Latest / Generals of WWII: The Art of Command / Battle of the Bulge: Germany's last gamble (with Bill Nance) | Ep 13

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Battle of the Bulge: Germany's last gamble (with Bill Nance) | Ep 13 · Generals of WWII: The Art of Command

• 0:06
  Welcome to generals of World War 2, the art of command.
• 0:10
  We are back with the great Bill Nance joining us once again.
• 0:13
  Bill was on our very first episode on General Bradley, and
• 0:16
  we're back today. We're going to have our very
• 0:18
  first episode on a battle. We're going to talk about the
• 0:20
  Battle of the Bulge, one of the biggest battles in the European
• 0:24
  theatre. But before we get to that, Bill
• 0:26
  has a disclaimer for us. Right.
• 0:28
  So all my comments on this podcast are my own and my own
• 0:32
  opinions and do not reflect the official position or policy or
• 0:36
  not necessarily reflect the official position or policy of
• 0:39
  the United States government, the Department of War, the Army
• 0:42
  University, the for the Command General Staff College or the
• 0:44
  Command General Staff School. Yeah.
• 0:47
  So Bill is an associate professor of history at the
• 0:49
  Command General College. And one of the cool things that
• 0:52
  he does there on the side, he has a podcast that he does
• 0:56
  called A Confused Heap of Facts that I highly recommend.
• 0:59
  What is that podcast about, Bill?
• 1:02
  It is a pair of historians who bring on other professional
• 1:07
  historians and we kind of geek out about history.
• 1:10
  It's a very eclectic group of topics.
• 1:13
  We take advantage of the expertise we have available.
• 1:16
  So there there's some, there's some interesting holes and then
• 1:19
  there's also some interesting deep dives that we do.
• 1:21
  Yeah, what I love about it, I mean, just looking at the last
• 1:25
  three topics, latest 1 was rebuilding the British Army
• 1:27
  after 1914. The one before that was medieval
• 1:31
  C2. The one before that was
• 1:33
  reassessing General Mead of the US Civil War.
• 1:37
  So it's kind of all over the map.
• 1:38
  Well, yeah, and that's part of the fun, right?
• 1:40
  We have all these different folks.
• 1:42
  And what it allows us to do then is it appeals to a wide variety,
• 1:45
  right? Because if you like military
• 1:47
  history, we will probably get to something that you are
• 1:51
  interested in at some point. And we publish once a month.
• 1:54
  And it's just part of, you know, the publisher, the Army through
• 1:58
  the Commit Combined Arms Command G6.
• 2:01
  And it's just out there. And if you find something,
• 2:05
  you'll find something that you like in there.
• 2:07
  Yeah, so yeah, confused heap of facts.
• 2:09
  Please check it out wherever podcasts are heard.
• 2:12
  Let's dive into this Battle of the Bulge to place from December
• 2:16
  16th, 1944 to January 25th, 1945 in the Ardennes region of
• 2:23
  Belgium and Luxembourg. How do we get to this point
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  after D-Day? OK, to be landing on 6th June
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  44, obviously some pretty intense fighting in the norm in
• 2:35
  the Normandy region. We are actually behind schedule
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  in Normandy and then after we, you have Operation Cobra break
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  out from there and then we are approximately 250 days ahead,
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  ahead of schedule. So we go from being way behind
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  to way ahead. Well, the sustainment couldn't
• 2:51
  keep up. So as we attacked across France,
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  the reason the sustainment couldn't keep up is we were 250
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  days ahead of schedule. It takes a minute, right?
• 3:01
  You have to build the rail lines, you have to get the ports
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  open, all sorts of details. So what you see is, is that we
• 3:08
  begin to culminate in kind of the eastern France, Belgium, the
• 3:13
  Netherlands. And what Eisenhower is doing is
• 3:15
  he's doing a broad front attack. He is not giving, he's not
• 3:19
  really designating a main effort per SE.
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  But the Germans would call it a it's not like, OK, we're only
• 3:25
  going to attack up here. He's attacking on a broad front.
• 3:28
  A lot of different reasons have been posed for this.
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  My own personal opinion is, is that Eisenhower doesn't want to
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  lose flags. What I mean by that is he's not
• 3:37
  going to stick a field army out all on this deep penetration.
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  Germans are very good at slicing off deep penetrations that
• 3:44
  aren't supported and killing them.
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  Eisenhower can afford to replace Rifleman, but he's only, we've
• 3:49
  only built 89 U.S. Army divisions, 95 total
• 3:53
  divisions American. And what you end up with is so
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  we've got 95 total divisions for the Pacific, the Atlantic and
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  the Mediterranean. So he can't afford to just throw
• 4:02
  away divisions. So September, October, we kind
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  of hit a pause as everyone kind of stops where they are, so to
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  speak, when they run out of gas. Interesting enough in the yard
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  den, which is this big massive terrain feature in eastern
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  France, Belgium, the Germany, it extends all the way into
• 4:24
  Germany. It's called something different
• 4:26
  in Germany, but it's the same basic train off train feature.
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  It's this area of swamps, forests, steep bridges, all this
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  kind of stuff and extends all the way back almost to the Rhine
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  River and divides the attack into Germany into basically a
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  northern approach up through the North European plain, up to the
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  Rhine River, across the Columbus Plain, and then S through the
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  across the SAR River and up towards Frankfurt and the
• 4:54
  Ardenne. It's cruddy terrain and no one
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  really wants to fight through it.
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  They can avoid it. So what's the frontline trace of
• 5:02
  where we get to in September of 44?
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  Is the frontline trace on 16 December 40?
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  So October's a little bit of a lull.
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  We do a November offensive across the entire frontline, all
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  the way from 9th Army up in the north to 1st French Army down in
• 5:19
  the South, and we're culminating in that offensive as the Germans
• 5:24
  launch theirs. Yeah, they kind of set the
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  mental map for the Allied forces.
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  The British, I believe, are on the north side near the
• 5:31
  Netherlands, Patton and the furniture on the South side.
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  And then kind of in the middle, lightly defended is the Ardens,
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  because they don't. No one's expecting anything to
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  happen there. Yeah, so from kind of north to
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  South, First off, you have the First Canadian Army fighting the
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  shelled estuary because Montgomery forgot to clear had
• 5:48
  other priorities clear the shelled estuary when he sees the
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  Antwerp. So the First Canadian Army is
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  having a bloody hard fight clearing the Shelter estuary.
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  The Second British Army is fighting up on the extreme
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  northern end of the line. That's also where you see that's
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  the holdover from the whole Market Garden fiasco.
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  Then you've got the US 9th Army and that's the 21st Army Group.
