![]() ![]() In the initial attack the Germans had an almost two-to-one advantage in manpower and for the first time on the Western Front outnumbered the Allies in terms of tanks and other armored vehicles. It was a good time to take a break, and then you had a huge blizzard."īy contrast, the Germans were very prepared and had amassed more than 400,000 men, and just over 1,400 armored vehicles including tanks, tank destroyers and assault guns. They (the Americans) were out of food, ammunition and gasoline. But from the American perspective, the Germans were going to be defeated – it was just that the Allies' supply lines couldn't keep up. "It was in many ways a colossal failure of intelligence, and the Allies misread the tea leaves. "There was a certain amount of hubris involved," Ulbrich added. Ulbrich, program director and associate professor in the Master of Arts in History and in Military History at Norwich University in Vermont, told Fox News. "If you look at where the Allies were – after fighting through the hedgerows of Normandy and racing across France, to them the Germans looked bloodied and beaten," David J. 6, 1945 file photo, American tanks wait on the snowy slopes in Bastogne, Belgium during the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler thought that this coming battle would "decide whether we shall live or die.In this Jan. ![]() German forces would then be free to focus all their attention on stopping the unrelenting and vengeful Red Army in the east. Battle of the BulgeOn December 16, 1944, Allied troops were massed along miles of the German border when the Nazis mounted a surprise offensive in the forests of Belgium. If his offensive bloodied the western Allies badly enough, Hitler believed they would be compelled to settle for an armistice. By sending three armies composed of nearly 250,000 troops and 1,000 tanks to smash through the Ardennes Forest along the German borders with Belgium and Luxembourg, the Führer hoped to seize the vital port of Antwerp and to drive a wedge between the Americans and the British. With American and British forces bearing down on Germany from the west and the Soviet Union closing in from the east, Hitler decided to launch a massive counterattack against the western Allies. Adolf Hitler once predicted that the Third Reich would “last a thousand years." By December 1944, however, every day brought Nazi Germany closer to destruction. ![]()
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