Battle of the Bulge

In the dead of winter at the end of 1944, Nazi Germany staked its last reserves in the west on a surprise attack through the forested Ardennes hills of Belgium and Luxembourg. The offensive, which the Germans called Operation Watch on the Rhine, opened on 16 December 1944 and was beaten back by late January 1945. It was the largest and costliest battle the United States Army fought in the Second World War, and it was the last major German offensive on the Western Front.

After the Normandy landings and the breakout of summer 1944, the Allies raced towards Germany but outran their supplies. The great Belgian port of Antwerp, captured in September, only began operating in late November. Adolf Hitler first set out his plan to his generals on 16 September. Armoured forces under Walter Model's Army Group B would break through the thinly held American line, cross the Meuse within days and retake Antwerp, splitting the British and American armies and, Hitler hoped, forcing the Western Allies to negotiate.

The Americans treated the Ardennes as a quiet sector where tired and inexperienced divisions could rest. Allied intelligence missed the German build-up, and low cloud kept Allied aircraft on the ground. On the morning of 16 December, more than 400,000 German troops attacked. The defenders were overrun in places, but stubborn resistance on the northern shoulder around Elsenborn Ridge held up the German advance. On 17 December, troops of an SS armoured battle group led by Joachim Peiper shot American prisoners near Malmedy, killing at least 84.

The town of Bastogne, where 11 paved roads met, became the key to the southern sector. By 21 December it was surrounded, with the US 101st Airborne Division and armoured and artillery units inside. When the Germans demanded surrender, the acting commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, sent back a one-word reply: "Nuts!" The weather cleared on 23 December, allowing supplies to be dropped and Allied aircraft to strike German columns. On 26 December, tanks of George S. Patton's Third Army, which had swung north at short notice, broke through to the town.

The deepest German penetration was halted near Foy-Notre-Dame, south-east of Dinant and short of the Meuse, by the US 2nd Armored Division on 24 December. On 1 January 1945 the Luftwaffe tried to regain the initiative with a mass raid on Allied airfields, destroying or damaging some 465 aircraft but losing 277 of its own. Allied forces, which grew to around 700,000 men, then pressed in on the salient, and by the start of February the front line was back roughly where it had been in December.

Figures vary with the period and units counted. The historian Charles B. MacDonald gives about 81,000 American casualties, and the US Army's preliminary report for its First and Third Armies listed 8,407 killed. British losses were about 1,400. German casualty estimates range from about 63,000 to more than 100,000. Some 3,000 civilians also died.

The offensive delayed the Allied advance into Germany by several weeks, but it used up Germany's last armoured reserves and much of its remaining air power. Because of troop shortages, Dwight D. Eisenhower opened front-line service to Black American soldiers, who had mostly been kept in service roles or segregated units; more than 2,000 volunteered, an important step towards a desegregated US military.

Our 1938 map shows the borders of Belgium, Luxembourg and Germany across which the battle was fought, and our 1945 map shows Europe at the end of the war.