7 Things German Soldiers Found Strange About the 101st Airborne

December 22, 1944. Four Germans walk across a frozen field outside Bastogne under a white flag, carrying a typed note. Surrender the town, or an artillery corps will wipe it off the map. The answer comes back as one word. Nuts. And the officers holding it can't even tell if it means yes or no. That word was only the first thing about the 101st Airborne that the German command couldn't file into any category that made sense. On paper the Germans had it right. A light division, cut off in a pocket about six miles across, short on ammunition, short on medical supplies, freezing without proper winter clothing. The man in charge wasn't even an infantry officer. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe was an artilleryman, running the division because Maxwell Taylor was back in the States at a conference when the offensive broke. By every rule of encirclement, these men should have been asking for honorable terms. They weren't. And the German side was arguing with itself. Von Luettwitz had sent the ultimatum on his own, and his superior, Hasso von Manteuffel, was furious when he found out. Then there were the men in the foxholes. Paratroopers trained to scatter on landing, lose contact with headquarters and keep fighting anyway in small groups. A German doctrine built on breaking the enemy's chain of command ran into a defense that had no single nerve center to cut. What we go through: The word "Nuts," Colonel Joseph Harper, and what he told the German emissaries it really meant Why McAuliffe's first reaction became the official reply The logic of a siege, and why the men inside Bastogne refused to follow it The surrender offer that started a fight inside the German command "Devils in baggy pants," and what that Anzio diary really described Why scattered paratroopers who wouldn't wait for orders were so hard to break December 23, when the skies cleared and the C-47s came over the perimeter P-47 Thunderbolts on the German columns, and the hunters becoming the hunted The artillery threat that turned out to be largely a bluff German bombers over the town at night, and why this was no clean rescue Cobra King, the Fourth Armored Division, and Patton's pivot north through the Ardennes The tank destroyers, armor and artillery fighting beside the 101st Said plainly: the 101st did not hold Bastogne alone. The "devils in baggy pants" line came from a different airborne unit in Italy, not from Bastogne. And the drops that saved the town came with real danger, for the aircrews flying low and for the men under German bombs at night. The Germans could cut every road into Bastogne. They couldn't cut the sky. What they were really up against was an army that could be surrounded and still not be cut off, while their own timetable quietly ran out. Tell me in the comments if anyone in your family served in the Ardennes that winter. And tell me this: if you'd been the German officer holding that slip of paper, what would you have thought "Nuts" meant? #Bastogne #BattleOfTheBulge #101stAirborne #WW2 #WWII #WW2History #Nuts #McAuliffe #Patton #Paratroopers #Ardennes #MilitaryHistory #WorldWar2 #CobraKing #History