The Battle of the Bulge is a ridiculous name for what happened in the Ardennes in December 1944 and in January 1945. For about six weeks, a million soldiers fought against each other. Between a hundred and two hundred thousand men were either wounded, captured, or killed. Whole towns across the region were leveled to the ground and several thousand Belgian and Luxembourger farmers, and their families were annihilated. The man who ordered the pointless attack was nowhere near the action. He spent most of that time hiding 55 feet underground in a bunker in Berlin. When his forces ultimately suffered their crushing defeat, Hitler killed his dog, swallowed a cyanide capsule, and shot himself in the head. The war in Europe ended eight days later.
On December 16th, my father was in the Saar region of Germany at the front. They started hearing rumors that the Germans had broken through the line to their north in Belgium. A week or so later, on Christmas Eve, several two-ton trucks picked up the infantry soldiers and moved them up towards the Ardennes. My father and his unit followed behind them in their radio jeeps.
It was a very cold night. In addition to Smitty’s straw on the floors for warmth, there were now also sandbags that were supposed to protect everyone inside the jeep in the event they drove over a landmine.
“We took turns driving. I preferred to drive, sleepy though I often was because keeping your feet moving on the pedals tended to keep them warmer. Driving at night in a convoy was difficult. You could not cut on your headlights, only the blackout lights. These had small blips of light that provided no help to the driver but were designed to make your vehicle visible to others nearby. Driving in convoy you could only watch the blips on the tail of the vehicle in front of you and judge the proper distance. We drove about 35 miles an hour. The roads were paved but narrow. Non-military traffic was nil.”
The next morning, which was bright and clear, was Christmas Day. At midday, they stopped in a small French village and the military cooks fed them a holiday dinner. While it was being cooked, a chaplain led a church service in a barn beside the road. His driver set up a portable electric organ and started playing Christmas hymns bringing many of the men to tears.
“While we ate our excellent Christmas meal from our mess kits sitting on various objects along the road or on our vehicles, wave after wave of American bombers flew overhead to cities deep inside Germany. There seemed to be thousands of them. They were all propeller planes and droned overhead for hours, first towards Germany then returning, in the afternoon.”
As the bombers returned, the battalion pushed forward towards Reims in France. They camped in a field that night, but this time each man was given a whole pup tent to himself. And there were showers. The men filed into long steamy tents, threw off all their clothes, and had one minute of hot water to wet themselves down. Then with a small piece of soap each, they washed themselves down and then were given another minute of hot water to rinse themselves off. Then they dried themselves. With real towels. Given the fact that the men had previously gone six weeks at a time without any bathing opportunities at all, this might have been the best Christmas present any of them could have asked for. When they were dry, they were all issued new clothing (that had belonged to the men who had showered before them and had been cleaned and dried in the interim) and then, before they dressed, they were all inspected for lice.
While the soldiers didn’t know what lay ahead of them, their superior officers likely did. They needed their men to be rested and alert to face the onslaught. Most of the men weren’t thinking ahead. They were all living fully in the moment and for them, this was an almost blissful moment. It was here, in this moment of relative calm before the storm, that my father went above his captain’s head to the battery commander and asked to be demoted from his position as Wire Corporal. Even though he had been doing the job for some weeks, he felt like he didn’t know what he was doing. He complained that his captain was forever riding him for not doing things right. I can just picture the battery commander’s eyes rolling back into his head as my father complained in front of him. My guess is that had they not taken this moment in France for everyone to catch their breaths, and they had just gone straight up to the front line, my father might never have said anything. Certainly, the battery commander was none too happy about it, but eventually okayed the request and busted Dad down to Private. One of the jeep drivers in the liaison section, a guy named Cancio was bumped up to Wire Corporal, and Dad took over his spot behind the wheel.
While they had all been taking turns driving from the beginning, my father had neither been trained to drive nor did he even have a license. This might have been a problem in other circumstances, but there, in the middle of a war, the major sergeant simply wrote him one. Because of the condition of the roads and all the shrapnel that was everywhere, the biggest problem that the jeep usually faced was a flat tire. This happened all the time. When a tire blew, it was replaced with one of two spares that they always carried. When they could get back to the motor pool, they’d take apart the flat and patch the leak and put it back into rotation. The jeeps were otherwise sturdy and simple little trucks. American jeeps had hand-crank-operated windshield wipers, but the German equivalents were electrically operated. Whenever they came across an abandoned German vehicle, it would invariably have been stripped of its wipers because some enterprising GI would have installed them on their own jeep.
