SS Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper led KampfgruppePeiper, consisting of 4,800 men and 600 vehicles, was charged with leading the main effort. The Allies at this point thought the information was of no importance. Gen. von Lüttwitz, commander of the XXXXVII Panzer-Korps, ordered the division to turn westwards towards Dinant and the Meuse, leaving only a blocking force at Marche-en-Famenne. In the extreme south, Brandenberger's three infantry divisions were checked by divisions of the U.S. VIII Corps after an advance of 6.4 km (4 mi); that front was then firmly held. Many of these pictures never ran in LIFE magazine, or anywhere else. For the next two days the perimeter was strengthened. Bedell Smith sent Strong to warn Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, the commander of the 12th Army Group, of the danger. — Theodore Draper, 84th Infantry Division in the Battle of the Ardennes, December 1944 - January 1945, 1945, p. 11 of 58. Kampfgruppe Peiper attacked Stavelot on 18 December but was unable to capture the town before the Americans evacuated a large fuel depot. Please refer to the appropriate style manual or other sources if you have any questions. [26] German forces remained in control of several major ports on the English Channel coast into the autumn, while Dunkirk remained under siege until the end of the war in May 1945. "[27]:170, In the center, the town of St. Vith, a vital road junction, presented the main challenge for both von Manteuffel's and Dietrich's forces. Eisenhower wanted Montgomery to go on the counter offensive on 1 January, with the aim of meeting up with Patton's advancing Third Army and cutting off most of the attacking Germans, trapping them in a pocket. Nearly half-a-million Nazi soldiers pounced on the Allied Army, catching them unaware in a heavy snowstorm. He later moved to Spain and South America. The fierce defense of Bastogne, in which American paratroopers particularly distinguished themselves, made it impossible for the Germans to take the town with its important road junctions. A few survived, and news of the killings of prisoners of war spread through Allied lines. With the castle acting as overflow accommodation, the main party was settled into the Adlerhorst's Haus 2 command bunker, including Gen. Alfred Jodl, Gen. Wilhelm Keitel, Gen. Blumentritt, von Manteuffel and Dietrich. Food was scarce, and by 22 December artillery ammunition was restricted to 10 rounds per gun per day. [94] On 20 December, Eisenhower removed the First and Ninth U.S. By 15 January Seventh Army's VI Corps was fighting on three sides in Alsace. [73], Small units of the U.S. 2nd Battalion, 119th Infantry Regiment, 30th Infantry Division, attacked the dispersed units of Kampfgruppe Peiper on the morning of 21 December. [59] Following the end of the war, soldiers and officers of Kampfgruppe Peiper, including Joachim Peiper and SS general Sepp Dietrich, were tried for the incident at the Malmedy massacre trial. Germany had thus forfeited the chance of maintaining any prolonged resistance to a resumed Allied offensive. [109], After officers of the regular German Army attempted to assassinate him, Hitler had increasingly trusted only the Nazi Party SS and its armed branch, the Waffen-SS. The name Battle of the Bulge was appropriated from Winston Churchill’s optimistic description in May 1940 of the resistance that he mistakenly supposed was being offered to the Germans’ breakthrough in that area just before the Anglo-French collapse; the Germans were in fact overwhelmingly successful. They also had intelligence that the Wehrmacht was using the area across the German border as a rest-and-refit area for its troops. Because of troop shortages during the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower decided to integrate the service for the first time. For the Americans, out of a peak of 610,000 troops,[18] 89,000[5] became casualties out of which some 19,000 were killed. The Battle of the Bulge has been depicted in numerous works of art, entertainment, and media, including: Coordinates: .mw-parser-output .geo-default,.mw-parser-output .geo-dms,.mw-parser-output .geo-dec{display:inline}.mw-parser-output .geo-nondefault,.mw-parser-output .geo-multi-punct{display:none}.mw-parser-output .longitude,.mw-parser-output .latitude{white-space:nowrap}50°0′15″N 5°43′12″E / 50.00417°N 5.72000°E / 50.00417; 5.72000, This article is about the 1944 German offensive in World War II. Skorzeny was tried by an American military tribunal in 1947 at the Dachau Trials for allegedly violating the laws of war stemming from his leadership of Operation Greif, but was acquitted. [131] Some authors have estimated German casualties as high as 125,000. For the offensive to be successful, four criteria were deemed critical: the attack had to be a complete surprise; the weather conditions had to be poor to neutralize Allied air superiority and the damage it could inflict on the German offensive and its supply lines;[41] the progress had to be rapid—the Meuse River, halfway to Antwerp, had to be reached by day 4; and Allied fuel supplies would have to be captured intact along the way because the combined Wehrmacht forces were short on fuel. The Germans suffered heavy losses at an airfield named Y-29, losing 40 of their own planes while damaging only four American planes. It was the largest and bloodiest battle that American soldiers would ever fight. [87], For Operation Greif ("Griffin"), Otto Skorzeny successfully infiltrated