Warfare and military history

The Key to the Bulge — Stephen M. Ruseicki

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Snow & Steel


The Key to the Bulge: The Battle for Losheimergraben
Stephen M. Ruseicki
195 pages including notes
published in 1996

A visit to the Bastogne War Museum when I was on a holiday in the Ardennes last October got me interested in the Battle of the Bulge again, as did the series WW2TV did on the campaign in December. Their interview with Peter Caddick-Adams on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know led me to read his excellent book on the campaign as a whole. Which in turn whet my appetite for more on the individual battles within the Ardennes Campaign. Military history like all history is fractal after all. You can get a broad overview but if you zoom in you get a lot more detail, new insights. Which is where this book comes in. With Snow and Steel I got the broad strokes of the Ardennes Campaign, with this I got an overview of one of the most important of the early battles in it, one that could be argued determined the outcome of the entire Ardennes Offensive…

That battle was the battle for Losheimergraben, then, as now, a small border crossing between Belgium and Germany, too small even to call a village. In December 1944 this was the front line, the furthest point reached by the great Allied breakout from Normandy earlier that year. Since then the front line in the Ardennes had been largely static; the real fighting continued further up north, in the Netherlands and around Aachen. The Ardennes itself was quiet, an ideal sector to introduces green troops to life at the front and blood them before they got thrown into real battle. Losheimergraben and neighbouring places like Lanzerath were held by such troops, the 394th Infantry Regiment of the 99th infantry Division. It was these troops that would hold out for thirty-six hours against the Sixth Panzer Army starting on the 16th of December, denying it the quick victory it needed to comply to its already impossible schedule.

Hitler’s original idea behind the Ardennes Offensive was to repeat the success of May 1940, when Germany’s panzers broke through the “impenetrable” Ardennes and split the Allied forces in two, ultimately sealing the fate of France and driving the British from the continent. This time his strategic aim was the same, but aimed at seizing Antwerp, denying the Allies its use and splitting up the British and American forces. There are however relatively few passages through these mountains that are usable by armour, of which the so-called Losheim Gap, also used in 1940, is one. Grabbing Losheimergraben, where an east-west road from Germany into Belgium intersects the main north-south road in the Ardennes, was to be the first step in the German drive through this gap. From there the goal was to drive the panzers forward into Bullingen, to Malmedy and beyond to cross the Meuse. Once the Meuse crossings had been made the panzer armies could drive onto Antwerp and victory. But it all depended on seizing those border crossings and seizing them quickly and that would be a job for the infantry.

The American defenses in this crucial sector, as they were all across the Ardennes, were light. Because it was regarded as a quiet sector, not only was it considered an excellent sector to bleed green troops in, it also meant fewer troops were stationed there in the first place. Which meant individual divisions had to defend larger pieces of the front line than was recommended. The 99th Infantry Division therefore had little in the way of reserves, needing all three of its regiments to remain in line to cover the entirety of what it was responsible for. Worse, it was stationed on the border with another army corps, with Lanzerath and the Losheim Gap right on the border, barely covered by any American soldiers. This is the stage on which those initial German attacks happened on the 16th of December. Yet despite being outnumbered and surprised, the inexperienced men of the 394th regiment of the 99th division held out for more than a day against the German onslaught. How was this possible?

As Ruseicki describes it, it’s clear the tenacity and sheer dogged will of these American soldiers to resist played a big role. they may have been green, but they were well trained, their morale was good and they weren’t going to just roll over. Making good use of their defences they held back the enemy as long as they could before withdrawing in good order to a new defensive line. Ultimately they were never broken and the Germans never quite managed to break through, the offensive stalled almost from the start. Looking at it from the German side, it’s clear that they had problems even had their opponents been a pushover. The obsession to keep the offensive a secret meant little preparation and with no reconnaissance allowed, they had no idea what they were walking into. Having soldiers that on the whole turned out to be just as green as the Americans, but far less well trained, didn’t help either. If reading this you are reminded of how Russia’s currently bungling its war on Ukraine, you’re not the only one…

This was an interesting look at one of the opening battles of the Ardennes Offensive. Ruseicki describes the action well without being overtly dramatic. A good example, well explained, of how small scale battles can impact a wider offensive.

