Let's Get It Right When We Recall Battle of the Bulge

[Boats]

Let's Get It Right When We Recall Battle of the Bulge
By: Mark Schulte - News-Max News 01-10-23
Re: https://www.newsmax.com/markschulte/...10/id/1108143/

Map link: https://www.newsmax.com/CMSPages/Get...axsidesize=600
Map of the Battle of the Bulge (U.S. Army)

President Joe Biden recently announced the belated dispatch to Ukraine of 31 M1 Abrams tanks, which are named for Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams, whose tank battalion broke the German Army’s encirclement of Bastogne during the titanic Battle of the Bulge.

The 101st Airborne Division and other American forces, including large components of the 9th and 10th Armored divisions, were trapped between Dec. 23 and Dec. 26, 1944 in this key crossroads Belgian town.

A quarter-century later, Abrams ably commanded American forces in Vietnam, and the four-star general then served as Army Chief of Staff between 1972 and 1974, until his death from cancer at 59 years of age.

More than 600,000 American GIs and pilots successfully fought to contain and then defeat Hitler’s Ardennes Offensive, between Dec. 16, 1944 and Jan. 25, 1945. The monumental battle occurred in a 1,500-square mile, triangular region of southeastern Belgium and the adjacent northern half of tiny Luxembourg (about the size of Cook County in Illinois).

But America suffered an abominable 19,000 killed, 47,000 wounded, and 15,000 captured, according to Williamson Murray’s and Alan Millett’s superb “A War To Be Won: Fighting the Second World War.”

In an inspiring speech to Congress on Dec. 22, 2022, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy compared Ukrainian soldiers, who have successfully resisted and partly expelled Vladimir Putin’s tyrannical Russian invaders, to the “brave American soldiers,” who during the Battle of the Bulge “held their lines and fought back Hitler’s forces during the Christmas of 1944.”

During the battle’s first two weeks, U.S. Generals Dwight Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, George Patton, Courtney Hodges and William Simpson rapidly redeployed to the Ardennes battlefield, beginning on the evening of Dec. 16, 1944, nine infantry divisions, seven armored divisions, and two airborne divisions.

On the first day of the German offensive, Americans had 1,000 tanks, assault guns and tank destroyers in the battle. By Jan. 2, 1945, there were 6,400 of these highly-mobile, lethal armored vehicles.

In contrast to Zelenskyy’s praise of American GIs’ heroism during a pivotal World War II battle, President Joe Biden, during a visit to Delaware’s National Guard/Reserve headquarters on Dec. 16, 2022, claimed that, after his election as vice president in Nov. 2008, his father pressed him to obtain a Purple Heart for his uncle Frank Biden, who allegedly fought and was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge.

As Joe Biden Sr. died in 2002 and his uncle in 1999, the octogenarian president obviously doesn’t know in which century he is living.

More egregiously, since a Purple Heart is awarded to soldiers killed or wounded in battle, 66,000 American GIs who fought this battle were eligible for the medal. For President Biden to ignore their awesome heroism and sacrifices, in a planned event on the 78th anniversary of battle’s opening salvos, to focus solely on his uncle’s real or fabricated participation, epitomizes his unsurpassed callousness and narcissism.

Of the 81,000 American casualties in the Battle of the Bulge, 41,000 incurred in Dec. 1944, and 40,000 in Jan. 1945, according to an excellent history by Lt. Col. Roger Cirillo (Ret.), published online in 2019 by the U.S. Army Center of Military History.

Regarding German Army’s Ardennes Offensive, Lt. Col. Oliver North who writes about American military history claimed, in an article on Dec. 23, 2022 on David Horowitz’s Frontpage Magazine website, that “by New Year’s Day 1945, the Nazi Army had been pushed back behind its national border.”

In fact, it would not be until mid-Feb. 1945 when American troops drove all enemy soldiers across the German border and behind the Western Wall, from where they had launched their counterattack in mid-December 1944.

I have appended eleven, interactive, daily maps of the Battle of the Bulge, between Dec. 16, 1944 and Jan. 18, 1945, which were created by the Library of Congress from the original situation maps of the U.S. Army.

The Jan. 1, 1945 map starkly demonstrates that the German “Bulge” in the American lines was still near its maximum size. This map also shows that the Sixth Armored, the division my late father fought with, had just arrived in Bastogne, and it immediately spearheaded the offensive that battered six German divisions.

But the human cost for the Sixth AD’s 10,500 soldiers, during that freezing and snowy January 1945, was an extraordinary 305 men killed, 1,237 wounded, and hundreds of cases of combat exhaustion, frostbite and trench foot.

The Fourth Armored, Lt. Col. Creighton Abrams’ division, and Sixth Armored Division, were the twin engines of Gen. George Patton’s mighty Third Army, beginning with the Allied breakout from the Normandy beachhead during the last week of July 1944. Starting on Dec. 21, 1944, they and six other divisions had rushed north, in some cases from more than 100 miles away, to obliterate the southern flank of the German “Bulge.”

The next time that President Biden or North visits Belgium, France or Germany, he might want to pay respects to the 5,070 American heroes, including Gen. Patton, who rest eternally in peace in the American Military Cemetery in Luxembourg City. Many were killed during the Battle of the Bulge.

About this writer: Mark Schulte is a retired New York City schoolteacher and mathematician who has written extensively about science and the history of science.
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Personal note: I can't relate to that conflict but I've seen and read plenty
on it. It took plenty of lives like most major engagements wars did in
those days.
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