The Battle of the Bulge, 1944.
The Battle of the Bulge, 1944.
The surprise German Ardennes counterattack infiltrates Salinger’s depleted 12th Infantry Regiment. Many units are cut off and wiped out. Salinger witnesses the massacre of two armies, the Germans now reduced to using child shock troops. He is a prime candidate to join the anonymous war dead.
J. D. SALINGER, excerpt from letter to Paul Fitzgerald, February 3, 1960:
There was a film on TV a couple of weeks ago, about the Battle of the Bulge. How the snow and the road and the sign-posts brought everything back to mind.
MARTHA GELLHORN: They all said it was wonderful Kraut-killing country. What it looked like was scenery for a Christmas card: smooth white snow hills and bands of dark forest and villages that actually nestled. The snow made everything serene, from a distance. At sunrise and sunset the snow was pink and the forests grew smoky and soft. During the day the sky was covered with ski tracks, the vapor trails of planes, and the roads were dangerous iced strips, crowded with all the usual vehicles of war, and the artillery made a great deal of noise, as did the bombs from the Thunderbolts. The nestling villages, upon closer view, were mainly rubble, and there were indeed plenty of dead Krauts. This was during the German counteroffensive which drove through Luxembourg and Belgium and is now driven back. At this time the Germans were being “contained,” as the communiqué said. The situation was “fluid”—again the communiqué. You can say the words “death and destruction” and they don’t mean anything. But they are awful words when you are looking at what they mean.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: Hitler knew Germany would never win the war by defending the Siegfried Line and then the Rhine River [at Germany’s western border]. His only chance was to win a lightning victory in the West. It was almost certainly an unattainable objective, but if surprise could be achieved, it might work. Nothing else would.
WILLIAM L. SHIRER: Hitler realized that by remaining on the defensive he was merely postponing the hour of reckoning. In his feverish mind there emerged a bold and imaginative plan to recapture the initiative, strike a blow that would split the U.S. Third and First armies, penetrate to Antwerp and deprive Eisenhower of his main port of supply, and roll up the British and Canadian armies along the Belgian-Dutch border. Such an offensive, he thought, would not only administer a crushing defeat on the Anglo-American armies and thus free the threat to Germany’s western border, but would then enable him to turn against the Russians.
ALEX KERSHAW: Salinger’s unit faced a fierce, ideologically committed enemy that was fighting basically to save the Third Reich. It came down to ordinary GIs, men like Salinger, fighting from foxholes in the worst winter in living memory.
Soldiers take defensive positions during the Battle of the Bulge.
U.S. ARMY HISTORICAL DIVISION: [The 4th] Division was by all accounts in poor condition for combat. All the rifle companies lost very nearly all of the men and officers with which they started the [previous] battle. Thus the division moved to Luxembourg with almost completely new personnel in the line companies. In addition, it was understrength about 1,600 riflemen, since no replacements were furnished during the last week in Hurtgen; many of the rifle companies were only about half strength.
SERGEANT ED CUNNINGHAM: In the first frantic days of mid-December, the newspapers called it Von Rundstedt’s Breakthrough in the Ardennes. Then, as the American line stiffened and held from Elsenborn to Bastogne, it became known as the Battle of the Bulge. In between that time it was probably the most frightening, unbelievable experiences of the war.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The enemy’s plan was simple and startlingly clear. In order to secure the main road through Echternach, Lauterborn, Scheidgen and Junglinster toward Luxembourg City, 20 kilometers away, all the towns in the 12th’s sector facing the Sauer River and the Siegfried Line had to be taken. Because of the average distance of from three to five kilometers between these towns, it was impossible to prevent the enemy penetrations from surrounding them and cutting off the forces which were in them.
ALEX KERSHAW: The Nazi surprise was caused by lousy Allied intelligence; the generals bungled terribly, misreading and disregarding field intelligence reports. It was the Allies’ worst intelligence failure of the Second World War. The battle began with the Americans on the run. They were taken completely by surprise on the 16th of December 1944. Over 200,000 Germans attacked them.
ERNEST HEMINGWAY: There’s been a complete breakthrough, kid. This thing could cost us the works. Their armor is pouring in. They’re taking no prisoners.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The front ran for nearly thirty-five miles along the west bank of the Sauer River and the Moselle River, and all three regiments were in the line. Because of its large sector and a shortage of equipment, communications were strained. [The 4th Division’s] artillery was scattered and shells were scarce. Its attached tank battalion, which had also taken heavy punishment in the Hürtgen Forest, was trying to repair its tanks in spite of an acute shortage of parts. One-fourth of its tanks were stripped for cleaning; many others would not run. The battalion had only twenty-six tanks which could be considered operational. The 4th Division, in other words, was in no position to fight.
