Original subtitles

The Allies surge westwards across Europe

and look set to win the war,

when Hitler unexpectedly counterattacks.

All of a sudden, German tanks and troops were in their midst.

The shock to the American troops was total.

Who in their right mind would launch a major, major offensive

of that scale in very, very difficult terrain, in midwinter?

The German Army has lost millions of men in the east,

and the Luftwaffe has taken a hammering.

But Hitler is hell-bent on striking back.

I mean, it is absolutely bonkers.

It's pie in the sky fantasy stuff,

dreamt up by someone who's lost all grip on reality.

But the assault costs more American lives

than any other in the war.

The hard-fought games of D-Day hang in the balance.

It's sort of a mad gamble.

This is the surprise offensive that Hitler hopes will snatch victory

from the jaws of defeat.

The Battle of the Bulge is one of the most titanic clashes of World War II.

Now, rare footage from around the world, expertly restored in full color,

tells the story as you've never seen it before.

On 6th June, 1944,

a massive Allied force lands on the beaches of Normandy in France.

It is the biggest seaborne invasion in history.

After four years, the Allies are finally back on French soil,

and their armies are supported

by a devastating Anglo-American bombing campaign.

In the east, the Nazis also suffer huge losses against the Russians.

Under attack on two fronts, the Nazis are close to complete defeat.

The D-Day landings are enormously significant

because it is the moment that Allied forces

step back on to the continent, they get a foothold

and they then smash the German armies.

And at the end of the Normandy campaign, they're then able to spread very rapidly

across France and into the low countries.

On 25th August, the Allies liberate Paris.

Brussels and Antwerp follow in early September.

Regaining the port of Antwerp

gives the Allies the fuel and supply pipeline

vital to their campaign.

It's a major advantage over a German Army suffering severe shortages.

By December '44, things aren't looking good for Hitler.

He needs to strike at the Allies with such force

that it's gonna encourage them, he believes,

to possibly drop out of the war to negotiate a peace.

The bombing has taken its toll,

and the retreating German Army are fighting with just a quarter

of the oil and gasoline they need

to feed their tanks and armored vehicles.

Yet, despite the disastrous situation,

Hitler refuses to accept that the Germans are a spent force.

He is dead set on fighting back.

Hitler has this idea that real men don't retreat,

that real men will kinda logger up in these armed camps

and today, the Germans need to stand here and not budge.

So, there's this kind of almost medieval castle warfare mentality.

But he also relies on the quality of his generals,

and the quality of his army and his technology.

On 11th September, Allied troops enter German territory,

and soon take the border city of Aachen.

The British and Americans have now liberated Belgium, Luxembourg

and most of France.

Germany's industrial heartland, the Ruhr valley, will surely be next.

Hitler remains in denial.

Despite the barrage of disastrous news, he refuses to accept reality.

He identifies Antwerp as key to turning the war.

If his soldiers can recapture this supply line,

they can choke the offensive

and still defeat the combined Anglo-American forces.

This time in December 1944,

the major supply harbor of the Allied forces was Antwerp.

Antwerp's one of the biggest harbors in Europe,

and it was an ideal place to supply the Allied troops

for the next dash into the Reich, because it was just behind the frontline.

So, the whole idea of Hitler was to recapture Antwerp,

and by this having a major blow against the Western Allies,

and this would give him then a relief to concentrate on the Eastern Front.

Hitler's ultimate objective is to take Antwerp.

If you take Antwerp, and you've closed this marvelous big corps,

basically all of these British, Canadian and American units

that are advancing across France and the low countries toward Germany,

will essentially be stalled

and might even wither on the vine for want of supplies.

It's Hitler's idea that he can stun the Americans and the British,

throw back their advance,

buy time to then turn back against the Russians.

So, it's sort of a mad gamble.

Hitler's plan relies on two critical factors:

the element of surprise, and bad weather.

With the enemy bogged down in the winter snow,

he gambles that the muddy foxholes in subzero temperatures

will have sapped Allied morale.

And poor visibility removes the Allies' greatest advantage…

air support.

He needs the sky to be overcast

so that the Allies can't bring their strongest trump card into play,

their air forces.

The forecast is for bad weather for at least ten days.

And the theory among the planners, and Hitler of course,

is that this will give his armored formations a chance

to break through the lines and to get all of the way to Antwerp.

But it is gonna rely on the weather's remaining true

during that whole period, because if the weather's bad,

the Allied planes won't be able to get off the ground

and although they have… Technically, they have air superiority,

they'll be kept on the ground and this will tilt the balance

back in the Germans' favor.

The gains since D-Day have made the Americans increasingly confident.

So much so, they are using the densely wooded Ardennes region

to train recruits,

and let their battle-worn veterans recover.

