5 ms·

Battle of the Bulge

27 points by rmason 5y ago

mikewarot 5y ago
There can be no doubt to the dedication and bravery of the men in that battle, but it would be incomplete to leave out the crucial role of the proximity fuze. https://www.historynet.com/proximity-fuze.htm https://www.historynet.com/proximity-fuze.htm In the words of U.S. Army General George S. Patton: "The new shell with the funny fuze is devastating. ... I think that when all armies get this shell, we will have to devise some new method of warfare. I am glad you all thought of it first."
- roywiggins 5y ago
  And they're are still important: the nuclear super-fuze, "boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three." https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/ https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...
myth_drannon 5y ago
"84 American prisoners were summarily killed by German Waffen SS in the largest mass execution of the war." I think they meant largest of American soldiers.
- chrisdhoover 5y ago
  It is an odd claim, the largest. I just did a cursory search and found several notable atrocities with larger numbers. Most occurred from over several days to over several months. I guess an argument could be that specifies in a single day or in a single hour but that kind of specificity trivializes the scale of atrocities committed against Poles, Serbs, and Jews. Large scale massacres includes: Palmiry, Liepaja, Katyn, Bubanj, and Borki This video is widely viewed and worth the time https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
  - ncmncm 5y ago
    The Katyn Massacre comes to mind: tens of thousands of Polish officers executed wholesale by the [Edit: not Germans but] Soviets and buried in mass graves they were made to dig, first, in the forest. The 84 Americans, and similar number of Germans, in France, was something unusual on the Western front, but would have been beneath notice in the East.
    - pintxo 5y ago
      Not to under-report German atrocities during the war, but Katyn was a Soviet atrocity [1]. As a side note, at the 70th anniversary in 2010, large parts of the polish political establishment died on their way to the ceremony at the site of the massacre [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        Oops. Everybody mixes that up. Even at the time, the Soviets managed to blame it on the Germans. But there is plenty of blame to go around. The Soviets also had a policy of executing everybody in prison before retreating, piling the bodies in the cellars for the Germans to drag out and bury, and blaming the Germans. It was easy to believe it of them. Objecting to that policy would have been fatal.
        myth_drannon 5y ago
        And then Germans would arrive and blame the Jews for that, then local Ukrainian populace would massacre the Jews(Lviv pogroms).
        sofixa 5y ago
        > Everybody mixes that up. Even at the time, the Soviets managed to blame it on the Germans. Yeah, they even used German weapons ( supposedly due to better reliability).
      - 5y ago
- ncmncm 5y ago
  What is most notable about that event is that the US slaughtered a similar number of German prisoners immediately after, as a reprisal. Patton succeeded in covering it up until after he died. On the Eastern front, it was usual to slaughter or just starve prisoners, on both sides. Furthermore, Stalin ordered that any Soviet soldier who had surrendered was guilty of desertion, and when "liberated" was sent to the GULag, or just executed if no transportation was convenient; German prisoners got the same treatment. Many, many thousands of Soviet (typically not Russian) prisoners fought tooth and nail to avoid being sent back East. Many committed suicide to avoid it. Tens of thousands of refugees who had fled West before the war were also "repatriated", and executed. Similarly, anyone in occupied Soviet territory who had been press-ganged into working or fighting for Germany was presumed guilty of treason. And, the Soviet NKVD had standing orders to shoot down whatever Soviet troops were at the back of any advance.
  - euroderf 5y ago
    Wondering, are there examples of similar atrocities in earlier Russian military history, or are these uniquely Soviet ?
    - myth_drannon 5y ago
      Yes, plenty (Caucasus campaigns come to mind). But they didn't call it atrocities back then, just another empire doing what empires do.
  - myth_drannon 5y ago
    Well it's a sweeping generalization about the former POWs all sent to Gulag. But yes, NKVD had a unit called SMERSH (Death to Spies) that would do that. They almost did it to my grand-grandfather who was injured at the beginnig of war, was captured and spent 4 years in a concentration camp(he was an officer hence treated better). Upon his return he was about to sent to Gulag but they found the doctor who treated him in the captivity and he testified that my g-grandfather was gravely injured, abandoned by his unit and didn't just surrender to Germans. He was never awarded a medal to commerate the victory (like all the soldiers had) but at least he was recognized as an army veteran (with all the rights that came with that)
njharman 5y ago
> "The Germans couldn’t operate below the regimental level without written orders." That is so ridiculously wrong. I'm thinking it must be journalist's mistake/misquote/out of context (e.g. referring to specific unit/time/area and not the blanket statement it sounds like). No actual WWII historian would say that.
- KingOfCoders 5y ago
  Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics (which I've learned about because of Agile development)
  - sofixa 5y ago