Snow & Steel — Peter Caddick-Adams

Warfare and military history
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Snow & Steel: the Battle of the Bulge 1944 – 45
Peter Caddick-Adams
872 pages including notes and index
published in 2014

Nuts!

The story of the Bulge should be familiar. Hitler’s last roll of the dice, an offensive that nobody expected. The goal: to split the western allies apart by reconquering Antwerp. Elite panzers racing through the Ardennes, reliving the glory days of May 1940, expecting little resistance from the outnumbered and inexperienced American forces stationed there. the allied airfoces, grounded by bad weather and unable to come to the rescue. The unexpected resistance and Hitler’s hopes smashed at Bastogne, when after an imperious demand to surrender now the town was surrounded, the commanding American officer responded with a simple “Nuts!”

It’s a great story, a story the town of Bastogne dines out on to this very day. When I was there on holiday last October literally every second shop window had something about the siege in its display. It also has the benefit of being mostly true. But it isn’t the entire truth of the Ardennes Offensive, or Peter Caddick-Adams wouldn’t have needed almost nine hundred pages to tell its story. There were other sieges beside Bastogne, other places where American resistance held up the Nazi attack long enough for it to ultimately fail, other tales of heroism and tragedy to be told. Arguably, one could say that the fate of the offensive had been determined long before Bastogne had even been reached. Similarly, the story didn’t end when the siege of Bastogne was lifted. There was more hard fighting to be done, fighting which lasted into January and February of 1945.

It’s Snow & Steel‘s ambition to tell the entire story of the Battle of the Bulge, knowing full well it’s impossible to do so. As the author himself has admitted, the air war for example is barely covered in this book. Similarly, some important battles are barely touched upon, some phases of the campaign less exhaustively treated than others. What Snow & Steel instead provide is as good as possible an overview of the campaign as a whole, set in context of both what gave birth to it and how it in turn impacted the rest of the war. Not only that, Caddick-Adams also looks at its impact after the war, on the people that fought in it but also those who sought to learn from its lessons. He himself has a background in the (Cold War) UK military and knows from first-hand experience how the Ardennes Offensive was studied to prepare for the expected Soviet attack on West Germany.

The first third of the book therefore is all about establishing the context in which the offensive took place, why it was planned and how it was planned. The conventional idea about the Ardennes Offensive is that Hitler thought it up on September 16th, when he announced it to the commanders who would lead the operation. As Caddick-Adams shows though, Hitler had from almost the start of the fighting in Normandy aimed for a decisive counterattack against the Anglo-American forces landed there, there had been attempts to do so but ultimately it wasn’t until the Germans had been driven out of France and Belgium that there was an opportunity to do so. Once the situation had stabilised, both the target of Antwerp as the Ardennes as the sector to attack through made sense. Antwerp was the closest harbour to the front the Allies had, only recently opened. Without it, supplies needed to come all the way from Normandy and Bretagne again and it was this logistic strain that had stopped Allied progress in the first place. Doing it through the Ardennes, repeating the success of May 1940 made sense both psychological as military. It was a quiet sector, undermanned and with a number of green divisions just arrived in theatre. If it could be done by surprise and if it could count on the absence of Allied air support, the operation had a chance of succeeding, at least in its initial goal, crossing the Meuse.

Not that many of the actual commanders believed that was possible, let alone reaching Antwerp, but this was 1944 and Hitler was in no mood for dissent after having almost been killed in a Wehrmacht plot. A more realistic plan would’ve been to try and encircle the American troops in the Ardennes and at the border with Germany, to try and destroy 15-20 divisions that way to buy time to prepare the defence of Germany, but that was rejected. To be fair, such a success wouldn’t have mattered much, only postponed the inevitable. Only if Hitler’s plan succeeded and had the effect of tearing apart the western allies would Germany have a chance at a negotiated peace. As Caddick-Adams shows, this was an idle hope. Both the goal and the effects it would have were unrealistic. Even getting to the Meuse, basically the start line for the drive to Antwerp would require a miracle, everything going to plan and the Allied responding exactly like Hitler wanted them to. But it didn’t and they didn’t and by the end of the first day it was already clear that it would not work.