ROBERT E. MERRIAM: Roaring cannons along an eighty-mile front served as the alarm clock for thousands of sleeping American troops that murky morning. It electrified men who felt safe in the assurance that theirs was a rest area. Commanders and their staffs tumbled out of bed, to eye with wonder the flashes of the distant artillery and listen, amazed, to reports from their outposts. They didn’t wait long; shortly after six o’clock, the first reports were hastily relayed back to the command posts that through the early morning dark could be seen German infantry, moving forward slowly in that characteristic walk. Behind them snorted the tanks, ready to roar through the gaps cleared by the infantry. In at least one instance, the infantry were driving a herd of cattle before them to detonate any mines which might have been planted in the earth by defending troops.
ALEX KERSHAW: Taking advantage of the cold, foggy weather and the total surprise of the Allies, the Germans penetrated deep into Belgium, creating a dent or “bulge” in the Allied lines. The temperature in the Ardennes during 1944–1945 was the coldest on record [below-zero temperatures]. What remained of Salinger’s division was resting on what turned out to be a front line for the German attack. The members of Salinger’s division were widely dispersed. What emerged out of the fog was hallucinatory.
PAUL FUSSELL: It was dark and it was foggy when the boys, stomachs paralyzed by fear, first saw shapes moving silently toward them, and then, as the shapes advanced, they saw the white snow garments and unique helmets of the German infantry, psyched up to kill them all. In the ghastly weather, you either fought back a bit against the bayonet and the grenade or you took off. If you were wounded outdoors you froze to death within a half hour.
COLONEL RICHARD MARR: The initial German attacks rolled over or around all the outposts on the 12th Infantry’s front without any difficulty, which was inevitable in view of the strength of the German forces. The Americans held their fire until the German lines were fully exposed, then opened a concerted surprise fire of machine guns. [The Germans] cut [the American forces] to pieces, while the riflemen in the houses picked off the forward ranks.
DANNY S. PARKER: The experienced German infantry penetrated the 12th Infantry Regiment in the early morning hours on either side of Echternach.
ALEX KERSHAW: During the most intense parts of the battle, guys Salinger knew were too afraid to fall asleep in their foxholes because they’d freeze to death. It was the last great gasp of Nazi Germany, and the American soldier took the brunt of that attack and held.
JOHN TOLAND: The Battle of the Bulge was the greatest pitched battle ever fought by the United States; it’s the only major struggle in the dead of winter. It was as great in scale as the Battle of Stalingrad—over a million soldiers and thousands of civilians were actively involved. Unlike any other campaign in World War II, it was conceived in its entirety by Adolf Hitler. It was his last great offensive, his last great gamble.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: To provide the will, Hitler counted on the children. The German soldiers of December 1944 were mostly born between 1925 and 1928. They had been deliberately raised by the Nazis for this moment, and they had that fanatical bravery their Führer counted on.
ALEX KERSHAW: Suddenly and overwhelmingly, detached American units, including Salinger’s 12th infantry, were fighting an enemy as young as fifteen, as old as sixty. Hitler threw everything at them—German weapons and munitions were diverted in massive quantities from the Eastern Front to the Ardennes—because it was Hitler’s last chance to gain control and end the war in the West on his terms. Salinger and the remainder of the post-Hürtgen 12th regiment were isolated because they had been spread along a thirty-five-mile front. The isolation, coupled with the intensity of the German attack, bred the fear that if they caved in, if this went badly and they were completely overrun, the war could turn against them, the gains of D-Day rolled back. The ghosts of Hürtgen reemerged. A whole division enveloped by the enemy? It was not beyond the realm of possibility during the opening hours of the battle.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: In the snow, fog, and dire cold, units like Salinger’s 12th were suddenly cut off from each other by German advances into and through their lines.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The Germans had infiltrated to a depth of four kilometers into the lines of 12th Infantry Regiment and had isolated it company for company.
ALEX KERSHAW: All the GIs could do was stand and hold or run. Many small units fought to the bitter end. For an entire month, Salinger’s 4th Division fought in one of the fiercest and bloodiest campaigns of the war.
The record cold in the Ardennes created accumulating problems. Trucks had to be run every half hour or the oil in them would freeze. GIs took to urinating on their weapons to thaw them out.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: One GI described the routine that he would use. He had three pairs of socks, and he would wear one pair on his feet to keep his feet warm; he would wear one in his helmet for his head, and he would have the third one in a pocket to try to dry his head off. He rotated these socks each day because he was very worried about frostbite, which was, along with trench foot, a huge problem.
