I was watching the PBS show about WWII-specifically the battle of the Bulge. It seems like a MAJOR breakdown in the US Army command-the ermans attacked (giving plenty of warning); the US troops holding the area were understrength and under-armed, there wereno reinforcements close by (Gen. Patton’s armored force was several days away)., and the US troops were poorly equipped-we took massive casualties from frostbite (our troops were not equipped with good winter boots).Also, we have very poor anti-tank weapons.
Granted, the bad weather helped the Germans-the USAAF fighters were grounded for days. But it seems that Eisenhower and his staff generals were pretty lax-who got the blame for this? 
For the most part, nobody took the blame. The people who made the mistake were Eisenhower and Bradley and nobody wanted to replace or punish them. So the issue was just ignored.
There was really very little fault to be laid at anyone’s feet. The American Army was as well-trained and -equipped as our society could make them. An intelligence failure? Intelligence almost always fails. When it doesn’t, that is the news.
Further, the Germans did the worst possible thing. They came out of their holes to let the Allies kill them. Without the attack, the Western Allies might have been delayed by a month or even more.
Mistakes were made. There was clear evidence that the Germans were preparing for an attack but this was dismissed because everyone “knew” that Germany was defeated and was going to stay on the defensive. And it was equally clear that the Ardennes region was defended too lightly but everyone “knew” that the Germans would never attack there (apparently it was the same knowledge that led people to conclude they wouldn’t attack there in 1940).
The Ardennes offensive never had a chance of winning the war for Germany. But it was a close thing and could have been a much worse defeat for the Americans and British. If that had happened, the Soviets might have closed the Iron Curtain on the Rhine instead of the Elbe. So, in hindsight, it would have been a much better plan if Eisenhower and Bradly had shifted a couple of divisions over.
Defeat?
:dubious: I mght be wrong, but I vaguely recall the Batle of the Bulge being a huge defeat for the Germans. As in, they lo0st a giant load of men, supplies, and eventually ground doing something wihch wasn’t all that bright. And that, as often happens, military leaders discounted the idea of a German offensive because they thought of it as a very bad idea.
Sure, we took casualties. They sent a load of troops in guns blazing, which usually results in casualties. But were those casualties disproportionate? Don’t recall.
The casualties were pretty even, I don’t recall in being a huge defeat for the Germans. It could be argued, that the Germans could not afford an equal battle. In that case, I can see you point.
I believe that the German’s met more resistance then they expected. (However, it may only have been Hitler that was being unrealistic). The key mistake made was this exhausted the last of Germany’s reserves.
Jim
From what I understand, The Bulge was Germany’s last big gamble in the West. They lost their reserves, abd about 600 tanks (including their newest models, the King Tiger) were lost. Hitler’s plan was to drive through Belgium, and split the US Army from the British Army. He thought he could capture Antwerp and shut down the Allied offensive in Northern Belgium. As was pointed out, it was a losing gamble-but I was surprised that the US Army was so poorly prepared. Maybe Ike and Bradley thought the war was just about over. Is it true that a vital part of the German plan was to capture a huge amount of gasoline/diesel feul? If their offensive was dependent upon capturing fuel, this surely was a mad gamle!
The US thought (incorrectly) that the Germans would not launch an offensive there and had primarily tired veterans on RR and Fresh green troops.
They were not prepared, because they made a judgment call of where to put the best troops and the judgment call was wrong. They had no good intelligence this time. It was thought strongly that Germany would be fighting a defensive war only from that point on. The Germans took one last big gamble and failed.
Jim
While watching the program I was wondering something about the battle of the bulge myself. When it was established that the Germans were well ensconced in a forrest why didn’t they just surround the area and arm the allied troops with bags of marshmallows.
Wet trees don’t burn all that well.
All in all, the battle was a major blow to the Germans. They couldn’t afford the loss of so many men and so much equipment. We could.
They do with jellied gasoline.
Short version: Allied intelligence at the time sucked. The weather prevented aerial reconnaissance, the Germans were mostly back in Germany so the French resistance no longer had much info on Wehrmacht movements, and the Germans could use telephone and telegraph hard lines instead of radio broadcasts to send orders. Also, the Allies had major supply problems due to a lack of sea ports and destroyed rail and roads. The Allies tried to guess where an attack might come from and guessed wrong. The Germans were successful at first, but ultimately the Bulge they made into Allied lines was cut off and encircled.
