by Dr. Daun van Ee
As Americans come to the 80th anniversary of the Ardennes Counteroffensive—the Battle of the Bulge—they might be asking themselves: “Is this event really one that should be celebrated?”
There are reasons to think otherwise. The two powerful German armies that attacked on December 16th, 1944, achieved almost complete surprise due to an egregious misreading of intelligence. Two full regiments of one unlucky infantry division surrendered, marking the largest American battlefield capitulation in Europe during World War II. The Germans pushed the Allies back a full 50 miles, creating the bulging salient, which lasted over a month and gave the battle its name.
Even worse was the appalling number of battle losses. The American Army suffered approximately 75,000 casualties. Of that total, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, later estimated that the number killed was 8,000 (Crusade in Europe, p. 365). Other estimates of the dead have gone as high as 20,000.
The battle also strained the great alliance that Ike had so skillfully assembled and maintained. Some British leaders, who had long doubted Eisenhower’s abilities, used the setback to renew their efforts to place the direction of the ground campaign under Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. The French leader, General Charles de Gaulle, threatened to withdraw his forces from allied command unless orders to withdraw partially from some French territory were rescinded. Eisenhower‘s American boss, Army Chief of Staff George C. Marshall, tried to give him enough room to conduct the battle without interference, but he made it clear that he expected him to take charge and to resist Montgomery’s attempt to take over.
Ike’s crisis management did not disappoint. Meeting with his senior commanders, he quickly lifted morale by explaining that the Germans, by coming out of their strong defensive positions, had presented the Allies with a golden opportunity to hasten the end of the war. He rapidly deployed his only reserves to constrict and slow the German thrust and temporarily reassigned two American Armies, the First, and the Ninth, to Montgomery’s army group in order to protect lines of communication. Eisenhower also directed his most aggressive commander, General George S. Patton, to launch a powerful counterattack in less than a week. Finally, Ike used a mixture of threats and conciliation to end—at least for a time—British and French challenges to his authority.
In the end, the Germans were pushed out of the bulge, and the original lines were restored. The Americans, fighting skillfully and bravely, paid a heavy cost in men and equipment, but those costs were matched by losses incurred in at least equal measure by their foe. Moreover, the Germans had used up their last reserves and were unable to cope with a massive winter offensive by the Soviets as well as the increasingly powerful Anglo-American-French-Canadian drive to the Rhine River and into the heart of the Reich.
Perhaps the best contemporaneous assessment of the battle came from Winston Churchill’s attempt to set the record straight after Montgomery had seemingly given the impression—publicly–that the victory had been won by the British. On January 18, 1945, the Prime Minister explained that relatively few British forces had been involved in the Ardennes: “Care must be taken in telling our proud tale not to claim for the British armies undue share of what is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever-famous American victory” (The Papers of Dwight David Eisenhower, vol. IV, p. 2483, doc. no. 2284, n. 4).
Dr. Daun van Ee is a historian and editor for the Eisenhower Papers Project at Johns Hopkins University and a Trustee of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Society. The Eisenhower Society is dedicated to promoting the memory and legacy of the leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower through educational programs, scholarships, grants, and special events. Learn more at dwightdeisenhowersociety.org.
The Dwight D. Eisenhower Society is dedicated to promoting the memory and legacy of the leadership of Dwight D. Eisenhower through educational programs, scholarships, grants, and special events.