    To be fair ( the quoted passage is still hilariously wrong), Hitler went away with that around 1941 because he got into his head that he's a great strategist, and started micromanaging more and more ( denying retreats, shuffling troops around wasting time and fuel, commanding the army group in the Caucasus, etc.) at the higher level. But below that, mission type tactics was still the norm.
KETpXDDzR 5y ago
The reason the allies won this battle might include bravery, but the obvious reason is the dramatic increase of man and equipment. I don't think that one or the other side was braver or smarter. I'm sure most axis, as well as allied soldiers thought they fight for the right thing. A brief timeline: 16 December: Allies: 228,741 men 483 tanks Axis: 406,342 men 557 tanks 24 December: Allies: c. 541,000 men 1,616 tanks Axis: c. 449,000 men 423 tanks 2 January: Allies: c. 705,000 men 2,409 tanks Axis: c. 401,000 men 287 tanks 16 January: Allies: 700,520 men 2,428 tanks Axis: 383,016 men 216 tanks [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge Edit: Formatting
- jandrese 5y ago
  German high command knew it had to be over quickly to have any chance of success. They didn't have reinforcements to send, everything in the area was already committed. Once the US reinforcements arrived it was game over. The whole plan was kind of dubious IMHO. Even if it were successful and the Germans were able to capture Antwerp the soldiers would be surrounded and cut off from supplies. Using it to negotiate a better surrender sounds like wishful thinking.
  - sofixa 5y ago
    > The whole plan was kind of dubious IMHO. Even if it were successful and the Germans were able to capture Antwerp the soldiers would be surrounded and cut off from supplies. Using it to negotiate a better surrender sounds like wishful thinking. By that point many knew the war was lost, only Hitler and few others were delusional. Even high level Nazis like Himmler and Göring knew all is lost (which is why Himmler tried negotiating a peace a few months later, and Göring proposed retreating to the Alps to make a last stand/bastion there).
    - Nomentatus 5y ago
      Indeed. But just continuing to fight at all was rather crazy... the idea being to wait and see if one side or other would offer a separate peace. So jabbing at each side (US/Britain/Canada/FreeFrench and the Soviets) hard was a desperate way to try to roll the dice, and incentivize that I suppose. There was no shortage dubious gambling on the German side after 1941.
rmason 5y ago
Probably ten years ago my Dad invited me to a dinner with a bunch of his friends. I had just seen a movie days before on the Battle of the Bulge. One of his younger friends was a high school history teacher. So I started chatting with him about the movie. Out of the blue one of my dad's friends says real quietly I was there. Now I had known this guy for over forty years at this time and never knew he was even in the war. I ask if he could tell us a little bit about his experience. He said I've never talked about it, never even told my late wife. I don't know if it was the beer that flowed freely that night or what but he started a stream of consciousness about that battle. He talked about the bitter cold. How he never wanted to be that cold ever again in his life. He talked about his best friend who died right next to him in that battle. The absolute randomness of who lived and who died. How they had to scrounge for supplies and improvise. They'd been told if they surrendered the Germans would kill them. How the battle turned when the skies cleared enough for them to get air support. The history teacher wanted to get him to speak to his class. But before it could be set up he died. My dad learned from his brother afterward that he'd had nightmares every night of his life over the war. This guy was a brick of the community, he and my father did all sorts of volunteer work after they retired. I hope telling his story that night gave him some peace. Truly they were the greatest generation.
- alostpuppy 5y ago
  Thank you for sharing that.
- cafard 5y ago
  "They'd been told if they surrendered the Germans would kill them." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre They weren't entirely wrong, though on the other hand Kurt Vonnegut was captured there and lived a long and healthy life.
- tomas_nort 5y ago
  Thank you
EdwardDiego 5y ago
> This content is not available in your area. :(
- davesmylie 5y ago
  https://archive.md/TK3Ch https://archive.md/TK3Ch
- thrower123 5y ago
  You're not missing out on much, it's the History Channel of today, and not the History Channel of 25 years ago.
legerdemain 5y ago
And here I thought this was about my struggle to zip up my pants in the morning.
FiatLuxDave 5y ago
My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a radio operator in Patton's army. The only story I remember about the Battle of the Bulge was that a German soldier had sneaked through the lines and was killing soldiers while they slept in the snow. He heard someone coming through the snow and pretended to be asleep and killed the man with his bayonet. It was the only time he ever talked about killing someone. He had a bit of what we would now call PTSD. When I was four years old, I jumped out to surprise him while he was reading a book. He full-force punched me in the face. He also didn't like loud noises. My grandmother said that he was always a little messed up after liberating a concentration camp (Buchenwald maybe?). He had originally joined the army to be part of the ski troops, as he was an avid skier. But during training he caught Rocky Mountain spotted fever and was recovering when his unit was sent over. After he recovered he was trained as a radio operator and assigned to Patton's army.
TMWNN 5y ago
Germany losing the Battle of the Bulge saved Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, etc. from nuclear fire.

