On Memorial Day, 2022

On the first day of the year, January 1st, 1945, Adolf Hitler began to speak to the German people "shrilly but confidently," or so says John Toland, a historian of the Second World War. Just two weeks after the shock of what would be known as "The Battle of the Bulge," what he told Germany went like this:

Our people are resolved to fight the war to victory under any and all circumstances. . . We are going to destroy everybody who does not take part in the common effort for the country or who makes himself a tool of the enemy. . . .The world must know that this State will, therefore, never capitulate. . . .Germany will rise like a phoenix from its ruined cities and this will go down in history as the miracle of the 20th century!

About that he was dead wrong, blessedly wrong. Many of his generals disparaged the preposterous notion that the Wehrmacht, defeated at Normandy and on the run back into the homeland, could rise once more and battle its way in a surprise offensive through Belgium to Antwerp, the seaport, when Allied forces had such vastly superior air power. He'd barely escaped an assassination attempt created by Wehrmacht generals who knew very well that the Fuhrer's sanity was waning. 

Hitler went on:

I want, therefore, in this hour, as spokesman of Greater Germany, to promise solemnly to the Almighty that we shall fulfill our duty faithfully and unshakably in the New Year too, in the firm belief that the hour will strike when victory will ultimately come to him who is most worthy of it, the Greater German Reich!

He could not have been more wrong. 

Was he lying? Perhaps. But despite the advice of some his best generals, he honestly--and probably madly--believed that the Reich's troops could--if they fought selflessly, committed to the German cause--still march to triumph. He was wrong, and it's easy to say today, he was greatly deluded. 

The outcome he described would not be because it could not be. During the six-week Battle of the Bulge, U.S. forces sustained 75,000 casualties (dead, wounded, captured), but some historians estimate Germany lost 100,000 in the bloodiest battle of the Second World War's western front. In frigid temperatures and deep mist and snow, military strategies were almost non-existent, futile. Hundreds of GIs found the battle impossible and surrendered rather than be slaughtered. Hundreds more found themselves alone along a 100-mile front that shifted in and out of the combatants' hands. Beautiful little towns in Belgium, gutted and occupied one day by Germans, would be inhabited the next by Americans. 

Thousands of American boys came away victors but could not have described what happened in the Ardennes forest any better than war watchers back home. The Bulge was terrible mess, an intense, bloody, frozen fight in hundreds of locations and crossroads.

Diet Eman, a Resistance worker in the occupied Netherlands, used to talk about "the fog of war." When she would use that phrase, she would shudder. There were altogether too many hours in war when what was happening was simply chaos, so many moments when discerning right from wrong was impossible, when people on both sides talked as Hitler did on the first day of 1945. In war, truth too is almost always a victim.

Pick up a book on the Bulge someday, wade through it. The mess can't be described quickly. Eisenhower had his hands full once he determined what Hitler was up to along the western front, but he was almost equally burdened by his squabbling generals, Patton among them, who could not be in the same room as the Brit dandy, Field Marshall Montgomery. The whole lot of them were petulant as school boys, despite the war, the blood, all around.

Today is Memorial Day, the day we remember what so many, after the war, could never forget, even if they couldn't--or wouldn't--care to describe it or even remember. Today we honor those who lived and died in the cold fog of war, the deep and perilous and indescribable fog of war.