WW2: BATTLE OF THE BULGE, 70 YEARS BEYOND AND LESSONS LEARNED AND STILL APPLICABLE TODAY.

 

December 16^th 2014 marks 70 years since the German Ardennes offensive also known as the battle of the Bulge was launched by Adolf Hitler the German Dictator in a last ditch effort to stop the advancing Allied armies from overrunning Germany in the late autumn and winter of 1944 as the Allies were hoping to bring the war in Europe to a close in early 1945.

Beginning with the D-Day invasion over six Allied Armies had landed on both the northwest and south coast of France and had linked up and were pushing their way across France towards the Low Countries and ultimately Germany.

 

The Allied landing on D-Day had been the culmination of American policy upon its entry into the War based on a meeting between US President Franklin D Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston S Churchill as far back as on 9th August 1941 when they met on the Atlantic Ocean near Newfoundland, Canada on the US Navy's heavy Cruiser The USS Augusta and eventually issued the Atlantic Charter on the 14th of August 1941 which came to articulate the war aims of the Western Allies and their view of a post war world.

The two leaders had agreed among other things that should the US enter the war, Europe was to receive priority attention in terms of manpower and material resources in prosecuting the war. It became known as the Europe- first policy and it was to guide American policy makers in the planning and prosecution of WW2. The policy was the brain child of Roosevelt who differed to the request of Winston Churchill on the need to come to the rescue of the United Kingdom which was bearing the brunt of the European war as it then was before the Pacific war erupted on December 7, 1941.

President Roosevelt with the firm support of General George C Marshall then Army Chief of Staff therefore set about ensuring that the defeat of Germany was going to be the chief pre-occupation of the American military, while offering enough resources for a containment of Japan in the Pacific front until the fighting in Europe was brought to a successful end. In the aftermath by late 1944 more than ninety percent of the American army was committed to France where over six armies had been deployed to the frontlines by November 1944.

Amongst the Armies on the field was the US First Army whose heroics had been detailed in my earlier writing on the “US First Army the forgotten heroes of WW2’’ under the command of Lieutenant General Omar N Bradley who later passed on Command to Lieutenant General Courtney C Hodges, when he was promoted to the command of the US Twelfth Army Group comprising the First and Third Army under the command of Lieutenant General George S Patton. Thereafter the US Ninth Army was also activated under Lieutenant General William H Simpson.

After the commencement of the Allied landing on the south coast of France in the Marseilles region in August 1944 the US Seventh Army under the command of Lieutenant General Alexander Patch also became operational and all these armies had by November 1944 been deployed along a front in western Europe stretching from Belgium and Luxembourg to the south coast of France bordering Switzerland as the Allies pressed towards Germany on a broad front. The US Seventh and French First Army were to become part of the 6^th Army Group under the command of General Jacob L Devers

 On the British side, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery commanded the British 21^st Army Group comprising the British Second Army under General Miles Dempsey and the Canadian First Army under the command of General Henry Crerar which was deployed along the Belgian-Dutch borders to a point linking with the US Ninth Army in Luxembourg which eventually together with the US First Army came under the command of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery in the heat of the battle.

Following the Allied landing in Normandy and the advance inland into France, it had become clear to all observers that the American Army and resources were becoming predominant in the field in Western Europe. Out of the seven armies on the field including the newly activated French First Army, four were American by November 1944 and even then the only French army was fully equipped and supplied with American materials. Following Operation Cobra and the breakout from St Lo into Brittany and the activation of George Patton’s Third Army, the Americans had become the dominant players on the field in Europe employing a bravado spirit on the battlefield that baffled the German Army.

Patton’s awesome armored strikes and breakthroughs led to the belief among the German Generals that the Americans had become the more dangerous foe and desperately needed to be stopped in a massive counter offensive employing the strategy of Blitzkrieg that had served the Germans so well in their earlier campaigns in the war. Hitler reasoned that he could break the American fighting spirit if subjected to a full blown German Blitzkrieg attack led by the awesome Tiger and Panther tanks.

By early December 1944 as the Allied armies had become bogged down by supply problems and the fatigue caused by a long and whirlwind advance of over 500 miles from the Seine River to Luxembourg, Belgium and in some places the German border. They had paused to regroup and rest in the cold and deep winter of 1944 which made motorIsed warfare difficult. As the Allied advance ground to a halt, Hitler felt he now had a good opportunity to launch his much vaunted counter offensive.

 For this, he had amassed three armies totaling over 24 Divisions, six hundred thousand men in all and over 1500 tanks and tank destroyers aimed at the line held by the US First Army in its weakest sector where tired and fresh troops were being refitted in the hilly Ardennes forest between Monschau (southwest of Aachen) and Echternach (northwest of Trier).

 

The German 5^th Army under the experienced Russian front veteran General Hasso Manteuffel was to launch a drive on the Meuse River at Namur cross it and head to Brussels, while SS Sepp Dietrich’s 6^th Panzer army was to lead an armored drive to the important supply city of Antwerp with a view to splitting the British-Canadian 21^st Army Group from the American First Army and subsequently crush them. He believed that at the end of the operation, the defeated Allies would be willing to accept a negotiated settlement of the war.

 

It was an ambitious plan that was meant to be accomplished within the four days of 16^th -20^th of December 1944 when complete weather overcast was predicted to preclude the Allies from employing their vast air power. With eight armored divisions in the lead the Germans achieved a penetration of the Allied lines 65 miles deep and some units of the 6^th Panzer Army came within sight of the Meuse River before the offensive ran out of steam as the skies opened up on Christmas eve and Allied fighters began to interdict the German lines and destroy the supply convoys.

The Germans ran into resistance stiffer than expected from the GI’s who gave a good account of the American fighting spirit as they denied the Germans vital gains by mounting road blocks, destroying bridges, fuel dumps and everything that could be of significant help to the Germans.

 The American resistance was particularly crucial at Bastogne and St Vith where the American 101^st and 82^nd Airborne Divisions respectively held the two vital junction towns that forced the German armor and supply convoys to the use of secondary roads that considerably slowed and hampered the advance.

By Christmas day in 1944 when the clouds fully cleared and Allied air power was in full swing, General Patton’s Third Army had sent in a relief column that had relieved the beleaguered city of Bastogne which never fell into German hands even though encircled for close to a week.

 With sufficient reinforcement pouring into the American lines, the German advance was soon brought to a halt in some of the heaviest fighting of the Second World War on the European front. With the Allies in early January threatening a counter encirclement of the German bulge in the Allied lines, the Germans had no choice but to withdraw their forces lest they be encircled in the resulting Allied pincer move.

 

By the middle of January the battle had shifted in favor of the Allies who had immediately launched a counter attack that threw the Germans into a full blown retreat back into Germany where the Allies subsequently began the great pursuit that led to the end of the war in May 1945.

The Battle of the Bulge was Nazi Germany’s last great offensive in WW2 and it resulted in the squandering of Germany’s last military reserves that was needed to stave off the Soviet Union’s great offensive launched on the 12^th of January 1945 in Poland that brought the Soviet armies to the door steps of Berlin.