their battlements. There are none of the massive fields and industrial agriculture that you're used to in other parts of France and Belgium here. To be honest, it's rubbish terrain for tanks, for armour. Very narrow tracks, weak medieval bridges, lots of potential for enormous traffic jams. But it was a place close to Hitler's heart because the Germans had played on the assumption

that it was an unsuitable place for offensive action in 1940. It was through the Ardennes that they'd driven the largest armoured column in history to that point in 1940. It was here that they'd astonished the French. They'd torn a massive hole in the Allied front line. The rock star German generals, Manstein, Guderian, Rommel, they had made their names. They'd forged their reputations in pushing for this daring assault through the Ardennes in 1940, and then executing it, then leading it. So, it had worked before. Would it work again? Adolf Hitler decided it was time to play the hits. And it was true, the Allies held this area thinly. They were certainly not expecting the Germans to drive a massive

armoured counter-attack through this very, very difficult terrain. Here Hitler thought was his chance to give the allies a bloody nose. He would try and capture the port of Antwerp, deny it to the allies. He would certainly batter it with rockets. He would then pivot those armies, those same armies that had been using this offensive, pivot them east to smash the Soviets. He was feeling a little bit bullish at this point. He was encouraged by the fact that new jet aircraft were coming into service. He slightly ignored the fact that there are only a handful of these aircraft and just not enough to make a difference.

But he thought there was a chance. And as usual, Hitler was a gambler. And in his fever dreams, he thought that once again, by passing through the Ardennes, he might be able to transform the strategic situation. taker. There's no problem there in that respect. But, you know, Hitler has a clear strategic goal in mind in launching the offensive in the West. His feeling is that the Western Allied Coalition cannot possibly hang together with the Soviet Union in the long run. So in a sense, he's got some insight in that he anticipates the Cold War, that these are not going to be natural allies and they will eventually fall out. What he doesn't quite understand is they're going to hang together as long as he's around. But what he hopes to do is to hit the Western armies so hard and to drive a wedge between the British Canadians in the North and the Americans

farther to the South that it'll fracture the coalition, it'll bring about political changes in Britain and the U.S., short of the unconditional surrender policy, and force them to the peace table of some sort of conclusion to the war that allows him to remain in place and perhaps even get them on his side against the Soviets long run. You know, it's a big gulp. That's probably not going to happen, but that's at least the overall purpose of this offensive. It's, I'd say, more psychosis than genius because he's expending some of his last great assets that he can't quite afford. And he's probably better served to hunker down and fight a defensive war from this point forward. But I will say this.

He does have insight into the future and anticipation that the communists are not going to remain allies with the Western allies. I mean, that's just not going to happen long term. Again, though, as long as he's around, they're going to be determined to finish this war. Hitler is the one thing that unifies them and probably the only thing. The German army of 1944 was not the German army of 1940. Or perhaps more importantly, the American forces they would face were very unlike the French forces that had caved in back then. I asked John about the condition of the German army. Yeah, I mean, it isn't quite to the point where he's sending orders out to units that don't exist. That's going to happen later in April 1945.

And then, you know, he has this meltdown that we all know about in Berlin. But at this point, the German armed forces are like a wounded beast. I mean, they're seriously damaged. They're having major manpower problems. They're having force readiness issues, command issues, equipment issues, and so on and so forth. But they are still strong enough that they can inflict a heck of a bloody nose on the allies. I mean, they can inflict a lot of damage, especially in a defensive battle, but they have enough offensive capability here because they have new equipment, they have some new weaponry, and they have enough young soldiers who are willing to fight, and some of whom are quite well trained, that the Germans still do have that asset in their pocket.

So I think there's a tendency for us on the Allied side to think, well, these guys are pretty much done. I mean, we've inflicted so much damage on them, they can't possibly win the war at this point. And of course, the latter is probably true. But it doesn't mean that they can't inflict some serious damage in the meantime. Their willingness to fight is so extraordinary. What do you think is going on with the German non-commissioned officers, junior officer rank? Their generals are probably more war-weary than anybody, but their frontline infantry, they're prepared to fight. What are they doing there? Why are they risking themselves? Yeah, I mean, that's what we're still coming to grips with all these decades later. I think in the East, it's easy to understand why they're fighting. I mean, the fear of communism, the fear of the Soviets overrunning Germany and, you know, exacting tremendous revenge for what the Germans had done in the

Soviet Union and also in Poland. And, you know, I think there's no question there's a great deal of motivation there. It's harder to come to grips with why they're willing to fight in the West. But I think part of it, too, in that respect is a couple of things. Well, there is still this kind of faith in Hitler that he's going to just sort of pull the cat out of the bag somehow and turn this around. And many of the German people had really attached their allegiance to him. And that remained to the bitter end. But I also think, too, they're fighting on home soil now, too. And I think that in some cases they feel they're fighting to prevent the Allies from overrunning their homes and families.