27 points by rmason 5y ago

There can be no doubt to the dedication and bravery of the men in that battle, but it would be incomplete to leave out the crucial role of the proximity fuze. https://www.historynet.com/proximity-fuze.htm https://www.historynet.com/proximity-fuze.htm In the words of U.S. Army General George S. Patton: "The new shell with the funny fuze is devastating. ... I think that when all armies get this shell, we will have to devise some new method of warfare. I am glad you all thought of it first."

roywiggins 5y ago
And they're are still important: the nuclear super-fuze, "boosting the overall killing power of existing US ballistic missile forces by a factor of roughly three." https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-modernization-is-undermining-strategic-stability-the-burst-height-compensating-super-fuze/ https://thebulletin.org/2017/03/how-us-nuclear-force-moderni...

myth_drannon 5y ago

"84 American prisoners were summarily killed by German Waffen SS in the largest mass execution of the war." I think they meant largest of American soldiers.

chrisdhoover 5y ago
It is an odd claim, the largest. I just did a cursory search and found several notable atrocities with larger numbers. Most occurred from over several days to over several months. I guess an argument could be that specifies in a single day or in a single hour but that kind of specificity trivializes the scale of atrocities committed against Poles, Serbs, and Jews. Large scale massacres includes: Palmiry, Liepaja, Katyn, Bubanj, and Borki This video is widely viewed and worth the time https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
- ncmncm 5y ago
  The Katyn Massacre comes to mind: tens of thousands of Polish officers executed wholesale by the [Edit: not Germans but] Soviets and buried in mass graves they were made to dig, first, in the forest. The 84 Americans, and similar number of Germans, in France, was something unusual on the Western front, but would have been beneath notice in the East.
  - pintxo 5y ago
    Not to under-report German atrocities during the war, but Katyn was a Soviet atrocity [1]. As a side note, at the 70th anniversary in 2010, large parts of the polish political establishment died on their way to the ceremony at the site of the massacre [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_massacre [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smolensk_air_disaster
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      Oops. Everybody mixes that up. Even at the time, the Soviets managed to blame it on the Germans. But there is plenty of blame to go around. The Soviets also had a policy of executing everybody in prison before retreating, piling the bodies in the cellars for the Germans to drag out and bury, and blaming the Germans. It was easy to believe it of them. Objecting to that policy would have been fatal.
      - myth_drannon 5y ago
        And then Germans would arrive and blame the Jews for that, then local Ukrainian populace would massacre the Jews(Lviv pogroms).
      - sofixa 5y ago
        > Everybody mixes that up. Even at the time, the Soviets managed to blame it on the Germans. Yeah, they even used German weapons ( supposedly due to better reliability).
    - 5y ago
ncmncm 5y ago