The regional commander, General Omar Bradley,

only has the most senior position

because the gifted General George Patton had been demoted.

A brilliant soldier but a harsh disciplinarian,

Patton had been punished for abusing his troops

during the Sicily campaign.

But Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower,

recognizes that Patton is indispensable to the war effort

and keeps him in Europe.

Omar Bradley had sort of got there be default.

Patton actually struck two American servicemen who were in hospital,

he felt as malingerers.

They were probably suffering the equivalent of shell shock,

battle fatigue, but he thought they were cowards and so he struck them.

And when this got back to Command HQ, of course,

he was more than slapped on the wrist,

he was actually removed from his position of command.

But despite his disdain for soldiers who wilted

in the horrific face of war,

Patton's soldiers always knew what to expect on the battlefield.

He famously told them:

"You're going to be up to your neck in blood and guts."

And thus, this controversial general

earned himself the nickname "Old Blood and Guts."

By comparison, Bradley is believed by many to have been complacent.

Was Bradley as good a soldier as Patton?

Almost certainly not.

He was relatively inexperienced as a major field commander,

and certainly, by the time of the start of the Ardennes offensive,

was probably underestimating what he had opposite him.

There's a kinda sense of, you know, a kind of bit of lackadaisical attitude.

Bradley and Eisenhower go back a long way.

As young men, they were cadets together

at the military training academy in West Point.

Their close friendship is one of the reasons

why Eisenhower has given him the commander job.

A brilliant organizer, Eisenhower, to the American people as Ike,

had been made the Supreme Allied Commander.

He was the consummate diplomat and handler of men.

It was his decision, despite the disgrace,

to keep the old war horse Patton close to the Western Front.

He was absolutely masterful at juggling

the very different characters that were in his command.

He was a master at keeping cool in a difficult situation,

which he proved during the Ardennes operation and others,

and making the right decision, not panicking.

The Americans are feeling so confident

that they fly in celebrities to entertain the troops.

The soldiers holed up in the sleepy Ardennes forest

are buoyed by the appearance of stars like Marlene Dietrich.

♪ Falling in love again ♪

♪ Never wanted to ♪

♪ What's a girl to do? ♪

♪ Can't help it ♪

Marlene Dietrich, who was of course German-born

but was very much pro-Ally at this point,

was working for the entertainment services provided by the US Army,

the USO as it was known.

Apparently, as well as singing all her classic songs,

Lily Marlene, and all the others, she actually made jokes about Hitler,

sort of questioning his virility

and, you know, that was why he was so determined to fight the war

because, you know, he was inadequate in bed.

You know, so she was funny, also a beautiful singer.

The sense of complacency on the Allied front is palpable.

The war is unquestionably over and its final phase.

How long that is gonna be is still undecided.

But it marks, kind of, absolutely the beginning of the end

in terms of the reinvasion of Northwest Europe.

Neither Omar Bradley nor his army thought

that they were going to be the focus

of a big German offensive through the Ardennes.

I mean, they thought they were in a quiet sector.

And it was the winter, and the Germans were fully occupied

repelling these Soviet attacks in the east.

And so, Bradley thought it was gonna be a continuation

of this steady… bloody but steady advance westward,

and then suddenly, all hell breaks loose.

16th December, 1944, 5:30 am.

Out of nowhere, the American divisions

are subjected to a ferocious artillery barrage,

lasting about 90 minutes,

followed by a tsunami of tanks.

The Germans' 6th SS Panzer Army launches a surprise attack

into Allied territory.

The Americans are totally surprised

by the German attack.

The Germans achieve a breakthrough

very quickly in many places, especially the 5th Panzer Army

in the central sector.

F. Keith Davis, who was serving

with the American 16th Field Artillery Observation Battalion,

witnessed the initial German attack.

It was a complete surprise. We had no idea.

It was panic, and they had brand new king tiger tanks

and they thousands of thousands of infantry troops.

They were mostly dressed in white for camouflage.

It's a big shock, no one is expecting it

because militarily, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever,

and you cannot blame the Americans for not expecting it coming.

I mean, you know, who in their right mind

would launch a major, major offensive of that scale

in very, very difficult terrain, in midwinter,

when the snow is deep and crisp and even.

I mean, it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.

Yeah, there's no question the Germans had the upper hand

for the first couple of days,

because they had broken through the Allied defenses,

they'd taken them by surprise, they'd captured a lot of prisoners,

they'd killed quite a few people, and they had made significant gains.

There's no question about that.

It was foggy.

If you heard tank treads coming down a cobblestone road,

you couldn't tell if it was a German tank

or an American Sherman tank coming towards you.

You couldn't hardly see your head in front of you.

The Germans commence the Battle of Bulge

with a massive bombardment of very concentrated shellfire,

which comes in and completely, you know, rips the guts

out of the Americans that are garrisoning along this line.

