World War II Day by Day

Bastogne, Belgium • January 25, 1945

On this date in 1945, in the thickly forested Belgian Ardennes, the Battle of the Bulge (referring to the German-induced bulge in Allied lines) effec­tively ended. The largest, most costly land battle fought by Ameri­can sol­diers in World War II marked in many ways the U.S. Army’s finest per­for­mance. Besides involving four Brit­ish divi­sions, the nearly 6‑week‑long battle in­volved 26 U.S. divi­sions of 600,000 men. Ranged against the Allies were just over 400,000 Ger­mans in 38 divi­sions, which collectively launched a surprise three-prong attack on Decem­ber 16, 1944.

Adolf Hitler’s objective for “Opera­tion Watch on the Rhine” was to re­take, in the opening days of this most des­per­ate gamble on Germany’s Western Front, the strate­gically important Bel­gian supply port of Ant­werp, with its access to the North Sea and the English Channel. Hitler hoped that Ant­werp’s capture would drive a wedge between British-Cana­dian and U.S. forces, making one or both Allied part­ners more likely to nego­ti­ate a settle­ment that would then allow him to con­cen­trate his dwindling military resources against Soviet forces in the east. It was a long shot to be sure, but Hitler convinced his generals it was worth the risk.

By Decem­ber 22 the German Wehr­macht (armed forces) had in­flicted enor­mous com­bat losses on the Amer­i­cans fighting in Belgium: 8,000 out of 22,000 men at the little border town of St. Vith alone. At Bas­togne, a major road junc­tion, dogged defen­ders of the vet­eran 28th Infantry, 10th Ar­mored, and 101st “Screaming Eagles” Air­borne Divi­sions held out until Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army’s 4th Ar­mored Divi­sion relieved them on Decem­ber 26. By then, 10 days after the Ardennes Cam­paign had begun, Hitler’s gen­erals, fore­most among them Gen. Hasso von Man­teuffel, com­mander of the 5th Panzer Army that had been delayed at St. Vith (5 days) and Bastogne, reluc­tantly con­cluded that Ant­werp could no longer be reached: the ini­tial rapid suc­cesses of the German drive through Eastern Belgium and Luxembourg had simply hit too many speed bumps and road­blocks en route to the coast and hence was days behind schedule.

The last German assault against Bastogne stalled in early January 1945 owing to an over­whelming Allied presence. Then the Allies counter­attacked. When finally elim­i­nated from the Ar­dennes bulge on Janu­ary 28, the Germans had lost upwards of 100,000 men, including 11,000 dead, a good per­cent­age of them killed by U.S. sol­diers revenging them­selves on the enemy for an unfor­givable atro­city, the mas­sacre of 84 of their own near Malmedy just west of the Bel­gian border. Lost to Hitler, too, were some 600 irreplace­able tanks and assault guns and about 1,000 planes. Amer­ican units lost perhaps 730 tanks and tank destroyers while suffering 75,842 casu­al­ties, including 8,407 killed, 46,170 wounded, and nearly 21,000 taken cap­tive. The Ardennes Cam­paign was the bloodiest battle fought by Amer­i­cans in World War II. British losses numbered 1,408, including 200 dead.

The Ardennes Campaign was Hitler’s last major offen­sive on any front. It failed to either shift the battle lines from the origi­nal starting point or delay Hitler’s inevi­table doom. On Decem­ber 26 at his forward head­quarters, Alder­horst in Cen­tral Hessen, a dis­appointed, self-pitying Hitler told Col. Nicolaus von Below, his Luft­waffe adjutant who for years had worked in the Fuehrer’s imme­diate sur­roundings, that he knew the war was lost; he blamed it partly on “enemy superiority” and partly on the Luftwaffe and “the traitors” in the Germany Army. “My best course now,” he told Below, “is to put a bullet in my head.” (Quoted in Beevor, Ardennes 1944, p. 299.) He waited until April 30, 1945, to do exactly that.

Hitler’s Costly Folly: Scenes From the Ardennes Campaign (Battle of the Bulge), December 16, 1944, to January 25, 1945

Left: A German infantry regiment in the Ardennes Forest, Decem­ber 1944. The German Ardennes break­through caught the Allies off balance. Hitler had selected the loca­tion of his western counter­offensive for several reasons: the terrain to the east of the Ardennes and north­west of Cologne was heavily wooded and offered cover against Allied air obser­vation and attack during the build­up of German troops and supplies; the rugged Ardennes wedge itself required relatively few German divi­sions; and a speedy attack to regain the ini­tia­tive in this partic­ular area would erase the Allied ground threat to Germany’s industrialized Ruhr centered around Duesseldorf.