There is some level of anger against the Western Allies for the bombing campaign of Germany. And so the average German soldier might well have had a relative killed in Allied bombing. I think that adds to the mix. I think there's also some level of good military discipline that remains among enough formations, I guess, that they're going to be quite formidable. They're reasonably well-armed, too. So, I think that helps. Let's talk a bit about the equipment. People will have heard of the famous tanks, the famous panzers that are being introduced towards the end of the war. How does the quality of their vehicles, of their personal weapons, how does that sort of compare to what they can be up against? Well, they really are outclassed in terms of mechanization, really, through much of this war. I mean, one of the great myths of the German armed forces

is that myth of the automation and blitzkrieg and all this. A lot of that tends to be a byproduct of German propaganda at the time. The average German infantry division is moving most of its stuff via horseback. I mean, that's straight out of yesteryear. I mean, and of course, when you talk about the U.S. Army especially, but also the British and Canadians at this point, I mean, they don't even know what a horse is anymore. Everything is mechanized. I mean, the level of vehicles is just off the charts.

The U.S. is the most automated society on Earth at this point, and this is reflected in our armed forces. So not as if the Germans don't have trucking and armored cars, and of course the famous tanks, they have even more self-propelled guns that are often mistaken for tanks. So there's that sort of coexisting alongside this larger tendency of yesteryear, move your supplies via horses and move your infantry on foot, and that's what it tends to be. And, you know, the aerial side, they're losing. The Luftwaffe still exists. And there are some planes that will support Hitler's counteroffensive. But of course, the Germans are badly outclassed in

the air at this point and badly outnumbered. You listen to Dan Snow's history. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. Don't go anywhere. There's more to come. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. In December 1944, Adolf Hitler was carried on his special train to Kranzberg Castle in West Germany. He had a command bunker there with a typically grand name, dramatic name. He called it the Eagle's Nest.

Now, he's a very superstitious man, and it was from here that he had overseen the greatest triumph of his career, the campaign which had shocked the world, defeated the superior forces of the Western Allies. It's from here that he had directed that attack through the Ardennes in 1940. He was now hoping that he could pull off the same trick again. It all began in the early hours of the 16th of December 1944. It was snowing. Thick white snow carpeted the ground. Young German troops stamped their feet, cursed as they handled icy cold magazines or checked the steel bolts of their rifles. At 5.30am their wait was pretty much over. Well before the thin grey light that passed for dawn at that time of year, 1,500 German barrels opened up with a roar,

spitting high explosives at their enemy to the west. It had begun. The Ardennes offensive was underway. Above those artillery shells roared V2 rockets. Remember, they're the first man-made objects to enter space. Ballistic missiles scudding like shooting stars across the winter sky. German commanders hoped that they would smash their target Antwerp into rubble, deny it to the Allies.

Some of those rockets would hit Antwerp. Later that day, one of them landed on a packed cinema in the city, killing more than 500 people in a flash. Just before sunrise, the German infantry made their move. I asked John how it was that the Germans achieved surprise, because I thought the Allies were routinely reading their encrypted communications by this stage of the war. Well, it shows that even when you have an intelligence coup like that, it's not a panacea for everything and that it's possible to miss intel. In this case, the Germans have limited their electronic communications that were the key

to really ultra to us intercepting much of their message trafficking and thus knowing something of their intentions, especially in relation to the Battle of the Atlantic, of course, too. But in this case, if they're limiting some of that message trafficking, we don't really have as full a picture of what their intentions are. We're getting a sense of their capability because you can't mask those three armies in that sector without us at least having some indication of this. So we've got that. And then there's photo recon on top of it. But the problem is the weather is getting worse. That diminishes the effectiveness of photo recon. So really, Dan,

