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Ricochetti more accurate than WSJ: Battle of the Bulge
Ricochet’s Jeff Sikkenga has a podcast (The American Idea #50) on the Battle of the Bulge, with Dr. John Moser. In the discussion, Dr. Moser notes that intelligence reports of the massing of German tank units in the center of the Allied lines were dismissed by command officials, including Omar Bradley.
In contrast, Warren Kozak, in an editorial in the WSJ (“My Father at the Battle of the Bulge”), states the following:
“The Battle of the Bulge isn’t as venerated as Iwo Jima or the Normandy landings, but it was the bloodiest battle the US fought in World War II. Between Dec. 16, 1944, and Jan. 25, 1945, more than 19,000 American soldiers were killed. Unlike the other battles, it began as a huge intelligence failure.
“The Allies failed to spot the massive German buildup of 30 divisions with more than 1,000 tanks in the densely wooded Ardennes region–giving the Germans the advantage of complete surprise.”
Dr. Moser is correct: The failure was not an intelligence failure but a command failure. A failure of imagination. A denial of reality developing before the Allied eyes. A refusal to act on, or even acknowledge, the information gathered by intelligence operatives in the lead-up to the battle. It was not an intelligence failure.
One of Patton’s generals, General Koch, later acknowledged the contribution of the intelligence operatives in tracking the German buildup of tank units prior to the Battle of the Bulge. These operatives were called the “Ritchie Boys” (there were Ritchie women as well) because they were trained at Camp Ritchie in Maryland. This group became the precursor to the OSS and the CIA. They were generally recruited for their language capabilities.
One of those intelligence operatives, Hugh Nibley, turned out to be one of my professors in my freshman year of college. He had a PhD from Berkeley in Classics and was teaching at the Claremont colleges at the outset of WWII. He resigned from his position and enlisted as a private. As he was processed, the Army discovered that he spoke fluent German (and was knowledgeable in many other modern and ancient languages–he had something of a fetish for languages and studied Egyptian and Coptic). Nibley was assigned to the 101st Airborne and drove the company jeep onto Utah Beach on D-Day +1 to join his unit. He also rode a glider into Holland as part of Market Garden. Mouse of the stacks that he was, he happened to be in a library in London perusing the stacks. He was in London, apparently, for a debriefing. While he searched the stacks, a group of Montgomery’s generals entered the library and began planning Market Garden. He was not noticed. Nibley ensconced himself in the stacks to avoid detection, as he feared what might happen to him if he were discovered, and listened to the planning. He became an acerbic critic of Market Garden.
As a freshman in college, I had no idea of any of this.
Nibley recounts in his memoirs of WWII (forced out of him by his son) his efforts to alert his superiors (he was a Master Sergeant) to the massing of German tanks in the lead-up to the battle. He spoke Dutch as well as German and obtained the information from Dutch civilians with whom he conversed. Nibley, as was the case with all of his intelligence colleagues, knew every unit in the German Army, and knew exactly whereof he spoke. He was sorely disappointed in the disregard his superiors had for the information he vigorously and assiduously collected. He was painfully aware of the cost in lives that resulted from the refusal of those superiors to act on the information. He became a devout pacifist.
Nibley seemed to have a charmed life during the war. He was slated to fly into Normandy on a glider but was bounced off the flight by a general who demanded a seat. That glider crashed and all aboard were killed, including the General, who was the highest-ranking officer killed on D-Day.
Nibley recounts that he found a piece of sheet steel just before he boarded the glider into Holland, and placed it on his seat. The glider came under fire and there was a line of bullet holes in the fuselage between the seats. No one was hit. When he disembarked from the glider, Nibley found bullet marks in the bottom of the sheet of steel that certainly would have killed him if he had not placed it on his seat.
Nibley was with the 101st Airborne in Bastogne before the battle. He was rotated out just before the fighting began. His replacement was killed when a German shell struck the headquarters building that the replacement was in during the artillery bombardment of Bastogne.
Warren Kozak is a journalist and author. He has worked for NPR and was a writer for television anchors (Ted Koppel, Charles Gibson, Diane Sawyer, Aaron Brown of CNN).
So perhaps it is not such a surprise to find Ricochetti surpassing the WSJ in historic accuracy. Still, kudos to Jeff Sikkenga for his excellent work, and thanks for his guest’s expertise.
And, given the fact of the command failure that cost so many lives, is it any wonder the Battle of the Bulge is not remembered in quite the same fashion as is Iwo Jima or the D-Day landings?
The valor of the soldiers was, of course, fully on par—perhaps even more remarkable—with those battles, fought in the dead of winter, with no preparation and general confusion. They held.
