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Being that I had a weight loss book published by Random House in 2014, I should note that this Battle of the Bulge story has nothing to do with adiposity. It’s the World War II battle, when Germany launched a massive counteroffensive against Western Allies who thought the fucking Nazis were ready to give up.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: December 16, 1944--
It was one of those battles that convinced America it’d single-handedly won World War II, even though the Soviet Union accounted for 75% of German corpses. But ‘murica did kick some ass in this battle. Winston Churchill called it “the greatest American battle of the war.”
We’ll be home by Christmas, many Allied soldiers were thinking in the fall of 1944, but Christmas sucked that year. Germany knew it was done for, what with the USSR pushing steadily from the east, Italy switching sides, and Western Allies coming in from that direction. In hindsight, what with how shitty life under the Soviet Union was, it might have been a better idea to throw everything at holding back the commies and actually welcoming the West into Germany. But Hitler wasn’t exactly logical. Continues below …
If you are interested in that other battle of the bulge, my entire weight loss book is available to paying subscribers (outside Canada, cuz contract restrictions—Canadians can just buy it from Amazon or wherever) and you can check out the Introduction for free here.
And yet there was some logic to it, had it worked. The purpose of the counteroffensive was to split the Allied lines and reclaim the strategically critical Port of Antwerp. Then they’d encircle and destroy the divided Allied forces one by one. The Germans knew they couldn’t win the war, but such a victory could allow them to force a negotiated peace treaty that didn’t involve unconditional surrender.
The Battle of the Bulge began on December 16, 1944, when over 400,000 men and a metric shit-ton of heavy weaponry came charging through the Ardennes Forest (which covers parts of Belgium, Luxembourg, France, and Germany) toward 228,000 unprepared and battle fatigued mostly American soldiers. To add insult to horrifying death, it was also cold as fuck that year.
The American supply lines were stretched and depleted, the men exhausted from weeks of continuous fighting. I know Band of Brothers is awesome, but the series perpetuates the myth that Bastogne was the turning point. The Battle of the Bulge lasted six brutal weeks, and while Bastogne was important, it was actually Elsenborn Ridge at the northernmost part of the German attack where they were stopped cold. In the cold. The outnumbered American forces at Elsenborn faced off against the best-equipped elite forces in the German Army—selected by Hitler himself—and halted their advance.
And although the Americans were outnumbered at Elsenborn and elsenwhere—that’s not a typo, just a pathetic attempt at humor—that inequality didn’t last, it shifted in their favor. Germany had been seriously depopulated, and was running out of warm bodies, whereas the Americans kept sending more and more men and supplies into the fight. By the time it was over on January 25, 1945, the Americans had almost twice as many men and ten times the tanks as Germany in the battle. It was the last German offensive on the Western Front. After that, it was all retreat.
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