I can see where defeat might not be the best word for it. But it’s hard to think of a better term offhand. Considered from the Allied point of view, there wasn’t any gain from the battle. The frontline was pretty much the same afterwards as it was before. The only difference was that the Allies had lost a lot of men and material to get back to the point where they started. Admittedly the Germans had lost even more men and material and were much less able to afford the loss, so it can be argued that the Allies won the battle in terms of relative attrition. But against this argument is that the Allies didn’t plan on this result (of course they didn’t have any overall plan - they were just reacting to the German plan). It was like a duel where one guy got shot in the knee and the other guy got shot in the heart; the guy getting his leg amputated might have done better than his opponent but neither of them came out ahead.
A mad gamble but as I wrote above, it was a close thing. The Germans captured several fuel depots during the battle and used them to keep the offense going. And they came very close to capturing much larger depots and minor changes in the battle might have gotten them much larger supplies. Ultimately it would have made no difference - the Germans could have had a pipeline to Saudi Arabia and the Allies would still have eventually gathered a bigger force to defeat them. But it could have been a much bigger setback than it actually was.
The Germans had, unexpectedly from the Allied PoV, managed to gather a modest reserve of relatively well-armed and trained troops, despite their staggering losses in France and Russia/Poland in 1944 so far. What were they to do with them?
Scattering them along the eastern front would have made no appreciable difference to what was happening there, there just weren’t that many of the new reserves. Nor were there enough to attack and drive back the Russians anywhere. The choices came down to stiffen the defenses in the West or attack in the West. Defending harder in the West merely meant giving more of Germany to the Russians. German military philosophy (the best form of defense is counter-attack) and Hitler’s personal inclinations were both only ever going to give one answer - attack.
But where? Again only one answer was ever going to be arrived at, the Ardennes - they’d had success there before (even with some of the same men!), they would have surprise, the forest and rough terrain would help shield them from Allied air (as did the weather of course), and it was along the fault line between the two Allied armies.
The Allies could have worked this out, except as mentioned previously in this thread 1/ they assumed the Germans were beaten, and 2/ their intelligence was not as good as they’d been used to as the Germans were mainly back on their native soil. Basically they were focussed on what to do in 1945, not on any possibility of an attack in 1944. So like at Arnhem they ignored what intelligence there was as inconvenient - it probably never made it through evaluation to the high command.
Was it a good idea from the Germans’ PoV? Probably not, as they had no realistic chance of achieving their objectives, or anything like them. But they felt they had to take a shot at it rather than just be ground down like they were in 1918. And as in WWI their goal from mid-war was to somehow split up the Allies; if they could do a 1940 and drive the Commonwealth back to their ports, who knew what might happen? Whereas they knew what would happen if they did nothing dramatic.
No, to the best of my knowledge no-one took the blame, but as it didn’t turn out all that badly for the Allies (Eisenhower said to his generals near the start of the battle: “The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster. There will be only cheerful faces at this table.”) I don’t expect there was any motive to find anyone to blame. And at least we got Kurt Vonnegut’s literary career out of it.
MIlitary strategy, at least in the modern era, is force-based, not geography-based. Look at Clauswitz, he talked about the importance of taking the enemy’s cities. Look at the American Civil War where they were interested in ‘possession of the field.’
What they overlooked is that when you destroy their army all their cities and fields are open to you. We now say the name of the game is to bust up the other guy’s ability to resist, his military.
The smart thing for the Germans to do in 1944 would have been to defend from their holes and hope that the Grand Alliance would fall apart, that space aliens would land, the the rules of physics should suddenly change, to play for time. Coming out to the Allies’ guns was a stone-cold dumb thing to do.
Let’s put it another way. What if in January 1945, Hitler launched another such attack, and one more in February? Would the war have been lengthened or shortened?
Um…huh? There are people who consider the Battle of the Bulge to be an allied defeat? Good gods people…this is revisionist history taken to new and previously untested levels! The Battle of the Bulge was a major German defeat. It was a highly unlikely gamble on Germany’s part…and one they lost badly. They completely miscalculated both the effectiveness of their offensive, the logistics support situation from their own perspective, the moral of the allies, the allies own effectiveness and cohesiveness on the defensive…well, the list goes on and on. I guess an easier list would be…what did the German’s do RIGHT.
Um…can’t think of a single thing here. All they did was shorten the war by a few months and make it possible for the western allies to push further into Germany before the Russian hammer fell on them. I suppose in retrospect this COULD be considered a bright spot for the German’s at that.
Um…it shortened the war by months, it brought the German’s out into the open and off the defensive, giving us a chance to smash a substantial percentage of their reserves in armor and men. It pretty much finished off what the German’s were using as a cohesive reserve and defensive force…and pretty much finished off a cohesive defense in the west. It drew off forces that COULD have been used to shore up their crumbling eastern defenses.
Whats not to like about this from the western allies perspective? The German’s fought a battle against troops we had pretty much stood down for the winter. IIRC there was pretty much parity in the casualties…which is an absolute disaster for the German’s who needed to be killing allies in boat loads for every German soldier killed.
