Book Review: 'Battle: The Story of the Bulge'
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| (C) 1999 Bison Books |
Pros: Very readable. Written just 15 years after battle, the account is vivid.
Cons: Missing part of the overall story due to still-existing classification issues.
Fog hung thick in the Schnee Eifel on the morning of December 16. The men of the Tank Artillery Regiment of the 1st SS Panzer Division, "Hitler's Own," were tense with excitement.
"All batteries ready to fire!" came the report.
On a nearby road, tanks of the division were lined up for the attack like a great winding dragon. A commander waved to the man standing in the turret of the next tank.
"Goodbye, Lieutenant, see you in America!"
The lieutenant laughed.
Final checks were made on the range finders. Throats were dry, hands were poised at the lanyards, eyes fixed on watches.
Up and down the line the arms of gunnery officers were raised.
It was 5:30 A.M.
"Fire!"
An eruption of flame and smoke burst all along the Ghost Front. For eighty-five miles mortars coughed, rockets hissed off launching platforms, 88s roared. The ground shook. Snow-covered fir trees quivered, shaking veils of white to the ground. Hundreds of tanks rumbled and clanked, and from the rear came the hollow boom of railroad guns hurling their fourteen-inch shells at targets miles behind the American lines.
-- John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge -- the popular sobriquet for the Ardennes Counteroffensive of December 1944 -- was the largest single engagement in the history of the United States Army, with more than 650,000 GIs directly involved in the month-long series of attacks and counterattacks in the snows and forests of Belgium and Luxembourg. It was also the Army's first real campaign in winter, which until December 1944 had traditionally been a season in which armies normally ceased major combat operations and settled in for a respite in which units could rest and refit until the milder weather of spring brought with it better warfighting conditions. It was also the Army's most dramatic victory ever, considering that it had been made possible by excessive Allied optimism (The Jerries are beaten; the war will be over by Christmas 1944) and what was perhaps the greatest intelligence failure in World War II.
On December 16, 1944, elements of three German armies -- 14 infantry and five panzer divisions in all -- attacked part of the American First Army along an 80-mile front along Germany's border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The sudden and unexpected counteroffensive hit the Americans in an area the Allies thought would be a nice, quiet sector for combat-weary divisions to rest and refit while green divisions fresh from the States could be acclimated to life on the line: the dark and deep forests of the Ardennes. Planned and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, this massive onslaught was launched with one objective in mind: penetrate the American lines, pass through the "impassable" Ardennes Forest, cross the Meuse River, and capture the vital port of Antwerp. At the very least, the Allied supply situation would deteriorate enough to slow the Anglo-American advance to the Reich's industrial heartland by a matter of months and buy time for Hitler and his tottering empire. At the very best, a German victory would split the Grand Alliance in three, trap the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group on the northern sector of the front, and the Fuhrer could attempt to convince the Soviets that further fighting was useless now that the Western Allies had been defeated at the Reich's very doorstep.
For a few snowy, foggy, and bitterly cold days, things seemed to be going Hitler's way. Caught off-guard by the sheer size of the counteroffensive, hampered by bad weather which prevented Allied air power to provide ground support to the tankers and infantrymen along the front, confused and misdirected by a small number of English-speaking German commandos wearing American uniforms, and, at some points along the 80-mile "Ghost Front," isolated, outnumbered, and forced to surrender, GIs fought a seemingly losing battle against hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. But even when some units panicked or were overrun, many American soldiers -- sometimes in dribs and drabs -- stood fast and delayed the enemy, giving Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, and his generals valuable time to plan a riposte and turn what seemed to be a disaster into a strategic opportunity. And sure enough, after a month's of heavy fighting in the awful cold of a European winter, the German counteroffensive was slowed, halted, and gradually pushed back to where it had started.
The late John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge was first published in 1959 by Random House, and was re-issued 40 years later by Bison Books and the University of Nebraska Press. It's also the very first book I ever read about this extremely fascinating battle; I checked it out from the library at Tropical Elementary when I was in sixth grade and read it over a long weekend. To me, Toland's descriptions of Hitler's last desperate gamble to wrest victory from certain defeat and the way the average American soldier recovered from the initial German onslaught were vivid and compelling, just as Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (which was also published in 1959) instilled in me a fascination for the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
Battle, as historian Carlo D'Este points out in this 40th Anniversary edition's new introduction, "was both praised and criticized. Toland aroused the ire of the academic and intellectual community for producing a book rich in detail from interviews but not based entirely on official documents." He was unfairly labeled as unqualified to be an historian "because he had never studied history or earned a doctoral degree."
But Toland had the last laugh; Bill Maudlin, the Stars and Stripes artist who created Willie and Joe during his stint in the Army during the war and would become one of America's greatest editorial cartoonists, was one of the author's most vocal supporters, writing in the St. Louis Dispatch that Battle was "more fascinating than any war novel. The pace is rapid, crackling, like battle itself....it contains the best description of the American soldier I have ever read."
If there's only one missing factor in Toland's otherwise excellent book, it's an in-depth examination of the Allied intelligence failure to detect the Germans' preparations or even intentions. To be fair, however, 21st Century readers should be aware that information about Allied codebreaking techniques and the German Enigma machine was classified as the "Ultra secret" until the mid-1970s. And although the late Charles B. MacDonald's 1984 book A Time for Trumpets expanded readers' knowledge about the Battle of the Bulge (including long chapters about intelligence failures and German security measures to hide their plans and intentions), Battle is still a very readable and informative account of one of World War II's greatest clashes of arms.