Right: Troops of the 1st SS Panzer Division “Leib­standarte Adolf Hitler” sprint past aban­doned and wrecked Amer­i­can equip­ment near Poteau, Bel­gium, in a photo staged for the photo­grapher only hours after the Battle of the Bulge began. The Western Allies’ string of dazzling suc­cesses in 1944, news reports of the bloody defeats that the Soviet armies were admin­is­tering to the Germans on the Eastern Front, and the belief that the Wehr­macht was col­lapsing and the Third Reich was tottering on its knees led Allied war planners to pay scant atten­tion to the quiet Ardennes sector, nick­named the “ghost front” pre­cisely for its quiet and undis­turbed loca­tion. The Amer­i­cans espe­cially paid dearly for this mind­set, as well as for ignoring their own field intel­li­gence and aerial recon­nais­sance reports of the Ardennes counteroffensive preparations.

Left: Hands raised, as many as 44 soldiers of the 3rd Battalion, U.S. 119th Infantry Divi­sion were taken pri­soner in Stou­mont, Eastern Belgium, on Decem­ber 19, 1944, by men of the 1st SS Panzer Division, of which Kampf­gruppe (battle group) Peiper was a part. Led by 29‑year‑old SS‑Ober­sturm­bann­fuehrer (Lt. Col.) Joachim (Jochen) Peiper, the 5,000 men in this mech­a­nized Kampf­gruppe were Waffen‑SS, members of the “weapons” wing of the SS (short for the Nazi Party’s Schutz­staffel), most of whom had seen grim duty on the Eastern Front. With a despi­cable reputa­tion for ruth­less­ness and brutality, the men took pride in their unit’s nickname, the “Blow­torch Battalion,” because of its penchant for setting fire to every building it could and burning to death every man, woman, and child inside.

Right: Several days earlier, on December 17, 1944, Kampf­gruppe Peiper reached an Amer­ican fuel dump in Buel­lingen, Belgium, where 200 U.S. soldiers from the 2nd Infan­try Divi­sion were taken prisoner and forced to refuel Peiper’s tanks, half-tracks, and other vehicles. This Ger­man photo­graph may show some of the men from the 2nd Infan­try Divi­sion being hustled back to German lines, where they were locked in POW cages. Nine­teen of their comrades in the small Bel­gian vil­lage of Hons­feld (now part of Buel­lingen) were literally caught napping. From their sleeping quarters they were hustled out­side in their boxer shorts and shot dead, with the exception of one GI who was thrown under the treads of a tank.

Left: Snowy scene of the massacre where a convoy of 84 lightly armed Ameri­can sol­diers of Battery B of the 285th Field Artil­lery Obser­va­tion Bat­talion were mur­dered on the after­noon of Decem­ber 17, 1944, after having sur­rendered to Kampf­gruppe Peiper at a five-way cross­roads vil­lage called Baugnez. The village was 2½ miles south of the Bel­gian town of Malmedy. At least twenty of the victims suffered fatal gun­shot wounds to the head, inflicted at very close range. More than 30 men lived to tell about the Malmedy Mas­sacre, and their reports were quickly forwarded to SHAEF, Gen. Dwight D. Eisen­hower’s supreme Allied head­quarters. “We had one unwritten rule from Patton in the Battle of the Bulge,” 18-year-old Wilbert “Bill” Gates recalled. “If the SS men tried to sur­render, we’d tell them to keep fighting because we were going to kill them.” Several weeks after the Malmedy Mas­sacre, a U.S. infan­try bat­talion of the 11th Armored Divi­sion machine-gunned 60 German pri­soners to death in the small village of Chenogne, Bel­gium, 5 miles from Bastogne, after receiving an order to “take no pri­soners.” By that time the phrase had become the per­sonal mantra of many U.S. fighting men. British units who lost mem­bers to Wehr­macht warriors exacted their revenge, too. Twenty-five miles to the north­west of Bastogne, at Forrières, two armored cars opened fire on sur­ren­dering Germans who had emerged, battle-worn, from a wooded area with their hands on their head, mowing everyone down.

Right: Bodies of Belgian men, women, and children murdered by members of the German military during the Ardennes Cam­paign (location not given). In Stave­lot and vicinity alone, Kampf­gruppe Peiper mur­dered about one hun­dred Bel­gian civil­ians. At 12 separate loca­tions along Kampf­gruppe Peiper’s line of march, 450 or more unarmed Belgian civil­ians and Amer­i­can POWs were murdered. After the war Peiper, Gen. Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, com­mander of the 6th Panzer Army in which Kampf­gruppe Peiper served, and 72 other SS officers and men from Peiper’s com­mand were put on trial by the U.S. mili­tary at Dachau, Germany, in May 1946. With one excep­tion all 74 defen­dants were found guilty. Forty-three were sen­tenced to hang, including Peiper; 22 received life sen­tences; and 8 given lengthy prison terms. All death sen­tences were even­tually com­muted. The last member of Kampf­grupper Peiper to leave prison was Peiper himself in December 1956. Under a death threat, Peiper’s charred body was found on Bastille Day (July 14) in 1976 in his home in Traves, Eastern France, destroyed in a fire presumably set by veterans of the French Resistance.

History Channel’s Military Heroes: Battle of the Bulge, The Lost Evidence