On the 16th of December, 1944
German troops began their final major offensive of the Second World
War.

Just as they had done in 1940, tanks were to smash through Allied lines in
the Ardennes forest and head for the coast.

They planned to split the British and American
armies in two causing their alliance to fall apart and allowing Germany to focus all its
resources on its real enemy, the Soviet Union.

Except none of that came to pass.

After all, this
was 1944 and the circumstances surrounding this attack were completely different.

After dogged
American resistance slowed up the German advance, the Allies were able to play their
trump card and destroy the German forces from the air.

The Germans were able
to create a bulge in the Allied line, from which the battle gets its
name, but by the end of January that Bulge was completely closed and the
Allies had a clear route into Germany itself.

So what went wrong for the Germans? Why
couldn’t they replicate their success from 1940? And was the offensive doom
to fail from the beginning? By September 1944 the Germans are on
the defensive in almost every direction.

In the west, the Allies had broken out from
Normandy and had raced to the German border, in the east the Soviets had launched the massive
Operation Bagration, and even in the south, the Germans are struggling to hold
the Allies moving up through Italy.

The problems continued at home.

Supplies,
resources and manpower were all dwindling fast as German cities were pounded
by Allied bombers day and night.

It seemed that it was only a matter
of time before Germany was defeated.

Nothing could be more significant of a march
of events than what these pictures show.

In almost the same month when Britain
was disbanding her Home Guard, the Nazis were forced to
organize the German equivalent.

But despite all of that,
German leader Adolf Hitler still believed that one final
offensive could turn the tide.

He also believes that the relationship between
the US and Britain is fragile and can fracture in a crisis such as a major counter-offensive
against the Allies.

But most importantly Hitler saw no way forward on the eastern front.

Soviet
manpower seemed limitless and Soviet territory was way too vast.

By launching a decisive attack
on the west he believed he could then negotiate a peace with the Allies and then turn his
full attention to the Soviets in the east.

So this was the plan.

Codenamed Operation
Watch on the Rhine, 3 army groups would make a concentrated attack along a 60-mile front
on American lines in the Ardennes forest from Malmedy in Belgium, to Echternach in
Luxembourg.

The area was considered a quiet part of the line and had just six weakened
American divisions defending it.

Some green troops newly introduced into the line and others
resting after heavy fighting earlier in the year.

The attack was to be conducted
by the 5th SS Panzer Army, 6th Panzer Army, and 7th Army making up 29
divisions, 12 of which were armoured.

The 7th Army under Eric Brandenburger would protect the
southern flank, the 5th Panzers under Hasso von Manteufel would cross the river Meuse and drive
to Brussels, and the 6th SS Panzers under Sepp Dietrich would cross the Meuse further north
and drive to the primary objective of Antwerp.

Without Antwerp, the already-stretched Allies
would be forced to continue supplying from the Mulberry Harbour at Arromanches all the way
back in Normandy.

Once captured all Allied forces north of the drive, who were mostly
British, could be cut off and destroyed.

Hitler believed that this would then cause the
Anglo-American alliance to fall apart and lead to a negotiated peace favourable to Germany.

However, his Generals were less than convinced.

Hitler’s plan was opposed by most of his top
commanders that were involved in the planning of the offensive.

This included Field Marshals
Gerd von Rundstedt who was Commander-in-Chief West as well as Field Marshals Walter
Model in command of Army Group B.

Both believed that crossing the Meuse river
and reaching Antwerp would not be possible.

They also believed that by creating this bulge
in the Allied lines they’d be dangerously exposed on either side and would invite Allied
counter-attacks.

Both von Rundstedt and Model had proposed alternative plans to Hitler, but both of
these plans were categorically rejected by Hitler.

He believed that he could recreate the success of
his Ardennes attack from 1940, which defied his General’s predictions and won a famous victory.

If you want to find out more about how and why it worked so well you can watch our video in the
description.

Needless to say though this was not 1940 anymore and the circumstances surrounding
this offensive were completely different.

Having lost over 3.

2 million men since the
beginning of the war Germany first needed more manpower in order to mount the attack.

The
volunteering age was lowered to 16, while the conscription age was raised to 60.

Men from the
Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were transferred to the army and workers who weren’t vital to the
war effort were also drafted in.

Most of those troops were formed into new Volksgrenadier
divisions.

These were essentially economized versions of normal infantry divisions bulked out
by new inexperienced troops.

To complement them, experienced Panzer and Waffen-SS divisions
were pulled in from the eastern front to lead the attack.

They were given priority for
newly built tanks, vehicles, and armaments.

In addition, Hitler put Otto Skorzeny, the man
who achieved prominence when he carried out the audacious rescue of Mussolini, in charge
of a specialized operation.

Skorzeny and his commandos were to drive captured American
vehicles and dress in American uniforms causing havoc behind the American lines.