In the brutal cold, soldiers receive rations.
MARGARET SALINGER: My father said that no matter what, he will always be grateful to his mother, who knit him socks and sent them to him in the mail, each and every week, throughout the war. He told me it saved his life in the foxholes that winter; he was the only guy he knew with dry feet.
EDWARD G. MILLER: You pray that you’re not another one of those anonymous casualties, because the casualty rate was enormous. The U.S. Army almost ran out of infantry replacements in late 1944.
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PRIVATE BOB CONROY: [A GI named] Gordon got ripped by a machine gun from roughly the left thigh through the right waist. He . . . told me he was hit through the stomach as well. . . . We were in foxholes by ourselves, so we both knew he was going to die. We had no morphine. We couldn’t ease [the pain], so I tried to knock him out. I took off his helmet, held his jaw up, and just whacked it hard as I could, because he wanted to be put out. That didn’t work, so I hit him up by the head with a helmet and that didn’t work. Nothing worked. He slowly froze to death; he bled to death.
WILLIAM MONTGOMERY: The casualties had been hit by shrapnel the night before and were lost in the dark. One man had frozen, poor guy. The other was a real Survivor—with a capital “S.” His leg was shattered, but he had made a tourniquet of his belt. He burrowed down into the snow and covered himself with his shelter-half, lit an alcohol cube with his Zippo lighter, and shoved his rifle butt into the small flame. When the fumes got to him, he put out the flame, flapped the shelter-half, and settled down for a while, then started over again. I remember him well because he was such a vivid example of the hell riflemen had to live through every day. Even now, fifty-five years later, I’m still in awe of what guys like him did. My squad and I carried a lot of them off the line—enough to know that it was the infantry who won the war.
DEBORAH DASH MOORE: The successful penetration of the American lines trapped large numbers of American troops, which is why many were captured. They ran out of ammo, there were no reinforcements, and they lost the resources to fight their way out.
COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: The enemy hoped to break up and isolate the regiment so that his panzers could pass through. The problem for Col. Chance [Salinger’s commanding officer] was to make contact with his isolated units and form a line.
STEPHEN E. AMBROSE: The Americans used desperate methods to bolster the defense. Pvt. Kenneth Delaney of the 1st Infantry Division had been in combat from D-Day to November 15, when he was wounded in the Hürtgen. A month later he was recuperating in a hospital in Liège, Belgium. “On December 17th,” he recalled, “the hospital staff informed us that if you can walk or crawl, you will have to go back to your Division as soon as possible.”
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GEORGE KNAPP: On Christmas of ’44, in a small town close to the river separating Luxembourg and Germany, I conducted a candlelight service in a barn alongside the road leading to the front line. Candelabra and candles came from a bombed-out church in town. Men of all faiths attended. We only had a trio to sing as the other member of an intended quartet had been captured. The next morning, my Christmas Day Services were conducted in a two-lane bowling alley in another town a bit farther away from the front.
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COLONEL GERDEN F. JOHNSON: On those days [of warmer temperatures], melting snow revealed the bodies of both German and American soldiers upon the ground where they had been frozen into weird shapes after they had fallen in the winter battles. Hundreds of dead cattle littered the fields, and destroyed vehicles lined the roads along with the carcasses of the horses that had been either partially or completely destroyed, and the wreckage lay untouched where it fell. Human excreta was deposited in the corners of rooms where the fighting had been at such close quarters that even leaving the buildings was an invitation to death. This part of Germany, just north of the point where the borders of Germany, France, and Belgium meet, was the filthiest area the 12th had ever fought through.
MARTHA GELLHORN: There were half-tracks and tanks literally wrenched apart, and a gun position directly hit by bombs. All around these lacerated or flattened objects of steel there was the usual riffraff: papers, tin cans, cartridge belts, helmets, an odd shoe, clothing. There were also, ignored and completely inhuman, the hard-frozen corpses of Germans. Then there was a clump of houses, burned and gutted, with only a few walls standing, and around them the enormous bloated bodies of cattle. The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.
At Warnach, on the other side of the main Bastogne road, some soldiers who had taken, lost, and retaken this miserable village were now sightseeing the battlefield. They were also inspecting the blown-out equipment of two German tanks and a German self-propelled gun which had been destroyed here. Warnach smelled of the dead; in subzero weather the smell of death has an acrid burning odor.
Farther down the street a command car dragged a trailer; the bodies of Germans were piled on the trailer like so much ghastly firewood.