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  the US 9th Army is the northern end of the off Army group.
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  You got the 1st Army with two of two of its three cores north of
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  the Arden focused just east of Aachen and fighting in the
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  Hurricane Forest. You may have heard of that.
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  And then so that's the 5th and the 7th core.
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  And then the 5th core, you have the 8th core arrayed across most
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  of the Ardennes and they're kind of the scene is like the rest
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  core. They're the economy of force.
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  7th core have got like fronts of like 20 clicks or less and the
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  8th core is like covering 40 kilometers.
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  US Third Army that's fought through the Moselle, across the
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  Moselle River, they're approaching the the Tsar, all
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  that kind of region. And then you have that's the
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  12th Army group. Then you have the US 7th Army
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  down South of them with the 6th and the 15th core who have just
• 6:53
  penetrated to the Rhine River, Strasbourg area.
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  Let's go to the other side of the lines.
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  This is Adolf Hitler's last major offensive in the Western
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  Front during World War 2. Why did Hitler do it?
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  Was it just to regain the initiative and did it have any
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  chance of succeeding? This a surprise attack.
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  Second question first, no, this was, this was basically a death
• 7:19
  ride from the beginning. And why they're doing it, it's,
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  it's a little bit harder to discern.
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  But in German military culture, the counter attack is very
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  prevalent, present. My academic mentor, a guy by the
• 7:35
  name of Doctor Robert Cetino, posits that there is a German
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  way of war and the counter attack is very big in there.
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  They're on the offensive. That's where they like to be, is
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  maneuvering, operating. And so they don't like fighting
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  on the best static defensive if they can help.
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  So as early as September and October, Hiller is already
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  pressing his commanders to try and do a counter attack, but
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  it's a little bit more than just they're counter attacking
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  because they're Germans. I mean, that's certainly a part
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  of it there. But really what it comes out to
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  is is that they're in a math problem and they're on the wrong
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  side of that math problem. The Soviets are off in the east
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  and bear in mind that in June, in the summer 44, the Germans
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  lost most of army groups center to a Soviet offensive and opera
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  Graciom Bagration. So the the Soviets are have
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  these massive armies that are eating German divisions in the
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  West. Yes, we have sustainment issues
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  with British, French and Americans, but it's still a math
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  problem and we're winning that. And so if it's just a steady
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  apply X number of firepower or you get Y result, the Germans
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  are going to lose that. And I think all the Germans
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  understood that. So they're trying to change the
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  math. You've got to get out of that
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  direct equation. So that's what he's trying to
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  do. Did it have much chance of
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  success? No.
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  And we can talk about that in a little bit in more detail, but
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  it's die fast or die slow. So I think with Hitler's
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  approach is, well, we're going to go there now.
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  Why doesn't he take that combat power and apply to the Soviets?
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  The, the whole point of the plan here is, is in the West you have
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  coalition, if you've attack and you're able to split the
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  coalition. And remember there are these
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  very highly publicized disagreements between Montgomery
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  and Eisenhower and Bradley. Remember Pat's and echelon below
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  Montgomery, but all of these highly publicized, the breads,
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  the front Americans. He thinks I can take advantages
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  if I can split the coalition and then maybe I can make this front
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  go away and then I can do something against the Soviets,
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  something being a very big question mark because if he
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  attacks against the Soviets, it's going to get swallowed by a
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  burp. The problem is, is that we're
• 9:52
  still talking long shot hope, I mean and we'll we can go through
• 9:56
  the details of that. There there are some recent
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  history of it. I mean, in War One, the Germans
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  were able to get rid of the Soviet front so they could
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  concentrate on the other front. So maybe that enters into his
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  plan. But his overall plan is to split
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  the Allied forces, capture Antwerp and maybe bag the
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  British Army on the north, then force a negotiated peace with
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  the Western allies. So a couple questions here.
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  Why is Antwerp important and who are the leading commanders on
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  each side? OK.
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  So let's kind of start with the geography and the move to the
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  people. OK?
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  So the reason Antwerp matters is because Antwerp is the port in
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  this theater of the war. I have this lesson where I walk
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  my students through it, and I actually have taken some.
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  I've gotten some like satellite imagery and just some like
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  pictures of ports. Because a port is not a port is
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  not a port in Antwerp today is still one of the major ports of
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  the world. It's a deep water port.
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  Yeah. Not only is it a deep water
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  port, it's gigantic. And when you think about the
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  fact that you're doing what we now today called joint forcible
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  entry, which is you're attacking into a continent, you have to
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  enter into a theater of operations, but then you're
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  doing Expeditionary warfare. The factories that make Sherman
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  tanks are not in France, they're in Detroit.
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  The factories in making one rifles, everything from your
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  food to your clothes to your weapons, everything and your
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  ammunition all has to come from mostly factories in the United
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  States or the United Kingdom. All of it get loaded onto a
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  boat, transported, loaded at a port, get transported across the
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  ocean and then offloaded at a port and then transported there.
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  And if you have a small port like say Scherberg or Calais or
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  any other smaller ports along the North European, northern
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  France, French coast, they can handle some of it.
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  But Antwerp is really the place where it's just it's massive.
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  It's designed to be massive. Marseille is also another one in
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  the South, but the Germans aren't getting there.
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  So that's why Antwerp matters. So, So yeah, he's going to, you
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  know, he's, he's somehow going to drive across the North
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  European plane to get the Antwerp again with no air, with
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  no air coverage. Let's let's, let's go with it.
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  Let's do the allies first. You got Eisenhower, Supreme
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  Supreme Allied Commander for European, so he owns 3 army
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  groups, the 21st, the 12th, and the 6th, which we kind of laid
• 12:20
  out a minute ago. He is also in modern parlance,
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  the ground component command. So typically in a modern U.S.
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  military context, you would have a theater commander who is
• 12:33
  responsible for the whole theater and then they'll have
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  ground component commander. Typically in modern American
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  terminology, a core commander in most cases.
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  Then you have an Air Force commander and you have a Navy
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  commander, but you'd have those 3 Eisenhower.
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  So Eisenhower's stool had, he is both the head boss and he's also
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  the ground command. So from north to South, he's got
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  Montgomery with the 21st Army group, Field Marshall, a
• 12:54
  Viscount Alamaine, any other number of, uh, titles that he
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  likes to have there Very prickly personality, very deliberate
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  personality. Good when he can say it.
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  A met a nice set mass battle and he's got 2 commanders under him.
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  He's got Dempsey and Carrar. They're not going to play a part
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  in this story. Very, very much so.
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  We can kind of set them to decide.
