He dreamed of the glorious spring of 1940, when his war machine, full of the fuel of triumph, hammered like a hundred thousand Thors out of the Ardennes and then onward to the sea, cutting Allied forces in two. Hitler was thinking, dreaming and plotting all of that. in the Ardennes sector where a single corps, the 8th American, of four divisions, held a front of 75 miles.' But the Allies weren't thinking Ardennes, weren't thinking defense the last thing they were thinking was defeat and mad enemy offensives. Especially was this true, as Winston Churchill wrote in Triumph and Tragedy, 'in the weak center. The conquering Allies had closed menacingly toward the German border along a thousand-mile front, a front too broad not to have weak spots. An intelligence colonel, so out of touch with the upbeat spirit of the day as to predict a serious attack impending in the Ardennes, was advised to go to Paris - take a rest, have fun. Data was gathered, but even the few who began to see the threat in the picture were not taken seriously. He was raising something else: an old-time thunder-and-lightning blitzkrieg force of such stunning power and numbers that it was beyond the interpretive grasp of those piecing together the Allied intelligence picture. Indeed, in a Germany seemingly staggering backward on punched-out legs, Hitler raised some 700,000 new recruits, many of them too old and too young, but most of them still believers. Despite their reverses both in the west and east since the Normandy invasion in June, the morale of the German people, well-insulated with propaganda and blind faith in their Führer, was still high in the autumn of 1944. There was the man named Adolf Hitler, for one. Thus spoke Monty, and who in the glow of optimism of that time was willing to say he was wrong? His situation is such that he cannot stage any major offensive operations.' George Patton and his tanks came crunching and skidding through the ice and snow to rescue the 'Battered Bastards' of Bastogne, some 76,890 Americans were dead, missing forever, wounded or taken prisoner,īefore all that, such was the confidence of the Allies that Montgomery had just the day before given his all-is-well situation report to a group of colleagues: 'The enemy is at present fighting a defensive campaign on all fronts. When the action that wasn't was over, after U.S.

Battle of the bulge tanks photos