[NKP_Vet]

My uncle Willie was with the 101st Airborne at the Battle of the Bulge. A few months earlier it was Normandy. He did't really talk about it much except he did tell me D-Day was nothing compared to the Battle of the Bulge. He said he was wounded but didn't get a Purple Heart. I asked him why and he said he was shot in the ass and was too embarrassed to tell anybody. Said the bullet just grazed him and he didn't deserve a Purple Heart. I was a pall bearer at his funeral a few years ago. I think of Uncle Willie any time I read about the battle.

[Farmer Dean]

The German army in 1944 was still a formidable enemy.Made ISIS look like a bunch of schoolgirls.

[Mouton]

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.

[Chgogal]

"I'll be home for Christmas. You can plan on me." Whenever I hear that Christmas song I think of that Battle. Your Uncle Willie was a great man. Merry Christmas to you and Thank You for your and your family's service.

[Mercat]

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.

[deadrock]

I suffer a battle with the bulge every Christmas.

[WhiskeyX]

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.