where you see the greatest anticipation for this coming offensive is those soldiers on the ground in the Ardennes, because they're out there patrolling and they're manning this thinly held sector. And they get a sense of the German buildup, hearing vehicles, sensing the German patrolling, intensifying, getting a sense of the mass of the German buildup, and also civilians who are moving back and forth, who are sometimes an intel source, they're actually providing a better indication than Ultra is at this point. I won't say Ultra is worthless for understanding what's coming, but it is really severely diminished compared with other points in this war. And this reminds me, my great-grandfather was at the Battle of Cambrian in the winter of 1917. He was on the southern flank of the British assault, and he was there

saying, there is a massive German counterattack heading this way anytime now, and he was told not to be defeatist. What is going on? Are these voices being listened to? Did the Germans achieve strategic surprise? They do achieve strategic surprise. There's certainly a detection of the buildup, but perhaps not the capability or the intention. I think there's a sense for people who realize that something is brewing, that there's going to be a local attack, maybe something like that, not a massive counteroffensive that this is ultimately going to become. So what the interesting dynamic is that, like, from the private level on up, each level feels that the higher headquarters doesn't quite grasp the threat that's brewing. Privates and sergeants are out there patrolling around. They're like, oh, man, you know, my captain doesn't get it. The captains are thinking that the colonels don't get it. The colonels are thinking the generals don't get it.

All the way up to Bradley and his 12th Army Group. And so, really, there's some level of concern at each level. But the question, too, is what you could possibly do about it. Because, again, the Herc and Forrest battle is raging to the north. It's just sucking manpower to the south. We're fighting in the Vosges. I mean, Montgomery's 21st Army Group is badly under strength. So even if we anticipate this thing to the full, the question is what we can do about it at the beginning. I mean, it's going to take time to get people and stuff in place. So it's a bit of a misnomer to think that we have no indication and we're completely surprised or blindsided. We're not quite, but the Germans have enough of the surprise on their side to drive a bulge, hence the name of

this battle, in the US line. The Germans were now sending three armies into this narrow stretch of the Western Front. The main effort was being made by six SS Panzer Army to the north and five SS Panzer Army to the south of them. Everything depends on speed. Lightning marches, coup d'etat, confusion, a sprint. If they slow down, if the Allies are able to respond and lock them into an attritional battle, bring their superior forces to bear, then the Germans will be crushed. This is a race. Now, the assault took different forms at various points along the line. In some parts of the line, the Germans decided it makes most sense to just infiltrate their people forward without an

artillery barrage. And then, you know, when they run into opposition, wherever it's going to be, they'll call in artillery and reinforcements and whatnot, because they knew, especially like in the sector of the 110th Infantry Regiment, 28th Division, which is really at the like the vortex of where 5th Panzer Army is going to be moving. They feel, you know what, we can kind of just infiltrate and move around them and envelop them. We don't necessarily need to telegraph what we're doing with artillery prep. But in other places, there will be that massive artillery prep. They also, the Germans decide, because remember, this is, they are then, it's mid-December, there's not much daylight.

So they decide they're going to have searchlights bounce off the clouds, and that'll help their because remember this is they are den it's mid-december there's not much daylight so they decide they're going to have search lights bounce off the clouds and that'll help their infiltrators and whatever move forward this actually ends up really hurting them in many places because it's silhouettes a lot of these attackers who are coming forward and they're just slaughtered in droves so really this is a kind of an infantry assault in its initial stages. The armor is road-bound and some of the heaviest armor. The problem is there aren't that many bridges that can hold up under, say, a Tiger tank or whatever. So it's an engineering problem, too, on that level. So the tendency is to have columns that are built up in traffic and that are choke-pointed in these towns,

the lead towns, the advanced towns where the American rifle companies are located, that are going to hold off much longer than the Germans ever expected. So that's interesting. So you've got the idea is that these would have been, well, a lot of them, very veteran infantrymen. They've been fighting for years on the eastern front. They've been fighting on the western front. And they're moving through Allied lines, front. They've been fighting on the Western front. And they're moving through Allied lines, looking for weak points, encircling, pushing, pushing deep. And then the hope was that they'd be able to sow so much confusion and chaos and fear that the tanks could rumble on the roads and to catch up with them. Yeah, a mixture. And also the artillery too, the self-propelled pieces

that were going to provide a lot of that fire support and blast the buildings where the Americans might be resisting and whatever. So the infantry is a mix. Some of them are highly experienced, particularly in the SS Panzer units, like the armored infantry men and whatnot, Panzergrenadiers, the Germans call them. But then you also have these Volksgrenadier units, too, that are in play. And some of those are just brand new guys, teenagers, older guys, or people thrown into the mix. So it's like the German armed forces at this point. Some kind of elite here and there, reasonably good formations that have been refitted in another spot,