HANSON W. BALDWIN: The fundamental reason for the German failure was a lack of military power to match Hitler’s imaginative and extraordinary aims. And, as so often happens in totalitarian societies, the Germans underestimated the staying power of their enemies. . . . After the first shock of surprise had been dissipated, U.S. troops, especially the bloodied veteran divisions, rallied, fought, and died. . . . This is probably the major imponderable of warfare—to know just when men will suddenly, and often of their own free will, commit an act of unthinking, desperate bravery.
PAUL FITZGERALD, excerpt from an unpublished poem:
The Fighting Fourth Division became a seasoned team, through Normandy, through Paris, and Luxembourg. The Siegfried Line deterred our troops, but soon it was asunder.
COLONEL RICHARD MARR: The 12th Infantry held; held in the face of odds so ominous that it would be difficult, even in retrospect, to believe possible had one not seen, during months of continuous combat, the high courage and honor which marks all ranks of the 12th Infantry.
SHANE SALERNO: Salinger’s 12th Infantry Regiment was awarded the Distinguished Unit Citation for its defense of Luxembourg.
MARTHA GELLHORN: There were many dead and many wounded, but the survivors contained the fluid situation and slowly turned it into a retreat, and finally, as the communiqué said, the bulge was ironed out. This was not done fast or easily; and it was not done by those anonymous things, armies, divisions, regiments. It was done by men, one by one—your men.
JOHN TOLAND: The will of the German soldier was broken. No one that survived the retreat believed there was the slightest chance of German victory.
ALEX KERSHAW: The brutal culmination of J. D. Salinger’s combat experience in the European theater of operations was the Bulge, fighting in the Ardennes. He was surrounded by a huge volume of human suffering and annihilation. It’s impossible to believe that he wasn’t fundamentally altered in unrecognizable ways.
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SHANE SALERNO: The common understanding is that Hemingway and Salinger met only two times, in Paris and in the Hürtgen Forest. However, another meeting took place during the Battle of the Bulge. On December 16, 1944, the first day of the battle, although Hemingway was in Paris, recovering from pneumonia, his friend General Barton told him “it was a pretty hot show and to come on up.” He did.
CHARLES MEYERS: I was in the Counter Intelligence Corps during World War II. During the Battle of the Bulge I was loaned, along with an Atlantan named Ernie Welch, to the 4th Infantry Division CIC team. The 4th Division anchored the southern hinge of the Bulge in Luxembourg. Its CIC team numbered about fourteen men, six of whom were located in pairs at each of the three regimental CPs. One of these pairs included Jerry (J. D.) Salinger.
Our assignment during that January 1945 required Welch and myself to jeep each day between Division Headquarters and the three regimental CPs. It was cold that winter, and we did a lot of warming up at the regimental CIC billets. Jerry was writing at that time and selling a few of the stories he was then writing in the time he could spare (sometimes a lot) from the war.
Hemingway was at that time attached to the 4th. Jerry gave him some of his stories to read, and one day, when Welch and I had dropped by to thaw again, Jerry showed me a note penciled on a piece of brown paper bag which Hemingway had sent him. The note commended Jerry’s “ear” and praised the considerable talent and promise of his stories.
LEICESTER HEMINGWAY: [When Hemingway took a hotel room in Luxembourg, he] came out to relax with good pals . . . [including] Jerome Salinger, who was a good man with the CIC.
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BART HAGERMAN: Every time it snows . . . I’ll think about those days during the Bulge. It brings back memories of the friends that I lost and the desperate feeling that we had in those days, and it kind of irks me that, after 50 years, I still think that way. I should forget it and go on about my life, but . . . it’ll always be with me, I guess.
ERNIE PYLE: There are many of the living who have had burned into their brains forever the unnatural sight of cold dead men scattered over the hillsides and in the ditches along the high rows of hedge throughout the world. Dead men by mass production—in one country after another—month after month and year after year. Dead men in winter and dead men in summer.
Dead men in such familiar promiscuity that they become monotonous.
Dead men in such monstrous infinity that you come almost to hate them. These are the things that you at home need not even try to understand. To you at home they are columns of figures, or he is a near one who went away and just didn’t come back. You didn’t see him lying so grotesque and pasty beside the road in France.
We saw him, saw him by the multiple thousands. That’s the difference.
MARGARET SALINGER: I remember standing next to my father—I was about seven at the time—for what seemed like an eternity as he stared blankly at the strong backs of our construction crew of local boys, carpenters building the new addition to our house. Their T-shirts were off, their muscles glistening in the summer sun. After a long time, he finally came back to life again and spoke to me, or perhaps just out loud to no one in particular, “All those big strong boys”—he shook his head—“always on the front line, always the first to be killed, wave after wave of them,” he said, his hand flat, palm out, pushing arc-like waves away from him.