He also ordered
a reactivation of a small parachute formation from the Fallschirmjäger regiments.

Hurriedly trained and inefficiently used, they were captured without playing
an active part in the battle.

In the end, despite their relative poverty,
the Wermacht were able to pull together over 300,000 men, 2,100 tanks and assault
guns, and around 1,900 artillery pieces.

So the Germans now had a substantial ground
force, but in the air it was a different story.

At this point in the war the Allies
are completely dominant in the air.

German troops can barely move out in
the open without being harassed by Allied fighter-bombers and bombers.

It’s extremely important that the weather is bad for this offensive because
the Germans want to make sure that they can do their build-up and launch the offensive
without being harassed by Allied airpower.

The Germans were also severely lacking in fuel.

Germany had suffered devastating attacks from
Allied bombers against its synthetic oil industry and the production of fuel became a massive
problem for them.

Because the attack mainly relies on armoured and mechanized units, fuel
is essential.

They were able to stockpile about 5 million gallons of fuel for the offensive,
enough to last for six days, but this wasn’t even enough to reach Antwerp.

A key part of this
therefore relied on capturing Allied fuel dumps.

Without capturing Allied fuel dumps
the offensive would grind to a halt.

Indeed the only thing that hadn’t changed from
1940 was that Germany was still numerically inferior.

German forces could not afford to get
bogged down in a battle of attrition which the Allies would surely win.

Therefore the timetable
for advance was strict.

By the second day, German forces were to have taken St Vith and
Bastogne to allow the crossing of the river Ourthe.

By the fourth day, they were to reach
the river Meuse.

Then onto Antwerp and victory.

To achieve maximum speed there was also a huge
German emphasis on surprise.

Military security had been especially tightened after the 20th
of July plot to assassinate Hitler and those involved with the Ardennes plan had to sign
oaths that they would not leak any information on penalty of death.

On the ground, the woods
of the Ardennes offered good concealment for the massing German armies and bad weather prevented
Allied reconnaissance from spotting them.

Although the Allies had decrypted German codes,
because most of the communications took place inside Germany, the Allies had
few chances to intercept them.

Despite that small silver lining though,
it’s easy to see why Hitler’s generals did not believe in this attack.

To work it
required complete surprise, poor weather, a rapid advance, and the capture of Allied fuel to
facilitate it all.

Without any one of those things it could fall apart.

Nevertheless on the 16th of
December Hitler rolled the dice one final time.

From 5:30 a.

m German guns pounded
the Allied lines for 90 minutes before 200,000 German troops
crashed into just 80,000 Americans.

The first indication of the attack
the American 110th regiment got was when the shells started exploding around them.

At first, things seemed to go well.

The attack was a complete surprise and the terrible weather kept Allied aircraft
on the ground.

Quickly though cracks began to show in the offensive strict timetable.

In
the north, the 6th SS Panzer army tried to take the vital high ground of Elsenborn ridge
on route to the river Meuse but were completely blocked by the 99th Infantry Division and
those problems continued further south.

The German plan stipulated that St Vith had to
be captured by the second day of the offensive, but the American troops defending St Vith
were able to hold out for five days until eventually evacuating.

Like St Vith, Bastogne
was another critical part of the German plan.

The Americans had realized the significance of
Bastogne as soon as the battle began pretty much and quickly sent the 101st Airborne Division as
well as the 10th Armored Division to reinforce the town.

They both arrived on the
19th and quickly set up defences.

A few days later they were completely
encircled by the Germans and they had to hold out for over a week but with
dwindling supplies food and ammunition.

Those are just a few examples of the valiant
American delaying actions which happened up and down the Allied line.

The terrain of the Ardennes
made road junctions extremely important and by holding these key points small Allied forces
could delay multiple German units buying time for reinforcements to arrive.

While there were
only 80,000 US troops in the Ardennes when the battle began, by Christmas eve there were half a
million Allied soldiers from different nations.

On the 19th of December General Eisenhower
made the controversial decision of giving the command of all troops, American and British,
north of the bulge to Field Marshall Montgomery and on the same day 30th British Corps which
had been taken into reserve to prepare for a continuance of the British advance in the north
was moved south to cover the Meuse bridges.

As reinforcements arrived the German
advance slowed down even more.

Remember they were supposed to have reached
this line from St Vith to Bastogne by December 18th and the river Meuse by the 20th.

Instead, these were their lines on the 24th.

Worse still for the Germans, fuel
was also becoming a major problem.

It was possible that the Germans may have been
able to capture Allied fuel stocks in the rear areas, but because they were too slow a lot of
the fuel dumps were either evacuated or destroyed and a lot of this work was actually done by
African-American drivers of the Red Ball Express in trucks like these.