On December 29, the 912th convoy drove into Belgium. On January 1st, they joined up with the 2nd Battalion of the 347th Infantry in a little town called Freux Menil. Freux Menil was on a two-lane road and just north of it were two more little towns, Moircy and Jenneville.
Beyond Jenneville, the road ran alongside a low ridge for about 1500 feet before turning left through a gap in the rise amidst a small forest. The Germans were dug in somewhere on the other side of the ridge. Beyond the bend, the road continued over a small bridge that had been damaged but was still passable. After that, the whole area was under German control. The road leading to the bridge was heavily mined and covered in snow.
At the top of this stretch of road, on a bend, was a house that faced up towards where the road turned left into the woods and out of sight. The front of the house had a huge hole in it from an artillery shell. There were bricks scattered everywhere. Two infantrymen set up a machine gun in the hole and had it pointed up the road towards the gap.
An old woman lived in the house, and she refused to leave. She lived in the kitchen and my father, and the rest of his unit bunked upstairs. Every time one of the guys came in from the snowy day, she would take their hands and say, “Froid, froid,” or “Cold, cold.” She would cook gruel on her stove and offer to share it with the men, but they always refused. Her son would occasionally visit her and told the men that no matter how much he begged her that she refused to leave. She was 80 years old and had lived there for her entire life.
This is where my father experienced The Battle of the Bulge. He wasn’t engaged over the whole map; he was only concerned with this one small road wending its way through these tiny villages. Every morning the infantry would advance along the ridge toward the German positions and every day, heavy German gunfire would push them back.
“From my worm’s eye view I had little conception of the “big picture,” but this seemed to be the standard German tactic. They would resist strongly for a while, and then suddenly pull back. Sometimes they would only go back to the next hill, at other times they would pull back two or three miles. The same thing apparently happened on a large scale. From what we heard, when a big gap in the line would be opened by the infantry, armored divisions would move quickly across big lightly defended areas until they encountered the Germans in strong new positions. Then the infantry would take over again. The Germans sometimes left behind two men dug in with a single machine gun. They would hold out until they ran out of ammunition or were killed, and only then would we find they had no support.”
Finally, one day, the Germans didn’t respond during the morning skirmish, and the front line was able to move slightly farther to the north.
“So, one morning we left Jenneville in our jeeps, diving down the road from which the mines had been removed, through the gap we had been carefully avoiding before, and across the rickety bridge to another village a few miles ahead. “
From where my father sat, the war, at times, must have seemed rather small. His immediate day-to-day experiences were with a very limited number of people - German, Belgian, and American alike. A million people were fighting but they were spread out over a many-mile-wide, hilly, and heavily forested area. Unless you were flying overhead, I can’t imagine there was any way to fully comprehend the scope of it. Most of those millions of pairs of eyes on the ground were probably looking at something very limited and contained.
Lord Haw-Haw was a propaganda announcer on German radio. He would broadcast the movement of Allied forces and gleefully report on the mounting casualties. Often, despite the propaganda, the guys on the ground found out more about where their friends were positioned from listening to Lord Haw-Haw than they did from anyone in the army. Even knowing that the radio announcer was lying, they would listen in to try and glean some news. While several different people were the voice of Lord Haw-Haw, the main one was a guy named William Joyce who was born in New York. He moved to London and joined a group of fascists before moving to Berlin and becoming a German citizen. He was spouting lies and nonsense, but he sounded like an American. Over time, I am sure that his steady stream of dispiriting reports started to play with their heads.
On top of that, a Waffen-SS commando named Otto Skorzeny had been appointed by Hitler to carry out something called Operation Greif. German soldiers wearing stolen British and American uniforms and driving captured vehicles went behind Allied lines trying to create confusion. The aim was to protect at least one bridge over the Meuse River from being destroyed before the Germans could use it to cross over. Skorzeny’s men wandered the countryside changing the direction of signs and passing false information along to any soldiers they encountered.
