The Battle of the Bulge, the German surprise attack on the American lines in the Belgian Ardennes in December, 1944, is celebrated in American military history as the major battle fought by the US Army in Europe in the Second World War.
Books on the subject, fiction and non-fiction, would fill a small library. It has been depicted in half a dozen films and a score of TV documentaries. Not many years ago the Battle of the Bulge was again world news, due to President Reagan’s controversial visit to Bitburg cemetery, Germany, where some of the SS who murdered US prisoners near Malmedy during the battle supposedly lie buried. Every high school kid can quote General MacAuliffe’s scornful reply to the German offer to surrender when his division was surrounded by them at Bastogne, ‘Nuts’. Actually he snorted something much cruder. Fortunately for the legend, his PR man censored the expletive in time. It could hardly have appeared in a school history book.
But who knows that the man who commanded the ‘battered bastards of Bastogne’ during that celebrated siege went on to command another division in a second Battle of the Bulge? Who knows, too, that nearly a thousand of those airborne troopers who had survived the fight at Bastogne were either killed or wounded in that second battle, without benefit of publicity or the media coverage their earlier stand had gained them? The history of that second Battle of the Bulge in the winter of 1944/45 has never been recorded, in spite of the fact that it lasted a month longer than the original Battle of the Bulge and cost the Americans some 16,000 casualties. It also cost perhaps twice that number of French soldiers serving under American command.
Yet, strategically and politically, it was a much more significant battle than the original Battle of the Bulge. It can be argued that if the Germans’ second attack had succeeded, the whole Western military alliance might have broken up and France been plunged into political anarchy. Indeed, although the German plan did not succeed, the bitter memories of that second Battle of the Bulge had a long-term influence on Franco-American relations: one which, in the end, probably led to General de Gaulle’s decision to leave NATO and ensure that the defence of France lay solely in the hands of Frenchmen.
As we shall see, that unknown battle also first brought the United States Army indirectly into contact with an area and a problem which three decades later would escalate into America’s most significant military defeat of the second half of the twentieth century – Vietnam.
What was this unknown battle? It was a German attack which the American command, thanks to Ultra, knew was coming. Yet it was one, too, which dealt them a stunning blow and forced the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, to order the first and only retreat of an American army in the whole course of the campaign in Western Europe. The Führer himself had given the attack its code-name Unternehmen Nordwind – a bold assault on the apparently unsuspecting US Seventh Army dug in in the French border province of Alsace-Lorraine, just below the embattled Belgian Ardennes.
While the Americans were fully occupied in the north, warding off the attack in the Bulge, thinning their lines out to allow Patton’s Third Army to counterattack, this new offensive would completely surprise the Americans in France, recapture Alsace-Lorraine and, with a bit of luck, knock France out of the war.
Thus it was, as the quarter of a million GIs of General Alexander Patch’s relatively green US Seventh Army prepared to celebrate the last New Year’s Eve of the Second World War, eight German divisions, three of them SS, readied themselves in the snow-bound French hills for the surprise assault. At eleven-thirty precisely on the night of 31 December, 1944, that great wind would sweep down upon the Amis and Operation Northwind, the Second Battle of the Bulge, would begin.