America Must Continue to Heed the Lessons of the Battle of the Bulge
Jarrett Stepman /
As America soon celebrates its 250th anniversary, it would be wise to look back to understand what allowed a small collection of colonies on the edge of the world to rise to the great power it became.
This year marks the 81st anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which began on Dec. 16, 1944, and ended a month later. It was one of the largest military operations in American history and is rightly recognized as a great Allied—especially American—riumph that led to the final collapse of the Third Reich and the end of World War II in the European theater.
Memory of the war is fading. I don’t mean that Americans no longer think of World War II. Sometimes it seems like the only historical event people think about when evaluating national or world politics. Comparing every politician to Hitler and every international situation to 1939 cheapens the meaning of the war and its complex beginnings.
But there are great and important lessons to be kept alive beyond the surface level pop history.
We must nevertheless never forget what it took to create the “post-War world” that was often so favorable to the American people. Too often the lessons of the war applied today only relate to the leaders at the top, to the Franklin Delano Roosevelts and the Neville Chamberlains. As important as these men and leaders were to the course of events, the war was much bigger than that.
At the Battle of the Bulge, the heaviest fighting took place on Christmas as German units pressed hard to break through Allied lines, reach the Meuse River, retake the port at Antwerp in Belgium and somehow, some way, stave off their defeat.
Much of the hard fighting and bitterly cold, miserable conditions of the battle was famously portrayed in the HBO series, “Band of Brothers,” which followed Easy Company of the 101st Airborne. Many other divisions participated in the battle too.
Though the Germans in some cases made notable advances after their surprise attack, their operation failed due in part to their own poor execution of an overly ambition plan and in even larger part to the hard fighting by men in the 28th Infantry Division, the 2nd Infantry, the 7th Armored, the 82nd Airborne and more.
One historian, Peter Mansoor, wrote of the Battle of the Bulge that it was “a victory made possible in large measure by the valor and sacrifice of a relative handful of American divisions” carefully positioned in a “quiet” part of the front. He noted that through the tenacity of these few men at critical moments of the battle Allied reinforcements were able to stem and then reverse the German tide.
They did so, Mansoor said, by capitalizing on American military strengths of “massed firepower, air superiority, tactical mobility, steadfast infantry, superior tank strength, and inexhaustible logistics.” These strengths could not be brought to bear without the “small unit” actions across the battlefield that “showed the American soldier at his best when the conditions he fought in were at their worst.”
In a sense, this remarkable victory harkened back to the original patriots of our American Revolution, those who had crossed the freezing Delaware on Christmas night in 1775 and turned the fortunes of war in favor of the Patriot cause and to those who later suffered in the snow at Valley Forge. Through suffering and endurance, the Americans there showed their true qualities.
Of the many, many remarkable aspects of the Battle of the Bulge beyond the fighting and sacrifice, the heroism, and tragedy of young lives cut short, is how it came to be that the Allied, mostly U.S. military, was able to triumph given the adverse circumstances.
The tired but ferocious army that defeated the best the Wehrmacht could throw at it in late 1944 didn’t even really exist just five years before. On the eve of the greatest war in human history the United States was only beginning the process of rearming. It could reasonably be said that in the 1930s, Romania had a more powerful army than the U.S., hard to imagine at any point after 1945.
Yet, a nation very much dedicated to peace was able, in just a few years, to muster and command the world’s most powerful combined armed forces, dominant in almost every measurable way.
We won the war of industry in the world’s greatest industrial war. We won the war of technology in a war where technology was rapidly reshaping the battlefield.
So much has been made of vaunted German “wonder weapons,” but the U.S. and to a certain extent the U.K. created and leaned on the technologies and innovations that would ultimately prove decisive like radar, time on target artillery strikes, proximity fuzes, and, of course, the atom bomb.
To make these all work and come together effectively on the battlefield required not just the work of brilliant generals, scientists, and governments, but whole nations. It took countless men and women of competence, dedication, courage, and willpower to produce victory.
And that’s something to remember this Christmas as we pass through another anniversary of that great battle with now very few surviving veterans.
Our victory at the Battle of the Bulge and on battlefields across the globe were not produced through enforced diversity quotas or even appeals to “democracy” and humanity It was strength of arms, able diplomacy, and widespread commitment to the task at hand by a nation of people used to overcoming obstacles and making the unimaginable the reality.
This is in large part the ideology of DEI, the acceptance of failure in the name of diversity. The abandonment of genuine merit, the willingness to tolerate mediocrity is so corrosive and is producing what will hopefully be a sustained backlash.
The United States has from its beginning been a nation strongly attached to its ideals, to the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and all the wonderful creations of a people committed to self-government. It has also been a nation of winners, filled with men and women relentlessly and restlessly dedicated to their industry, their craft, their career, and occasionally to war.
We honor those before us by keeping their memory alive and by remaining as dedicated as they were, so that we may pass on the blessings of our labor and sacrifice to posterity as they did.