Morning Prayers--Battle of the Bulge, 75 years later

. . . no one thought it was going to be easy to stop the full power of 1 SWS Panzer Corps' right hook. Just before first light, the fog came rolling in, deadening the sound of movement and providing perfect cover for the attackers. 

First to be hit were the 2nd Division battalion who were deployed north of Rocherath. Hitler Jugend Division had quietly brought up a company of tanks close to the American lines during the night and these, with their supporting panzer grenadiers, attacked out of the fog at dawn.

There are 400 pages in Peter Elstob's Hitler's Last Offensive (1971), and this particular passage makes up just less than half of one of them. You can consider this particular story as, well, "ordinary."

The veteran 2nd Division men quietly let the tanks pass and then came out of their foxholes and fired bazookas into the thin rear armor plating of the panzers, knocking out several and scattering the rest. At the same time they engaged the Germany infantry in close fighting in the swirling fog using bayonets and sometimes knives.

Well, maybe ordinary is overstatement. After all, there were thousands and thousands of participants at the Battle of the Bulge, 75 years ago right now, many thousands more who never affixed a bayonet or shouldered a rifle. But some did, including the two companies whose experience is remembered in this passage.

The German attack failed but as soon as the fog lifted and it got light, the panzers and their infantry came on again in strength and with determination. The fury of this onslaught was too much for some of the American infantry who had been under attack and without rest for a long time and a number broke and ran. They did not get far for their company commandeer personally halted the retreat and sent them back. Another company commander, when he saw that the Germans could not be stopped, called for artillery fire on his own positions--only twelve of his company escaped; yet another company lost all but ten men. 

At full strength, in the assault on Allied lines in France, Belgium, and Luxembourg, Hitler threw 450,00 troops into a battle he knew very well would be, should it fail, their last and his. Estimates vary as to what he lost when he lost, but the numbers are staggering--65,000 to 98,000 men. Close to 20,000 GIs never returned. 

We won. Praise the Lord. 

But we lost more than that number. At the funeral of a vet's wife not long ago, that vet's cousin told me his aunt's husband was never the same after the war. He was wounded at the Bulge. 

Yesterday I walked out around a pond south of town, walked all the way down to the river, a mile away, all the while listening to John Toland's Battle: the Story of the Bulge. I've never read much about the war, any war, really. I wrote a book about the life of a woman who was part of the Dutch Resistance during the occupation of Holland, but I haven't read that much. War stories--like the one I just typed in--set a chill in my soul.

But suddenly things converged somehow: the death of my father-in-law, the stories of a Lakota army nurse I know, purple hearts of men I knew--and I find myself, 75 years after the fact, immersed in a bloody winter's tale of woe and war that's so immense it's no wonder its hundreds of thousands of participants often chose not to think--or talk much--about it. The Bulge was horror, incredibly huge in indescribable ways.

Last night's news was difficult, in part because we're in the hands of man with bone spurs, who likely never read a word about the Bulge, a man who's promised us time and time again that he only operates from impulse, from what he feels in his gut. 

This time, I so hope and pray not.