What is most notable about that event is that the US slaughtered a similar number of German prisoners immediately after, as a reprisal. Patton succeeded in covering it up until after he died. On the Eastern front, it was usual to slaughter or just starve prisoners, on both sides. Furthermore, Stalin ordered that any Soviet soldier who had surrendered was guilty of desertion, and when "liberated" was sent to the GULag, or just executed if no transportation was convenient; German prisoners got the same treatment. Many, many thousands of Soviet (typically not Russian) prisoners fought tooth and nail to avoid being sent back East. Many committed suicide to avoid it. Tens of thousands of refugees who had fled West before the war were also "repatriated", and executed. Similarly, anyone in occupied Soviet territory who had been press-ganged into working or fighting for Germany was presumed guilty of treason. And, the Soviet NKVD had standing orders to shoot down whatever Soviet troops were at the back of any advance.
- euroderf 5y ago
  Wondering, are there examples of similar atrocities in earlier Russian military history, or are these uniquely Soviet ?
  - myth_drannon 5y ago
    Yes, plenty (Caucasus campaigns come to mind). But they didn't call it atrocities back then, just another empire doing what empires do.
- myth_drannon 5y ago
  Well it's a sweeping generalization about the former POWs all sent to Gulag. But yes, NKVD had a unit called SMERSH (Death to Spies) that would do that. They almost did it to my grand-grandfather who was injured at the beginnig of war, was captured and spent 4 years in a concentration camp(he was an officer hence treated better). Upon his return he was about to sent to Gulag but they found the doctor who treated him in the captivity and he testified that my g-grandfather was gravely injured, abandoned by his unit and didn't just surrender to Germans. He was never awarded a medal to commerate the victory (like all the soldiers had) but at least he was recognized as an army veteran (with all the rights that came with that)

njharman 5y ago

> "The Germans couldn’t operate below the regimental level without written orders." That is so ridiculously wrong. I'm thinking it must be journalist's mistake/misquote/out of context (e.g. referring to specific unit/time/area and not the blanket statement it sounds like). No actual WWII historian would say that.

KingOfCoders 5y ago
Also see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission-type_tactics (which I've learned about because of Agile development)
- sofixa 5y ago
  To be fair ( the quoted passage is still hilariously wrong), Hitler went away with that around 1941 because he got into his head that he's a great strategist, and started micromanaging more and more ( denying retreats, shuffling troops around wasting time and fuel, commanding the army group in the Caucasus, etc.) at the higher level. But below that, mission type tactics was still the norm.

KETpXDDzR 5y ago

The reason the allies won this battle might include bravery, but the obvious reason is the dramatic increase of man and equipment. I don't think that one or the other side was braver or smarter. I'm sure most axis, as well as allied soldiers thought they fight for the right thing. A brief timeline: 16 December: Allies: 228,741 men 483 tanks Axis: 406,342 men 557 tanks 24 December: Allies: c. 541,000 men 1,616 tanks Axis: c. 449,000 men 423 tanks 2 January: Allies: c. 705,000 men 2,409 tanks Axis: c. 401,000 men 287 tanks 16 January: Allies: 700,520 men 2,428 tanks Axis: 383,016 men 216 tanks [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge Edit: Formatting