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  And then you got more Bradley. Bradley was a very deliberate
• 13:17
  commander and kind of had his favorites, and he didn't get
• 13:21
  along very well with Montgomery. The two were always feuding.
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  There was always some sort of food fight between those two.
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  And then down to the South, got Jake Devers, and Jake and
• 13:29
  Eisenhower don't always get along personally.
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  However, Jake's, we're going to set him to decide because he's
• 13:34
  not a big player there. And then just drilling down the
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  12th Army Group, you've got Bill Simpson, who we've talked about
• 13:40
  previously. He's up on the North End of the
• 13:43
  Battle of the Bulge. He's not going to play a part in
• 13:45
  this other than as a troop provider.
• 13:48
  Then in the center, you've got the first US Army under God, God
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  by the name of Courtney Hodges. And Courtney's an interesting
• 13:56
  character in that he failed out of West Point math, got a lot of
• 14:00
  folks. And then as a Mustang, he came
• 14:03
  up through the ranks. Well, OCS and had reached that
• 14:09
  point and had brought over the US Third Army during the initial
• 14:13
  stages of the war, had been the deputy commander of US First
• 14:16
  Army. And then when Bradley fleeted up
• 14:18
  to take 12th Army Group, he'd taken 1st Army kind of a non
• 14:24
  entity in terms of command presence.
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  Simpson was very much a staff centric commander who had
• 14:30
  control of the staff. Patton is very much a commander
• 14:33
  centric commander who very much had control of his organization.
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  Hodges never got control of his organization.
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  So when you see the US First Army fight, in most of its cases
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  it's all the corps is kind of doing their own thing.
• 14:45
  The 1st Army very rarely fights as an army doing an army battle.
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  And you see This is why you can see core commanders get really
• 14:53
  big outsize roles sometimes. Like a guy by the name of a
• 14:57
  Lightning Joe Collins, 7th Core Commander, kind of gets to do
• 15:01
  whatever he likes because Courtney lets him do it.
• 15:04
  I actually was looking at the German side and I I had a
• 15:07
  question about this because I was looking at these guys.
• 15:10
  Set Dietrich, You have Piper Yeah, modal.
• 15:15
  Modal was pretty good. The other two, I don't know if
• 15:17
  they're any good at all, but what all three have in common is
• 15:20
  they're loyal. Meanwhile, you have like von
• 15:22
  Manstein sitting on the bench. So I think is Hitler just after
• 15:26
  the assassination attempt. He's not looking for quality,
• 15:29
  he's looking for loyalty at this point.
• 15:31
  Yes. So, so you've got Modal is kind
• 15:35
  of the is the Army Group B commander.
• 15:37
  There's more army groups out there, but Modal's got and then
• 15:40
  you've got Montlifel with the 5th Pens Army commander.
• 15:43
  He's supporting effort one and then you got the Six Pens Army,
• 15:46
  which is supposed to be the main effort and that is Sep Dietrich.
• 15:49
  Sep Dietrich is his only qualification really is as you
• 15:53
  said, he's loyal. Montlifel got some experience
• 15:56
  and does in he's got some bona fides.
• 15:59
  And then you got Eric Brandenberger down in the South
• 16:02
  with the 7th Army and solid replacement level commander.
• 16:05
  I mean, it's like, you know, nothing to write home about, but
• 16:08
  has done solid work. So the the that's kind of the
• 16:11
  the cast of characters over there.
• 16:14
  But what's kind of interesting about these guys is that they're
• 16:17
  handed basically garbage math. They have to figure this out.
• 16:22
  Well, I mean they're they're given plenty of men, but it's
• 16:25
  almost presume that they'll capture a fuel dumps along the
• 16:28
  way and just make it work like that.
• 16:30
  I I just don't think they had a chance with no air cover.
• 16:33
  I mean, the weather worked out. We'll.
• 16:34
  We'll get into it. I just kind of pulled these
• 16:36
  troop levels. So the USA kind of at the start
• 16:38
  of the fight had about 228,000 kind of in the battle area and
• 16:43
  the Germans had about 406,000 or so in their numbers are kind of
• 16:48
  hard to look at it. But another way of looking at it
• 16:51
  is the US had about four divisions kind of in the line,
• 16:55
  the 106th to 28th, the 4th Infantry Division kind of the
• 16:59
  three line divisions, 28th, 4th, Yep.
• 17:05
  And then 9th Armored Division in reserve there.
• 17:08
  Then the Germans had a bunch in their order of battle. 6th
• 17:13
  Panzer Army had Para S S Panzer divisions, 3 Volks Grenadier
• 17:17
  divisions, a Falsheim Yeager division and a Panzer brigade.
• 17:20
  Separate 5th Panzer Army had 123 Panzer divisions and four Volks
• 17:24
  Grenadier divisions. The 7th Army had three Volks
• 17:27
  Grenadier divisions and a Falsheim Yeager Paratroopy
• 17:30
  division. The attack caught the Allied
• 17:32
  forces off guard due to poor weather and the belief that
• 17:36
  Germany lacked offensive capability.
• 17:38
  They basically thought the Germans were a spent force.
• 17:41
  Can you discuss the subversion techniques used by the German
• 17:44
  commandos and spies behind enemy lines and how they sow
• 17:47
  confusion? Germans had any number of
• 17:50
  operations going on through there.
• 17:51
  So the 150th Pens or a brigade that I was mentioning earlier
• 17:54
  was was equipped with captured American equipment.
• 17:58
  So they had some Shermans that was kind of painted up to look
• 18:00
  like this. And the idea was they would kind
• 18:02
  of slip through, kind of worked at 1st and then it didn't work
• 18:05
  much past that because it only works when when people aren't
• 18:09
  expecting yet as soon as that happens, everyone goes, oh,
• 18:11
  that's there. They also slipped a bunch of
• 18:13
  commandos and and these guys were dressed up in American
• 18:16
  uniforms and their whole job was to set up roadblocks,
• 18:21
  assassinate, do whatever they like.
• 18:22
  Most of these operations did not work in their direct action
• 18:27
  role. What's fascinating though, is
• 18:29
  what they did do, which is when the Americans found out they
• 18:33
  were doing this, got Eisenhower basically was put under forced
• 18:37
  house arrest by a security team. Bradley was at.
• 18:40
  Well, I think it's, I think it's Bradley as well.
• 18:44
  He's out trying to do something and he gets stopped and like who
• 18:48
  won the World Series in my company?
• 18:50
  God help if you don't like baseball, right?
• 18:53
  So everyone's trying to figure out like a way to, you know,
• 18:56
  make sure that you're no, you're actually an American.