and then completely raw dudes just more or less, you know, almost taken off the street and thrown into this mix with a minimum kind of training, depending on where we're going. One unit became particularly infamous. It's a unit commanded by Otto Skorzeny, aka Scarface. He was Hitler's darling SS commando. He'd been a key part of the impressive raid that had managed to snatch Mussolini from prison in Gran Sasso. Mussolini, in September 1943, had been grabbed by German commandos and taken north, where he could be set up as a puppet ruler of German-occupied northern Italy. He would be leading a hand-picked force of English-speaking commandos. They'd wear American uniforms, they'd sneak behind American lines, try and infiltrate

deep behind American lines, and generally cause havoc. It's alleged, it's lots of myth-making around these folks, but it's alleged that part of their training was learning how to chew gum like Americans, slouch like Americans. Although I always thought that's a bit of an exaggeration. Now, they failed in their primary goal, which was to take the bridges across the River Meuse. But they did manage to sow chaos at a very critical time for the Allies. And that atmosphere they created, the vibe, the story, the legend they created, massively overshadowed their actual military activity on the ground. It's interesting, a day or two after the start of the offensive, we have a letter from General Patton to Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander.

General Patton is this swaggering, gun-toting field commander who has the reputation as the finest general in the US Army. He writes to Eisenhower saying, Krauts, speaking perfect English, raising hell, cutting wires, turning road signs around, spooking whole divisions

and shoving a bulge into our defences. It's questionable to how many divisions were actually spooked by Skorzeny's men, but it appears they managed to put the wind up General Patton, the otherwise unflappable American commander. And partly a result of this atmosphere of fear that they created, the Americans set up checkpoints all over the place, every crossroads, with military police grilling passing troops on details, asking them things that only Americans would know, like the names of Mickey Mouse's girlfriend,

or who was beating who in the baseball leagues, or the capital cities of American states. And the story goes that even General Omar Bradley, one of the most senior American commanders in Europe, he was briefly detained when he rightly said that Springfield was the capital of Illinois, because the military policeman who questioned him insisted that it was Chicago. Bradley managed to extricate himself, but it is a demonstration of the fact that units marching towards the sound of the guns, reinforcing units, were slowed down. So Skorzeny's ruse was pretty effective. The German forces did make some progress, in some places some quite eye-catching progress. But, but, unlike 1940, something odd was happening. Well, it was something odd anyway to the German high command.

It's a story as old as military history itself. The Germans were surprised to find out, frustrated to find out, that their enemy were not playing the part that had been assigned to them in the planning phase. The American enemy were not conforming to their wishes. The Americans were fighting. They were fighting like cornered wild cats. Yeah, the way this usually plays out is, say you'll have an American rifle company that's been manning a town, say like Hosingen or Marnock or Weiler, whatever. So that's maybe 120, 130 guys.

You possibly might have a little bit of tank or tank destroyer or self-propelled support here and there. You have artillery behind you, and that's supporting you to some extent. So the pattern was part of your company is out there in prepared foxhole-type positions outside the town, protecting especially any access to the road net. Part of it is ensconced in the buildings. And so you can see that the Germans are going to run up against resistance in a lot of places. And they're going to tend to, like you said, work around those weak points. So pretty soon, in many cases, these small groups are going to be surrounded or cut off or whatever, and are going to be just fighting as best they can for as

long as they can. And in many cases, that's just a day or so, but that's a lot of time to cost them because they can't afford that. And so when they fight often to sometimes to extinction, but more often to a diminution to where they run out of ammo or whatever, then they're going to gravitate west the best they can to get out of there, refit. But some of them are captured. You know, you can imagine how chaotic this truly is. And so pretty quickly, the front is just aflame with small unit engagements like this. And then at the higher headquarters, there's a sense of this is a much bigger attack than we ever expected. We didn't think they were capable of this. We need reinforcements. And that's going all the way up to Eisenhower then. Okay, but John, let me ask about these American troops that are fighting so tenaciously, because this is such a key point. Was it their training? Was it their leadership? Was it their morale, equipment? Why did they just