In short, it was a HUGE gain for the allies in the battle. Even the Russian’s gained from it as it drew off reserves that could have been used on the eastern front. You do understand that its always more costly to attack an enemy who is on the defensive, dug in, well supplied and on his home turf (i.e when he’s fighting for his home and family in a very real sense)? Its MUCH easier to attack an enemy who is on the defensive when you have total air superiority…which the allies had at this time. As soon as the weather cleared it was a foregone conclusion that the German’s were going to get hammered into scrap…which is exactly what happened.
:dubious: Oh, it was a mad gamble, right enough. However…a close thing? How do you figure? Look at a map sometime and see how far the German’s advanced. It wasn’t a ‘close thing’…it was a disaster from the German’s perspective. They had everything they could initially wish for. They caught the allies by surprise. The allied forces at the front were just holding troops since many of the hardened combat troops had been pulled out for refit and relaxation before the big push scheduled for the spring. The weather cooperated giving the German’s a window where they could move before allied air smashed them.
And yet…with all that they really didn’t accomplish much of anything. It was never in question that the German’s would achieve more than a spoiling raid after the initial attacks. They were never in danger of splitting the allied armies and driving to the sea as they had in 1940. One has but to look at their battle plans (which would be laughingly unrealistic…if so many hadn’t died because of such stupidity) and compare them to where the German army ACTUALLY got too…and what they paid to get there.
From the Wiki article quoted up thread:
The US losses ranged from 70,000-104,000. The Brits lost an additional 1,400 (i.e. they remained essentially untouched). I don’t see the mention of the Canadian’s who were, IIRC, on the right flank somewhere…but lets just guess that they took comparable losses to the Brits at around 1,400.
For this German casualties ranged from something like 60,000 to 100,000. That seems pretty even…except when you stop to think about it. The allied wounded would have been recovered from the field. The damaged allied vehicles: tanks, jeeps, munitions, etc would have also been recoverable from the field. The German causalities wounded in the fight would either have been lost to the allies or they would have had to treat them with their already strained logistics. German armor and other vehicles knocked out of the fight would equally be lost to the German’s, who didn’t have the ability or logistics to recover most of the damaged equipment and get it back into fighting shape. And with their diminishing industrial capabilities, diminishing logistics for war materials, and overly complex and difficult to manufacture weapons and armor every loss to the German’s was magnified several fold over similar losses to the allies. Recall that the American’s were willing to lose 4 Sherman tanks to take out one Panther…and considered the exchange reasonable. The Russians were willing to lose 12 T-34’s to take out a single Tiger…and again, they considered that a fair exchange. Here the allies were pretty much taking loses on essentially a one for one basis with the German’s…it just doesn’t get any worse than that for Germany.
So…who took the blame? I’m not seeing why anyone would have…on the allies side. We all know who’s fuck up this REALLY was…it was Bush’s fault! Urf…I meant to say…it was Hitlers fault! It was an asinine ‘gamble’ that had the probability of success approaching nil. Hitler never did think that the American’s could fight their way out of a paper bag (despite plenty of facts to the contrary), he thought the Brits were pretty much too worn out to fight on, that the French were worthless (well, even a blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally) and that the Russian’s were subhuman barbarians who didn’t have a chance against his fine superhuman troops.
As for blame on the allies side…I’m not seeing it. The allied high command rightfully (unless you are a neurotic idiot with delusions of grandeurs) considered a German attack at that time and in that place to be highly unlikely. They wanted to give the allied armies some time to relax a bit, get laid and generally decompress before being thrown back into what was going to be hell…German’s defending every field and town like maniacs. Even considering the losses I bet that if the allied general’s could have planned out the thing they wanted best for the German’s to stupidly do it wouldn’t have been as good for us as what they actually DID.
-XT
Oh, come on. You don’t really want to argue in favor of that nonsense, do you?
I’d have to agree that the Battle of the Bulge was a major setback for the Germans. Even if they had no good options at the time, they brought their ultimate defeat closer by launching this campaign.
And their top command knew it was doomed before it got started, that the goals were hoplessly overoptimistic.
That Hitler thought the French were worthless? Why not? I’d say it was pretty evident that he didn’t have much use for them by and large. As I said, he felt the US and the Russians were pretty worthless as a combat power too. Even his opinion of the Brits wasn’t all that high.
Or did you mean the joke I made at the expense of the French with the ‘blind squirrel finds a nut occasionally’? It was meant to be a joke. No, I don’t think the French were worthless as a combat power in WWII…I think they made a lot of mistakes and were so demoralized by the after effects of WWI that they just didn’t have the stomach for another long, brutal war.
-XT