Published in General
By the time of the buildup to the Bulge began, high-level command had developed an over-reliance on the intelligence obtained via the Ultra project decoding German radio communications. The specifics weren’t shared for fear of alerting the Germans that their encryption system had been breached, but generalized information (“expect an attack in this sector”) was generally very good. But the German buildup had been conducted under radio silence. Indeed, units who had been pulled out of the line elsewhere were sent there to rest and refit because the sector had been quiet and was expected to remain so. The Ardennes Offensive thus came as more surprising than it might have been.
To the question “was it an intelligence failure or a command failure” the answer is “both.”
That strikes me as quite bizarre.
Now, if you can make the OTHER GUY a pacifist, then you’ve got something.
He was disgusted at the arrogance and incompetence of the generals on our side, and at their cavalier (in his view) sacrifice of lives unnecessarily. He felt the losses from the Battle of the Bulge were entirely avoidable.
He was a professor at BYU, which is where I did my undergraduate work. Taking his class was like trying to get a drink of water from a fire hose so vast and rapid was the torrent of information he covered in his lectures.
In the Spring of 1971 the Young Republicans brought John Wayne to campus to screen and discuss his movie, the Green Berets. The campus was aflame with support for the Vietnamese War, and the most popular mantra was “No Substitute for Victory.” BYU was a very conservative campus. That week a letter from Dr. Nibley appeared in the student newspaper, beginning with a quote from Isaiah: They shall beat their swords into ploughshares and practice war no more.
What followed was a resounding condemnation of war generally, from a religious perspective, and the Vietnamese war in particular. That letter provoked a torrent is student responses condemning professor Nibley. At that time, and for decades thereafter, none of us students had any idea what Nibley had done during WWII.
Nibley had been in Germany before the War as a young Mormon missionary. He had been in Karlsruhe then. His postwar time in Europe included a drive through that city, which had been fire bombed to ashes. He also visited Pforsheim, which had also been firebombed with 30,000 civilians incinerated. Nibley mentions that he discussed the firebombing of Pforsheim with the mayor of that city.
He was trained in the high German method of the Classics at Berkeley. One can only imagine his response to the devastation. He may well have had a bit of PTSD. His experiences were not far removed from those of Kurt Vonnegut, though he was never a POW.
For me , reading his memoir of his war experiences, after having experienced the campus events in 1971, was a sobering experience indeed.
Right. As they say, “War is hell, don’t start one (Germany).”
WE aren’t the ones who should or need to be pacifists.
These days, it’s “Make Gazans pacifists, and there’ll be no war.” Back then, “Make Germans pacifists, and there’ll be no war.”
Over the weekend I watched the Billy Wilder film A Foreign Affair, set in 1947 Berlin, featuring a lot of footage of the destroyed city. From the trivia on the IMDB page:
The Bay of Pigs is Exhibit A for an organizational structure that did not permit adverse info from rising to the top. The rise of “yes men” is a deadly form of organizational vascular disease or even cancer.
It is not just a military phenomenon. When I did lobbying work, my clients were part of a number of business group coalitions centered on particular issues. The reps for a certain large manufacturing corporation would offer politically impractical proposals with great zeal and we came to understand that in their organization, sending bad news/reality feedback back up the channels to the leadership was greatly discouraged. The CEO and his immediate subordinates apparently had a set view on how Congress will act and what the best course of action should be and the failure to agree–even it was nominally one’s job to be the eyes and ears on site on Capitol Hill and report the facts–was forbidden.
Peace through strength. Talk softly and carry a big stick. All of that. When we fiddle, the world doesn’t just burn, but explodes. Gaza attacked due to US support for Iran. Russia attacked as Biden wrung his hands and all but egged him on. Joe was almost giddy with Russia’s attack on Ukraine. Now of course he is claiming credit for Assad’s fall because of the Russian attack on Ukraine, and the Hamas attack on Israel. Assad fell because Turkey rightly concluded that Biden would do nothing and now are likely to attack the Syrian Kurds before Trump takes office. Trump got the Turks to back off the Kurds last time. Any attack on the Kurds now will be a problem for us and NATO. And China may invade Taiwan before Biden is gone.We’ll be lucky if that does not happen. Putin may go wild in Eastern Europe before Biden leaves. I fear the world is on the brink.
Good luck making Putin, Islamic terrorists, or Xi or Un pacifists. Only way to do that without war is through overwhelming military superiority that adversaries know we can and will use if necessary. And that once engaged, they will be completely destroyed in the fastest way possible. And that they have no chance of prevailing, or even inconveniencing us. That is, unfortunately, not the state of affairs at this time. To the contrary. The only thing keeping the Middle East contained to a degree now is Israeli capacity and Israeli resolve.