Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble

by Antony Beevor

From the bestselling author of Stalingrad, Berlin and D-Day, Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble tells the story of the German's ill-fated final stand.

On 16 December, 1944, Hitler launched his 'last gamble' in the snow-covered forests and gorges of the Ardennes. He believed he could split the Allies by driving all the way to Antwerp, then force the Canadians and the British out of the war. Although his generals were doubtful of success, younger officers and NCOs were desperate to believe that their homes and families could be saved from the vengeful Red Army approaching from the east. Many were exultant at the prospect of striking back.

The Ardennes offensive, with more than a million men involved, became the greatest battle of the war in western Europe. American troops, taken by surprise, found themselves fighting two panzer armies. Belgian civilians fled, justifiably afraid of German revenge. Panic spread even to Paris. While many American soldiers fled or surrendered, others held on heroically, creating breakwaters which slowed the German advance.

The harsh winter conditions and the savagery of the battle became comparable to the eastern front. And after massacres by the Waffen-SS, even American generals approved when their men shot down surrendering Germans. The Ardennes was the battle which finally broke the back of the Wehrmacht.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, World War II, War, Military Fiction, Military History, Historical

453 pages, Paperback

First published November 18, 2015

About the author

Sir Antony James Beevor is a British military historian. He has published several popular historical works, mainly on the Second World War, the Spanish Civil War, and most recently the Russian Revolution and Civil War.
Educated at Abberley Hall School, Winchester College, and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, Beevor commanded a troop of tanks in the 11th Hussars in Germany before deciding in 1970 to leave the army and become a writer. He was a visiting professor at Birkbeck, University of London, and the University of Kent. His best-selling books, Stalingrad (1998) and Berlin: The Downfall 1945 (2002), have been acclaimed for their detailed coverage of the battles between the Soviet Union and Germany, and their focus on the experiences of ordinary people. Berlin proved very controversial in Russia because of the information it contained from former Soviet archives about the mass rapes carried out by the Red Army in 1945.
Beevor's works have been translated into many languages and have sold millions of copies. He has lectured at numerous military headquarters, staff colleges and establishments in Britain, the US, Europe, and Australia. He has also written for many major newspapers.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

I grew up a World War II movie junkie, and one of my favorites was Ken Annakin’s The Battle of the Bulge. The movie is a sequel of sorts to the D-Day classic The Longest Day, which Annakin also helped direct. The two movies share a lot of similarities. They are both big, long, World War II epics with sprawling all-star casts. The main difference, besides The Battle of the Bulge being in color, is that The Longest Day strove for historical verity (having been based on Cornelius Ryan’s famous book), while The Battle of the Bulge puts Robert Shaw in a tank and has him attack Telly Savalas in a battle royale for an oil dump.

As a kid, the thing that struck me about The Battle of the Bulge is how badly the Americans got knocked around. At the start, the American officers aren’t paying attention to the German buildup and the soldiers are unprepared. When the attack commences, the German tanks, far superior to their American counterparts, wipe the floor with the good guys. There are German soldiers in American uniforms speaking perfect English and wreaking havoc behind the lines. To top it all off – and despite mainly ignoring the actual reality of the battle – the film depicts the massacre of American troops at Malmédy.

Just as I am about to despair, however, the tide turns. The classic American comeback begins when the character played by James MacArthur (the older, hunkier brother in Annakin’s masterpiece, The Swiss Family Robinson) comes across some dastardly Nazi saboteurs dressed in American uniforms. MacArthur calmly engages the Nazis in conversation, and then in the badass moment of the movie, calls out to one of them: “Does the road to Amblève still lead to Malmédy?” He then blows them away. (Personally, I would’ve liked MacArthur to have wiped them out with a coconut bomb, but I wasn’t asked).

The Battle of the Bulge asks a lot of questions. Questions like, “Why do the Ardennes look like the plains of Spain?” Answer: Because it was filmed there. Or, “Why is Robert Shaw a Nazi?” Answer: Hollywood magic.

The movie fails the history of the battle at every level, but does a decent job – if I’m being charitable – at capturing the ineffable essence of the Bulge, that sense of a moral victory hewn from an overwhelming tactical defeat; of individual heroism in the face of a mass systemic breakdown. It’s a very American battle in that it starts out with utter unpreparedness and ends with the salvaging of dignity and, eventually, outright triumph.

The oddly named Battle of the Bulge (it has nothing to do with the waistlines of the soldiers of any warring nation) began on December 16, 1944, with a desperately powerful offensive by the German Army, which included tough panzer divisions and the feared Waffen-SS. The Nazi blow landed on a weakly defended sector of the Allied lines in the Ardennes region of Belgium. The American troops, under the command of Omar Bradley, were forced to retreat in disarray. Despite the initial breakdown of the American unit-cohesion, enough makeshift commands banded together to fatally slow the Nazi advance. (They were helped by traffic jams and roads turned to mud). Eventually, the Nazi offensive petered out, well short of its Hitler-derived goal of Antwerp. On a map, the totality of the German advance looks like a salient (or bulge) punched into the Allied lines.

Antony Beevor is the latest in a series of authors (including John Toland) to grapple with this intense and fascinating battle. Ardennes 1944 is written in typical Beevor style, which is a good thing. It is unpretentious, solid, conservative and fair in its judgments, and equally balanced between the minutiae of battlefield movement and the experiences of the soldier on the ground. Ardennes 1944 also presents its material in a methodical, day-by-day style. This is extremely helpful in a wide-ranging battle with two major areas of operation (dubbed the Northern and Southern Shoulders) and with so many different tactical units involved.

Beevor previously covered the Allied invasion of Europe in his equally well-written D-Day: The Battle for Normandy. Ardennes 1944 picks up where that book leaves off. Instead of jumping straight into the battle, Beevor helpfully sets the scene. The American and British Armies have broken loose from the hedgerows and liberated France. A drunk and armed Ernest Hemingway is carousing in Paris. Antwerp is in Allied controlled. The end of the war has reached a point of mathematical inevitability. The Allies’ top generals – Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, General Omar Bradley, and Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery – are more concerned with who is going to get the most glory than in actually concluding the war. Montgomery wants his troops to take the lead; Bradley wants that honor to go to his 12th Army Group. As Beevor notes, Marlene Dietrich is also around, wearing a dress so tight she goes without underwear. (She claimed she slept with Patton. She did sleep with James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne). All in all, the Allies believed the Germans a spent force, and were ill prepared for a ferocious counteroffensive.

The introductory chapters also include descriptions of the U.S. First Army’s capture of Aachen and the needless Battle of the Huertgen Forest. (In deciding on the best path to the Rhine, Courtney Hodges decided on the worst possible route, straight into a dense forest that limited Allied air superiority). Simply put, the end results of these battles were to batter the American forces involved, weakening them in the face of a growing German presence on their front.

The secret operation, codenamed Watch on Rhine, was a classic Hitler delusion, designed to split the Anglo-American forces militarily, and rive the Anglo-American-Soviet alliance politically. The result, however, was to split the Anglo-American forces politically (though not fatally), and to leave Eastern Germany woefully unprepared for the titanic Soviet onslaught that began in January 1945. Before getting to that point, the American Army had to face its toughest battle in the European Theater. When it was over, the Americans had suffered 75,482 casualties, including 8,407 men killed. (The British, by contrast, lost 200 men killed, which explains in and of itself why so many Americans were pissed off by Montgomery’s attempts to take command of U.S. forces).

Starting on Saturday, December 16, Beevor devotes a chapter to each day of the battle up until the relief of Bastogne on December 26. He also provides the battle’s follow up, describing Himmler’s Operation Nordwind, and the Allied counteroffensive to flatten the Bulge. Beevor does a fine job describing a complicated engagement, moving from the strategic to the tactical to the personal experience of the soldiers. He walks a fine line in the level of detail to provide. If there’s too much, you’re bound to get bogged down (as I did, in Charles MacDonald’s company-level opus, A Time for Trumpets). If there’s too little, you don’t have a clue how things actually occurred. Here, he does a good job keeping the forest in sight, while regularly zooming in to inspect the trees. Importantly, he never loses sight of the human dimension:

American field hospitals could…be a grisly spectacle. A senior nurse with the Third Army described a ward known as the ‘Chamber of Horrors,’ which stank of ‘gore and sweat and human excretions.’ She recounted a night shift, tending two soldiers who ‘had been dying all day yesterday, and they were dying all right now…One, a private in the infantry, had lost both legs and one hand: he had a deep chest wound and his bowels were perforated by a shell fragment…The other patient was a corporal in a tank outfit. His spinal cord was severed and he was paralyzed from the waist down. His belly was open, and so was his chest.’ Both boys were in a coma, breathing noisily. ‘It’s a good thing their mothers can’t see them when they die,’ she said…

Beevor’s account is helped along by a number of good maps, a map key (important if you didn't go to West Point or Sandhurst), a glossary, a table of military ranks, and an order of battle. He also intersperses the battle narrative with a number of subplots. The zaniest, of course, is the squabbles between Eisenhower, Bradley, and Montgomery. Their petty fights over honors, glory, and fame would almost be funny if the stakes weren’t dead serious to thousands of men. To call them children is an insult to children, because children don’t know better.