Ironically it might have been the paranoid security measures Hitler insisted on to keep the operation a secret that both made it such a surprise to the Allies and led to its ultimate failure. For various reasons, the usual intelligence the Allies relied upon were already less effective now the enemy was in its homeland. No need for encrypted radio broadcasts if you can use your secure telephone lines for example. At the same time, the actual participants in the operation were kept in the dark as long as possible. Initially only the highest commanders of the offensive were in the loop, while the average soldier was only informed just before the offensive started. There was little opportunity therefore for anybody to spill the secret, but it also meant the troops were ill prepared for the actual fight. Worse, with Hitler forbidding reconnaissance efforts or anything that could give away the game, the Germans were also much less informed about the Allied positions and strengths than you would’ve wanted to be.

When it comes to the actual battle, it becomes clear almost from the start that it would fail. Initial resistance is much harder than the Germans realised and the highly optimistic targets for the first day are reached almost nowhere. Worse, the Allied response is much quicker than Hitler had anticipated. Much of the credit for that Caddick-Adams gives to Eisenhouwer, who acted decisively from day one to get reinforcements to the front and to get the shoulders of the offensive stabilised in order to counter attack. With the failure to get through the Ardennes as quickly as was needed to be able to cross the Meuse and start the true offensive, the fighting became a war of attrition which the Germans would always lose. Ultimately it set the Allies’ plans for the invasion of Germany back a couple of months, but in return many of the elite troops and weapons they would’ve faced otherwise had already been destroyed in the Bulge.

I started reading this book because I went on holiday to the Ardennes with my family, visiting the Bastogne War Museum there, but also because of the excellent series of Battle of the Bulge programmes the Youtube channel WW2TV ran in early December. If you want to get a taste of Peter Caddick-Adams writing, then watch the presentation he did for that channel on 10 Facts about the Battle of the Bulge everyone should know. I really like the methological way Caddick-Adams sets out his vision on the Offensive and why it was doomed to failure in this book and if you want a one volume overview of the campaign this is the one to get. I would however recommend that you keep both Wikipedia and Google Maps handy to look up things, because it can be a bit confusing at times. Viewing the battlefields on Google Maps gives a better grasps at the geography and flow of the battles, while Wikipedia is handy to look up some of the less explained details.

Nuclear Nightmares — Nigel Calder

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Nuclear Nightmares


Nuclear Nightmares: an Investigation into Possible Wars
Nigel Calder
168 pages including index
published in 1979

To distract myself from the current state of the covid-19 ravaged world, I read this cheery little treatise on the machinery for nuclear war. Many many years ago, sometime in the early eighties, I bought the Dutch edition for a guilder at a church fair. And boy was it worth it: I had nightmares for years. Not that you needed much to have nuclear nightmares in the early eighties; if you ever wonder why late Gen-Xers and early millennials are so cynical, it’s because we grew up with the idea that the nuclear holocaust could happen every minute just because some world leader was a bit too gung ho. Or some seemingly small mistake makes the Soviets think an American missile barage is on its way and this time there isn’t a junior officer brave enough to wait for confirmation before he launches a counterstrike…

But that is not the nightmare that Nigel Calder sketches in this book. His is a technocratic world, a world of rational men tending carefully balanced machinery designed to deliver megadeath on the enemy. Men who do not want to murder millions of people, but who will do so if and when it is asked of them. A world full of acronym littered dry, bureaucratic language that conceals the existentialist horror at the heart of it. An orderly world that calmly makes plan to destory or cripple the enemy’s ability to wage nuclear war, that worries about the vulnerability of MIRVED Minutemen III and whether they were safe enough and good enough to hit back at the Soviets after a first strike. Can we depend on the survivability of our systesm to give our leaders time enough to think about whether they want to strike back?

And then no two years later you got a fake cowboy in the White House talking about the Evil Empire, mentally disintegrating on the job and joking on live tv that the bombs will drop in five minutes. All while promoting implausible future wonderwaffen that would make America safe from nuclear attack forever.