make decision after decision not to be spooks, not to worry about the fact that this was probably a hopeless task and the Germans already penetrating and getting in between them and their brigade headquarters? Why did these rifle companies just draw a line and stay where they were and fight it out till their ammunition ran out? What's that tell us about the U.S. Army? Yeah, I think it tells us that this is a pretty darn good army. I mean, these are reasonably well-trained guys and reasonably committed to the mission and they're determined to fight and they have good enough leadership at the NCO and junior officer level. They're pretty well armed. I think that helps too. They have a lot of firepower at their disposal. They have faith that they're probably going to win the war and that they have a higher command

that's going to, you know, respond to their needs. I think there's all of that in play. And the culture is not in a sense of, oh, we're in a bad situation, so let's just pack it in. I mean, for the most part, these guys are going to fight. And of course, not everybody, but most are going to fight really hard. And so the order that you're constantly getting is one of these guys, if you do have communication with hire, is hold at all costs. And I often think about that and say, let's step back and really understand what that means. All costs, what that means is our lives. I mean, that means we're told we have to sacrifice you for some sort of larger purpose. And I think it's amazing that so many of these guys do precisely that. They hold at all costs. Now, it doesn't mean that they're

going to be suicidal, say like the Japanese in the Pacific, where they say, okay, well, we're just going to die here. I mean, we're never going to leave. No, they're going to fight as long as they can. And then in many cases, they're going to try and get out of there. And in some cases, fight another day. In some cases, they don't have the choice because they're chased out and apprehended and captured by the Germans. It's a mix, but you have enough people who are willing to fight, able to fight, armed well enough to fight with enough ammo that they really are going to derail the German offensive within the first two days or so, especially in that sector to the north, like at Lanzerath and the 99th Division and the 2nd Division at the Twin Villages, Krenko

and Raschrath, and of course the 28th Division east of Bastogne. That's where a lot of this is decided in the beginning. There's a great example of this at the forgotten but absolutely essential Battle of Elsenborn Ridge. And this really did prove a crucial turning point in the Battle of the Bulge. The troops of the US 99th Division were untested. They'd been placed in that sector specifically because they were very unlikely to see fighting. They were stretched thinly over a 22-mile front, and they had no reserves. All three regiments, because of the length of the line, were up in the front line. And against these 99ers, Hitler sent his hand-picked warriors. The 6th Panzer Army had been given priority when it came to

equipment, supplies, gear. They'd been given the shortest possible route to the ultimate objective, Antwerp. A group within the 6th Panzer Army was commanded by the Nazi pin-up, dashing tank commander, heartless, genocidal, SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Joachim Peiper. He led a camp group, he led a battle group consisting of nearly 5,000 men,

600 vehicles. And he was charged with leading the main effort. He was going to lead the dash to the sea. They'd been given everything they asked for. They'd been equipped with the newest, most powerful tank, the Tiger II heavy tank. This was to be blitzkrieg warfare. But the US troops, the 99ers, they hadn't read that script. And they clung on, an astonishing act of tenacity. They sent clerks, they sent cooks and drivers into the front line, and they scrapped. They fought. They stubbornly held out against waves of German armour, German infantrymen. They bought the Allies time to prepare defence elsewhere, to shore up, to come to terms with what was going on. Kampfgruppe Peiper was actually

forced to reroute. He didn't have enough fuel, even under best conditions, to reach Antwerp. He was hoping to loot some on the way. Now he was having to do a U-turn and go a longer route round, thanks to the tenacity of the 99ers, wasting precious fuel they didn't have. Here's John McManus. The standard Elsenborn Ridge for the 99th Division, for a brand new division, is really quite remarkable because, you know, they're outnumbered pretty significantly and they're on the wrong end of some pretty violent German attacks.

The most famous part of this was probably what happens at Lanzerath with the INR platoon of the 394th Infantry Regiment under Lieutenant Lyle Boak, whose unit holds off major, major German attacks for the better part of a day that costs them time that they don't have. It was a similar story at the beautiful village of Clairvaux in North Luxembourg. There was a bitter battle here that was fought over the first two days. German forces did manage to encircle the American defenders, mostly troops in the 28th Infantry Division, but the Americans didn't give up. And this is the battle that John refers to as the Ardennes-Alemaux. One of the units encircled was the 110th Infantry Regiment, led by Colonel Hurley Fuller. Colonel Hurley Fuller, this is just a guy who did not have very good luck. He was a crusty Texan.

