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.
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