Beevor also takes time to cover other worthy topics, including the rampant shooting of prisoners by both sides (most infamously the German slaughter of Americans at Malmédy); the frantic struggle for survival by Belgian civilians caught between two warring armies; and the ill-fated Operation Greif, where English-speaking Germans were dressed in American uniforms, given American equipment, and dropped behind American lines, causing a lot of confusion but achieving no lasting success. Due to this book’s relative brevity, there is sometimes not a lot of room for amplification. Thus, certain topics that Beevor touches on – such as the laudable performance of black units – do not get enough space.

Ardennes 1944 is a sturdy history. It is not written with the Shelby Foote-esque prose of Rick Atkinson’s Liberation Trilogy. And it lacks the provocative opinions put forth by Max Hastings. (That isn’t to say that Beevor doesn’t make his opinions known. He does. He is highly critical of Omar Bradley’s performance, and is consistently irritated – as is most of posterity – by the preening of Montgomery).

The virtues of Ardennes 1944 are in its thoroughness, readability, and dependability. The judgments made in this book are solid, and steer clear of an annoying tendency of modern historians to deprecate the abilities of the Anglo-American armies while celebrating – with a certain touch of gauche reverence – the skill of the German Wehrmacht. There is an ocean of World War II books out in the world. It is a war that will be fought on paper (or on ebooks) for the rest of human time. Antony Beevor’s books have proven to be offerings that stand out in an enormous crowd.

(I received a copy of Ardennes 1944 from Viking in exchange for an honest review).

[Anthony · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Last Gasp

Sir Antony Beevor is one of the most famous historians of the Second World War. When reading his work you can expect quality. His Ardennes 1944 is no different. It is a meticulous and deeply engaging examination of one of WWII’s most famous battles. Known for his ability to blend thorough research with vivid storytelling, Beevor tackles the Battle of the Bulge with a historian’s rigor and a novelist’s eye for detail, capturing the desperation, heroism, and brutal cold that defined this last major German offensive of the war.

Beevor structures the book chronologically, breaking down the complexity of the battle as it unfolded from December 1944 to January 1945. He navigates between the experiences of the high command and the soldiers in the field, giving the reader insight into the often fragmented and chaotic nature of the conflict. This dual focus reveals the contrast between strategic plans and the harrowing on-the-ground reality faced by both Allied and German soldiers.

One of Ardennes 1944 greatest strengths is its balanced portrayal of both sides. Beevor dives into the motivations, challenges, and often bitterly human weaknesses of the German and Allied forces alike. He explores Hitler’s strategic delusions, including the overconfidence that led him to launch an offensive that ultimately sped up Germany’s defeat. Meanwhile, he highlights the Allied response, showing how initial surprise gave way to a tenacious counterattack despite internal miscommunication and a devastating winter landscape. By incorporating firsthand accounts from soldiers and civilians, Beevor makes this history intensely personal, illustrating how the battle reshaped lives and tested morale.

I found that the usual ‘Beevor-style’ anecdotes were present in this book. The poignant tales of young children and innocent Belgium civilians loosing everything and caught in the cross fire and shell explosion. Soldiers suffering horrendous injuries in hellish conditions and of course the bitter cold, which caused frostbite and trench foot in up to 20,000 American soldiers alone. Readers will also be familiar with the personal stories of Major Richard Winters of the 506th infantry division, 101st Airborne, E Company. Famous for the Band of Brothers book and series. From boots on the ground, there is an insight into high command. The relationships, personalities and viewpoints of those at the top such as Allied Commander Dwight D Eisenhower, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery and General George S Patton. The latter who hated Monty and he didn’t even realise!

However, I must warn you that this book is not without its criticisms. Some readers may find Beevor’s level of detail overwhelming, particularly when it comes to military logistics and battle movements. At times, the dense specifics of troop deployments and supply issues can slow the narrative pace. But for many, this depth of analysis only enhances the sense of immersion and provides a fuller understanding of the logistical nightmare that the battle became.

In sum, Beevor’s Ardennes 1944 is an essential read for anyone interested in World War II, military history, or the complexities of leadership under fire. Beevor’s ability to present both the grand scale of war and the intimate experiences of those who fought makes this a memorable and informative account of a battle that tested the resilience of men and machines alike. It’s a demanding but rewarding read, offering a comprehensive look at a critical turning point in the closing months of the war in Europe.

[Dj · Rating 4 out of 5]

There have been truckloads of books on the Battle of the Bulge, so when a new book comes out, sometimes you have to ask, what new can be said about a Battle, or more appropriately a series of Battles, that have been examined and reexamined dozens if not hundreds of times. Well as this book proves, nothing really. Antony Beevor's book doesn't really bring anything new to the table all of the information that is presented has been presented elsewhere. This is not to surprising. Even having said this it isn't wise to just toss aside a book because it brings no new facts to the table. In this case while it presents nothing new in the way of information, it does organize it well and makes it very easy to read.

Battles as a whole are not the focus of this book. Instead it is more geared towards the human condition. While the book does include descriptions of battles. (How can you have a book on the Battle of the Bulge and not have any battles?) In general these are brief and more overview than detail. The real details are given in regards to the conditions of the soldiers involved. He also deals with the conditions of the Civilians who had the misfortune of being caught up in the battle. While none of the information in and of itself in regards to this are new, the fact that he brings up these things throughout the book is. Most books on the battle will drop a comment on the conditions everyone was suffering under, but few make it a primary focus. After all knowing how both sides were suffering from cold, malnutrition and lack of proper clothing isn't exciting. Doesn't reveal the struggle of nations, it is in short all to human.

This is a book that should be added to any collection for a Bulge enthusiast.

[Stefania Dzhanamova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antony Beevor's work is an engaging overview of the Ardennes offensive, Adolf Hitler's "last gamble."

On September 16 1944, the day before Operation Market Garden (a series if battles fought in southern Holland) was launched, Hitler bewildered his entourage at the Wolf's Lair with his decision to counter-attack from the Ardennes. The Führer was determined never to negotiate, explains Beevor. He continued to convince himself that the "unnatural" alliance between the capitalist countries of the west and the Soviet Union was bound to collapse, and he calculated that, instead of being ground down in defensive battles on both eastern and western fronts, a final great offensive stood a far better chance of success. "By remaining on the defensive, we could not hope to escape the evil fate hanging over us,’ explained Generaloberst Alfred Jodl (chief of the Wehrmacht planning staff). "It was an act of desperation, but we had to risk everything."
On the eastern front, an attack with thirty-two divisions would be overwhelmed by the immense forces of the Red Army, reasoned Hitler further; a sudden victory on the Italian front would also change nothing. However, he believed that in the west, by driving north to Antwerp, two panzer armies could split the western Allies, forcing the Canadians out of the war and perhaps even the British in "another Dunkirk"; it would also threaten the war industries of the Ruhr.
As Beevor explains, the Führer had selected Ardennes as the sector for the breakthrough because it was thinly held by American troops. Another great advantage was the thickly forested region on the German side of the frontier, which offered concealment for troops and tanks from Allied airpower. Everything would depend on surprise and on the Allied leadership failing to react quickly enough. Eisenhower, he assumed, would have to consult with the other Allied commanders, and that could take several days.
Ever lacking realism, he wanted to launch the offensive in November, "the period of fogs," although he knew that it would take most of the month to prepare. Generalfeldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt, known as "the Old Prussian," and Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model, commander-in-chief of Army Group B, could hardly have been more different in appearance, tastes and political outlook; yet, even they agreed that Hitler’s "grand slam", or "large solution", was one of his map fantasies, narrates Beevor. They, as well as the rest of the field commanders, realized that fuel was going to be a problem big enough, and of course, soon any hope of keeping to Hitler’s original plan of attacking in November disappeared. Even the beginning of December looked increasingly uncertain – the transport of fuel, ammunition and the divisions themselves was delayed, partly due to Allied bombing of the transport network and partly due to the earlier difficulties of withdrawing formations to prepare. "Hardly a single panzer division found the time and fuel to train many of the novice tank drivers. German forces on the western front had been receiving priority for the replacement of panzers, assault guns and artillery. Waffen-SS divisions received the bulk of the new equipment and had the pick of reinforcements, but even then they tended to be mainly youngsters transferred from the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine," describes the situation Beevor. And tensions between the Waffen-SS and the German army were growing because of Hitler’s insistence on saving SS formations in a retreat while ordinary divisions were left to fight on as a rearguard.