He had fought in World War I. He had actually attended the University of Texas as a young man, but had never graduated, I don't think. And he had left to go fight in World War I. He'd seen combat in World War I. And he had, you know, one of those military careers that progresses, but is not particularly outstanding or brilliant or noticeable. And so he had become a regimental commander by

D-Day. He was in the 2nd Division at that time, commanding the 23rd Infantry. And if anyone knows about the rhythm and pace of the Battle of Normandy, the fighting around Sanlo is just horrible for about two months. And he loses his job at that time as a regimental commander because his unit was not progressing much. But he had a friend in the 8th Corps Commander Troy Middleton, Major General Troy Middleton, who once he realizes that there's a regiment that's opened up in the 28th Division, he helps make sure that Fuller gets that job. So this is a byproduct of the Hurtgen fighting that I was talking about, which the 28th Division had suffered horrifying casualties

in that. And so the regimental commander had been wounded, and so Fuller takes over. So he takes over shortly before the bulge. And so if you can imagine, this unit, it's been beaten up in one of the worst battles in our history, in Hürtgen, horribly attrited, and they're sent to this Ardennes sector to rest as a quiet sector, get replacements and, you know, rehabilitate somehow. And here now you find yourself right in the middle, smack dab in the middle of one of the biggest German offenses of the war. And Fuller is the guy who has to deal with this as a brand new commander who most of his people don't know him. Those who do don't have much confidence in him. He's a

cantankerous, crusty dude, but he's been really concerned about a German offensive, actually, and he's been hollering to hire about that. And so his regimental headquarters is in a little town called Clairvaux in Luxembourg. And it's in a hotel called the Hotel Claravalis. And so you can imagine how he's just trying to manage this battle for the first couple of days. It's one crisis after another, trying to create little counterattacks and salvage people and holler for reinforcements. And so he's on the phone with the chief of staff of the division, a colonel named Gibney. And he's convinced Gibney doesn't really know what's going on here.

I mean, this is just horrendous. And so as he's on the phone, a German tank pokes its muzzle into the Clarivellas and pumps around like down the hallway. And Fuller is on the phone with the chief of staff and the guy hears this. He's like, oh my God, is that what I think? He's like, Fuller's like, yeah, it is. Things are this bad. Help me out. You know? And so he's kind of vindicated by this. And so to him and his mind, especially as a Texan, he was thinking this is like the Alamo. And when I thought of that, I thought, oh my God, that's exactly it. Alamo and the Ardennes. That's what this is. So he said he felt like Colonel Travis at the Alamo. So he has to manage that complete mess, if you can even

imagine that. And eventually he has to escape the Claravalis across the fire escape, which is like three stories up. It's like a ladder and it takes you onto a ridge. And he has this whole odyssey with his other survivors trying to escape from the Germans. It's just a crazy situation. I mean, that's what I love about history. It's when the spotlight of world affairs just lands on you. You can have a whole career being overlooked,

under-promoted, frustrated, and then boom, one day you wake up and you're at the heart of world affairs. I love that. That's so true. And it's so fascinating, isn't it? In this instance, that this guy who's been sort of beaten up a little bit by the army admin and kind of a hard luck kind of dude now ends up as the centerpiece of this whole thing. But I think he manages this thing about as well as we could expect. For the 110th Infantry, basically his regiment,

fights to extinction in about a two-day period. And the significance of this, it buys enough time for other units to come in and reinforce and get to Bastogne and hold on to it. And that matters

in the larger context too. This is Dan Snow's History Hip. More after this. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Eleanor Janaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history.

We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes, who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were

by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. This was a soldier's battle. It was a story of heroic resistance by small groups of men. They were young, they were inexperienced, they were far from home, they were freezing cold, they were inexperienced, they were far from home, they were freezing cold, they were in the dark most of the time, and they were facing the finest that the Third Reich could throw at them. And yet they fought on. They fought on when there was no hope. They fought on when they were surrounded. They fired their weapons so they had no more cartridges. They grappled in the forests with an unknown enemy

until ice-cold steel bayonets tore through flesh. They cradled screaming friends in their last moments. These men, their names are unknown to us. These places are forgotten. But they all played their part. They nudged the course of history in those dark, unseen places. One key crossroad though has become more famous, and I think it's served to embody, to memorialise all of those disparate battles. And that place's name is Bastogne. When you go there today, it feels like

