Friday, December 16, 2005

 

This Day in History

On this day in 1944, German troops start a counter-attack through the Ardennes forest in Belgium in what would become known as the Battle of the Bulge. The German plan was to retake Antwerp in Holland and deprive the Allied troops of their closest port for resupply. They didn't make it and their failure paved the way for our rapid sweep to and over the Rhine in 1945. Still, it cost us about 75,000 killed, wounded or missing, which remains the greatest single battle defeat we Americans have ever suffered. The different outcome from the beginning of the war (May, 1940), when the Germans main attack was through the Ardennes, was largely because Americans kept fighting after the first break-through, and even when surrounded. This gave us time to redirect our own counter-attack and crush the Germans. Four and a half years earlier the French speaking troops surrendered when the Germans broke through and the Germans didn't really stop until they hit the English Channel and then Paris.

I had an uncle with the 10th Armored Division in Bastogne and a cousin with the 82nd Airborne near St. Vith. They both made it home from the war.

Comments:
Why was it a defeat if we crushed the Germans?
 
It wasn't, of course. It was a great victory that probably shortened the war in the west by at least 4 months and kept the majority of Germany out of the Soviet sphere.

It also vindicated the allied decision to hold the Ardennes weakly (contrary to the approved narrative of the event), in that a vastly superior German force was unable to break through even the weak forces deployed there.

In many ways, this is akin to the flaws in the approved narrative about the Maginot line, which was unbreached by the original German attack, falling only after the surrender of Paris. The French problem was that their doctrinal response to a German attack was incapable of on-the-fly modification.
 
Started off as a defeat; they broke through our lines, killed and captured tens of thousands then we stabalized the line, counter-attacked and beat them back to the starting line while inflicting more casualties on them than they had on us. But the original breakthrough was a defeat.
And Doug, good analysis, but I have seen on the history channel, accounts that the Maginot line was breached before the surrender. Did they misinform me? Thanks for the comment.
 
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