On top of that, Hitler's never-slackening obsession with secrecy further complicated matters. According to his orders, no troops were to be briefed until the evening before the attack, regimental commanders would know nothing until the day before, and no registering of artillery could take place in advance; maps were to be distributed only at the very last moment, for security reasons, and total radio silence was to be observed. Commanders of corps artillery had to reconnoitre all the gun positions themselves. Not surprisingly, remarks Beevor, many officers were soon able to work out that a major offensive was in preparation, since the artillery dispositions alone indicated that the deployments were not for defensive purposes.
Meanwhile, Goebbels "kept repeating the mantra of the Nazi leadership that ‘the political crisis in the enemy camp grows daily’." Yet, many of their most loyal followers were not convinced by this message of hope anymore; they simply felt that there was no choice but to fight on to the bitter end. Beevor cites the shocking words of a captured Waffen-SS Standartenführer: " . . . if the whole German nation has become a nation of soldiers, then it is compelled to perish; because by thinking as a human being and saying – 'It is all up with our people now, there’s no point in it, it’s nonsense' – do you really believe that you will avoid the sacrifice of an appreciable number of lives? Do you think you will alter the peace terms? Surely not. On the other hand it is well known that a nation which has not fought out such a fateful struggle right to the last has never risen again as a nation."

As "X-Day" for the Ardennes approached, continues Beevor, the delays in the delivery of fuel and ammunition became worse – each panzer division needed seventy trains alone – and the attack had to be pushed back to dawn on 16 December.
So far, nobody below the level of corps command had been informed, but SS-Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper of the 1st SS Panzer-Division guessed what was afoot on 11 December when Krämer, the Sixth Panzer Army’s chief of staff, wanted to discuss a hypothetical offensive in the region. He asked Peiper "how long it would take a panzer regiment to move eighty kilometres at night." To be sure of his answer, Peiper himself took out a Panther (a German armored tank) for a test run over that distance in darkness, and realized that moving a whole division was a much more complicated matter. What he and his superiors had underestimated, though, was the state of the roads and the saturated ground in the Ardennes.

To say that the German commanders were optimistic about Hitler's gamble would be a huge exaggeration, argues Beevor. When, on September 13, Oberstgruppenführer-SS Sepp Dietrich of the Sixth Panzer Army visited the headquarters of Army Group B, Model said to him that this was "the worst prepared German offensive of this war." Rundstedt noted that out of the thirty-two divisions promised, four divisions were withdrawn just before the attack. While most generals were deeply sceptical of the operation’s chances of success, younger officers and NCOs, especially those in the Waffen-SS, were desperate for it to succeed.
On the evening of 15 December officers were finally allowed to brief their troops. Hauptmann Bär, a company commander in the 26th Volksgrenadier- Division, told his men: "In twelve or fourteen days we will be in Antwerp – or we have lost the war." In the 10th SS Panzer-Division Frundsberg, the briefing on the offensive produced "an extraordinary optimism" because the Führer had "ordered the great blow in the West." They believed that the shock of an unexpected attack would represent a massive blow to Allied morale, explains Beevor, and according to an officer in the highly experienced 2nd Panzer-Division, "the fighting spirit was better than in the early days of the war." Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army alone had more than 120,000 men, with nearly 500 tanks and assault guns and a thousand artillery pieces. As Beevor remarks, "the Allied command had no idea of what was about to hit them on their weakest sector."

One of the great debates about the Ardennes offensive, asserts Beevor, has focused on the Allied inability to foresee the attack. There were indeed many pieces of information which taken together should have indicated German intentions (Right from the start, Hitler’s orders for total secrecy cannot have been followed. Word of the forthcoming offensive even circulated among senior German officers in British prisoner-of-war camps.), but "as in almost all intelligence failures, senior officers discarded anything which did not match their own assumptions," explains he. Plus, the Allies could not believe that the Germans, in their weakened state, would dare to undertake an ambitious strategic offensive, when they needed to save their strength before the Red Army launched its winter onslaught. Such a gamble was definitely not the style of Gerd von Rundstedt, reasoned they. In London, the Joint Intelligence Committee had also concluded that "Germany’s crippling shortage of oil continues to be the greatest single weakness in her capacity to resist." Yet, reveals Beevor, the Allied command had gravely underestimated Hitler’s "manic grasp on the levers of military power."
Another reason why the Germans succeeded in surprising their enemy was that the Ardennes sector was deemed a low priority for air reconnaissance, and as a result of bad weather, very few missions were flown in the region. This is why, when the Germans began bringing new divisions to the sector and then relieving them out for commitment elsewhere, the Allied headquarters wrongly perceived this practice as an indication of Hitler's desire to have this sector of the front remain quiet and inactive.

Thus, when at 05.20 hours on 16 December, ten minutes before "zero hour", the artillery of Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth Panzer Army opened fire, most American soldiers, "avoiding the chill of damp snow in the sixteen hours of darkness", were asleep "in farmhouses, foresters’ huts, barns and cow-byres." As Beevor explains, German artillery commanders, knowing that American soldiers preferred shelter, always targeted houses, so sentries were instructed to never be in the house by the door, but in foxholes at a short distance away to watch for German surprise attacks. "But it was only when the shells began to explode all around that there was a panic-stricken scramble by the men to extricate themselves from their sleeping bags, and grab equipment, helmets and weapons," writes Beevor.
It was Hitler who had laid down that infantry divisions would make the breakthrough so that the precious panzer divisions would start fully intact farther on. The first reports to reach him were most encouraging – Jodl reported "that surprise had been achieved completely." Indeed, surprise had been achieved, analyzes the situation Beevor, but what the Germans really needed was momentum to turn surprise into "a paralysing shock." However, while some American troops, together with frightened civilians, "lost their heads" and began to save themselves, "in other places there was supreme valor," as an officer in the 99th Division relayed. According to Beevor, these feats of extraordinary courage would slow down the German onslaught with critical results.

Although Hitler refused to face reality until it was far too late, German generals realized that the great offensive was doomed by the end of the first week, reveals the author further. They may have achieved surprise, but they had failed to cause the collapse in American morale that they needed. It was German morale instead which began to suffer. "Officers and men began to show more and more their loss of confidence in the German High Command," wrote Generalmajor von Gersdorff. "It was only the realization of the immediate danger of the homeland and its frontiers, which spurred the troops to increase their effort against an unmerciful enemy." The commander of Panzer Lehr, Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, described the Ardennes offensive as "the last gasp of the collapsing Wehrmacht and the supreme command before its end."

Fighting in the Ardennes had reached a degree of savagery unprecedented on the western front. The Nazi cold-blooded slaughter of prisoners and civilians was chilling. For instance, Belgian civilians who hadn't flown the onslaught and had resigned themselves to another German occupation, were subjected to indiscriminate arrests and executions because SS Sicherheitsdienst security service was bent on taking revenge for the harassment the retreating German forces had suffered from young Belgians in Resistance groups in September.

The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west. But, as with the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance. "When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time needed to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream," concludes Antony Beevor. "Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the soldiers of an army they had affected to despise."

Another, less known but rather entertaining, part of the narrative deals with the two "special" operations the OKW (Oberkommando der Wehrmacht) had planned.
The first one concerned the Führer's order of "a parachute attack in the framework of a powerful offensive": Oberstleutnant Friedrich Freiherr von der Heydte was to drop on the first night south of Eupen; the mission was to block American reinforcements coming south from the Aachen sector.
Heydte’s 300 paratroopers dropped, indeed, but the mission was a disaster. Sitting in his forest hideout, Heydte was getting increasingly bitter about the "amateurish, almost frivolous manner displayed at the higher levels of command, where the order for such operations originated". While Dietrich had assured him that he and his men would be relieved within a day, there was no indication of a breakthrough round Monschau, and without radios, there was no hope of discovering the progress of the battle. Not to mention that the paratroopers had so little food left they had to creep up to an American artillery battery to steal some boxes of rations.
Isolated paratroopers and air crew from the scattered drop soon fell into American hands. On 22 December Heydte, by then feeling very ill and utterly exhausted, went into Monschau on his own and broke into a house. When discovered by a civilian, he was relieved when the man told him that he would have to report him to the American military authorities. After a spell in hospital, Heydte was transferred to a prison camp in England. "It was comfortable, but he and other officers held there never realized that their conversations were being recorded," remarks Beevor with a tinge of humor.