a very nondescript Belgian village. It's a place where it doesn't feel like history should happen there, but it did. And Bastogne should have been a formality. It should have just been a waypoint, a place secured as the Germans advanced. But there as well, the US 22nd Division fought hard, slowed the Germans down. And just before they were about to relinquish Bastogne, US reinforcements were able to slip in. In this case, the men of the 101st Airborne. Yes, that does include Easy Company of the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, the famous Band of Brothers. The 101st had been recuperating a hundred miles away in Reims in France, and it had been a frantic scramble. They'd been told to quit their snug quarters and abandon their amorous adventures, hop on the back of trucks. They were driven 100 miles. Forward elements had started to arrive on the 18th, and the whole division made it into Bastogne

on the 20th, just before the Germans cut it off and were pressing in from all sides. The Americans weren't very well equipped. They were not very well dressed. They were unprepared, and they were heavily outnumbered. And reflecting this, on the 22nd of December, the German commander in the area demanded that his American counterpart surrender. He sent him a famous note, which I will quote at length because it's a good story. To the US commander of the encircled town of Bastogne, the fortune of war is changing. This time, the USA forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armoured units. And he warns him that more units are on their way.

He says, there is only one possibility to save the encircled USA troops from total annihilation. That is the honourable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think it over, a term of two hours will be granted, beginning with the presentation of this note. If the proposal should be rejected, he said, the German artillery corps will be given orders to annihilate the USA troops in and near Bastogne. All the serious civilian

losses caused by this artillery fire would not correspond with the well-known American humanity, correspond with the well-known American humanity, signed the German commander. This brusque note received a very terse reply. General McAuliffe, in command of US troops in Bastogne, wrote, to the German commander, nuts! exclamation mark, the American commander. And apparently this had to be translated for the Germans. Nuts basically meant go to hell. And so the fighting continued. The Americans there called themselves the battered bastards of Bastogne and they held out for days until eventually American troops mounted a counterattack that smashed through a corridor to them on Boxing Day. I've always been struck by an account left by Jack Pryor as a young army physician who found himself in Bastogne, and he did his best to administer aid

to hundreds and hundreds of wounded soldiers. He particularly remembers in a makeshift aid station in town, there were two Belgian nurses. They were called the Forgotten Angels, and they helped him care for the wounded. One was Augusta Chiwi. She was a young woman from the Belgian Congo, and she volunteered to help during the siege. And the second was Renée Lemaire, another Belgian nurse who volunteered. She was killed on Christmas Eve when a German round hit a building full of wounded soldiers. She was killed alongside 30 American soldiers. American soldiers. And Pryor captures the madness of war. He captures Christmas Eve spent surrounded by the wounded, running out of supplies, German rounds smashing into the ground all around him, but also drinking a celebratory glass of champagne that one of him or his men had

liberated from a smashed house nearby. Now, Bastogne always gets talked about, but as John McManus explains, strategically, once the siege warfare there begins, it's an indication that the German plan has been completely derailed. It's dramatic, but ultimately pointless. In relation to Bastogne, by the time we have the siege and all that that's gone on, it becomes anticlimactic. And the reason is Bastogne was really valuable to the Germans the first day or two when they could use it as a crossroads pivot point to move north. OK, and this is, I think, quite true on the northern shoulder, too, around Elsenborn, St. Viv, Verbamont, Lanzerath, Lohsheimer, Graum, whatever we happen to be talking about, these places matter the quicker the Germans could get them. The longer this thing went on, the less point all of it had. And so by the 23rd, especially by the time the weather gets a little

bit better, by that time, the German offensive has really unraveled. They've gotten into this thing of besieging Bastogne, which is not to their advantage. In the north, they have not had the kind of decisive breakthrough they want. Piper and his group starts to get turned back and hits something of a dead end. And you've had enough time for Eisenhower and his colleagues to scrape together enough reinforcements to throw in there. Famously, of course, the 101st at Bastogne, but the 82nd airborne at Verbomont, but many, many, many others. Patton attacking North with his Third Army. I mean, all that has happened by now. So let's think about what the Germans are in this for to get to Antwerp. Is there any possibility that's going to happen by December 23rd? No, no. Yeah, it's a good point.

If you're engaged in a dash to the sea, the fact that you find yourself in a brutal siege, although it may feel incredibly intense, awful, and traumatic for the people involved, you're nowhere near discharging the idea of the plan. And, you know, we have to acknowledge that, just how terrible and traumatic that is for those who became POWs. And they inflicted damage, and this is all terribly traumatic for those who were in the midst of it. But if we're thinking at the bigger picture level, it's already unraveling. For instance, Hasso von Manteufel, who commanded the 5th Panzer Army, later said that when he didn't get Bastogne by the end of December 17th, he knew something was really badly wrong. And I think maybe that's a larger commentary that this was the pattern, even though you may not have sensed it as a German soldier by December 19th, 20th, 21st. This thing wasn't going in the right direction and time favored the Allies, I suppose. On the 23rd of December, the weather improved.

