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.

Well written but not a comprehensive history of the Bulge; many military units were either left out or covered only slightly. Still, it’s readability and perspective were top notch.

Excellent book, well written. My parents read it and recommended but their volume is lost. Dad fought in the Battle of the Bulge so I really wanted to read. Just wish there were more maps.

John Toland's work on this absolutely fantastic book is simply superlative. Critical acclaim is nearly universal for this gripping, accurate, and well-told story of the greatest American victory over the Germans during WWII and the only large-scale offensive battle ever fought during the winter, the worst in Europe is some fifty years. Toland veers from the usual historian's path by telling the story in terms of the foot soldier both on the ground and on the defensive against the final counterattack of the Wehrmacht with over a thousand tanks (including many of the new tougher Tiger and Panther models) and more than 250,000 battle-hardened soldiers. Against them were just three full strength (and very green and inexperienced) American divisions with some reserves regiments composed of more experienced soldiers in the heavily wooded and almost impassable woods of the Ardennes forest area. Eisenhower's logistics support was strung out and unable to adequately supply the broad-based front that had evolved after the initial breakout from D-Day. Consequently, it was difficult to arm and support all the troops, and amazingly, Hitler's masterful attack struck exactly at the single weakest point along the line. The result was a complete but temporary disaster, but one that pitted poorly equipped, armed, and clothed U.S. Army troops against a much larger, better armed, clothed and equipped enemy who was striking with blitzkrieg speed and effectiveness. What happened in those woods is the stuff of history, and is commonly referred to as the Battle of the Bulge. The simple truth of the matter is that American troops simply outfought, outlasted, and outsmarted their German opponents in a deadly game of attrition and standoffs in the worst possible weather and cold conditions. Those who like to say the Americans (along with the Allies) won the war largely because we simply out manned and out supplied tour opponents had better take a good look at how well we also outfought them in the Ardennes generally and at Bastogen in particular when we had none of those advantages. Outgunned, out manned, and outflanked, the Americans simply fought back with murderous ferocity and beat the Germans to a bloody pulp. This is truly a great book; it is easily the best single volume yet published covering the Battle of the Bulge in detail. I must admit that I do also like John Eisenhower's "The Bitter Woods" and Stephen Ambrose's "Citizen Soldiers" as well. Both of these are excellent books, built neither measures up to the sheer brilliance of "Battle". So, amigo, for the one most exciting, best reading, and painfully accurate and detailed account of the single greatest successful encounter of the U.S. Army against the might of the Wehrmacht during World War Two, I recommend this book. In my humble opinion no one really has a complete WWII library without it.

A really good book on the ardennes offensive. A must for military history fans.