The other special operation which the OKW planned was a commando venture, using picked troops in captured American vehicles and uniforms to penetrate Allied lines and cause mayhem in the rear. The infamous SS-Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, known for his role in Operation Oak (Hitler's raid to save Mussolini), was assigned with supervision of the mission.
Eight of Skorzeny’s nine Jeep teams slipped through American lines on the night of 16 December. They consisted of the best English-speakers, but, as Beevor reveals, even they were not good enough, so some carried vials of sulphuric acid to throw in the faces of guards if stopped. Some groups cut wires and changed road signs. One even managed to misdirect an entire infantry regiment. According to Beevor, however, the greatest success of the operation, combined with Heydte’s disastrous parachute drop, was to provoke an American over-reaction bordering on paranoia – the "idea of German commando troops charging around in their rear areas turned the Americans into victims of their own nightmare fantasies." Roadblocks were set up on every route, greatly slowing traffic because the guards had to interrogate the occupants to check that they were not German. American roadblock guards came up with their own questions to make sure that a vehicle’s occupants were genuine: they included a baseball quiz, the name of the President’s dog, the name of the current husband of Betty Grable, and ‘What is Sinatra’s first name?’ American General Bruce Cooper Clark gave a wrong answer about the Chicago Cubs. "Only a kraut would make a mistake like that," declared the guard. Having been told that he should look out "for a kraut posing as a one-star general", he was convinced he had discovered his man, and Clarke found himself under arrest for half an hour. (Another way of checking was to make the soldier or officer in question lower their trousers to check that they were wearing regulation underwear.)


In summary, "Ardennes 1944" is an outstanding historical work in all aspects. From the experience of soldiers to the day-by-day account of the battle to the logistics of the whole offensive, it is impressively researched, brilliantly detailed, and compellingly told.

[Philippe Malzieu · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is serious, well written. I read it like a thriller. Beevor mixes the university excellence and an accessible writing. There is a people who always fascinates me. I had discovered him in Paxton's book. It is Montgomery. This mixture of orgueil and of mediocrity fascinates me. I have to find a biography of him.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antony Beevor brings his historical expertise and writing abilities to the Ardennes Offensive of the winter, 1944-45, or the Battle of the Bulge, as it's known in America. This was the American Army's largest battle ever, and the corpus of written material on it is similarly immense. Do we really need another book about this battle? Well, Beevor does bring some new material to the table, such as the fate of civilians trapped in the battle, or who managed to flee, and to the towns, villages and farms which were destroyed by both sides' extensive use of aerial or artillery firepower. And while the massacre of American prisoners by their SS German captors at Malmedy is notorious, he also points out that the Americans themselves took their revenge in a bloody fashion, and with the connivance or approval of high-ranking American officers. Indeed, one of his main points is that even by the standards of the Second World War in Western Europe, this battle was notable for its savagery and enormous numbers of casualties. Fighting in the dead of winter did not improve things. Another strong point of this book is how Beevor manages to strip the fighting of whatever "glorious" aspects it might have without being preachy. Nonetheless, the American Army, with some exceptions, has much to be proud of here, having been taken by surprise and heavily outnumbered as the offensive commenced, it managed to turn things around and stop the Germans before they could achieve anything of strategic significance, with a little help from Monty and the Brits, it should be said. It was a grave political mistake on Hitler's part, but the writing was on the wall for Nazi Germany by this point. A very good book indeed on an important battle of WWII.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

I received this book through a "First Reads" giveaway on Goodreads.
I've read a number of Antony Beevor's books (Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942-1943 and The Fall of Berlin 1945 being two of my favorites) and his latest is up to his usual excellent standards. Deeply researched, meticulous in detail, and full of helpful maps, Beevor provides a day-by-day account of the Battle of the Bulge that manages to bring clarity to what was a very confusing battle of multiple attacks and counter-attacks, and deftly covers the conflicts and tensions among the Allied High Command. This book is in many ways what I consider military history for the "armchair general" - lots of descriptions of when a specific military unit advanced to a particular hamlet to engage a specific enemy military unit. So if you are not the type who relishes flipping back and forth to the maps and the Order of Battle to follow along precisely what and where is happening (which I do, much to the amusement of other family members) and instead find that type of detail to be distracting, be forewarned. But Beevor also seamlessly weaves the viewpoint of the foot soldier and civilian into the narrative, bringing the actual human experience, and the pain and brutality of battle, to the forefront of his account. Recommended.

[Jason Koivu · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thorough and focused look at the fighting in the Ardennes towards the end of WWII. Viewers of the Band of Brothers miniseries will remember this mainly for the defense of Bastogne, Belgium in the middle of winter.

Beevor mostly discusses the decisions and movements of generals and field marshals, with the occasional quote from the lower ranks or non-combatants like Ernest Hemingway. The affects on the landscape and people are relayed with great sympathy. In the end, the reader comes away with a comprehensive understanding of a key point in the war: Germany's surprisingly potent last-gasp offensive.

[Tami R Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Antony Beevor has once again written a gripping and well researched account of a WW2 battle that deserves to be placed high on the list of the myriad books on the topic. Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble holds nothing back in its evocative overview of the moments of despair and elation of both Axis and Allied soldiers as they struggled in the depths, muck and mire of the wooded German landscape.

The reader is transported into the damp and dark foxholes as Panzers roll overhead in an attempt to bury soldiers alive while men huddle and try, largely unsuccessfully, to avoid trench foot and the chill of the forest. One cannot help but notice that Beevor's comparisons to the misery of the Eastern Front are incredibly astute.

As with most of Beevor's excellent accounts, detailed maps along with his descriptive prowess provide the reader an eagle eye view of the positions of men circled in Bastogne and heartbreaking losses as competing armies struggle back and forth over small bits of land, again evocative of Stalingrad.

The genius in Beevor's writing is not only battle descriptions and troop movements but his use of well-timed stories and anecdotes both humorous and utterly grotesque that help capture the insanity and contradictions of war. I highly recommend this brilliant book.

This is a review of the UK edition of the book released May 21st, 2015. The US edition will be released on November 5th, 2015 under the title Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge

[Checkman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent account of the Ardennes Offensive. I've read many a book about this campaign (the United States Army gives it campaign status; Alsace-Ardennes) so I'm always looking for a different approach. Mr. Beevor has a style that looks at the military situation in depth, but not to the point of overwhelming the reader with platoon and battalion movements. He mixes the unit histories with personal accounts ,from both sides, and the civilians caught in the middle. I can't help comparing him with the World War II histories that I devoured when I was a kid.

Many of those books ,from my youth, were written in the fifties and sixties. They rarely concerned themselves with the suffering that the ground war inflicted on the civilian population. As a result I had the image of Europe as an underpopulated continent. Yes there were civilians, but when it came time for the armies to clash they were thoughtfully out of the way. When I would view the photos and films of troops fighting ,among the ruins of villages and cities, it never dawned on me that there were civilians (possibly many) still there among the ruins as well. I certainly never considered that the destruction of the infrastructure could lead to famine, cholera, pestilence and so on. By the seventies historians began to look at the devestation that the war inflicted on the civilians (on all sides) but the focus was still more on the combatants it seems. I suppose that I wasn't interested in such dreary things and ignored those writers who did look at the civilians. Well ,in 2019, I am more attuned to the plight of those deemed "inconvenient" and Mr. Beevor does good work showing how even the Liberators (allied forces) inflicted more than a few hardships on the populations. Those poor folks who were so inconviently in the way.

In addition to showing what civilians had to endure Mr. Beevor is remarkedly fair-minded when it comes to the various allied forces. Many historians are blantent when it comes to their favoritism. There are historians who seem to admire the German military machine while others give an inordiante amount of attention to the so-called "elite units" (airborne, Rangers, Commandos, SAS etc) while giving the more average formations short shrift. There are those who bad-mouth the United States ground effort (with the exception of the Marine Corp) ,this has become rather trendy recently, while praising the Soviet forces. Then there are those who enjoy comparing the numbers of dead and injured as some type of proof of who fought harder than others (this trend I personally find rather despicable) I could go on and on, but I think you get my point.

Mr. Beevor does not do that. He understands that war is chaotic and everybody will make mistakes. He talks about the courage of the average American infantryman and praises their efforts....to include the hard luck 106th Infantry Division. Rather than focusing on just St. Vith (I finally got to visit St. Vith in 2012) and Bastogne he addresses that U.S. soldiers across the region fought and held up the Germans. Sometimes for a few crucial hours and sometimes for a few days. It's all rather refreshing. Especially coming from a British historian. The other thing that Mr. Beevor does is point out that the American soldiers fought the first few days of the offensive with little to no air support. It has also become trendy to point out that if it hadn't been for the lavish air and artillery support the American troops wouldn't have stood a chance. Mr. Beevor points out more than once that many of the American troops fought hard with little to no air support, sparse manpower and meager ammunition supplies.