a small part of his battalion of English-speaking Germans disguised in American uniforms behind the Allied lines. A general offensive launched in mid-November by all six Allied armies on the Western Front brought disappointingly small results at heavy cost; continued efforts merely exhausted the attacking troops. [34][90] This was the standard practice of every army at the time, as many belligerents considered it necessary to protect their territory against the grave dangers of enemy spying. [27]:1, Adolf Hitler first officially outlined his surprise counter-offensive to his astonished generals on 16 September 1944. In France, orders had been relayed within the German army using radio messages enciphered by the Enigma machine, and these could be picked up and decrypted by Allied code-breakers headquartered at Bletchley Park, to give the intelligence known as Ultra. Get a Britannica Premium subscription and gain access to exclusive content. Ultra also picked up communiqués regarding extensive rail and road movements in the region, as well as orders that movements should be made on time. Battle of the Bulge | Holocaust Encyclopedia Believing in omens and the successes of his early war campaigns that had been planned at Kransberg, Hitler had chosen the site from which he had overseen the successful 1940 campaign against France and the Low Countries. The next day GIs who relieved the Rangers reported a considerable movement of German troops inside the Ardennes in the enemy's rear, but that no one in the chain of command connected the dots.[46]. British losses totaled 1,400. The 26th VG received one Panzergrenadier Regiment from the 15th Panzergrenadier Division on Christmas Eve for its main assault the next day. The Ourthe River was passed at Ourtheville on 21 December. For the site of their counteroffensive, the Germans chose the hilly and wooded country of the Ardennes. The 110th's situation was by far the worst, as it was responsible for an 18-kilometer (11 mi) front while its 2nd Battalion was withheld as the divisional reserve. Among them were Volksgrenadier ("People's Grenadier") units formed from a mix of battle-hardened veterans and recruits formerly regarded as too young, too old or too frail to fight. Judged on its own account, the Battle of the Bulge had been a profitable operation for Germany, for, even though it fell short of its objectives, it upset the Allies’ preparations and inflicted much damage at a cost that was not excessive for the effect. A single 18-man Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon from the 99th Infantry Division along with four Forward Air Controllers held up the battalion of about 500 German paratroopers until sunset, about 16:00, causing 92 casualties among the Germans. But the VI Corps AAR for January 1945 puts its total losses at 14,716 (773 killed, 4,838 wounded, 3,657 missing, and 5,448 nonbattle casualties); and Albert E. Cowdrey and Graham A. Cosmas, "U.S. infantrymen fire at German troops in the advance to relieve the surrounded paratroopers in Bastogne. With only enough ammunition for a single fight, they withdrew towards Germany and attacked the rear of the American lines. [35] The plan banked on unfavorable weather, including heavy fog and low-lying clouds, which would minimize the Allied air advantage. Montgomery subsequently recognized his error and later wrote: "Not only was it probably a mistake to have held this conference at all in the sensitive state of feeling at the time, but what I said was skilfully distorted by the enemy. The Allies captured the port of Antwerp intact in the first days of September, but it was not operational until 28 November. [32] Hitler believed he could split the Allied forces and compel the Americans and British to settle for a separate peace, independent of the Soviet Union. [81] They had little time to establish any unit cohesion or train together. The aims of the German counteroffensive were far-reaching: to break through to Antwerp, Belgium, by an indirect move, to cut off the British army group from American forces as well as from its supplies, and then to crush the isolated British. A footnote to the U.S. Army's official history volume "Riviera to the Rhine" makes the following note on U.S. This is a complete misnomer. As a result, the start of the offensive was delayed from 27 November to 16 December. Additionally, their extensive telephone and telegraph network meant that radios were no longer necessary for communications, which lessened the effectiveness of Allied Ultra intercepts. The plan was to pull 13 infantry divisions, two parachute divisions and six panzer-type divisions from the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht combined German military strategic reserve. Hitler rejected this. The Battle of the Bulge a complete account of the final offensive of the German army in World War II. [88] By late Christmas Eve the advance in this sector was stopped, as Allied forces threatened the narrow corridor held by the 2nd Panzer Division. It included the most experienced formation of the Waffen-SS: the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. The leadership composition of the Sixth Panzer Division had a distinctly political nature. Two separate westbound German columns that were to have bypassed the town to the south and north, the 2nd Panzer Division and Panzer-Lehr-Division of XLVII Panzer Corps, as well as the Corps' infantry (26th Volksgrenadier Division), coming due west had been engaged and much slowed