German Panther V tanks on a road in the Ardennes.
SS infantry advance as the attack begins.
SHEETS OF FLAME leaped from the German gun pits at precisely 5:30 A.M. on December 16. Drumfire fell in crimson splashes across the front with a stink of turned earth and burned powder, and the green fireballs of 88mm shells bored through the darkness at half a mile per second, as if hugging the Ardennes hills. The shriek of German Nebelwerfer rockets—known as Screaming Meemies—echoed in the hollows where wide-eyed GIs crouched. Then enemy machine guns added their racket to the din, and rounds with the heft of railroad spikes splintered tree limbs and soldiers’ bones alike. The thrum of panzer engines now could be heard from the east, along with a creak of armor wheels, and as the artillery crashed and heaved, a rifleman in the U.S. 99th Infantry Division reflected, “You’d think the end of the world is coming.”
Through the trees the infantry emerged as bent shadows, some in snowsuits or white capes, others in green greatcoats with helmets or duckbill caps, shouting and singing above the whip-crack of rifle fire. One GI, hiding in a barn among cows, whispered, “The whole German army’s here.” Along the thin American line, men dug in deeper, scratching furrows with helmets and mess tins. Others scuttled to the rear, past the first dead men, who wore the usual blank expressions.
The battle was joined, this last great grapple of the Western Front, although hours would elapse before American commanders realized that the opening barrage was more than a deception, and days would pass before some generals acknowledged the truth of what Rundstedt had told his legions in an order captured early Saturday: Es geht um das Ganze. Everything is at stake.
The struggle would last for a month, embroiling more than a million men drawn from across half a continent to this haunted plateau. The first act of the drama, perhaps the most decisive, played out simultaneously across three bloody fields scattered over sixty miles—on the American left, on the American right, and in the calamitous center. “Your great hour has struck,” Rundstedt had declared to his men. “You bear in yourselves a divine duty to give everything and to achieve the superhuman for our Fatherland and our Führer.”