Sun now flashed off the hoarfrost. On the 23rd of December, the weather improved. Sun now flashed off the hoarfrost. The sky even had patches of blue. But this improved weather brought little cheer to the Germans, because it also brought with it the unmistakable roar of Allied aviation engines. Frustrated by days of impotence days on the ground due to poor visibility the young aircrew now sprang on German positions like hungry wolves The P-47 fighter bombers powered by their double wasp engines scoured the landscape for German vehicles

its plethora of.50 cal guns spraying supersonic rounds the aircrew also firing rockets or dropping bombs on German vehicles, for whom the low cloud was no longer a protective cloak. Alongside air power, the might of Allied logistics had really revved up. Troops had been trucked in from all over Western Europe. Bridges across the Mers had been held. Gaps had been stopped up. Hitler's offensive had run into the unstoppable obstacle that was Eisenhower's war machine. And as the new year approached, that machine switched to the offensive. It could have been more spectacular, really. The Allied didn't try and cut off the entire bulge, encircle all the Germans within it. Instead, Patton and

Montgomery hacked their way in from south and north respectively into the heart of the bulge. The German troops ran out of ammunition and fuel. Now their units experienced the horror of being surrounded, of fighting to the last in basements. The dreams of the Antwerp dash were themselves dashed. They were a distant memory. Hitler as always was obviously reluctant to order units to retreat, but eventually as the Allies' jaws got ever closer to each other, some units were withdrawn from the tip of the bulge, and by the beginning of February, the two front lines were pretty much back where they'd been in mid-December. Hitler had nothing to gain for an enormous military effort.

Winston Churchill addressed the House of Commons following the Battle of the Bulge. He said, this is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory. What's the strategic consequence of the Allied victory at the Battle of the Bulge? Well, the strategic consequence, I think, is the Germans lose people and stuff they can never really replace. General Omar Bradley, who commanded 12th Army Group, and admittedly, maybe his take is a little self-serving, but he felt it hastened the end of the war in Europe. And I think that's possible. I mean, certainly this didn't do Germany any good to lose people they could never replace.

I think it led to a tremendous sense of pride in the U.S. Army that we could take this kind of punch and ultimately prevail. And it is largely an American battle, though not exclusively. There are about 1,000 British servicemen who lose their lives in the fighting along the northern part of the front. lives in the fighting along the northern part of the front. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery will get command of the northern shoulder, including the better part of two U.S. armies, 1st and 9th. But it is largely a GI fight, and I think there's a sense that they had fought pretty well, that they had prevailed, that we had adjusted, that especially I think Eisenhower handles this battle very well. So I think there's some level of confidence, too, that's going to come out of this that's going to come out of this

that's going to really help the U.S. Army once it plunges into conquering Germany in 1945. Well, the only person who doesn't agree with that is Field Marshal Montgomery, who, of course, takes all the credit himself for turning back the German tide. As he's wont to do, right? It's a tricky battle, the trickiest I've ever managed, right? Yeah, I mean, what a character. John, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. Tell everyone what your brilliant book is called.

So the book is called Alamo and the Ardennes, the untold story of the soldiers who made the defense of Bastogne possible. And it focuses on the 28th Infantry Division, Combat Command Reserve of the 9th Armored, Combat Command B of the 10th Armored, and then eventually the 101st that get there. And it's really just such a dramatic human story of all these individuals and all these little places, like you said, Dan, the spotlight of history now shining on you. There's all these, I mean,

I mentioned Fuller, but there's all these other guys who are in a similar circumstance and make a difference in the larger sense. Well, that's it, everybody. Thank you so much for listening to this anniversary edition of Thans Knows History, The Battle of Bulge. Thanks so much to John C. McManus, the author of Alamo and the Ardenne, the untold story of the American soldiers who made the defense of Bastogne possible. It's great to finally get to work with John. I've been a big fan of his podcast for a long time. Make sure you check out Someone Talked and We Have Ways USA. But that's it for now, folks. See you next time. Thanks for listening. Thank you. you