FEW U.S. GENERALS had enhanced their reputations in the Ardennes, except for battle stalwarts like Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe. An American army that considered itself the offensive spirit incarnate had paradoxically fought best on the defensive. The cautious January counterattack designed by Bradley and Montgomery, with Eisenhower’s consent, pushed Germans from the bulge rather than beating them out; though it was intended to “trap the maximum troops in the salient,” the effort trapped almost no one. Among top commanders, Patton proved the most distinguished. His remarkable agility in fighting the German Seventh Army, half the Fifth Panzer Army, and portions of the Sixth Panzer Army was best summarized in Bradley’s six-word tribute: “One of our great combat leaders.”
Winston Churchill sought to repair Anglo-American discord with a gracious speech in the House of Commons. Speaking of the contest in the Ardennes, he said, “United States troops have done almost all the fighting and have suffered almost all the losses,” he said. “They have lost sixty to eighty men for every one of ours.” The Battle of the Bulge “is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory.” To his secretary, the prime minister later remarked that there was “no greater exhibition of power in history than that of the American army fighting the battle of the Ardennes with its left hand and advancing from island to island toward Japan with its right.” Montgomery also showed unusual courtesy in notes to Eisenhower and Bradley, “my dear Brad,” telling the latter, “What a great honour it has been for me to command such fine troops.”
On January 24, 1945, American soldiers of the 75th Infantry Division march through the forest to cut off the road to St.-Vith.
Eisenhower claimed that the German offensive “had in no sense achieved anything decisive.” In fact, AUTUMN MIST had hastened the Third Reich’s demise. Hitler’s preoccupation with the west in late 1944—and the diversion of supplies, armor, and reserves from the east—proved a “godsend for the Red [Russian] Army,” in the estimate of one German historian. Half of Germany’s fuel production in November and December had supported the Ardennes offensive, and now hundreds of German tanks and assault guns fighting the Russians were immobilized on the Eastern Front for lack of gasoline. By January 20, the massive Soviet force of two million men had torn a hole nearly 350 miles wide from East Prussia to the Carpathian foothills, bypassing or annihilating German defenses. Bound for the Oder River, Stalin’s armies would be within fifty miles of Berlin at a time when the Anglo-Americans had yet to reach the Rhine. Here, six hundred miles from the Ardennes, was the greatest consequence of the Battle of the Bulge.
Russian soldiers load a Katyusha rocket launcher during their final advance into Berlin.
On January 25, 1945, the Western Allies counted 3.7 million soldiers in seventy-three divisions along a 729-mile front, with U.S. forces providing more than two-thirds of that strength. Eisenhower also had almost 18,000 combat aircraft—complemented by air fleets in Italy—and overwhelming dominance in artillery, armor, intelligence, supply, transportation, and the other essentials of modern combat. The Pentagon accelerated the sailing dates of seven U.S. divisions, diverted two others not previously earmarked for Europe, and combed out units in Alaska, Panama, and other quiet theaters where George Marshall, chief of staff of the U.S. Army, believed “plenty of fat meat” could be found. So desperate was the need for rifle-platoon leaders that an emergency school for new lieutenants opened in the Louis XV wing of the Château de Fontainebleau outside Paris, with classes in map reading, patrolling, and camouflage. Many of these students were among the almost 30,000 U.S. enlisted men who received promotions and battlefield commissions during the war. Army draft levies, which had just increased from 60,000 to 90,000 men a month, would jump again in March to 100,000. SHAEF expected the armies in the west to grow to eighty-five divisions by May.
That would have to suffice. Britain had nearly run out of men, and the American replacement pool was described as “almost depleted,” with much hard fighting still to come against Germany and Japan. Eisenhower asked for a hundred thousand marines; he would get none. Patton calculated that victory in western Europe required “twenty more divisions of infantry”; that was a pipe dream. Eisenhower would have to win with the forces now committed to his theater, and no more.
The Battle of the Bulge had affirmed once again that war is never linear, but rather a chaotic, haphazard enterprise of reversal and advance, blunder and enthusiasm, despair and elation. Valor, cowardice, courage—each had been displayed in this spectacle of a marching world. For magnitude and violence, the battle in the Ardennes was unlike any seen before in American history, nor like any to be seen again. Yet as always, even as armies and army groups collided, it was the fates of individual soldiers that drew the eye.
“Everybody shares the same universals—hope, love, humor, faith,” Private First Class Richard E. Cowan of the 2nd Infantry Division had written his family in Kansas on December 5, 1944, his twenty-second birthday. Two weeks later, he was dead, killed near Krinkelt after holding off German attackers with a machine gun long enough to cover his comrades’ escape. “It is such a bitter dose to have to take,” his mother confessed after hearing the news, “and I am not a bit brave about it.” Cowan would be awarded the Medal of Honor, one of thirty-two recognizing heroics in the Battle of the Bulge. Like so many thousands of others, he would be interred in one of those two-by-five-by-six-and-a-half-foot graves, along with his last full measure of hope, love, humor, and faith. The marching world marched on.