Posted on 12/23/2014 7:00:50 AM PST by NKP_Vet
In 1944, seventy years ago, at Christmas the American and German armies were fighting it out in the Battle of the Bulge, the last German offensive of the War.
(Excerpt) Read more at the-american-catholic.com ...
The German army in 1944 was still a formidable enemy.Made ISIS look like a bunch of schoolgirls.
My great uncle was awarded a silver star for his heroics at that battle. Never spoke about it and I did not know about it till reading his obit.
I too think of him and all those who fought there at this time of the year.
My uncle George was there. At the same time his little brother Isaac Albert was in a cushy desk job in Paris. George ended up a severe chronic alcoholic (probably with mental health issues including PSTD) and Uncle Al became a publisher of a well known so I won’t mention it newspaper on the west coast. My dad drove a bus and since they wouldn’t let him go into officer training corps and he was exempt from the draft, he stayed stateside with his wife and baby son.
I suffer a battle with the bulge every Christmas.
And the US army, even tougher.
Very few of us today could do what they did. But it needed to be done.
My Father in Law, got lost behind the lines for several days. The military sent his mother a notification that he was missing in action. He never talked about what he did or where he hid out. The only remarks he made in reference to this battle was to the cold. Sleeping in foxholes at -30 degrees below zero. He was in an artillery unit. He survived this and fought his way through to the end of the war. He passed at 88 years of age, five kids, 19 grandchildren, and nine great grandchildren. These were the men who saved the world for us. We will never see their likes, ever again. God help us.
Most people in this country don’t understand what it means to have to fight a determined and well equipped enemy.The German army got overwhelmed by numbers and lack of air support.
And fighting a war on two fronts, and the classic failure of attacking Russia during winter, and attrition.
Uncle Willie told me that they engaged the enemy almost every day after landing at Normandy and heading in-country. He said German soldiers were hid out in the thick bushes and you just couldn’t see them till they were right on you.
Absolutely!
And the strategy was brilliant — rotating the artillery and defenses in response to attacks. Made the defenses look bigger than they were.
And even the “Nuts” response bought time for Patton.
He too, was cut off - actually, his entire unit was. He told me that they were pretty mad, because they thought we'd lost the war. "They didn't come all the way to Europe to lose.", or somesuch, was the general opinion.
I've got a couple of pictures from then that made it back.... One is of his encampment - bunch of pup tents more-or-less covered in snow. Looked cold. The other is one of him and his XO, standing in waist-deep snow. Both of them are grinning like fools, though I'm not sure why. :-)
Good post - thanks
One of the family members was a company commander of an infantry company positioned on the frontline. The night before the German offensive the Germans used loudspeakers to broadcast loud demands to surrender. The Germans began by calling on our family member, the company commander, to surrender himself and his company command or face annihilation. Then the Germans called on each on of his platoon commanders by name to surrender their platoons. Then the Germans called upon each of the platoon sergeants by name to surrender. by the time they were getting to the last of the platoon sergeants the German attack began with the German assault on their frontline positions. Our family member, the company commander, lost field telephone contact with his platoon leaders in the first sixty seconds of the German attack. The German tanks rolled right through and over their positions almost as if they weren’t there. Before the German infantry could follow up the tank assault and capture the Americans left standing after the attack by the tanks, the company commander and those few men left with him ran for it in the direction of the German tanks in an effort to try and keep up with them and avoid the German infantry. Eventually he and most of his small party of a few men exfiltrated back into the American lines, where they rejoined the fight. I still have some of the war trophys he took off the German POWs.
Another family member was a truck driver with an U.S. Army transportation company. His first news of the German attack was when his truck convoy was ambushed by a German SS tank force, which shot up the lead and tail end vehicles of the convoy to trap the remaining vehicles of the convoy. Taken captive by the SS, they were stripped of some of the uniforms which kept them warmer in the freezing cold weather and were marched off into captivity.
Although he and his buddy were captured on the first day of the attack in December 1944, they didn’t reach a POW camp until March 1945. During that time they endured a cold Hell that left him traumatized the rest of his life. The Germans marched them towards the rear with little to no food. Their shelter was open fields in the snow and the freezing winds, road ditches, and ravines where the guards could keep them penned up. As these conditions continued for week after week, the men were dying of frostbite, exposure to the elements, starvation, dehydration, diarrhea, dysentery, and worse. The worst of the tortures they faced were the decisions they had to make about the distribution of what little of the miserable food they had. There was nowhere near enough food to go around for all of the American POWs on this death march. When one of their friends or comrades fell too ill, they had to make the agonizing choice between giving the few morsels of food to a man who was about to die and begging for food or giving the morsels of food to a man who had some chance of living.
These terrible choices decisions haunted him the rest of his life. Whenever the family served a feast on Thanksgiving or Christmas, he would choke on his words as he gave the blessing for the food with tears streaming down his face. The memories of the starvation and hardships were relived each season as he paid tribute to his fallen friends and comrades. At the end of the war when they were being evacuated from their POW camp in Germany, he was the last man out of the gates, and he turned back to the front gate, stole the padlock off of the gate, and brought it home as his last act of defiance.
Sadly, your observation is correct.
No doubt!
And a Merry Christmas to you & yours...
My God! What our guys went through. To think - we lost more guys at the “Bulge” - in one month - then we’ve lost in Irag & Afghanistan in the last 10 years.
This is not to diminish any way the loss of our guys in these more recent campaigns, but the sheer scale and scope of our losses in WW1, WW2, Korea & VietNam in simply mind boggling.
We owe those generations big time...
sheesh - typos!
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