He isn't afraid to criticize Field Marshal Montgomery, but he also praises Monty when he makes the correct decision. In recent years I've come to view Monty in a different light. Yes the man could be a horses ass at times, but he wasn't incompetent and there were times he was more sparing of his troops lives then American commanders. This same balanced approach is applied to Patton, Bradley, Eisenhower and what not. It's a refreshing and honest style and I , for one, appreciate it. The war ended almost seventy-five years ago. It's time to go beyond petty nationalism and look at the involved parties in a more honest light.

All in all a well written and refreshingly biased free account of one of the most famous battles/campaigns of the Second World War. Excellent work Mr. Beevor.

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another compelling narrative from quite simply a great historian. After reading of Stalingrad & Berlin - both books easily get a 5/5 for me - I turned to a moment in the war that always interested me but I just never got around to reading about it, until now - Operation Market Garden. A disaster for the Allies made even worse as they were going up against a Germany that looked like it was on the verge of collapse. So much detail in this book which, like the other two, I'd worry that it would at some point drag itself out for too long and become boring, but that was definitely not the case. It's gripping, it's tragic, it feels epic, is never dull, and not difficult to read. Field Marshal Montgomery had a bit of a nightmare with this ill-conceived gamble, and Beevor makes his feelings clear when it comes to this debacle. Let's just say he's not his biggest fan.

[Michael Kotsarinis · Rating 4 out of 5]

To be more specific 3.75/5 but that's just minor nagging mainly because I'd love some more maps to help the reader draw a better picture as he watches this documentary. OK, I have to confess that Antony Beevor is my favourite war historian but there is good reason for that. Most of his books are written in a way that we get the feeling we watch a detailed documentary, verging on historical fiction at some points and not a true history book. But be not mistaken, this is history as real as it can get, properly and exhaustively researched.

[Peter Jowers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars for research! Readers should just try and imagine the mental torture of being colder, wetter and more apprehensive than one could possibly imagine!

I think the saddest thing I took from reading the book was the fact that the senior German Generals were unable to persuade Hitler to give up the whole plan which had no chance of long term success. The allies on the western front might well have reached Berlin before the Soviet forces and saved many lives on the process.

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

In "Ardennes 1944", one finds Antony Beevor in top form. There is a an excellent military history of the battle that clearly explains the strategies employed and vividly describes the action on the fields of battles. The debates and political conflicts within the high commands of the two armies are analysed. The sufferings of the civilians are treated in depth. Finally to please lovers of literature and the arts , Beevor describes with great gusto the adventures of Ernest Hemingway, Martha Gellhorn, Kurt Vonnegut, and Marlene Dietrich in the combat zone.
Like a number of other GR reviewers I feel that this book would be best read after Beevor's "D-Day: The Battle for Normandy".

[Gram · Rating 3 out of 5]

A solid account of "The Battle Of The Bulge", Germany's last ditch attempt to halt the advance of the Western Allies in December 1944/January 1945. As well as his usual meticulous research, author Anthony Beevor adds some macabre thoughts and comments from soldiers on both sides along with details which are extremely upsetting, such as the murder of US troops and civilians by the Waffen-SS and reprisals by US troops who killed German troops after they surrendered. Beevor points to the disturbing fact that “a number of [Allied] generals… openly approved of the shooting of prisoners in retaliation”.
Belgian civilians suffered as numerous battles raged around the countryside and Allied generals bickered among themselves. Beevor captures the continual atmosphere of confusion which lasted throughout the fighting and sometimes it's difficult to keep up with what actually happened during this last futile effort of the Nazi regime. American and German casualties numbered about 80,000 on each side while 30,000 civilians were killed and wounded. One deadly result of the Battle of the Bulge was that it drew men and equipment away from the Eastern Front where - as the fighting in the Ardennes came to an end - the Red Army mounted its winter offensive and made huge gains against a weakened opposition.

[John Nellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good general history of the Bulge

Antony Beevor, once again has written a good general account of an important battle of the Second World War. It was a very good account of the campaign which actually begins by setting the stage with the a rundown of the allies Autumn battles. Then the book continues with the planning of the Bulge, the battle and the allied counter offensive. It is the followed by a chapter on the aftermath of the battle. I found it a very good read on the Battle of the Bulge. Just right in the amount of information was given, about the battle. Some books tend to bog down with too much detail, this was just right for me. That's why Beevor is one of my favorite World War Two authors.

[Olethros · Rating 3 out of 5]

-Sobre un sangriento e inútil intento de canto del cisne.-

Género. Historia.

Lo que nos cuenta. Con el subtítulo La última apuesta de Hitler, acercamiento a la batalla de las Ardenas, desde las circunstancias que hicieron posible el movimiento en ambos bandos durante el último año de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, su caótico desarrollo y su previsible, a pesar de todo, desenlace.

¿Quiere saber más de este libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

[Bruce Katz · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some years ago I had the honor of speaking to two gentlemen who had been at the Battle of the Bulge. I didn't ask them about their experiences -- it was clear that neither wanted to -- so I simply shook their hands, said I had read enough to have some very small awareness of what they endured, and thanked them.

I thought of those men (and the many thousands who weren't in front of me) when I read an obituary in the Washington Post. A woman named Muriel Engelman who had served as a front-line nurse in Ardennes with those soldiers. I had never heard of her, never even knew they were nurses there as the battles raged. Reading about her made me want to learn more about the battle. (If you're interested, here is Ms Engelman's obituary: https://www.washingtonpost.com/obitua...).

The nurses didn't get much attention in Beevor's harrowing book but one is obliged to let that go in acknowledgement of the heroic amount of research that must have gone into preparing and writing "Ardennes 1944." There's far, far too much in the book to touch upon here. Suffice it to say that "Ardennes 1944" captures the horrors of those winter months near the end of the war. Men having to fight and survive in three feet of snow, in sub-zero temperatures so cold that ammunition clips froze solid. . Of severe frostbite and trench foot. Of days without food. Bad decisions, generals seeking to undermine one another, desperately calling Eisenhower to complain about this or that affront. The personalities of the participants, always the personalities: these are people on the pages of the book, not mere names and cut-outs.

Beevor also shows to us the psychological effects of the battles: the breakdowns, the fury that led soldiers (the Nazis first at Malmedy in Belgium, then American GIs in retribution) to slaughter enemy combatants who had surrendered. The preening egotism and self-absortion of military leaders who thought they alone knew what needed to be done to fight the war, how deeply many of them despised one another. The GIs fighting tanks with weapons that bounced off the armor. The German generals who knew after one week that the operation was doomed to failure at great cost but who had to quietly go along because Hitler himself had ordered it, told them where the battles would be fought, and refused to permit retreat. Germany's military so depleted that boys as young as 15 and 16 were sent into battle.

I finished the book shaken by the enormity of what those American (yes, and British, Canadian, etc.) soldiers went through. So much terrible suffering and loss. So much desperate bravery in the midst of hell on earth.

A couple of excerpts to give a glimpse into Beevor's style and vision:

The pompous and megalomaniac [Lt. General John C. Lee] even expected wounded soldiers to lie to attention in their hospital beds whenever he appeared on a tour of inspection in boots, spurs and riding whip, accompanied by a fawning staff. Beevor's tells us that even General Patton himself never dared cross Lee "in case he retaliated by shutting down supplies to [the] Third Army."

• "Many [American] units... proclaimed their arrival on Nazi territory by symbolically urinating on the ground."

• German soldiers who, when asked to haul their own artillery, tell their officers, "You can kiss my ass. I’d rather be taken prisoner.” Such sentiments, Beevor wryly observes, were certainly not revealed to Führer headquarters.

• An Unteroffizier Mükller said that in Heidelberg ‘The mood there is shit, yet the hatred is not directed at the enemy, but against the German regime.’ People were saying: ‘If only the Allies would hurry up and come to end the war.’

• GIs offset the expense of prostitutes and drink by buying cartons of Chesterfield, Lucky Strike and Camel cigarettes for fifty cents through the US Army’s PX organization, then selling them for anything from fifteen to twenty dollars. Often, Beevor tells us, the intermediary step of buying the cartons in the first place was skipped entirely: "66 million packs of cigarettes disappeared in a single month."

• In all too many cases, replacements joined their platoon at night, not knowing where they were or even which unit they were with. They were often shunned by the survivors of the platoon they were joining who had lost close buddies. And because replacements were seen as clumsy and doomed, the veterans kept their distance. This attrition wasn't limited to the infantry: "Sometimes new company and platoon leaders survived for such a short time that their men never even knew their names."

• The forest, riven diagonally by ravines, had all too many vertiginous slopes. They were too steep for tanks and exhausting for heavily laden infantry, slipping and sliding amid the mud, rock and roots. The pine forest was so dense and so dark that it soon seemed cursed, as if in a sinister fairy-tale of witches and ogres. Men felt that they were intruders, and conversed in whispers as if the forest might be listening.

