My friend Randy LeCocq and I, John Driscoll, are two U.S. Army veterans living in Helena, Montana. We chose to study some of the key engagements during the Battle of the Bulge because together they comprised the largest land battle ever participated in by the United States, creating a wealth of folklore associated with that intensified period of brutal combat. The lore of the big battle included the initial shock on the home front as American families read hometown newspapers, watching the front line move steadily across France to the German border, only to suddenly see a large bulge showing the Allies in retreat.
Well-known stories surfaced, such as the Malmedy massacre of a hundred GIs, and the Siege of Bastogne, and General McAuliffe's response of "Nuts" to the German surrender note. Lesser-known stories were as important. Late in the tough slog from the Normandy beachhead, the Allies were running out of troops. Soldiers from the notorious replacement depots were failing to last long in combat. GIs were without winter clothing. And, U.S. intelligence had failed to detect Hitler's surprise attack, misleadingly called "Watch on the Rhine."
There are the stories about General Eisenhower being firm in the face of bad news, telling his commanders at Verdun there will be no gloomy faces around the table. And those about General Patton, saying he could reach Bastogne from the Saar, 110 miles south, with three divisions starting in two days. There are the stories of Field Marshal Montgomery versus Eisenhower and Bradley, and tales of Bastogne's brave Belgian nurses, and of the skies clearing just before Christmas so U.S. C-47s could drop supplies inside Bastogne's perimeter and gliders could land with doctors after bringing them through the flak.
There was Patton's war prayer, and the Germans missing the Allied fuel dump at Spa, and tales of bitter cold and snow and ice, and frostbite, and German 88 shells and tree-bursts. There were the huge German Tiger tanks and German posing as Americans at crossroads and brave Belgians misdirecting SS Panzer tank columns.
The Bulge was a continuous battle on several fronts in bitter cold covering a rectangle 45 miles deep by 60 miles wide in forests and hills, often where prisoners were not taken. Each side lost 500 men killed daily for six weeks with the tally of wounded and missing running three times that rate. By the end, it was "all in" for both sides, with the Germans committing 400,000 troops, and the U.S. pouring 600,000 soldiers into the vortex, pressing a million men against each other. For the U.S., the high school class of 1944 was hardest hit, going from graduation to replacement centers in France, to military cemeteries in Belgium and Luxembourg in only six months. We were running out of men in the European Theater and the Bulge was eating up two thousand soldiers each day
The National World War II Museum in New Orlean brings home the human aspect. At the museum, visitors first enter a Pullman coach of the era and sit on bench seats to watch film footage taken from the train in 1943. We are taken back in time, moving along and stopping in small towns, looking out the window at the few dusty Depression-era cars and trucks moving along narrow country highways. It is a more rural and simpler America the boys leave behind. Many of them would return to a country that would never be the same.
Leaving the Pullman car, you walk through the Pacific or European Theater galleries. The latter, "The Road to Berlin," leads you into a large tunnel with displays and videos along the route, first through the tough, mountainous Italian campaign of 1943, then on to D-Day and Normandy, through France and the hedgerows, finally reaching the Battle of the Bulge before the final section, crossing the Rhine and invading Germany itself. You emerge from the "Road to Berlin" journey with the Bulge in perspective as one very difficult campaign in a series of very difficult campaigns.
"The Road to Berlin" leaves us with something else, the realization that the Bulge was not our first rodeo. By December 1944, we had learned how to fight and defeat the Germans. Our privates, non-commissioned officers, and platoon leaders, through tough experience, knew how to handle counterattacks, even by tanks. They knew what had to be done, to grab the bazooka or, like Lieutenant George Luening of St. Xavier, Montana, lead an almost suicidal January 1945 attack up a hillside against snipers, mines and interlocking machine guns, with little cover. They knew the war was a matter of attrition, and they were mentally prepared to die to do the job. So many had already died or been carried away on stretchers, it seemed normal. They were often fatalistic. Even with supreme personal efforts, they were resigned to the random odds of death by combat.
Authentic American heroism emerged everywhere at the Bulge, as indicated by the astounding 18 Medals of Honor awarded there. The Bulge is a story of American boys fighting in minus-ten-degree cold and deep snow holding the line "at all costs." sometimes forced to allow enemy tanks to roll over their own fortified foxholes after calling artillery on their own position, then getting up and following the tanks, blowing them up and shooting the SS infantry off them. After all that, the GIs would go back home to the farm after the war, put their medals away and tell their family and friends they just did their job, nothing special, and they'd rather not talk about it. Sixty years later their obituaries would briefly mention their involvement in World War II, in this or that service or division, only occasionally with the added words that they "fought in the Battle of the Bulge."
Survivors were generally quiet out of respect for those who did not come back, or for fate allowing them to live and form a narrative, resentful of those veterans who claimed to have won the battle all by themselves or suggested that the battle was the only one that determined the war's outcome. The battles in the Bulge were U.S. Army actions for sure, and big ones, but during the broader World War II conflict, the U.S. Army, not to mention the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, lost nearly 300,000 service personnel, both battle and non-battle dead or missing. Add to this the massive military and civilian losses of our Allies and you see why survivors of the Bulge often said nothing. There is gratitude for the dominating role of personal luck. Plus, the true picture of what happened at a given place is a confused one complicated and clouded by "the fog of war."
Despite this fog of war, it seems possible to focus on a number of engagements during the Bulge that seemed to have been critically important to the battle's outcome. From these we tried to find any evidence that men from Montana were involved and, if they survived, to learn some of their impressions from their direct experiences.
During World War II, Montana, with .42 percent of the U.S. population, contributed .40 percent of of the total number of Americans who entered the U.S. Army. Out of those Montanans who did join the Army, 4.59 percent failed to return home alive. These 1,553 man and women from Montana represent .59 percent of the Army's total dead and missing. While only a small portion of the sacrifices were made during the Battle of the Bulge, we find it interesting to review the rapid sequence of massive engagements during the Ardennes Campaign through the eyes of our Montana soldiers to connect hometown sacrifice to the larger battlefield picture.
One of our objectives was to understand the Bulge, and especially how our troops managed to stop the German steamroller. Once we began studying the bulge in detail, we became more awed. Outnumbered four to one, and in some places ten to one, how did Americans stop the attack after being surprised by the huge German tanks of the SS Panzer, battle-tested Eastern Front veterans? As German General Manteuffel remembered, his troops were moving through Allied line "like raindrops."
We were both intrigued and inspired by the courage of the shocked and outnumbered U.S. soldiers standing in harm's way during the Bulge. Almost everywhere they seemed to make heroic decisions, somehow resolving the crises of their own internal wars, overcoming their fear, knowing it "was worth it" and something that had to be done. The Battle of the Bulge shows us something about Americans. To steal a Churchill phrase, it was perhaps our finest hour.
We begin our study by providing a quick summary of the Bulge for background, and then proceed with the tale of our own journey, in winter, which included an exploration of each section of the Bulge.