• 18:58
  So their impact had more to do with their perceived damage and
• 19:04
  presence more than what they actually did, if that makes
• 19:07
  sense. So for every guy that they
• 19:09
  killed on at our checkpoint or a roadblock, there were like 20
• 19:14
  more cases where Americans were just like staring at each other
• 19:18
  and yelling at each other. Right, but it slows the response
• 19:22
  time. Like if you're changing Rd.
• 19:24
  signs and killing roadblock guards and and causing havoc, it
• 19:27
  slows the ability of the Americans and British to
• 19:30
  respond. Some, but not really that much.
• 19:34
  A lot of it was it was just a confusing time.
• 19:37
  And the problem with the Ardenne, of course, is that the
• 19:39
  roads are kind of cruddy already.
• 19:41
  And then you add in the bad weather.
• 19:42
  As I, as I tell students, when we do, when we go to, when we
• 19:46
  look at the the Ardenne, it's small groups of dudes driving
• 19:50
  around, mostly on roads because the ground is too soft to
• 19:53
  actually take it. And it's hide and go seek.
• 19:55
  Lose or dies is the way to kind of think about those first
• 19:58
  opening days of the battle. Yeah, dense forest, rugged
• 20:02
  terrain, as you mentioned, make up the Ardan area.
• 20:05
  This is the same area that was supposed to be impenetrable
• 20:07
  during the 1940 invasion of France.
• 20:10
  Is Hitler just going once too often into the well here?
• 20:13
  Well, you can even go before 1940.
• 20:16
  So this is the same place where the Germans came through in
• 20:18
  1870. This is the same place where
• 20:20
  they came through in 1914 and they came through in 1940.
• 20:24
  It's not so much that the Ardan is impenetrable, it's that it is
• 20:31
  the roads don't. The roads only go in certain
• 20:33
  directions. So there's a term called line
• 20:36
  and drift that we use in the army, which is like when you're
• 20:38
  going hiking and all that kind of stuff, there's a certain way
• 20:40
  you're just going to naturally go because it's easier kind of
• 20:42
  the easier way to go. And those roads spit you out in
• 20:46
  the Ardenne at a place called Sedan.
• 20:49
  If you're going from the German border to France and you follow
• 20:54
  the easy way you're going to end and where you can kind of spread
• 20:58
  out off the roads a little bit, you're going to end up at Sedan,
• 21:01
  which is interesting, where they came in 181719141940.
• 21:07
  But the roads are narrow and constricted.
• 21:12
  Everything that the naysayers said would happen in 1940 about
• 21:16
  when they came through there did happen.
• 21:18
  They just got one. The difference being here is, is
• 21:21
  that you have to be you have to economize someplace.
• 21:25
  So that's kind of why with the Western allies did that is they
• 21:27
  looked at and said, we're not, we're not going east the other
• 21:30
  direction because the I fell, which is the German part of this
• 21:33
  train obstacle. It's rugged, it's hard, it
• 21:37
  doesn't there's nothing really strategic of important to pass
• 21:40
  the Rhine River. So they're just going other
• 21:42
  places. So it's one of those cases of
• 21:45
  it's not so much a case of oh, well, they'll never attack.
• 21:48
  It's just different. They could attack there, but
• 21:50
  what are they going to? Where are they going to go?
• 21:52
  Right. And then that's why they had
• 21:54
  stationed there, you know, 101st Airborne and a couple other
• 21:57
  units that were basically on rest duty just guarding that
• 22:01
  point. They didn't think anyone would
• 22:02
  come there. But the German offensive created
• 22:05
  a bulge in the Allied lines, giving the battle its name.
• 22:08
  So how far deep did the German army get and were they close to
• 22:12
  getting to Antwerp? They got deeper than they
• 22:15
  thought they were. They never got close to Antwerp.
• 22:18
  Any Battle the Bulge game you play if you if you play war
• 22:22
  games, the Muse river is seen as the victory line.
• 22:28
  And that's because this is such a far fetched plan already that
• 22:32
  just getting across the Muse, I think the one of the German
• 22:34
  generals put it is if we reach the Muse, we should drop down to
• 22:38
  our knees and thank God for it. And they didn't do that.
• 22:41
  And that was the first major obstacle they were they had to
• 22:45
  overcome and they didn't. And they never got there.
• 22:48
  They they did get close to the muse.
• 22:50
  I mean, it was a pretty deep penetration, but they never even
• 22:54
  got out of the Arden. They they got stuck there.
• 22:57
  And interesting enough, they also went in the wrong
• 23:01
  direction, which is also a point that I'll highlight is.
• 23:07
  So let's talk about those natural lines of drift.
• 23:10
  The attack was supposed to cut across on the northern shoulder
• 23:13
  of the bulge through a town called St.
• 23:15
  Viv and hop across the Muse River there where it's actually
• 23:20
  short distance. It's also some of the most
• 23:22
  rugged parts of the train. The the roads don't go that way,
• 23:26
  the terrain don't fit that way. And so where they ended up is
• 23:31
  down on the southern end of the Ardennes, down by Gaston N
• 23:36
  Luxembourg City, that kind of area, which is mildly
• 23:42
  interesting but utterly beside the point in terms of where they
• 23:46
  actually needed to be. They're trying to get to,
• 23:49
  they're trying to go north and they're ending up pushing South
• 23:52
  and West. It's it's interesting, like
• 23:55
  Tyson said, everyone has a plan to they get punched in the mouth
• 23:58
  and you you mentioned natural lines of drift.
• 24:00
  Sometimes your battle plan goes Askew and we'll come back to
• 24:04
  Bastone in a minute. How did the Allied forces
• 24:08
  respond? I know George Patton and Omar
• 24:10
  Bradley respond quickly, but was there infighting and squabbling
• 24:14
  amongst the American British generals?
• 24:17
  Rapidly and yes. So the initial attack happens on
• 24:22
  16 December and 8th Core loses coherence rapidly. 8th Corps is
• 24:28
  the the US Corps responsible for the ardent Troy Middleton, great
• 24:34
  commander in a lot of ways. He's so spread out when he
• 24:37
  comes, each of his divisions basically ends up fighting a
• 24:40
  separate 1. Middleton makes a couple of
• 24:42
  decisions that he sends a combat command B of the 9th Armored
• 24:46
  Division up to the northern end of the bulge by St. and they
• 24:49
  help out there, but they're pretty much gone.
• 24:51
  That said, the response is pretty rapid and so Hodges call
• 24:59
  Simpson or Bradley call Simpson, depending on which source you
• 25:01
  read. I think they, well they both
• 25:03
  did. We know that for a fact.
• 25:05
  Who initiated the conversation to move the 7th Armored Division
• 25:09
  S that's depending which source you read.