• For 23 November, Thanksgiving Day, Eisenhower had ordered that every soldier under his command should receive a full turkey dinner. Battalion cooks tried to comply in the Hürtgen Forest, if only with turkey sandwiches, but as men climbed out of their foxholes to line up, they were hit by German artillery fire. A major who witnessed that day of heavy casualties confessed that he had never been able to eat another Thanksgiving dinner again. He ‘would get up and go to the backyard and cry like a baby’.

All this is just a sample of what Beevor gives us. There were sections I skimmed through quickly, unable to keep straight what company or battalion he was talking about, sometimes whether they were American, German, or British, and so on. Seen in its entirety, though, "Ardennes 1944" is a masterpiece of history -- technical when it needs to be, filled with empathy, and alert to the telling detail that says so much. Like this, my last quote, this from the diary of Major Chester B. Hansen, aide to General Omar Bradley: ‘The GIs looked cold bundled in brown against the winter wind that tore through their open vehicles, sitting stone-facedly on the piles of baggage in their trucks as they rode through town, staring back vacantly at the civilians who looked earnestly to them.’

[Sud666 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anthony Beevor writes an excellent military history of the Ardennes Offensive, 1944. It is often called "The Battle of the Bulge" and was the last German offensive operation on the Western Front. Coming at a time when the Allies felt the Germans to be in retreat, the assault would shock the Allies and last five weeks from 16 December 1944 to 28 January 1945.

Beevor looks at the strategic and tactical decisions of both sides. Using the words of the soldiers who participated in the conflict this is a military history that feels "alive". Well well-written and full of interesting tidbits, it's an excellent history of the Ardennes offensive.

The Offensive, another of Hitler's madcap idiotic plans, not only failed but it denuded the Eastern Front of the forces necessary to stop the Soviet onslaught. It only proves how large an impediment Hitler was to the overall strategic design of the plans.
Overall? One of the best military history books about this important conflict. If you wish to read a superb book or wish to learn more about this crucial battle-then you can't go wrong with Beevor's excellent book.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Antony Beevor crafts another episode set during WW2. The first book I delved into of his was Stalingrad, and I found that book a really great insight into that conflict, with a more 'human touch' than most historical war books usually contain, plus containing a great bibliography and the Order of Battle of each side at the end. I found he dealt with both the Russian and German side of the story quite equally - and that would be no mean feat considering the recriminations afterwards. So, the only other Antony Beevor book I read after was his study of the Spanish Civil War, which was equally as informative and quite bi-partisan towards again a very dangerous, touchy subject (and still is to this day). This latest book he published in 2016 in paperback is focused on the last major operation by the Wehrmacht in the European Western Theater in December 1944 - the subtitle of the book being quite apt; a gamble Hitler made that some believe stopped the Allies in gaining Berlin and allowed the Russians to steamroller the remnants of Hitlers Army across Eastern Europe and into Berlin. Again, as it is a Beevor history study, there are many maps contained throughout the book, but having to keep flipping back and forth to find where the locations were was a minor annoyance. I digress - there is a wealth of info here that if interested allows further study and is very informative, and if flipping back and forth to find the relevant map, just browse back to the map-index at the front.

The Battle of the Bulge; whether it is from the famous 1965 film or some other popular reference to it, most of us would be aware of and familiar with it being the one battle that caught the American Army completely unawares to both the buildup of troops along the Ardennes forests as well as the panic some of the American troops experienced when the Germans advanced. It is the one battle that most of us should be slightly aware of Germans masquerading as American troops who operated to cause disruption behind the lines, such as diverting reinforcements elsewhere. How effective this was (and I read a while ago that the historical accuracy of their existence was a myth - not true according to Beevor) was probably quite minimal, but it did cause a paranoia amongst the Americans that even Eisenhowers' security was increased and he became effectively a prisoner indoors. Also, the recriminations of being caught wearing American uniforms was being executed out of hand. Another relatively well known incident during the Battle of the Bulge was the infamous murder of American prisoners of war at Malmedy (actually the killing took place a few miles down the road from that town in a place called Baugnez). From this incident, the Battle of the Bulge became one of the most brutal operations, as when the Americans learned what had happened, murdering POWs became quite standard (but still not in the majority of cases) practice for both sides, and the American Generals took a blind eye to recriminations, especially against the SS troops who became prisoner. Antony Beevor suggests that what the Ardennes battle had done was to bring the brutality of the Eastern Front to Belgium caused by the German veteran units used in the campaign. Also, who is not familiar with the siege of Bastogne, and General McAuliffe of the 101st Airborne Division saying 'Nuts!' to the surrender ultimatum issued by the Germans? Iconic history for sure.

This leads again to Beevors 'human touch' element found in his books, dealing with the civilian aspect that most histories ignore, or glance over. The Ardennes in Belgium was a rural area, and the amount of civilian casualties is quite stunning in all regards, not only being killed, but also having their small villages and towns being completely obliterated along with their livestock being stolen for starving troops from both sides of the conflict. Again, Beevor lets no side come away clean from what happened; either for the Germans sending their SD (think Commissar units in Russia) units back at the wake of their advance to capture and kill resistance fighters and young men who had hindered the Germans in their initial retreat in September '44 or sending them back into Germany as forced labour, but also the bombardments indiscriminately obliterating whole towns and farmsteads with civilians hiding in cellars - along with the bombing from heavy bombers to deliberately cause the road network to become full of debris to hinder the Germans from advancing and retreating afterwards. Antony Beevor suggests that 8000 Belgians lost their lives during this period of war and many more loosing their homes and livelihood, not just from the Ardennes offensive, but also from hundreds of V1-V2 rockets that hit major cities such as Antwerp and Luxembourg during this time. In the post-aftermath, they had to deal with hundreds of mines across the whole of the Ardennes front.

The conclusion is interesting; it being essentially Hitlers last gamble using what little fuel he had left for his elite Panzer formations and veteran units to try and cause a split in the Allied coalition, knowing he could realistically not take on the might of the Allies superiority in both manpower and equipment, his Generals knowing that it was a futile last attempt to win, and by doing so taking away a lot of units from the Eastern Front that, once the offensive was in retreat with the Germans losses in manpower, equipment and resources, allowed Stalin to launch the last major offensive. As I mentioned, the Battle of the Bulge may well have allowed Stalin to take Berlin before the Allies, as despite the victory against the Bulge, it also cost them dearly too. Good study.

[Steven Peterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best books that I have read on "The Battle of the Bulge." It does a nice job of laying out the preliminaries, as Adolf Hitler contemplated a grand offensive to turn the Third Reich's fortunes around. It did not work--and the book notes why it did not. Lack of fuel for the tanks, lack of focus on the ultimate goal, wasting too much energy on taking Bastogne, and so on. . . .

The volume outlines the bravery of American troops who were overwhelmed at the outset of the unexpected offensive. They slowed the advance of the Panzers and allowed American forces to join the fray--from the two airborne divisions assigned to come into play and a segment of George Patton's army and the annoying "Monty" with British forces.

The story of this book is the tenacity and bravery of both German and American/British forces. The Germans took heavy casualties as they advanced; the Americans tenaciously fought back, using bazookas and other weapons against the impressive German tanks.

The book details appalling episodes (such as the wanton killing of American troops at Malmedy and American reprisals against Germans who tried to surrender). As William Sherman once said: "War is all Hell" (or something close to that).

The book also explores the politics of the Allies--with Monty striving for advantage and Dwight Eisenhower trying to keep matters under control. The tensions among Omar Bradley, Monty, and Eisenhower is nicely depicted.

But the detail in telling the story of the different armies--American, British, and German--is the centerpiece of this story. Readers will learn a great deal about the actuality of the struggle--and the usual Hitlerian ineptitude that blunted the German initiative.

[Pramodya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another brilliant work by Antony Beevor.

Not much more to add than What I’ve already mentioned previously about his works in how good he is in his narration of key military facts, painting a vivid overall picture of the offenses as well as the minor events that takes place in these battle fields.

He weaves such a good account on military events, Using well-researched facts. He is fair in his praises as well as in his critique on both sides involved in the offensive. And as usual he is capable of evoking various emotions and insights through his clear and well arranged prose that I’ve come to love so much.

As the author concludes at the end, the Ardennes offensive was Hitlers last gamble in his desperate attempt to scrape something out of the last stages in a long, senseless and brutal war which he started.
His inability to see the reality in the ground/battlefields and his underestimation of the allied soldiers strength and will to fight, inevitably led to the failure of this much gambled offensive.

