I wonder why the german high command went along with the plan? Surely they knew that they would not capture any channel ports. It was clearly suicide, but tye pressed ahead with it…not only did they 9the germans0 exhaust themselves, they also used up their precious reserve of tanks. Also, i saw some film footage of the final stages of the battle-the germans were fleshing out thier divisions with boys! I wonder how many of these kids just gave up when confronted by tanks?
But we are talking about a period quite a bit after the defeat of the French early in the war. Though Hitler may have carried his attitude towards them over to this point, I’d say the situation had changed with regards to the French.
Yeah, OK. It’s a joke I find very annoying for some reason, although I’m not French.
I don’t find it particularly annoying, even though it was the upper echelon of the military that was the failure versus the average soldier.
But it’s a lot more accurate than the nearly as prevalent assessment of the effectiveness of the Polish Army. They stood up to their enemies for longer, with less equipment, being surrounded on all sides, and without foreign aid (even from the French.)
So compared to the Poles, the French were ineffective. It’s just not the average French soldier’s fault.
What else would they do? Telling Hitler you weren’t going to follow his orders in late 1944 was not a viable option if you wished to remain healthy and free :dubious:
Actually, they would probably have obeyed orders even without the possible adverse consequences. The German officer corps has a long tradition of doing their professional best to carry out orders - however ill judged. Also they had sworn a personal oath of loyalty to the Fuehrer that many of them took very seriously.
A lot of the high command thought it was a bad idea to initially invade France the way they did…and Hitler had over road them. Of course, a lot of them thought the plan for invading Russia was ill-conceived as well so…
Too be sure. Its nearly as annoying as when someone takes one line out of your post that is just an aside and harps on it…with out commenting on all the rest of your post. 
Humor is one of those things that varies between people. And granted the French thing has been done to death…and mostly by people who haven’t a clue about the actual historical events but are simply parroting anti-French bullshit about surrender monkeys (who eat cheese) and such.
Don’t feel bad however…you should have seen how angry this religious guy got when I told the joke about the nun, the dwarf and the donkey. The sparks REALLY flew that day…
-XT
The Battle of the Bulge was a last throw of the dice, mistakes where made on both sides, 20 - 20 and all that.
The OP does make a good point, in that it was a serious miscalculation and misreading of the tactical situation by Eisenhower, Bradley, etc. Although the Battle of the Bulge turned out pretty well for the Allies for all of the reasons outlined above, they were caught badly off-guard by the German offensive in the Ardennes. You should always assume your enemy - particularly one as fanatic as the Nazis, with their backs to the wall - will try to strike you hard. But once the shit hit the fan, Eisenhower and his top commanders made the best of the situation, pounded the hell out of the Germans and pressed on to victory. No one was in any mood to court-martial Ike in 1944-45.
Obligatory anti-French military joke… Why are French streets lined with trees? So German troops can march in the shade.
They did try to have it changed for more realistic solutions (shorter envelopments of either the north or south shoulder of the Bulge). But Adolf vetoed any changes to the plan.
War is a game with incomplete information - especially WWII. Like poker, sometimes you can make a good decision and lose. That doesn’t mean someone is to ‘blame’. Perhaps the allied generals thought there was an 80% chance the troops would be needed elsewhere, and given the information they had this was a good decision. They just came up on the short end of the odds this time. The Germans took a longshot and lost. The allies had no real reason to suspect it.
The measure of the generals in this situation is how they react to the new information. Now that they know what’s going down, how do they react?
An example of a real screwup would be General Lucas at Anzio. Landed behind German lines, his men were supposed to spearhead behind the German lines and cut off the Germans on the front. General Lucas was overly cautios when he landed, losing the element of surprise on the Germans, who now had time to shore up the defenzes and essentially bottleneck Lucas’s men. That was bad judgement.
Just a small point: how many men were killed or wounded on each side isn’t really a relevant measure of who won or lost that particular fracas. You understand that “Offensive” in this context means a bunch of guys get out of their trenches and run across open ground while the defenders hose them with machine gun and artillery fire, right?
For the attacking side to suffer about the same number of casualties as the defenders in an attack is probably not that bad of a performance - The Red Army lost about the same number of people at Stalingrad as the Germans did, probably a little more, but it was still an overwhelming Soviet victory by any measure.
An excellent example of superb reaction was that of Patton. I bow to no one in my distaste for Patton but he was a first rate operational thinker.
When the news of the German attack came Patton was sure it was just a local, spoiler attack to draw allied troops away from places where advances were being made. All the same, he and his staff sat down and examined the possibilities one of which was a pullback of some of his armor to attack the bulge from the south.
At the general confereance at Eisenhower’s headquarters all were sure that this was the real thing and that Patton should, in fact, pull back a substantial force to shore up the south. All Patton had to do was telephone his people and say “OK, we’re going with Plan C, or whatever” and the wheels were in motion.
There were few delusions about the likely success of the plan. Rundstedt said of the plan “Antwerp! If we reach the Meuse we should go down on our knees and thank God!” and “It was obvious to me that the available forces were far too small - in fact no soldier really believed that the aim of reaching Antwerp was really practicable. But I knew by now that it was useless to protest to Hitler about the possibility of anything.”
Sepp Dietrich, commander of the Sixth Panzer Army said “All Hitler wants me to do is cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go on and take Antwerp! And all this in the worst time of the year through the Ardennes where the snow is waist deep and there isn’t room to deploy four tanks abreast let alone armored divisions! Where it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four and with reformed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men - and at Christmas!”
Combined arms attack in force is what you do with an armored reserve*. Everything the German high command had learned told them this was the case. Using it in any other way is just foreign to doctrine. The fact that every prior combined arms counterattack on the post D-day western allies was an utter catastrophe is hardly reason enough to reconsider. If the troops try really really hard and if they really care about the fatherland and the fuerher then the German army will prevail.
*If you are the WWII German Army