• 25:12
  The bottom line is the 7th Armored Division is moving
• 25:14
  within 12 hours of notification, which is pretty darn fast to
• 25:18
  move an armored division. And that's on the northern side.
• 25:22
  Down on the South, Bradley calls up Patton and says, I need the
• 25:25
  10th Armored Division. And what's interesting is the
• 25:29
  contrast between, say, Simpson and Patton is a Simpson says,
• 25:31
  hey, man, what do you need? Absolutely.
• 25:32
  Here you go. Patton says, no, I need the 10th
• 25:35
  Armored Division because they're right now fighting down and
• 25:38
  around the SAR. And the 10th Armored Division is
• 25:40
  his penetration, is his exploitation force that he's
• 25:43
  waiting on. He, he says, oh, Bradley's
• 25:46
  taking, taking stock of his fears and all that kind of
• 25:51
  stuff. And his, his, the patent papers
• 25:55
  are full of that. But the 10th Armored Division
• 25:57
  does begin moving and it happens relatively rapidly.
• 26:01
  And so the idea being is, is that yes, there was there was
• 26:05
  some conflict in terms of who is going to give up patent didn't
• 26:10
  want to give up the 10th Armored Division, Bradley said.
• 26:13
  I'm making it in order to give it up patent give it gave up the
• 26:15
  10th Armored Division. And what you saw is those
• 26:18
  initial 2 divisions, the 7th Armored Division and the 10th
• 26:21
  Armored Division, those are kind of the initial response
• 26:24
  divisions that in the, you know, held the two key crossroads long
• 26:29
  enough for other forces to get there.
• 26:31
  One tharmored division up in the north at Saint Vith, 10th
• 26:33
  Armored Division in the South around Bastone.
• 26:35
  And also don't forget the 20th Infantry Division.
• 26:38
  We died to give the 10th Harbor Division time to get there,
• 26:41
  which then died to get the time of the 101st to get there.
• 26:44
  So bottom line is, is that the response is actually pretty
• 26:47
  rapid. There's that famous line from
• 26:50
  conference from the patent where they say, hey, when who can do
• 26:53
  anything? And patent says I can attack
• 26:55
  with three divisions in three days or something.
• 26:58
  And the answer come and the idea there is, is that what he's able
• 27:01
  to do is he's got a core headquarters already kind of
• 27:05
  allocated to that. The third quarter, he's got them
• 27:07
  over there. And what he's doing is he's
• 27:08
  pulling divisions from his other cores and shifting them up to
• 27:14
  third core and 3rd course, doing the plan to go north.
• 27:19
  I just want people to realize how hard that is if you're
• 27:21
  engaged in anatomy at your front and to turn your core 90° while
• 27:25
  engaged and then go help someone else out within two days.
• 27:28
  I think it's a very difficult feat.
• 27:29
  Well, right. And what's cool though is, is
• 27:31
  that this is not just patent. This is actually how the US Army
• 27:34
  was built. So the way the US Army was built
• 27:37
  in World War 2 is, is that the field Army headquarters owned
• 27:41
  all the divisions. The core headquarters of that
• 27:44
  intermediate level was a tactical headquarters only.
• 27:50
  It did not own any divisions and sustainment.
• 27:54
  All the supplies ran from the army depots to the division
• 27:59
  depots. So the way it worked with third,
• 28:02
  with 3rd Army is that Patton says, so he's got a core
• 28:06
  headquarters not committed right now.
• 28:09
  So he sends that core headquarters to our lawn,
• 28:11
  Belgium, and says you, you're going to attack N you're going
• 28:14
  to get 2 infantry divisions in an armored division. 26th I want
• 28:17
  to say the 80th. I always forget that one in the
• 28:20
  fourth armored division. Come up with a plan.
• 28:22
  You tell me where you want them to go in their assembly areas.
• 28:26
  3rd That's all Third Course thinking about. 3rd Army is then
• 28:31
  busy plotting all the convoy clearance movements of those
• 28:36
  divisions from their original starting locations to the
• 28:38
  assembly areas the Third course provided them.
• 28:41
  Then the 12th and the 20th core the two frontline corps.
• 28:44
  The 3rd Army are worrying about rearranging and reassure and
• 28:50
  reshuffling their front lines as those divisions that would have
• 28:53
  been pulled are transiting. So everyone's doing their job.
• 28:58
  The 12th and 20th cores are rearranging the frontline.
• 29:01
  The Army headquarters is working route clearance, third cores
• 29:05
  planning the attack. And so that's how they're able
• 29:07
  to move so fast. Same things happening up in the
• 29:09
  north as well, just different cores and different divisions.
• 29:14
  Yeah, the town of Bastogne becomes a focal point.
• 29:18
  And I know most of us have seen Band of Brothers where American
• 29:20
  forces held out despite being surrounded.
• 29:23
  And the 101st Airborne Division famously resisted German demands
• 29:26
  to surrender, responding with, quote, nuts.
• 29:30
  How dire Was there a situation or was this just kind of like a
• 29:33
  like a symbol, symbolic? It was desperate all along the
• 29:36
  front and this is just where all the roads kind of met up.
• 29:40
  I'm going to get some hate from this, but Bastone, uh, but best
• 29:44
  down isn't as important as we make it out to be.
• 29:47
  Yes, it's famous. Yes, the 101st was there.
• 29:50
  Great. Bastone's on the wrong part of
• 29:51
  the battlefield, man. It's all the way down in the
• 29:53
  South now. It is a Road junction.
• 29:55
  And if the Germans did take Bastone, that would allow them
• 30:00
  to penetrate a little bit deeper.
• 30:02
  That just meant that the German divisions would have died
• 30:05
  farther West. So yes, by the time the US Army
• 30:09
  gets to Bastone and all that kind of stuff, the fact that
• 30:13
  they're at Bastone, remember it's the 5th Panzer Army that's
• 30:15
  there. They're this supporting effort.
• 30:18
  There's the Germans are so far off their timeline by the time
• 30:21
  the 101st pulls into Bastone and they're in the wrong part of the
• 30:24
  front, that really Bastone is a distractor for the Germans.
• 30:28
  And they can they kind of screen it and keep going.
• 30:32
  Now, that would have helpful to have the the the crossroads of
• 30:36
  Bastone. It would have helped.
• 30:37
  But again, that just means the Germans die a little bit farther
• 30:40
  out there. Did the 101st put on a good show
• 30:42
  and hold out at Bastone? Absolutely.
• 30:46
  But the problem is, is that best?
• 30:47
  But if the Germans have substantial combat power at
• 30:50
  Bastone, they're already going the wrong way.
