Rich Lowry:
What’s merry about all this, you ask?”
Thus began a Christmas Eve message from General Anthony McAuliffe to his troops besieged at the Belgium town of Bastogne. Adolf Hitler had launched a desperate counteroffensive against the allies in the West in December 1944. As described in the book No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne, the town became a linchpin of the Battle of the Bulge.
Hitler hoped to split the Allied armies and retake the crucial harbor at Antwerp. His attack through the Ardennes forest, accompanied by a withering artillery barrage, caught the Allies by surprise and met with initial success.
But he needed Bastogne, a crossroads that General Dwight Eisenhower quickly decided must be held.
The American general rushed the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) to the town, together with other units. Seventy years ago, the heroes of Bastogne, or, as they were fondly dubbed, “the battered bastards of Bastogne,” spent Christmas breaking the advance of the German army in one of the most storied fights in American history.
It is Bastogne that gives us some of the great statements of American military defiance. When the Germans demanded surrender of his forces, Generl McAuliffe shot back with his famous rejoinder, “NUTS!” A soldier’s quip captured the spirit of the American defenders: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”
The bravado shouldn’t obscure the dire conditions. The Americans were undersupplied and outnumbered. The weather was miserable, frigid and snowy, with cloud cover denying the Allies their advantage in the air.
This had been the case for weeks, leading to General George Patton’s famous prayer, reading in part: “Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies.”
When the weather cleared on December 23, Allied planes attacked the German forces on the ground and dropped supplies to the besieged at Bastogne. As Christmas approached, the Americans scratched out what cheer they could. On Christmas Eve, an American officer wrote “Merry Christmas” on a map showing the Americans surrounded. There was a Christmas service, appropriately enough, in a stable, and one at an ancient chapel.
But they were still under mortal threat, and many Americans assumed, as the Germans prepared another assault, that they wouldn’t survive Christmas.
