7 Mistakes That Cost Germany the Battle of the Bulge

Go and look at a photo of King Tiger 213 in La Gleize. One of the most powerful tanks Germany ever built, still parked by the road where its crew walked away from it on Christmas Eve 1944. Nobody beat it in a duel. Nobody had to. It ran out of gas. That tank is the whole Battle of the Bulge in one picture, and most of the films about the Ardennes never get round to explaining why it is sitting there. So nobody writes in about it, here is where I stand. The German soldiers in that forest were not fools and they were not weak. They had real surprise, local superiority, and in places they hit the Americans very hard. Two regiments of the 106th were cut off on the Schnee Eifel and around seven thousand men surrendered. That happened. What I am talking about is the plan above them, and the seven bets Hitler made with it, each one leaning on the one before. The first was Antwerp, more than a hundred miles away, in winter, with no fuel reserve behind the tanks. Rundstedt, Model and Manteuffel all argued for a smaller hook around Aachen. Hitler said no. Sepp Dietrich later complained he had been told to cross a river and take Brussels and Antwerp with too few men and too little time. That sounds like hindsight, but the arithmetic was on the table before the first shell fell. After that it was roads, gasoline, small American units that were supposed to collapse and did not, a crossroads town called Bastogne, a sky that was supposed to stay grey, and finally a refusal to stop when the thing had already failed. What we go through: Antwerp, the Small Solution, and why the generals lost the argument Eighteen men at Lanzerath holding up Kampfgruppe Peiper for a day Captured gas at Büllingen, and the Americans who burned their own fuel at Stavelot rather than let Peiper have it Engineers blowing bridges at Trois-Ponts and Habiemont in front of his lead tanks Why those charges never killed a tank, and still killed the offensive Krinkelt, Rocherath and Elsenborn Ridge, where the 12th SS ran into a wall St. Vith, the 7th Armored driving sixty miles down clogged roads, and four extra days Bastogne, seven roads meeting in one town, and the 101st arriving in open trucks without a parachute The surrender note, McAuliffe's one word reply, and Patton turning Third Army ninety degrees December 23, the sky clears, and every column on those narrow roads becomes a target 2nd Panzer stuck at Foy-Notre-Dame, four miles from the Meuse, out of gas Celles, the 4th Armored reaching Bastogne, and Peiper walking eight hundred men out of La Gleize on foot Operation Bodenplatte, German fighters shot down by German flak, and three hundred aircraft Germany could not replace January 12 on the Vistula, and what the Ardennes cost Germany in the East Said plainly on the numbers: American casualties are usually put somewhere between seventy-five and ninety thousand. German losses run from about sixty-three thousand to over a hundred thousand depending on who is counting. Bodenplatte cost the Allies two to three hundred planes and cost Germany around three hundred aircraft and well over two hundred pilots. The Allies replaced the planes in weeks. Germany never replaced the pilots. There is no mystery in any of this. An army that has to win in hours cannot afford to lose a day at a tree line. Germany had to reach American fuel before the Americans could move it or burn it, and the Americans turned out to be very good at both. Rundstedt said afterwards he would have been grateful just to reach the Meuse. That was not modesty. It was a judgment about what his army could still do. Tell me in the comments where you are watching from and whether anyone in your family was in the Ardennes that winter. And tell me this: which of the seven do you think actually decided it? Chapters Searchlights in the Ardennes Bet One: Antwerp Bet Two: The Roads and Lanzerath Bet Three: The Fuel Bet Four: Americans Who Didn't Collapse Bet Five: Bastogne Bet Six: The Sky Clears The Tip of the Bulge Bet Seven: Refusing to Stop King Tiger 213 #BattleOfTheBulge #WW2 #Ardennes #Bastogne #Peiper #KingTiger #101stAirborne #Patton #MilitaryHistory #WorldWar2 #Wehrmacht #SSPanzer #Hitler #WW2History #IvansWarArchive