• 30:55
  They need to be going north, not messing around down there in the
• 30:58
  South. And the reason they're down
• 31:00
  there, of course, is because that's where the they kind of
• 31:04
  drifted. That's where the where they
• 31:06
  could maneuver and get to. And that's how they got there.
• 31:10
  But there were a couple, there were a couple sticky moments.
• 31:15
  I think that opening battles around Bastone are a lot more
• 31:17
  interesting than the actual siege itself.
• 31:20
  The fight around Noville with Team de Sobri is fascinating to
• 31:25
  me because you have this task, armor, task force and battalion
• 31:30
  of the 101st hold that town for the better part of two days, and
• 31:35
  that's a fascinating story in of itself.
• 31:37
  Yeah, I think, I think it's just been portrayed more famously
• 31:42
  because everyone knows it, but it was just kind of like
• 31:44
  emblematic or or just a symbol of the defiance along the whole
• 31:48
  line maybe. And it just like we'll pick one
• 31:50
  battle bastone and just show how stubborn we were.
• 31:54
  And they did a good job in the in the in the in the mood, in
• 31:57
  the band of brothers and all because it's a great show.
• 31:59
  My only gripe with it is, is that the love of the 101st has
• 32:04
  overshadowed what I consider to be much more operationally
• 32:08
  significant and just as important fight.
• 32:11
  The fight of the 7th Armored Division up at Saint Viv, which
• 32:15
  is really a core plus fight. You know, the three combat
• 32:18
  commands of the 7th Armored Division, the remaining regiment
• 32:21
  of the 106th Infantry Division, be a regiment of the 28th
• 32:24
  Infantry Division that just kind of fall.
• 32:26
  It just kind of wanders over that direction.
• 32:28
  But in the fight, you talk about what battle takes you and then
• 32:31
  you've got Combat Command B of the 9th Armored Division.
• 32:34
  You've got a six regiment battle going on around St.
• 32:38
  Vith, which is really where the Germans need to be.
• 32:40
  And they hold out for like a week before they finally pull
• 32:43
  back. And it's this running battle
• 32:46
  with these six regiments trying to cross the the Salm River.
• 32:50
  And that's amazing thing in the the 28th Infantry Division,
• 32:55
  those dudes bled for every inch of ground between their
• 33:02
  frontline positions and Baston, and they're almost completely
• 33:07
  ignored from that during that fight.
• 33:11
  Yeah, yeah, let's talk about weather as well.
• 33:14
  Severe weather initially grounded Allied air support,
• 33:17
  aiding the German advance. But did the weather hinder
• 33:21
  German supply and communication as well?
• 33:24
  Yes, of course to have your supply hindered, you must
• 33:28
  perhaps have supply which which is part of the problem.
• 33:33
  So what it came out to is this is a situation where you
• 33:39
  actually want to be colder than what it was.
• 33:43
  And for the opening stages of the battle, the temperature was
• 33:46
  about 3334° and precipitating, which if you've ever been out in
• 33:53
  that kind of weather, really, really sucks because the grounds
• 33:55
  not frozen, it means your cross country mobility is heavily
• 34:00
  limited. And go, let's go back to these
• 34:02
  roads, the good roads in that part of the gun, in that part of
• 34:06
  the world, not counting the modern autobahns that have been
• 34:09
  cut through, but disregarding the one or two modern highways
• 34:12
  that have been cut through, they're not that wide.
• 34:14
  So all of a sudden you're taking a division of several 100,000
• 34:18
  something vehicles and you're jamming them on a road.
• 34:21
  I don't care how many vehicles you have, there's physics is a
• 34:26
  thing. You only say, you know only one
• 34:29
  deal can can occupy a given space at a given time.
• 34:32
  And in 16 December, that is a mass 161718 December.
• 34:37
  That's a massive issue for the Germans.
• 34:40
  They're they're stuck in traffic and you actually have cases
• 34:43
  where monthly full and and Sept Dietrich are out on the ground.
• 34:48
  So you can imagine like multi star generals are out there
• 34:51
  trying to push traffic along because it's that bad of a of a
• 34:56
  mess up. Yeah, it's just interesting how
• 34:59
  weather played a huge factor in the battle.
• 35:02
  Once weather cleared, though, Allied air superiority helped
• 35:05
  halt and push back the German forces.
• 35:08
  I also read that there are atrocities and war crimes
• 35:10
  committed. I want to talk about the
• 35:12
  Mallmany massacres and the American response to those
• 35:17
  massacres. What's going on here?
• 35:20
  OK, so the the Mall Mani massacre actually takes place in
• 35:23
  the opening stages of the offensive guy by the name of
• 35:26
  Piper has been given a reinforced regiment to the first
• 35:30
  s s of Panzer Division and his job is to get as deep as he
• 35:34
  possibly can as fast as he can. Basically sees a bunch of
• 35:37
  bridges before they can be blown.
• 35:39
  US engineers laugh in the high explosive.
• 35:42
  They they stop, they stop him as he's going, but he's sliding
• 35:45
  along getting through there. And he comes across a column of
• 35:49
  part of the 7th Armored Division as they are moving to reinforce
• 35:52
  St. Vin.
• 35:53
  And Piper doesn't want to take prisoners with them.
• 35:56
  They'll slow them down. And there is some confusion as
• 35:59
  to exactly who said what and when and where.
• 36:02
  But The upshot is we something like 80 prisoners are killed.
• 36:05
  This is not the only case of Germans killing prisoners in the
• 36:10
  Battle of Bulge or in general. This is something, I mean, to be
• 36:16
  quite blunt about it, this is something that the German Army
• 36:19
  in World War 2 is kind of known for.
• 36:22
  And the word gets out of there this because we actually
• 36:25
  recaptured the Mamadi. Actually, we'd say it's the
• 36:27
  Mamadi massacre. Where it actually occurs is this
• 36:29
  little postage stamp town called Bognez, and the troops find the
• 36:33
  remains there. And by this point in the war,
• 36:36
  the tolerance level for the enemy, for the Germans was
• 36:41
  pretty low. And that led to several
• 36:46
  unfortunate cases of just of indiscipline and in cases of the
• 36:50
  US military not willing to take prisoners.
• 36:53
  And what's interesting is about the she known massacre is that
• 37:02
  was actually the 11th Armored Division.
• 37:04
  It was it was new to theater and they've taken some some
• 37:08
  substantial casualties in their counter attack there.
• 37:12
  The 11th Armor Division was part of the reformed 8th Coors push
• 37:16
  to kind of push in the nose of the of the of the bulge and they
• 37:22
  took some prisoners. And was it reprisal for Mamadi?
• 37:26
  Was it just in discipline? It's hard to tell.
