On December 16, 1944, a stealthily assembled German army with more than 2,000 tanks and guns struck westwards where the Allied commanders least expected, through the snowbound valleys of the heavily wooded Ardennes region of south-east Belgium.
It was a last, desperate gamble by the Führer, designed to capture the vital port of Antwerp, bisect the Allied armies and win a quick peace settlement with Germany’s western enemies so he could concentrate on advancing Russians in the east.
No one but Hitler could have been daft enough to order it. The snow was thick, the frost unbearable. The Nazis had almost no air cover and were so short of fuel their battle plans relied on capturing supplies from their foes. Yet for a few tantalising days it seemed that they might succeed.
Their target was chosen: the soft centre of the Allied line, lightly guarded by a few battle-weary units and untried rookies. Bad weather initially grounded the Allies’ fighter-bombers and a combination of surprise, courage and dirty tricks saw the Panzer divisions advance so swiftly that they created a 50-mile indentation in the Allied line, from which the “Battle of the Bulge” soon got its name.
Within days Allied resistance rallied, the skies cleared, the Panzers’ fuel started to run dry and the tide inexorably began to turn. By the end of January the “bulge” was closed but up to 100,000 men on each side were dead, wounded or taken prisoner.
For the Americans, who bore the brunt, it was the deadliest action of the war. But for the Germans it spelled disaster, a costly loss of men and tanks they could not afford.
Relics of the battle survive throughout the Ardennes and there is hardly a village without a plaque to some heroic action, scarcely a town without a Sherman tank plonked proudly in the square.
In Bastogne, the square (complete with Sherman tank) was renamed after Brigadier General McAuliffe, commander of the US 101st Airborne Division which reinforced the strategically vital town. When surrounded and called upon to surrender, McAuliffe famously retorted with perhaps the tersest communiqué in military history: “Nuts!” You can visit the underground command post where he said it at Bastogne Barracks.
Bastogne’s new War Museum is a tour de force, with “flashback” areas where you can experience a bombardment in a café cellar. The town’s 101st Airborne Museum and the Bastogne Ardennes 44 Museum are also much admired.
The few miles around Bastogne are packed with Bulge-related sites. The titanic Mardasson memorial is Belgium’s hymn of praise to its American saviours. Shaped like a five-pointed star it’s a history lesson in stone, with accounts of the battle carved on the massive walls.
101st Airborne included Easy Company, real-life heroes of Steven Spielberg’s Band of Brothers, and in the woods of Bois Jacques near Foy you can still see the “foxholes” they dug for protection. There’s a very different wood at nearby Bizory, the Wood of Peace, planted in 1994 in the shape of the Unicef symbol of a mother and child.
North of Bastogne is Houffalize, where almost 200 civilians were killed by American bombing and where the American 1st and 3rd Armies finally closed off the Bulge on January 16. The main relic is a German Mark V Panther tank – a rare survival, but matched by more Panthers at Celles and Grandmenil.
British involvement in the battle was more limited, but the pretty town of La Roche-en-Ardenne was recaptured on January 11 by the 51st Highland Division. Lovingly rebuilt since the war, it also has the only museum in the region mostly dedicated to British forces, the Battle of the Bulge Museum.
The brave Scots are also commemorated on a memorial above the town, where there is a rare Achilles “tank destroyer” (self-propelled anti-tank gun). A few miles away at Hotton is the Commonwealth War Cemetery with the graves of 600 British and Commonwealth servicemen.
Baugnez, near Malmedy, on the northern edge of the Bulge, was the scene of the battle’s most infamous episode: the shooting in cold blood of 84 American prisoners by an elite SS Panzer unit commanded by 29-year-old Lt Col Jochen Peiper. The admirable Baugnez 44 Historical Centre has all the details.
You can still eat at the café where survivors of the massacre were sheltered by the patron, and at the Hôtel du Moulin in nearby Ligneuville, where Peiper’s officers coolly ate the breakfasts abandoned by fleeing Americans. Peiper was finally stopped at La Gleize, where the December ’44 Historical Museum has some fine exhibits, notably one of the colonel’s 69-ton King Tiger tanks.
Peiper’s defeat effectively ended German hopes of a breakthrough. But their grim legacy remains. At St Vith, almost flattened during the battle, the rebuilt main square displays pictures reminding visitors of the catastrophic damage. At nearby Poteau, the privately-run ’44 Museum is housed in a former customs house whose roof timbers are still charred from wartime fires.
Just up the lane from Poteau, a stone tablet marks the spot where an American unit of armoured cars was ambushed on December 18. The Germans filmed the attack for propaganda, creating memorable images of the battle. The fields are peaceful again now – so quiet you can almost hear the ghosts.
Download a Battle of the Bulge tourist guide at http://pdf.opt.be/pdf/en/BAT60.pdf
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