The book also describes the various gains and losses of ground in the battlefield by both sides as well as the political turmoil that went on in the military hierarchy between the allied nations and also within the German armies.
He also lays out the unimaginable loss of lives and property born by the both sides and also more importantly by the average Belgian civilians. The scars left by the events during this period of time can be still felt and seen even today around this area in Europe.

This was a truly a brilliant and enthralling day-by-day account of the offensive, that marked the beginning of the end of the European front for the German Reich.

[Philip · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beevor's books are always great, this latest one is no different. Striking in its detail of the senseless atrocities against prisoners that characterised this phase of the war in the West, the constant bickering and backbiting between the Allied generals (Bradley's paralysis, Montgomery's insufferable hubris, Patton's peculiar madness, De Gaulle's arrogance) and against this the complete insanity of Hitler's "strategy" which sacrificed the remaining strength of his armies in a mad gamble despite warnings by Guderian of an imminent massive Soviet offensive in the East. Hitler's personal role in Germany's defeat is still often underestimated, he was without doubt their greatest military liability. The unforgivable cowardice and ineptitude of the craven sycophants he surrounded himself with (Goering, Jodl, Himmler etc. contrasts so strongly with the grim determination of the professional German officer corps who fought on against all odds and were under constant attack and harassment from the ideologues in their midst. This book reinforces the old adage that "war is hell".

[Mark Seemann · Rating 2 out of 5]

Either my taste has changed since I read Beevor's Stalingrad, or Beevor has changed, as an author, but I found this hard to come through.

Every paragraph in the book seems to start with a formulaic list of army units and places. Often, these sentences are hard to decipher; here's an example from p. 240:

"The advance Kampfgruppe of the 2nd Panzer-Division had started early on 22 December heading for Marche."

I had to read that sentence 3-4 times before it made sense at all.

Too much of the book is like this, and where the language is easier to parse, it's often formulaic; I counted 5 occurrences of the phrase "as the crow flies" tagged on to a sentence about distance.

I understand that the content is well-researched and learned, but in this case, that doesn't mean that it's particularly readable.

[Yair Zumaeta Acero · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Ardenas 1944: La última apuesta de Hitler" es un ensayo histórico del afamado historiador militar británico Antony Beevor editado en 2015 donde -como el subtítulo lo indica - se aborda la última ofensiva diseñada por Hitler durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial dirigida el sábado 16 de diciembre de 1944 hacia los bosques nevados belgas de la región de las Ardenas, consistente en un ataque por sorpresa a la línea aliada pobremente defendida con destino Amberes, y donde se buscaba infligir de esta manera una terrible derrota al ejército norteamericano (al que Hitler consideraba débil, bisoño e inferior), evitando así que el frente Occidental se acercara cada vez más a Berlín para poder ocuparse de la ofensiva soviética de invierno en el frente oriental, con un Ejército Rojo a orillas del Vístula.

Aunque a simple vista todo este plan parezca descabellado, en un principio la batalla fue un éxito, logrando sorprender a las tropas norteamericanas haciéndolas batir en retirada. Con un poco de suerte y gracias a inclementes condiciones atmosféricas que impedían el uso de la aviación por parte de los aliados, la ofensiva alemana logró recobrar una porción considerable de terreno de las Ardenas belgas, casi hasta el río Mosa. Sin embargo en medio de los combates se cometieron numerosos crímenes brutales en contra de combatientes desarmados y población civil (por parte de ambos bandos), sumado al brutal invierno de 1944 que convirtieron a la Batalla de las Ardenas en el combate más sangriento que los norteamericanos sufrieron en Europa y supuso además la pérdida de casi la totalidad de dos ejércitos veteranos alemanes en momentos en los que los soviéticos tocaban la puerta oriental del Reich..

Sin que la narrativa en este caso sean tan brillante como en las dos óperas magnas de Beevor, Stalingrad y The Fall of Berlin 1945, se destaca como siempre su capacidad para narrar batallas involucrando experiencias personales de los combatientes y eventos ocurridos tras bambalinas protagonizados por los altos mandos; con asuntos más densos como acciones militares y temas eminentemente operativos sin perder el ritmo narrativo ni el interés del lector, en especial en esta batalla donde se sucedían muchos eventos al mismo tiempo en diferentes sectores.

Más allá de la importante contribución narrativa de este libro acerca de una las batallas más sangrientas de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, en mi humilde opinión resultan bastante interesantes dos tesis que plantea el autor y que aparecen como harto polémicas dentro de la historiografía oficial de los vencedores de la contienda: Por un lado los bestiales crímenes que cometieron los alemanes (en especial las divisiones Panzer de las SS) durante toda la ofensiva de las Ardenas, coronada en sangre con la infame masacre de Malmedy donde se fusiló aproximadamente a 120 prisioneros de guerra norteamericanos. Sin embargo Beevor no se detiene exclusivamente en este aspecto y resalta que una vez la ofensiva alemana fue detenida, los soldados norteamericanos - auspiciados incluso por el mismísimo general Omar Bradley - empezaron a fusilar prisioneros de guerra alemanes, relatando una muy desconocida masacre perpetuada por la 11a División Acorazada en el pueblo de Chenogne, donde se fusiló a 70 prisioneros de guerra alemanes.

La otra tesis planteada por Beevor - y que ha sido furiosamente atacada por historiadores rusos - es que el envío de los ejércitos V y VI Panzer al frente de las Ardenas, allanó - sin quererlo - el camino para la ofensiva rusa del 12 de enero de 1945 sobre las cabezas de puente del Vístula, permitiendo que los ejércitos rusos al mando de los comandantes Zhúkov y Kónev alcanzaran el río Óder en menos de un mes sin la resistencia alemana prevista.

Un muy buen libro, imprescindible para los amantes de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y que viene soportado por una jugosa cantidad de mapas, ilustraciones y órdenes de batalla. No es lo mejor que ha escrito Beevor pero se hace importante dentro de su colección de ensayos.

[Fred Forbes · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm going with 4 stars in light of the depth of the research and knowledge this book represents, but I found it quite tedious. Might be due to my lack of detailed knowledge of the areas in question (the maps tended to obscure rather than enlighten) and my lack of vocabulary as it related to the structure of the armed forces, both Allies and Germans. I picked the book up due to my father's participation in the battle driving a tank destroyer and could not help but being impressed with the troop's performance under horrible conditions. So, while I appreciate the sacrifices made, I think I am more appreciative of the fictionalized, easier to follow military histories of folks like Jeff Shaara.

[Christos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Άλλο ένα εξαιρετικό βιβλίο από τον Άντονι Μπίβορ για μια από τις σημαντικές μάχες του Β' ΠΠ.

[Loring Wirbel · Rating 4 out of 5]

The fact that this close-up of Ardennes comes only three years after Beevor's sweeping The Second World War is proof that this military historian can work from both the broad 30,000-foot view or the close-in intimate portrait, and weave details from many threads in either domain.

Certain battles will always have too many books and too many analyses behind them - Carthage, Agincourt, Gettysburg, Normandy. The Battle of the Bulge is on the outside edge of this cluster, primarily because it was an embarrassment for both the US and UK, and hell on earth for those doing the fighting. In any event, books on specific battles or campaigns usually are fairly tedious because the authors only pay attention to the movement of troops and the decisions of military leaders.

Beevor already has proven in books on Stalingrad, Berlin, and pre-Franco Spain that he is not that kind of writer. He ties together social aspects, conditions of civilians, physical and mental states of soldiers, and pulls them together with the shifting fortunes of the battlefield. This is all the more valuable here, because we are reinforced in our beliefs that Field Marshal Montgomery, Gen. George Patton, and Gen. Omar Bradley were worthless, but we also learn that Eisenhower, Courtney Hodges, and other allied commanders had some pretty serious problems. We also get a unique view of the Nazi commanders, and the pressure Model, Pieper, and others were under to wage an offensive they knew in their hearts would go nowhere. Hitler wanted all his fellow Germans to go down in flames in a national suicide, and it was only between the demise of Operation Valkyrie and the development of the Ardennes offensive that this became clear to all the leaders of the SS and OKW.

It should surprise no one that after SS massacres of civilians in the early days of the Ardennes, the informal decision was made among the allies (with full SHAEF backing) that German prisoners could be shot whenever troops deemed it appropriate - which was most of the time between Dec. 17 1944 and mid-January 1945. Certainly Patton, and even Eisenhower, wanted as many Germans dead as possible, meaning German soldiers could not expect that much better treatment than from Soviet soldiers after the Eastern Offensive began in early 1945.

A bonus to this book is the view of literary giants who were on this battlefield - Salinger, Vonnegut, Hemingway, and his estranged wife Martha Gellhorn. The tales of how the waning days of Ardennes led to Slaughterhouse Five are alone worth the price of admission. And so it goes.