And on the other side, a succesion of half dead paranoid survivors of Stalin convinced the west could and would attack them any minute. For all the Western hawks worrying about Soviet plans for world domination, more concerned with Dmitri in Leningrad finally getting a fridge and colour television, but worried that the imperialistic west was plotting to abuse a period of weakness.

But even when Calder was writing his book, he was chronicling an illusion. The neat, orderly world of calm dispassionate technocrats making brilliant plans for the end of the world was fake. The reality is shown in a much more recent book, Eric Schlosser’s Command and Control. In reality, there were at least half a dozen incidents in which an American nuclear weapon would’ve detonated on American ground but for a bit of luck, where nuclear bombs are safeguarded with nothing more than a simple bicycle lock, where instead of intricate control mechanisms and the decision to launch made only at the highest level, any Italian soldier could’ve launched a leased American nuclear missile because there were no safeguards.

In hindsight, I’m not sure if Schlosser’s reality wouldn’t have frightened me more than Calder’s already terrifying portrait of a mechanism that could sleepwalk into nuclear war. What comforts me is that the actual military commanders involved at the time seemed to think a nuclear war would never happen, that the entire idea of the Cold War turning hot was a fantasy. Just read the reactions of senior Warsaw Pact commanders (PDF) to the idea of actually going to war and how likely that had been. If only I had know that in 1984, having nightmares every time the news was about arms limitation negotiations or tensions in Europe.

Of course, within a decade this whole system would be obsolete, that existential threat vanquished, the whole complex revealed to be irrelevant, as the people of Eastern Europe rose up and overthrow those seemingly invincible ‘socialist’ dictatorships. That seventies idea that the only choice the world had was between an uneasy detente between twho hostile systems or nuclear annihilation that sets the tone for Calder’s book was shown up to be false by the actions of ordinary people, completely powerless to do what it was built for, safeguard the existence of its masters’ world system.

The late 1970s were a strange time, the Soviet Union slowly rotting from the inside out while the lunatics of Team B –the people who thirty years later would bring you the War on Iraq — were busy screaming their heads off that America was doomed because the commies were so much better armed and so much more ruthless. All that was fake, but at the time we didn’t know better. All the clever clogs and military commentators really thought that the West was losing the Cold War, that our vulnerabilities meant a nuclear war was inevitable if we didn’t want to go Red. So much of eighties pop culture is steeped in that American paranoia, from Red Dawn to Pournelle’s CoDominion stories where detente was interstellar. Meanwhile here in Europe we grew up knowning our towns were just a megaton apart from each other and we were busy cataloging the likely nuclear targets near our home towns.

A real great time to grow up in. Never thought I’d make it to adulthood, but here we are.

Furies — Lauro Martines

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Furies


Furies: War in Europe 1450 – 1700
Lauro Martines
320 pages, including index
published in 2013

A lot of history books about war and warfare, even when they look at the impact war had on wider society, on the civilians and soldiers caught up in it, are remarkably clinical and dry about the violence it brings with it. Not so Furies: War in Europe 1450 – 1700. Before it’s good and well started, you get the first grizly massacre to process, no horrid detail spared, all the better to prepare you for the rest of the book. This is not an easy read, not your average military history wankfest, this is a book with a message and that message is that war in Early Modern/Renaissance Europe was hell, a total war where nobody cared if you lived or died.

That period from roughly 1450 to 1700 was one in which a military revolution took place, with Europe emerging from feudalism and war as a noble pursuit for knights and aristocrats giving way to mass warfare by any means necessary. It was a revolution brought about through the introduction of gundpower weapons making possible new ways of making war, as well as the growing strength of the emerging European nation-states. Add to that increasing religious schism and you have a recipe for warfare on an apocalyptic scale and Martines is not afraid to show what that meant on the ground, for the people caught up in the war.

The first chapter therefore is a mosaic of war waged across the period, showcasing the horrors of war. It’s beat after beat of violence and horror, laid out in quick scenes, foreshadowing the themes of the other chapters. It’s not as intense as some of the descriptions Martines offers in later chapters, but still makes for uncomfortable reading. If you get queasy reading this, the rest of the book is not for you.