Additionally Germany’s
inability to capture vital roads meant that there were a lot of traffic jams that formed
and this meant that the fuel that they did have wasn’t able to be brought up to the
front to the units that needed it most.

One thing that had gone the way of the
Germans was the weather.

This was one of the coldest winters on record in the area with
average temperatures around -7 degrees celsius.

That not only kept Allied aircraft at bay but
also affected US ground forces who did not have adequate winter clothing.

Many were forced to
rely on cotton field jackets and wool gray coats.

One of these Americans was Lieutenant Ben
Rugg of the 2nd Infantry Regiment.

Rugg, who was wearing this helmet, was immediately
sent into action with his regiment attacking the town of Berdorf on Christmas day.

Rugg was actually wounded on the 26th, receiving a penetrating wound in the shoulder,
but went on to fight and eventually captured the town.

And you can actually see how violent
the battle was because there, in addition to the wound he received, he also received
either shrapnel or a bullet to his helmet.

On the 23rd though the weather
conditions finally started to lift and the Allies were able to bring their
air superiority to bear.

Attacking German tanks and supply routes and dropping
much-needed supplies to the surrounded men at Bastogne.

The tide of the battle was
turning as Allied counter-attacks began.

The first major counter-attack was led by General
George S.

Patton who commanded the US 3rd Army.

At the time of the attack, Patton was actually
preparing his army for an offensive into the Saar region of Germany, but he was quickly ordered to
attack northwards relieving the besieged Americans at Bastogne.

The 3rd Army was able to achieve
this within a few days, breaking the siege on the 26th and this really represented a herculean
feat of logistics because it was done so quickly.

The offensive was quickly turning into
the battle of attrition that the Germans had hoped to avoid.

In a desperate
attempt to regain the initiative, the Germans launched two new offensives in
January.

First Operation Baseplate which aimed to temporarily gain air superiority so
that the Ardennes Offensive could continue.

The Luftwaffe did manage to destroy around
300 Allied aircraft, but they lost over 200 irreplaceable pilots in the process.

A
loss from which they would never recover.

The second was an offensive further south in the
Alsace-Lorraine region codenamed Nordwind.

This was designed to break through the American
lines which were now stretched due to the departure of Patton’s 3rd Army.

However,
the Americans had anticipated the attack and halted it with heavy losses.

All the while
Allied counter-attacks continued in the Ardennes.

The next major counter-attack was launched on the
30th of December and another major counter-attack was launched in the north a few days later.

By
the end of January the bulge had been completely closed up and the lines had returned to what they
were before the German offensive had started.

At the end of the battle, both sides had suffered.

The Germans had taken 80,000 to 100,000 casualties and the Allies around 75,000.

But unlike
the Germans, the Allies could rely on a steady flow of replacements to fill the gaps.

Amongst those casualties were soldiers killed on both sides in a series of massacres.

The
most famous were at Malmedy and Chenogne, but other lesser-known massacres were committed
by the 1st SS Panzer Division.

Including the brutal murder of 11 African-American pows
in the town of Wereth and the massacre of nearly 300 Belgian civilians in the towns of
Stavelot, Ster, Renardmont and Parfondruy.

Hitler’s gamble had come at a
high cost with next to no reward.

Everything needed to go right for the offensive to
work, but the Germans had forgotten an old maxim ‘no plan survives contact with the enemy’.

Yes, the Germans achieved surprise.

But the
first objective, crossing the Meuse, is never achieved even though the plan hinges on it being
crossed by the fourth day of the offensive.

Although the weather works in their favour for the
first week, when the weather clears on the 23rd the Allies are able to resume their air
offensive against the Germans on the ground.

Alongside their own problems, the German army was
essentially fighting a completely different enemy from the one they destroyed on the same ground in
1940.

The few American units in the area fought with tenacity.

Slowing up the German advance
and allowing the Allies’ air superiority and mobile armoured reserve to mount
counter-attacks in a way they never could years earlier.

Pulling Germany into the
battle of attrition it couldn’t hope to win.

If you’re wondering if the offensive was doomed
to fail before it began you only need to ask the German commanders who organized it.

But let’s
imagine that everything goes right for the Germans and they’re able to reach Antwerp.

What
happens next? They’re hoping for a negotiated peace with the Allies, but it’s very hard to see
this happening given all the effort and resources that the Allies poured into the invasion
of Europe and the campaign that followed.

The Battle of the Bulge, with its slim chance
of success, was Hitler’s hail mary, his final throw of the dice before the inevitable.

In the end though it simply shortened the war and essentially ended Germany’s ability to
resist in both east and west.

When the Soviets launched their winter offensive in January they
swept aside German resistance and advanced 300 miles closer to Germany in a matter of weeks.

Two
months later the Allies would do the same thing, crossing the Rhine into Germany itself.

Soon
the war in Europe would finally be over.