More than a quarter million Germans, some of them wearing captured American uniforms and speaking English, equipped with the latest armored vehicles, including behemoth King Tiger tanks, launched the last major offensive of World War II against the Western Allies. Eventually known to Americans as the Battle of the Bulge, the sudden German attacks against unprepared American troops already looking forward to a Christmas respite met with initial success and threatened to delay the Allied drive into Germany indefinitely.
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| German troops advanced past a knocked out U.S. halftrack. |
The German attack drove a salient into the Allied lines of almost 70 miles with a width of about 50 miles such that on a map it looked like a "bulge" had appeared in the Allied lines. The difficulty for the Germans was that even as they attacked and drove deeper into the Ardennes the more they exposed their own flanks to Allied counterattacks.
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| U.S. troops sit atop a destroyed German Panther tank. |
Realizing that he could no longer maintain an active defense on two fronts and understanding that the Soviet Army was likely to achieve a strategic breakthrough that would known Nazi Germany completely out of the war, Hitler hoped that his panzertruppen would be able to drive a wedge between the Americans and the British and cause enough casualties that they would rethink their intentions of destroying the Nazi regime.
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| Generals Bradley, Eisenhower and Patton confer. |
Historians have long debated whether the Germans had enough men an materiel to realistically have any hope of achieving even a limited version of Hitler's goals, but, in the end, it didn't matter as the Allies were able to contain the German onslaught and, eventually recapture their own positions. The drive into Germany began in earnest early in 1945.
[December 16, 1944]
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