[Cropredy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm normally a big fan of Beevor's books for their superb writing - I was particularly fond of Stalingrad, Fall of Berlin, and D-Day - so when I saw Ardennes in the airport book store in Heathrow, I grabbed it immediately.

The challenge in writing a popular history of an event in World War II is how to do it in an original way as the stories have been told and retold now for seventy (70) years. For "Ardennes", I felt as if there wasn't a whole lot new here that hadn't already been done in Atkinson's "The Guns at Last Light" or MacDonald's "A Time for Trumpets".

What seemed to me to be new material were Beevor's use of secretly-recorded tapes of captured Germans, American retaliation for the Malmedy Massacre, and the experience of the Belgian civilians during the battle. Of course, the challenge in writing history of such a bloody battle is that many of the participants died (or died later before VE day) and left no tales.

Beevor does a good job reminding the reader of the power of artillery (American mostly) in causing huge numbers of casualties and breaking up German attacks. He also puts to rest any notion of climatic tank battles near the Meuse (as featured in the movies) as the Germans had run out of petrol and were essentially immobilized.

There were plenty of maps and you'll be referring to them often as the book covers the battle chronologically so any given chapter might require reference to three maps (northern flank, Bastogne, drive to the Meuse)

So - if you've never read anything on the Battle of the Bulge, this is a perfectly fine book. If you have, then this will add somewhat to your knowledge of the story.

[Cav · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the Americans, the "Battle of the Bulge" was the largest and bloodiest single battle fought in World War II, and the third-deadliest campaign in American history. Out of a peak of 610,000 troops, 89,000 became casualties; out of which some 19,000 were killed...


In paying homage to those that fought and died during this battle, I started the book just after the anniversary of the end of the battle; January 25th.

Author Sir Antony Beevor is a British military historian. He has published several popular histories on the Second World War and the 20th century, in general. This is my third from the author, after his 2006 book The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939, and his 2012 epic book The Second World War, which I really enjoyed.

Antony Beevor:


Beevor provides some background and historical context early-on:

"...At the end of August, just when it seemed as if the German front was on the point of collapse, supply problems threatened to bring Eisenhower’s armies to a halt. The French rail network had been largely destroyed by Allied bombing, so around 10,000 tons of fuel, rations and ammunition had to be hauled daily all the way from Normandy in the supply trucks of the US Army’s ‘Red Ball Express’.
The distance from Cherbourg to the front in early September was close to 500 kilometres, which represented a three-day round trip. Liberated Paris alone needed an absolute minimum of 1,500 tons a day. Only the wealth of American resources could have managed such a task, with some 7,000 trucks racing day and night along one-way routes, consuming almost 300,000 gallons of fuel a day. Altogether some 9,000 trucks were written off in the process.
In a desperate attempt to keep up momentum in the dash across France, jerrycans had been delivered to front-line formations by the transport aircraft of IX Troop Carrier Command and even by bombers. But aircraft used up three gallons of aviation fuel for every two gallons of gasoline they delivered. Every aspect of the supply crisis underlined the urgent need to open the port of Antwerp, but Montgomery’s focus was on crossing the Rhine..."

A German machine gunner marching through the Ardennes. December 1944:



Interestingly, Beevor mentions that both Ernest Hemingway and J.D. Salinger were present during this battle:

"...Hemingway, again armed with a Thompson sub-machine gun despite the recent inquiry into his martial activities, was also carrying two canteens, one filled with schnapps and the other with cognac. He certainly demonstrated his own fearlessness under fire on several occasions, and even took part in one battle. Journalism was not high on his priorities. He referred to himself mockingly as ‘Old Ernie Hemorrhoid, the poor Poor Man’s Pyle’, in a mild jibe against Ernie Pyle, the most famous American war correspondent. But he studied the men around him and their conduct under fire because he had plans for writing the great American novel about the war. As his biographer observed, ‘Ernest gloried in the role of senior counsellor and friend to both officers and men.’ He was fascinated by the nature of courage and derided psychiatrists’ views about a man’s breaking point.
J. D. Salinger, little more than a mile away with the 12th Infantry Regiment, continued to write short stories furiously throughout this hellish battle, whenever, as he told his readers, he could find ‘an un-occupied foxhole’. This activity seems at least to have postponed Salinger’s own psychological collapse until the end of the war..."

As was Kurt Vonnegut:

"...Vonnegut and a dozen others tried to find their way back to American lines through the snowbound forest, but the Germans of the 18th Volksgrenadier-Division who were mopping up trapped them in the bed of a creek. Loudspeakers broadcast an order to surrender. To hurry them, the Germans fired tree bursts over their heads. Deciding that they had no alternative, the cornered Americans stripped their weapons and threw the working parts away. They emerged with their hands up, and thus began their imprisonment which, in Vonnegut’s case, led to Dresden and the firestorm of February 1945, described in Slaughterhouse-Five..."

The persistence of the Allies would eventually pay off. Hitler knew it was only a matter of time:

"...But while Hitler refused to face reality in public, in rare moments he acknowledged the hopelessness of their position. Late in the evening in the bunker at Ziegenberg,
he spoke to his Luftwaffe adjutant, Oberst Nicolaus von Below, about taking his own life.
He still blamed setbacks on the Luftwaffe and the ‘traitors’ in the German army. ‘I know the war is lost,’ he told Below. ‘The enemy superiority is too great. I have been betrayed. After 20 July everything came out, things I had considered impossible. It was precisely those circles against me who had profited most from National Socialism. I pampered and decorated them, and that was all the thanks I got. My best course now is to put a bullet in my head. I lacked hard fighters . . . We will not capitulate, ever. We may go down, but we will take the world with us...’"

I'd like to include one more quote that I felt captured the duality of this battle; its tragedy, and its triumph. Beevor closes the book with this quote of the many American "Kriegies:"

"The unsung American victims of the Ardennes offensive were those captured by the enemy and condemned to spend the last months of the war in grim Stalag prison camps. Their journey to Germany was a series of long cold marches, interminable rail journeys packed into boxcars, being bombed and strafed by Allied aircraft and dogged by the debilitating squalor of dysentery. Sergeant John Kline from the 106th Division described his ordeal in a diary. On 20 December, he and his fellow prisoners were made to march all day without food and with no water to drink. They resorted to handfuls of snow. At a little village ‘the Germans made us take off our overshoes and give them to the civilians’. They saw German soldiers sitting in captured Jeeps eating what was supposed to have been their Christmas dinner. On 25 December, after German civilians threw stones at the column of prisoners of war, he wrote, ‘No Christmas, except in our hearts.’
Two days later they reached Koblenz in the afternoon, and were given some soup and bread from a portable kitchen. As they were marched on in groups of 500, a man in a business suit lunged into the street and hit him over the head with his briefcase. The German guard told him that the man must have been upset over the recent bombings.
As the fighting approached its end in April 1945, the Australian war correspondent Godfrey Blunden came across a group of young, half-starved American prisoners of war, presumably also from the 106th Infantry Division. He described them as having ‘xylophone ribs’, sunken cheeks, thin necks and ‘gangling arms’. They were ‘a little hysterical’ in their joy at encountering fellow Anglo-Saxons.
‘Some American prisoners whom I met this morning seemed to me to be the most pitiful of all I have seen,’ Blunden wrote. ‘They had arrived in Europe only lastDecember, gone immediately into the front line and had received the full brunt of the German counter-offensive in the Ardennes that month. Since their capture they had been moved almost constantly from one place to another and they told stories of comrades clubbed to death by German guards merely for breaking line to grab sugar beets from fields. They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was all about.’ They at least were alive. A good number of their comrades had lacked the will to survive their imprisonment, like the original for Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, who acquired the ‘5,000 mile stare’. Reduced to blank apathy, they would not move or eat and died silently of starvation.
The surprise and ruthlessness of Hitler’s Ardennes offensive had brought the terrifying brutality of the eastern front to the west. But, as with the Japanese invasion of China in 1937 and the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, the shock of total warfare did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected. It provoked instead a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded. When German formations attacked, screaming and whistling, isolated companies defended key villages against overwhelming odds. Their sacrifice bought the time needed to bring in reinforcements, and this was their vital contribution to the destruction of Hitler’s dream. Perhaps the German leadership’s greatest mistake in the Ardennes offensive was to have misjudged the soldiers of an army they had affected to despise..."

Ardennes 1944 was a good book, and I found much of the writing here very informative. Unfortunately, however, I found that Beevor's telling of the story fell a little flat for me. Much of his writing details specific army divisions, local landmarks and towns, and then dates. Over and over, with little context to help the reader stay anchored to the bigger picture.
The average reader unfamiliar with the battle will likely be lost at times here, unfortunately...
3.5 stars.