and frustrated in outlying battles at defensive positions up to 16 kilometers (10 mi) from the town proper, but these defensive positions were gradually being forced back onto and into the hasty defenses built within the municipality. [116] Consequently, at 10:30 a.m. on 20 December, Eisenhower transferred the command of the U.S. First and Ninth Armies temporarily from Bradley to Montgomery. Here LIFE.com presents a series of photographs made by LIFE photographers throughout the fighting. The Battle of the Bulge, also known as the Ardennes Offensive, was Germany’s last ditch attempt at mounting a full scale attack on the Western Front. Eisenhower commented in his own memoirs: "I doubt if Montgomery ever came to realize how resentful some American commanders were. The Allies relied too much on Ultra, not human reconnaissance. The battle has also featured on television; it was the subject of the, The battle has also been featured in music, most notably "Screaming Eagles" by, This page was last edited on 27 March 2021, at 10:46. "[121][122][123], Despite his positive remarks about American soldiers, the overall impression given by Montgomery, at least in the ears of the American military leadership, was that he had taken the lion's share of credit for the success of the campaign, and had been responsible for rescuing the besieged Americans.[124]. German troops advancing during the opening phase of the Battle of the Bulge, December 17, 1944. [34], Hitler's plan called for a Blitzkrieg attack through the weakly defended Ardennes, mirroring the successful German offensive there during the Battle of France in 1940—aimed at splitting the armies along the U.S.—British lines and capturing Antwerp. In early February, the Allies launched an attack all along the Western front: in the north under Montgomery they fought Operation Veritable (also known as the Battle of the Reichswald); east of Aachen they fought the second phase of the Battle of Hürtgen Forest; in the center, under Hodges; and in the south, under Patton. [96], Despite determined German attacks, the perimeter held. Disagreement and confusion at the Allied command prevented a strong response, throwing away the opportunity for a decisive action. By late November another ambitious special operation was added: Col. Friedrich August von der Heydte was to lead a Fallschirmjäger-Kampfgruppe (paratrooper combat group) in Operation Stösser, a night-time paratroop drop behind the Allied lines aimed at capturing a vital road junction near Malmedy.[47][48]. Many historians have argued that the Nazi attack on the … Its newest and most powerful tank, the Tiger II heavy tank, consumed 7.6 liters (2 U.S. gal) of fuel to go 1,600 m (1 mi), and the Germans had less than half the fuel they needed to reach Antwerp. [103] First, Third, and Seventh Armies suffered a total of 17,000 hospitalized from the cold.[18][l]. Seventh Army casualties: "As elsewhere, casualty figures are only rough estimates, and the figures presented are based on the postwar 'Seventh Army Operational Report, Alsace Campaign and Battle Participation, 1 June 1945' (copy CMH), which notes 11,609 Seventh Army battle casualties for the period, plus 2,836 cases of trench foot and 380 cases of frostbite, and estimates about 17,000 Germans killed or wounded with 5,985 processed prisoners of war. [71], At dawn on 19 December, Peiper surprised the American defenders of Stoumont by sending infantry from the 2nd SS Panzergrenadier Regiment in an attack and a company of Fallschirmjäger to infiltrate their lines. The lead role in the attack was given to 6th Panzer Army, commanded by SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. The battle also severely depleted Germany's armored forces, and they were largely unable to replace them. Montgomery, refusing to risk underprepared infantry in a snowstorm for a strategically unimportant area, did not launch the attack until 3 January, by which time substantial numbers of German troops had already managed to fall back successfully, but at the cost of losing most of their heavy equipment. The British 29th Armoured Brigade of British 11th Armoured Division, which had turned in its tanks for re-equipping, was told to take back their tanks and head to the area. Omissions? This view was opposed by the British Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, as well as Field Marshal Montgomery, who promoted a rapid advance on a narrow front, with the other allied armies in reserve. Though some of his staff were concerned at how the press conference would affect Montgomery's image, it was cleared by CIGS Alan Brooke, who was possibly the only person from whom Montgomery would accept advice. Their front lines in the west had been considerably shortened by the Allied offensive and were much closer to the German heartland. Lack of fuel held up the advance for one day, but on 23 December the offensive was resumed towards the two small towns of Hargimont and Marche-en-Famenne. The stiff American defense prevented the Germans from reaching the vast array of supplies near the Belgian cities of Liège and Spa and the road network west of the Elsenborn Ridge leading to the Meuse River. Battle of the Bulge Battle of the Ardennes By: Jack DePaul and Amanda Kaufmann 2. Their intention was to control the twin villages of Rocherath-Krinkelt which would clear a path to the high ground of Elsenborn Ridge. I found the northern flank of the bulge was very disorganized. 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