Book Review--John Toland, Battle: the Story of the Bulge

I also remember that Patton said, "You are not here to die for your country, but you are here to make the G--d--- German soldiers die for their country." I always remember what he said.  Pat McLaughlin, Wakpala, SD, from his memoir in the Teton Times, May 26, 2004.

There are those who can judge with more authority whether John Toland's Battle: The Story of the Bulge is a great book. I don't know that I've ever read another tome about war, any war, about D-Day or Pearl Harbor or those horrible trenches in WWI. I've been to Gettysburg and Chattanooga and walked through white crosses at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery and Memorial in Belgium, even spent a couple of hours at Bastogne. Trust me--we have too many books in our house, but few are about war.

But my father-in-law was at the Bulge, as was a woman, a nurse, whose story I know very well and a man she treated, like her a Lakota, a kid from Lakeview, SD, who lost both legs to a tank amid all the blood in the snow. It is, just now, 75 years since Hitler created "Watch on the Rhine," the almost unimaginable surprise attack on "the Ghost Front" in Belgium, whereby he hoped to cut off Allied supply lines by taking Antwerp. Very, very few saw it coming. Twenty thousand GIs were killed, forty thousand wounded, 23 thousand taken captive. Hitler lost far more, many of them just boys. In fact, Hitler lost the war at Bastogne.

I loved Toland's Battle because he tells the story at ground level. By way of thousands of hours of interviews, he keeps his watch and his calendar in mind as he details the story from both sides, having interviewed everyone--the GIs and Tommies and Wehrmacht. Stories weave around and through the battle lines. Enlisted men and draftees appear, disappear, then appear again and again until Hitler is beaten. Belgian and Luxembourgian civilians are treated as the battle-scarred veterans they were, their towns and village hamlets beaten into dusty madness. Toland's Battle is war, up close-and-personal, no holds barred, bloody and damnable. 

And when it's over, Toland pounds the pulpit. He makes the case he's already made: the American soldier was the hero at the Bulge, not because he wanted to be, not because he was fighting for flag or freedom or anything else all that glorious. 

His love of luxury made him a poor soldier in his first moments of battle. But in the Bulge, he soon learned that there was only one way to survive: he had to fight. And he fought, not for political or ideological reasons, but for his life. 

It's a stunning appraisal, really, a view of battle that makes "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" feel more than a little tinny. All that suffering and all that horror in the frozen woods at Argonne was, Toland says, just a matter of sheer survival. 

"With all its obvious faults the United States Army in World War II was a powerful, democratic army," he writes. It survived immense weaknesses that grew from its own inexperience. "Many of its officers were fumbling and incompetent," he says. "But the school of battle soon destroyed or winnowed most of these. The army that won the Battle of the Bulge and raced through Germany was hard and tough--run by hard and tough men."

After close to 400 hundred pages of hand-to-hand combat, of atrocities (on both sides), of frozen limbs and amputations, Toland's commendations had me convinced: at the Battle of the Bulge, American boys became fighting men, killers. They won the battle. They won the war.

There are likely other views, but John Toland takes his stand right there, and it's the only close-up of the Battle of the Bulge that I've read. 

Finished it on a Friday. 

Then, at church on Sunday, the sermon text was the Beatitudes, a system of justice and righteousness light years afar, a reminder, once again, of how wildly radical Jesus the Savior was. And is.

Kent Haruf's sweet novel, Benediction, includes a woe-be-gone preacher whose life is in shambles and is almost universally hated by Holt, Colorado, the small town Haruf loves. At the start of the Iraq War, the new preacher in town opens up the Bible to the Beatitudes--and is hounded out of town.

I'll admit I really liked John Toland's Battle. At 72, I'm not sure exactly how to love the Beatitudes.