In his introduction Martines puts forward his thesis of the armies of this period as “frail monsters”, prone to melt away through desertion, disease or lack of pay. That last one especially. As armies got bigger and bigger and wars more expensive, states ran their ability to finance them right to the ragged edge and quite often the soldiers in the field were the last to be fed, let alone paid. Which in turn meant they were that much more likely to plunder their way around the country, whether or not it was their own or the enemy’s. Indeed they were expected to live off the land, as the required infrastructure to feed what was arguably a mobile town on a level with the largest cities in Europe of that time just wasn’t there.

Most soldiers at the time being professionals anyway, an Europe wide brotherhood of mercenaries, with little love for the countries and princes they nominally fought for. Of course, a great many of those professionals didn’t exactly volunteer to become soldiers, but had been forcibly drafted. Whether professional or drafted, as soldiers they were subjected to what was in theory a strict discipline, with harsh punishments for ill discipline and especially desertion, but with enforcement sporadic.

Harsh through life in the army was though, Martines makes it very clear life for any unhappy civilian caught in the army’s claws was much worse. Whether trapped in a siege, or forced to house soldiers in your village, or just robbed, raped and killed, civilians almost always came out worse when encountering soldiers. They did occassionally get their own back though; any wounded soldiers left behind when an army moved on would surely be killed once it was out of sight.

After the first chapter, Furies moves from subject to subject through European history, looking at the sacking of cities, sieges, how armies are like mobile, dying cities in this period, plunder, the fate of villages in the path of an army, the growing influence of religion in war, weapons & princes and the emergence of the state, not necessarily in that order. Throughout it Martines emphasises the suffering and violence war meant, without becoming prurient.

Apart from wanting to foreground the suffering war brought with it, Martines also wants to show how war made the state, how the need for princes to grow their armies also meant the power of the state grew with it. As countries searched for the edge in financing their tax structures were strengthened, as princes had to command their armies more the power of their aristocracy lessened. The chaos that war created helped the state in this respect, as long as it wasn’t consumed by it.

Furies is ultimately only an introduction to a complex subject, as Martines himself is the first to admit. What I liked most about it was its point of view, never shying away from the reality on the ground. It’s a much needed corrective to some of the more bloodless academic treasises covering the same subject.

Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 — Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle

Warfare and military history
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Cover of Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945


Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945
Tom Jentz & Hilary Doyle
48 pages
published in 1993

Osprey is one of the largest publishers of war nerd and wargaming nerd books in the world, publishing books since 1969. They pulbish roughly a dozen series, each focusing on a specific range of military subject; the New Vanguard series in which this was published is about military equipment and vehicles, but not airplanes. Kingtiger Heavy Tank 1942-1945 was the first book published in it and set the tone for the series.

The focus here is on the machine, not so much on how it was used, so there are a lot of pages about the development of the Tiger II, chronicling the minor and major differences between subvariants. Lots of details about armour thickness and gun lengths and calibres and such. Of course there’s only limited room for this in a 48 page book, much of which is also taken up by the drawings and pictures that are the main attraction, but Tom Jentz and Hilary Doyle are both very thorough writers. It’s only at page 36 that we get to the operational history of the tank.

But of course the main draw, pun intended, of these books is the artwork, in the very capable hands of Peter Sarson. Every New Vanguard book is build around the cut away illustration on the middle pages, but I personally like the three view diagrams on the preceding and following pages better. Sarson gives a good impression of the sheer mass and brute strength of the Tiger II. these are big tanks and they look it.

Much of what’s in this book is only of interest to real war nerds; the emphasis is solely on the machine, not on how it was used let alone the goals it was used for. Jentz and Doyle do a good job of making the design and production history of the Tiger II understandable. They hit the usual notes of the complicated prehistory of the design, with two competing turrets, the Porsche and Henschel, the latter ultimately winning, as well as the teething problems that the relatively quick introduction of the tank caused. They go on to describe in detail the various production variants, followed by the unit history. In the end you have a good overview of the Tiger II’s history, though it’s still only an introduction. A small library has been written about the Tiger II after all.