"All batteries ready to fire!" came the report.
On a nearby road, tanks of the division were lined up for the attack like a great winding dragon. A commander waved to the man standing in the turret of the next tank.
"Goodbye, Lieutenant, see you in America!"
The lieutenant laughed.
Final checks were made on the range finders. Throats were dry, hands were poised at the lanyards, eyes fixed on watches.
Up and down the line the arms of gunnery officers were raised.
It was 5:30 A.M.
"Fire!"
An eruption of flame and smoke burst all along the Ghost Front. For eighty-five miles mortars coughed, rockets hissed off launching platforms, 88s roared. The ground shook. Snow-covered fir trees quivered, shaking veils of white to the ground. Hundreds of tanks rumbled and clanked, and from the rear came the hollow boom of railroad guns hurling their fourteen-inch shells at targets miles behind the American lines.
-- John Toland, Battle: The Story of the Bulge
The Battle of the Bulge -- the popular sobriquet for the Ardennes Counteroffensive of December 1944 -- was the largest single engagement in the history of the United States Army, with more than 650,000 GIs directly involved in the month-long series of attacks and counterattacks in the snows and forests of Belgium and Luxembourg. It was also the Army's first real campaign in winter, which until December 1944 had traditionally been a season in which armies normally ceased major combat operations and settled in for a respite in which units could rest and refit until the milder weather of spring brought with it better warfighting conditions. It was also the Army's most dramatic victory ever, considering that it had been made possible by excessive Allied optimism (The Jerries are beaten; the war will be over by Christmas 1944) and what was perhaps the greatest intelligence failure in World War II.
On December 16, 1944, elements of three German armies -- 14 infantry and five panzer divisions in all -- attacked part of the American First Army along an 80-mile front along Germany's border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The sudden and unexpected counteroffensive hit the Americans in an area the Allies thought would be a nice, quiet sector for combat-weary divisions to rest and refit while green divisions fresh from the States could be acclimated to life on the line: the dark and deep forests of the Ardennes. Planned and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, this massive onslaught was launched with one objective in mind: penetrate the American lines, pass through the "impassable" Ardennes Forest, cross the Meuse River, and capture the vital port of Antwerp. At the very least, the Allied supply situation would deteriorate enough to slow the Anglo-American advance to the Reich's industrial heartland by a matter of months and buy time for Hitler and his tottering empire. At the very best, a German victory would split the Grand Alliance in three, trap the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group on the northern sector of the front, and the Fuhrer could attempt to convince the Soviets that further fighting was useless now that the Western Allies had been defeated at the Reich's very doorstep.
For a few snowy, foggy, and bitterly cold days, things seemed to be going Hitler's way. Caught off-guard by the sheer size of the counteroffensive, hampered by bad weather which prevented Allied air power to provide ground support to the tankers and infantrymen along the front, confused and misdirected by a small number of English-speaking German commandos wearing American uniforms, and, at some points along the 80-mile "Ghost Front," isolated, outnumbered, and forced to surrender, GIs fought a seemingly losing battle against hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. But even when some units panicked or were overrun, many American soldiers -- sometimes in dribs and drabs -- stood fast and delayed the enemy, giving Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, and his generals valuable time to plan a riposte and turn what seemed to be a disaster into a strategic opportunity. And sure enough, after a month's of heavy fighting in the awful cold of a European winter, the German counteroffensive was slowed, halted, and gradually pushed back to where it had started.
The late John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge was first published in 1959 by Random House, and was re-issued 40 years later by Bison Books and the University of Nebraska Press. It's also the very first book I ever read about this extremely fascinating battle; I checked it out from the library at Tropical Elementary when I was in sixth grade and read it over a long weekend. To me, Toland's descriptions of Hitler's last desperate gamble to wrest victory from certain defeat and the way the average American soldier recovered from the initial German onslaught were vivid and compelling, just as Cornelius Ryan's The Longest Day (which was also published in 1959) instilled in me a fascination for the D-Day landings of June 6, 1944.
Battle, as historian Carlo D'Este points out in this 40th Anniversary edition's new introduction, "was both praised and criticized. Toland aroused the ire of the academic and intellectual community for producing a book rich in detail from interviews but not based entirely on official documents." He was unfairly labeled as unqualified to be an historian "because he had never studied history or earned a doctoral degree."
But Toland had the last laugh; Bill Maudlin, the Stars and Stripes artist who created Willie and Joe during his stint in the Army during the war and would become one of America's greatest editorial cartoonists, was one of the author's most vocal supporters, writing in the St. Louis Dispatch that Battle was "more fascinating than any war novel. The pace is rapid, crackling, like battle itself....it contains the best description of the American soldier I have ever read."
If there's only one missing factor in Toland's otherwise excellent book, it's an in-depth examination of the Allied intelligence failure to detect the Germans' preparations or even intentions. To be fair, however, 21st Century readers should be aware that information about Allied codebreaking techniques and the German Enigma machine was classified as the "Ultra secret" until the mid-1970s. And although the late Charles B. MacDonald's 1984 book A Time for Trumpets expanded readers' knowledge about the Battle of the Bulge (including long chapters about intelligence failures and German security measures to hide their plans and intentions), Battle is still a very readable and informative account of one of World War II's greatest clashes of arms.
Product details
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1959 books
Ardennes Counteroffensive
Battle of the Bulge
Battle: The Story of the Bulge
John Toland
World War II books
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