Remembering the Battle of the Bulge

The prints, posters, maps, and photographs in my office reflect personal experience rather than decorative taste: sailboats racing on the coast of Maine, grandchildren in the snow, glimpses of Paris. The one that calls to me again and again is a 3″ × 16″ photographic panorama of a sector of the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg bordering Germany. There at dawn on December 16, 1944, more than 200,000 German troops and nearly 1,000 tanks began the Battle of the Bulge by attacking 83,000 American soldiers. It became the U.S. Army’s largest land battle of World War ii. The assault was Hitler’s idea: a successful thrust to Antwerp and the sea would shatter the Western Front and the unity of the Anglo-American alliance. Although the Wehrmacht had swept through the northern half of Luxembourg and into Belgium, by the end of January the American First and Third Armies eliminated the sixty-mile salient (“the Bulge”) and liberated Luxembourg for the second time in five months.

Among our vastly outnumbered forces on that battle’s first night, I was an unremarkable combat infantryman who became one of the battle’s nearly 81,000 American casualties. That night has been with me every day since.

After a year in the army, during the summer of 1944 I was combat training in Kentucky with the 75th Infantry Division in which I made my closest army friendships. These friendships ended when many of us were shipped out of the division as replacements for troops killed, wounded, and missing in European combat. Along with several thousand g.i.’s lumbering under bulging backpacks, I slogged up the gangway of a gray troopship that was once the elegant Cunard liner Mauretania, and sailed from a midtown Manhattan pier to Liverpool.

After brief passage through a staging camp in the Midlands, I was sent to a replacement depot (“repple depple”) in the countryside above Normandy’s Omaha Beach. For some days we strangers to one another slept in two-man tents and hiked through orchards whose owners we angered by knocking toothsome apples from their trees with our rifle butts. There we also discovered the transcendental effects of gulping Calvados like the cider we thought it was.

As that summer was ending, Paris had been liberated, and the Allies were pressing the war into Luxembourg, Belgium, the Netherlands, and up the Valley of the Rhone. A number of us replacements were trucked to a railhead in Normandy and packed aboard a train of “forty-and-eight” boxcars (for forty men or eight horses) familiar to World War i doughboys and American Legion conventioneers. Despite our animal heat it was always cold in those crowded accommodations. During a brief stop at a small passenger station en route, some French awaiting a train were aghast when several g.i.’s dashed in with a burning woodstove and set it up in their boxcar. Our train dragged from Normandy in the west to Metz in the east to Verviers, Belgium, in the north where we spent a night on the floor of a bombed-out felt factory. The next day we moved to the front in Huertgen, a vast coniferous forest on the western edge of Germany.

As a nineteen-year-old private first class assigned to Company A, 112th Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division, I joined the division in Huertgen when that city was being destroyed in a futile assault on Germany’s Siegfried Line or “West Wall.” The decision to attack in Huertgen was one of our army’s larger blunders of the war. The wise and learned American military historian, Russell F. Weigley, ranked Huertgen as “a military tragedy” worse than the Civil War’s Wilderness or the Argonne of World War i. A dense stand of tall firs planted in seemingly endless rows, the forest was a dripping gloom. Europe’s coldest autumn in thirty years, driving sleet, clinging wet snow, and foxholes seeping ice water made existence tough enough, and the army’s failure to supply the troops with galoshes produced great numbers of...