• 37:30
  You will find a different answer for that.
• 37:32
  But bottom line is, is that both sides were viewing this as a
• 37:37
  brutal struggle and Mamadi was part of it, but there was more
• 37:41
  to it than that. That said, as a matter of
• 37:44
  policy, you wanted to be captured by the Americans or the
• 37:47
  British and not the Germans because yes, there were moments
• 37:51
  of indiscipline. Yes, there were those cases that
• 37:54
  did happen. American and British policy was
• 37:58
  still to take prisoners. Right.
• 38:00
  Interesting. Though Patent executed his rapid
• 38:02
  pivot of 3rd Army, he relieved Best on a key turning point in
• 38:06
  the battle. So how does everything?
• 38:08
  Kind of get under control. And how does the Allied counter
• 38:12
  offensive go? OK, so things go bad for the
• 38:16
  Germans basically day one, they're well behind schedule.
• 38:20
  Bunch of engineers go out and blow the bridges.
• 38:22
  There's a great book called Those Damned Engineers Rate line
• 38:25
  where Piper has his blood bridge blown right in front of his face
• 38:28
  and he says all those damned engineers.
• 38:30
  Of course the engineer branch loves the story.
• 38:32
  So they're they're hitting heavy trained.
• 38:35
  There's also substantial resistance.
• 38:37
  I don't. And again, I'll just keep
• 38:39
  beating the drum about the 20th Infantry Division, the 7th
• 38:42
  Armored Division, 10th Armored Division, 4th Infantry Division.
• 38:45
  Those guys deserve a huge amount of credit for how much
• 38:50
  resistance they give to just degrade and slow the German
• 38:54
  attack as it gets going. And then what ends up happening
• 38:58
  is that they start building out the shoulder of the bolts fairly
• 39:01
  rapidly, and 9th Army is pushing divisions down South.
• 39:06
  The 82nd and the 101st are released from theater reserve.
• 39:10
  82nd ends up on the northern shoulder of the Bulge working
• 39:12
  for the 18th Airborne Corps. The 101st ends up in Bastone,
• 39:16
  and they kind of have their own independent operator for a
• 39:20
  while. I think they've eventually
• 39:21
  fallen to the 8th Corps for a bit.
• 39:23
  I've got to go back and take a look.
• 39:25
  They're they're kind of off by themselves because 8th core
• 39:27
  loses phase lock for a bit and then so the two shoulders form
• 39:31
  and then the Germans are kind of going down the center of it.
• 39:34
  And 1st Army is feeding the army divisions in from the north.
• 39:39
  Eisenhower gives the 1st and 9th Armies to Montgomery to kind of
• 39:43
  command and control, although Montgomery kind of lets them
• 39:46
  handle their own business for the most part, which is pretty,
• 39:48
  which is pretty solid of them actually.
• 39:51
  And then Patton is kind of feeding in from the South.
• 39:54
  What you just see is, is that as a, after a certain point, the
• 39:56
  Germans just start kind of dropping from exhaustion and
• 40:00
  also resistance because they're getting pushed and shaped and
• 40:04
  herded into kind of a, into a kind of a point.
• 40:09
  And then basically they were they run out of gas and then at
• 40:13
  that point. Our resistance has been such
• 40:16
  that we just start crushing the bulge in as it goes.
• 40:20
  Yeah, and the skies open up from weather, so we can pound from
• 40:23
  the air now. Yeah.
• 40:24
  So it's, it's a little from column A, a little from column
• 40:27
  B. There's argument that we should
• 40:30
  have pinched it off at the base of the salient rather than we
• 40:34
  kind of pushed it in from the center of the salient.
• 40:38
  Some of that is because we had to go to Bastogne to rescue the
• 40:40
  101st, but the other part of it is, is that the the terrain and
• 40:45
  the road networks at those shoulders were really kind of
• 40:48
  hard to sustain large offensive operations.
• 40:52
  So it's. It's not the best possible
• 40:55
  solution, but it worked well enough.
• 40:58
  Well the battle results in heavy casualties on both sides,
• 41:00
  approximately 80,000 American and Allied losses and 100,000
• 41:05
  German losses. This significantly weakens
• 41:08
  Germans ability to continue the war.
• 41:10
  So in your opinion, why did the attack fail it?
• 41:13
  Never had a chance to succeed to begin with.
• 41:15
  So Rob Cetino is a great line and I forget exactly where he
• 41:18
  says it in one of his talks, but if ones if an army has to depend
• 41:22
  upon bad weather to even take the field, maybe they shouldn't
• 41:27
  be there. Good point, and that's kind of
• 41:30
  the short answer. The longer answer is it has a
• 41:33
  lot to do with the just darn hard resistance the the initial
• 41:40
  units provide. There is there are moments of
• 41:42
  panic, yes, There are moments of mass surrenders, the 106th
• 41:45
  Infantry Division being one. But overall the story is much
• 41:48
  more along the lines of units to get their act together a lot
• 41:52
  faster than the Germans possibly thought they could.
• 41:55
  And you see the US Army able to react at an operational scale
• 42:00
  and level that no one really thought possible.
• 42:05
  I mean, we reorient the 5th core, the 18th core, the 7th
• 42:10
  core, the third core, the 12th core.
• 42:14
  We reorient 5 core and the 8th core.
• 42:17
  When we rebuild it, we reorient 6 cores in the space of like 2
• 42:23
  weeks. And I think that's a key point.
• 42:25
  Those initial slowdowns helped the overall stopping of the
• 42:29
  bulge. Like there's a story, I forget
• 42:32
  where it was maybe saying that there was a platoon of U.S.
• 42:34
  soldiers, 22 guys even. They were down to 22 guys and
• 42:37
  they held up a battalion of 500 German soldiers wave after wave
• 42:40
  and just get stopping these guys in their tracks.
• 42:42
  That was the INR in town Reconnaissance platoon of the
• 42:46
  99th Emperor Division, and that's at Lanzarothridge.
• 42:49
  And if you go to Lanzarothridge, there is still, you can still
• 42:51
  see remnants of their foxholes. There's a little memorial up
• 42:54
  there. And yeah, they, this one
• 42:57
  platoon, like 20 dudes, holds out all day long.
• 43:01
  And what's fascinating about that is it's, again, the road
• 43:05
  networks. They slow the Germans down.
• 43:08
  And this is where Piper gets stuck.
• 43:10
  He spends the entirety of the 16th of December stuck in a
• 43:13
  traffic jam because the third false shooter, yeah, the third
• 43:16
  Falshimieger can't get through there until literally this
• 43:21
  platoon plus some of their friends in other parts of the
• 43:24
  line literally run out of ammunition.
