Beevor declares victory with WWII history

It’s hard to imagine there's anything left to be said about the Battle of the Bulge after Antony Beevor's Ardennes 1944. Though it’s ground that’s been well covered before — in print and on film — Beevor manages to offer both a panoramic and intricately detailed account of “Hitler’s last gamble” to win the war in Europe.

The plan came to Adolf Hitler in September 1944 as he lay in his sickbed battling jaundice. With no hope of immediate success fighting Russia on the eastern front, Hitler looked to the west. There, he reasoned, a surprise attack through the forests of the Belgian Ardennes, driving all the way to Antwerp, would split Allied forces in two and force Canada and even Britain out of the war.

It would take a combination of bravery, good fortune (in the form of well-timed good weather) and sacrifice on an epic scale to stop him.

“Everything would depend on surprise and on the Allied leadership failing to react quickly enough,” writes Beevor, a British military historian and best-selling author whose works include D-Day: The Battle for Normandy and Stalingrad. But as Beevor so thoroughly reveals, the attack “did not achieve the universal panic and collapse expected.” Instead, “It provoked a critical mass of desperate resistance, a bloody-minded determination to fight on even when surrounded.”

There’s a deep resonance and inescapable sense of completeness to Beevor’s work. It’s an exhaustive if sometimes exhausting march of strategy and execution. Undoubtedly, some readers will suffer battle fatigue with what seems like a shot-for-shot accounting of the conflict.

It’s a top-down and bottom-up examination of the Battle of the Bulge (so-called for the bulge the German advance created in the front lines) which began Dec. 16, 1944 and involved more than a million men — almost half of whom were American, resulting in the greatest number of U.S. casualties in the war (more than 75,000, with 8,407 killed).

Beevor weaves it all together: the mistakes that cost the Allies dearly; the chilling efficiency of the Panzer army; the bitter conditions of the snow-heaped battleground; the deadly cunning of German spies; the divisive egotism of British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery; the devastating toll of tree bursts and trench foot; the Siege of Bastogne; fear and desertion on both sides; German atrocities against POWs at Malmedy and American in-kind retribution; and, not least, the non-combatants trapped in the middle.

We’re re-introduced to a dizzying array of wartime ranks, designations, weapons, maps and military slang along with a cast of military characters that still resonate through history (for better or for worse) — and encounter novelists Ernest Hemingway, Kurt Vonnegut and J.D. Salinger as well.

There’s a temptation in the telling of war stories to insert nostalgia into a time when the enemy was easier to identify and victory had a clearer outcome. But Beevor doesn’t give into it, which contributes mightily to the heft of his work.

Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge

By Antony Beevor

Viking Books, 480 pp.

3 out of 4 stars