jandrese 5y ago
German high command knew it had to be over quickly to have any chance of success. They didn't have reinforcements to send, everything in the area was already committed. Once the US reinforcements arrived it was game over. The whole plan was kind of dubious IMHO. Even if it were successful and the Germans were able to capture Antwerp the soldiers would be surrounded and cut off from supplies. Using it to negotiate a better surrender sounds like wishful thinking.
- sofixa 5y ago
  > The whole plan was kind of dubious IMHO. Even if it were successful and the Germans were able to capture Antwerp the soldiers would be surrounded and cut off from supplies. Using it to negotiate a better surrender sounds like wishful thinking. By that point many knew the war was lost, only Hitler and few others were delusional. Even high level Nazis like Himmler and Göring knew all is lost (which is why Himmler tried negotiating a peace a few months later, and Göring proposed retreating to the Alps to make a last stand/bastion there).
  - Nomentatus 5y ago
    Indeed. But just continuing to fight at all was rather crazy... the idea being to wait and see if one side or other would offer a separate peace. So jabbing at each side (US/Britain/Canada/FreeFrench and the Soviets) hard was a desperate way to try to roll the dice, and incentivize that I suppose. There was no shortage dubious gambling on the German side after 1941.

rmason 5y ago

Probably ten years ago my Dad invited me to a dinner with a bunch of his friends. I had just seen a movie days before on the Battle of the Bulge. One of his younger friends was a high school history teacher. So I started chatting with him about the movie. Out of the blue one of my dad's friends says real quietly I was there. Now I had known this guy for over forty years at this time and never knew he was even in the war. I ask if he could tell us a little bit about his experience. He said I've never talked about it, never even told my late wife. I don't know if it was the beer that flowed freely that night or what but he started a stream of consciousness about that battle. He talked about the bitter cold. How he never wanted to be that cold ever again in his life. He talked about his best friend who died right next to him in that battle. The absolute randomness of who lived and who died. How they had to scrounge for supplies and improvise. They'd been told if they surrendered the Germans would kill them. How the battle turned when the skies cleared enough for them to get air support. The history teacher wanted to get him to speak to his class. But before it could be set up he died. My dad learned from his brother afterward that he'd had nightmares every night of his life over the war. This guy was a brick of the community, he and my father did all sorts of volunteer work after they retired. I hope telling his story that night gave him some peace. Truly they were the greatest generation.

alostpuppy 5y ago
Thank you for sharing that.
cafard 5y ago
"They'd been told if they surrendered the Germans would kill them." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malmedy_massacre They weren't entirely wrong, though on the other hand Kurt Vonnegut was captured there and lived a long and healthy life.
tomas_nort 5y ago
Thank you

EdwardDiego 5y ago

> This content is not available in your area. :(

davesmylie 5y ago
https://archive.md/TK3Ch https://archive.md/TK3Ch
thrower123 5y ago
You're not missing out on much, it's the History Channel of today, and not the History Channel of 25 years ago.

legerdemain 5y ago

And here I thought this was about my struggle to zip up my pants in the morning.

FiatLuxDave 5y ago

My grandfather fought in the Battle of the Bulge. He was a radio operator in Patton's army. The only story I remember about the Battle of the Bulge was that a German soldier had sneaked through the lines and was killing soldiers while they slept in the snow. He heard someone coming through the snow and pretended to be asleep and killed the man with his bayonet. It was the only time he ever talked about killing someone. He had a bit of what we would now call PTSD. When I was four years old, I jumped out to surprise him while he was reading a book. He full-force punched me in the face. He also didn't like loud noises. My grandmother said that he was always a little messed up after liberating a concentration camp (Buchenwald maybe?). He had originally joined the army to be part of the ski troops, as he was an avid skier. But during training he caught Rocky Mountain spotted fever and was recovering when his unit was sent over. After he recovered he was trained as a radio operator and assigned to Patton's army.

TMWNN 5y ago

Germany losing the Battle of the Bulge saved Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, etc. from nuclear fire.