• 43:26
  Interesting enough, though, that Lieutenant, it was his birthday
• 43:28
  that day. He didn't, he spent the he gets
• 43:31
  captured. He goes for, I want to say years
• 43:35
  before real thinking he's a failure, thinking that his
• 43:39
  platoon basically that he got his platoon captured and he
• 43:42
  failed in his mission. And in reality, they got a
• 43:45
  Presidential Unit Citation and one of the key elements in the
• 43:48
  initial delays. Yeah, there's a interesting side
• 43:51
  note, and it's a positive thing that actually came from this
• 43:53
  battle. Due to manpower surges at the
• 43:56
  front. Eisenhower decided to fully
• 43:58
  integrate the service for the first time, and black soldiers
• 44:01
  up to this point were kept kind of in maintenance and service
• 44:04
  positions, but more than 2000 volunteered to go to the front.
• 44:07
  Do you think this was an important step towards a
• 44:10
  desegregate desegregated U.S. military?
• 44:14
  Yes, but only a staff U.S. military.
• 44:17
  U.S. Army fully desegregates in the
• 44:19
  1950s with Truman's executive order.
• 44:21
  But yeah, I mean, it turns out that when you need manpower,
• 44:26
  you're willing to let go of a lot of other things as as you go
• 44:29
  through there. And those platoons fought well,
• 44:32
  fought well and fought hard, afraid for the time that they
• 44:34
  were employed. Well, final question, what do
• 44:38
  you what is the legacy of the Ballot bulge?
• 44:41
  Do you think it shortened the war because Hitler used up his
• 44:44
  last manpower reserves? Or did it elongate the war
• 44:47
  because the Allies were more cautious with their advance
• 44:50
  towards Berlin? It's hard to say long length and
• 44:53
  versus shortened. However one the Allies the
• 44:56
  Americans were never really headed toward Berlin.
• 44:58
  They weren't necessarily more cautious.
• 45:00
  Eisenhower's whole operational approach really aftermarket
• 45:04
  garden was attritional, killed Germans West of the Rhine.
• 45:08
  And the idea was, is that he wanted to destroy the German
• 45:11
  military West of the Rhine if they would present themselves
• 45:13
  for battle. Because you don't want a formed
• 45:17
  coherent, capable enemy on the east Bank of the Rhine.
• 45:20
  If you got across that thing, it's a mile wide at blood,
• 45:23
  right? It's bigger than the
• 45:24
  Mississippi. So he wanted to kill Germans
• 45:26
  West of the Rhine. The Germans made that easier.
• 45:29
  Now, did it slow him down a little bit?
• 45:30
  Well, possibly. But I mean, we didn't have to
• 45:33
  dig him out of their holes as much because we, they, they came
• 45:36
  out of them. So I, I don't know, I consider
• 45:38
  that a bit of a wash in terms of lengthening or shortening
• 45:42
  because, yeah, it took us time to then deal with that.
• 45:46
  But we kind of had to rebuild our stocks anyways after the
• 45:49
  November offensives. And if the Germans are just
• 45:52
  going to do us the favor of choosing the time and place of
• 45:55
  the battle, we'll go from there in terms of legacy.
• 45:59
  I think it's maybe like it seems like a failure at the beginning
• 46:02
  because we were surprised and they turned it into a like a, a
• 46:05
  success. Yeah.
• 46:08
  But where I where I can really see the legacy is this is where
• 46:11
  the US Army really gets to show off that it could operationally
• 46:17
  maneuver and handle itself in a in a tough fight.
• 46:21
  And that it was kind of, you know, it could play with the big
• 46:24
  boys because everyone always sits there and says, oh, I mean,
• 46:26
  there, there's that, there's that old, what I can see be very
• 46:30
  tired argument about whether the American infantry was any good
• 46:34
  or not. And Pete Mansour wrote a really
• 46:36
  good book called the The GI Offensive in Europe that talks
• 46:39
  about precisely that. And Michael Doubler wrote one
• 46:42
  before that. People will sit there and say,
• 46:44
  oh, the American military, you just won't because you would
• 46:46
  lots of stuff and all that kind of stuff, fine, but I'd rather
• 46:49
  win with lots of stuff and you have then lose with not a lot of
• 46:53
  stuff. But it really showed that the
• 46:54
  American Army could in kind of a cut and thrust do pretty well.
• 47:02
  I mean, it's like there aren't that many armies that could
• 47:05
  reorient as fast as as the US Army could.
• 47:09
  The German Army is actually one of them.
• 47:10
  But everyone always points to the German Army is this
• 47:13
  maneuvering operational genius group.
• 47:15
  And we point to the Americans as this kind of stodgy, you know,
• 47:19
  get everybody online and walk very slowly towards the enemy.
• 47:22
  Yet we could do that when we wanted to.
• 47:26
  And it wasn't just patent doing it.
• 47:27
  It was really across the entire line.
• 47:30
  Yeah. And I think it just shows
• 47:31
  resilience. Yeah, you can make the case.
• 47:33
  Well, the Americans just showed up in 42 and really in Europe
• 47:36
  only in 44. So, you know, Germany was a
• 47:39
  spend force by then. But I think this shows that they
• 47:41
  weren't. And they still had capable
• 47:43
  units. The Germans and the Americans
• 47:45
  still beat them even when they were surprised.
• 47:47
  So I think their resiliency is a big part of the legacy.
• 47:50
  Yeah. And the problem is it's, it's
• 47:52
  really hard to get at that when you're at your best and I'm at
• 47:55
  my best. And I mean, it's hard, right?
• 47:58
  Because as you point out, you go where the battle leads, you
• 48:01
  know, you go where the you go where the fight is.
• 48:04
  And sitting there saying, well, why did if the Americans have
• 48:08
  been in 1940, but if the Americans have been engaged in
• 48:10
  1940, we'd be in a very different world.
• 48:13
  Already, even Napoleon at Waterloo, people were like,
• 48:17
  well, he was done anyways. Even if he'd lost there, well
• 48:20
  you still got to fight the battle, he's still got to beat
• 48:21
  the guy. Even if he's outnumbered 700,100
• 48:24
  thousand, you still have to beat the guy in a battle.
• 48:27
  Exactly. And I think that's what the
• 48:29
  Americans did here and the allied forces, Canadians and
• 48:32
  British. So, yeah, good stuff, Bill.
• 48:34
  I appreciate the overview of the Battle of the Bulge.
• 48:38
  Again, if you want to check out Bill's podcast, I highly
• 48:41
  recommend A Confused Heap of Facts and we thank him for his
• 48:45
  time. Thanks John, I love being here.
• 48:47
  Thank you, Sir.