As the Allies caught onto this, they started issuing passwords that, in theory, only non-Germans would understand. “It was very important to know the password. It changed every day and was passed down from Third Army headquarters by word of mouth every day before noon. When challenged by a guard or anyone you had to say the password. He had to respond with the countersign. For the life of me, I cannot remember a single pair of them. They might be something like “Chicago” with a countersign like “Bears”.” There are many stories of Allied Commanding Officers being held prisoner for a few hours because they couldn’t remember the correct password. Ultimately, Skorzeny’s unit failed, but not before they sowed suspicion and distrust everywhere.
Last month, Michael and I drove through the small Belgian villages that my father fought in. We started finding memorial plaques that mentioned the 87th Division. Just north of Jenneville, we realized that we’d found the actual stretch of road leading to the bend that disappears into the woods that he’d written about. Instead of snow, though, it was covered in wildflowers. A young tree that most certainly had not been there eighty years ago stands strong and tall right in the middle of it.
On a historical plaque about the war, we found a map with an indication of a house called Villa Jacoby that must have been where they were billeted. Since the war, the house has clearly been rebuilt and expanded upon. There are no holes in the walls now but there is a very new-looking window. The stonework is patchworked with sections that all look as if they were built at different times.
When we drove over the little bridge he mentioned, we found a stone memorial commemorating their victory there. Both an American and a German flag fly above it. That’s where he was. Right there. When he was there, he was twenty-one years old. He was freezing and he was terrified. Instead of the breeze through the trees, he was listening to gunfire and exploding shells.
All the battlefields that we visited on this trip are beautiful, whether we were in Waterloo, Verdun, or the Ardennes. Lush green foliage and beautiful summer flowers completely cover all their gently rolling hills. Thick dark forests shadow their edges and sometimes overrun them. We drove past an uncountable number of isolated ancient-looking working farms and tiny thriving villages that, in some cases, have withstood bombardment for centuries. Built and rebuilt and rebuilt again. Even the immense cemeteries holding the honorable dead with their rigidly ordered lines of white grave markers stretching almost as far as the eye can see are lovely. I had to remind myself many times, that when those battles were being fought, none of that was there. Instead, there was mud and churned-up ground, and dead bodies.
The overall aim of this part of the war had been to protect the town of Bastogne at all costs. Bastogne had seven major roads passing through it and had the Germans managed to take control of it, they would have been able to move all their equipment westward wherever they wanted it to go. While the Germans encircled the town, they were never able to take it.
As the 87th pushed north, the British were pushing South to pinch the Germans off in the middle. As they got closer to each other, there was a very real concern that the two Allied forces might start accidentally shooting at each other. One morning as the colonel was cooking breakfast in the house they had taken over, Major Bentley-Smith, a British officer in a beret and an overcoat covered with insignia came in and announced himself with a sharp salute. Colonel Bodner, who was stirring oatmeal with a long wooden spoon, looked up and acknowledged the Major, but kept stirring.
The war wasn’t over yet, but the tide had turned against Hitler’s final offensive in the Ardennes. Bastogne was no longer under threat of occupation. On January 16th, the 87th Division was moved into Luxembourg to relieve the 4th Division who had been fighting since they landed at Normandy over six months before.
My father’s unit managed to force the Germans back up a narrow country road over about two weeks. It was an infinitesimally small sliver of the Battle of the Bulge, but the whole offensive was nothing more than hundreds of similar slivers, each happening just out of sight of all the others. During that fortnight, soldiers lost their lives along that road, as they did along many similar roads throughout the entire region. Homes were destroyed and civilians and farm animals were killed. Lives were changed forever.
The more I write about all of this, the less I seem to understand it. I am now much clearer about the events of the war, itself, but as to the why and how of it all…? I feel like that kind of understanding is ever slipping through my fingers.
Somebody just recently said to me that if the pawns in a chess match refused to play, there’d be no game. The people credited for winning wars are never the rank and file who fight in them. At the end, down in the bunker with Hitler in Berlin, Magda Goebbels poisoned her six children, and then she and her husband killed themselves, too.
I wish I could feel something for them, but I don’t. The only one in that bunker that I find my heart going out to is Hitler’s dog.
I am in France (Brittany) as I type along. Thank you for another fascinating and personal post. Some time in the 70s’ my dad asked me to read A Midnight Clear (can’t remember author, but he wrote BIrdie too). According to my dad the author did not reveal his identity and wrote under a pseudonym. My dad thought this book captured his war experience better than all the other WW2 literature. A movie was made at some point, but I did not see it. He loved that book…