And then they roll the tanks through

and so they achieve an absolutely breakthrough

and begin racing for the key road hubs on the way to Antwerp.

The German Army is able to have its way with this sort of under-strength,

unprepared, utterly surprised American force in the Ardennes,

and that's why they're able to push through

and create this massive bulge in the American line.

It is ten hours

before the American high command hear about the German offensive.

General Bradley is in Paris.

It's unfortunate for the Americans that the group commander, Bradley,

is actually absent from the field when the attack takes place.

He's actually visiting his good friend Eisenhower in Paris.

They're at the HQ in Versailles. He's congratulating Eisenhower

on his recent promotion to five-star general.

When Bradley hears of the attack in Paris, he thinks it's just a minor local attack

and that it's probably not going to take too much to fight it off.

Eisenhower, interestingly enough, instinctively thinks

no, there's something more to it than this.

And it's lucky that he does because this allows him

the opportunity to order up reinforcements immediately.

Eisenhower, seeing the scale of the attack and ferocity,

thinks there's no way this is a feint,

the Germans don't have forces to play around with,

and what would they be feinting at?

And he divines that this is indeed a German drive for his principle port.

And so, he's the one who says look we have to react,

and we have to react quickly.

Bradley doesn't get back until the afternoon of the next day.

Only then does he realize the scale of the German attack

and that he needs reinforcements, immediately.

Overnight, the Germans have managed to sneak 1,500 troop trains

and 500 train loads of supplies to the Western Front.

They were aided by winter weather,

so Allied aerial reconnaissance is pretty spotty,

so they don't catch this massive buildup,

but they can't believe the Germans would do something so reckless

with that Soviet pressure on the Eastern Frontier.

Hitler's gamble on surprise and poor weather has paid off,

and German progress in the opening days of the campaign is ominous.

While the Allies hurriedly make white robes

and paint their tanks to blend with the snow…

the German Army quickly move to secure crossroads and bridges.

To add to the Allied confusion,

further chaos is being carefully orchestrated

by Hitler's favorite commando.

Otto Skorzeny has gained a reputation as a daredevil.

His mission to rescue the deposed Italian dictator

Benito Mussolini from a mountaintop prison

had launched his reputation.

The liberation of Mussolini is a major coup.

It earns Skorzeny the prestigious Knight's Cross.

There were not many nice Nazis in the Second World War,

but even among all those horrible people

who followed Hitler and became his devoted supporters,

Otto Skorzeny was one of the nastiest.

He was not one of the good Germans,

he was a very, very nasty piece of work.

In a plan devised by Hitler himself,

the colorful Waffen-SS lieutenant colonel, Skorzeny,

trained a unit of English-speaking German troops.

Disguised in stolen American uniforms, they are now behind enemy lines

causing maximum disorder and confusion.

Skorzeny is a very interesting character.

He's fanatical, he's, very devoted to his job

and, you know, he's a kind of… He's a bit of a thug, really.

You know, he loves fighting, he's aggressive,

he's got huge dollops of personal courage,

he's got dueling scars on him, he's quite big and tall,

and he's got very, very distinctive features.

And he's a kind of, sort of, troubleshooter, as well.

You want to kind of cause mayhem and destruction behind Allied lines

um, in the Battle of the Bulge, Skorzeny's your man.

Known as operation grief, Skorzeny's German soldiers pose as GIs.

They travel in captured American jeeps, and tanks disguised with plywood.

The imposters cut telephone lines

and send American reinforcements in the wrong direction.

Everything within their means to cause complete and utter chaos.

This plan is hatched to get German-Americans,

people who've been in America before the war

but who have German backgrounds, come back to fight for the Reich…

put them in American uniforms and put them behind the lines

and just sort of start sowing seeds of mistrust,

mayhem, changing signs around and murdering people and so on.

And actually, they're quite effective.

A handful of Skorzeny's English-speaking soldiers are captured,

but their work isn't over.

They spread a rumor that Skorzeny is personally leading a raid on Paris,

to kill or capture General Eisenhower.

This causes complete panic among Eisenhower's guards,

and there's a lockdown round about Christmas day,

because they fear the commandos are on the way to kill him,

and he's absolutely furious as you can imagine,

because he's pretty much put under house arrest for no good reason

because there never had been an order of that type put out,

and there were no German commandos anywhere near Paris.

It would've been such a vast embarrassment

if the German's had managed to get hold of him or kill him.

And in that mood and panic,

an awful lot of people in the Allied camp felt that anything was possible.

Their actual military impact was almost nil,

but the psychological impact was terrific,

because word went all through the American armies

saying half these people who are Germans who are coming,

they're all dressed up as Americans and they speak American.

And so, the level of suspicion

and everybody looking over their shoulder in those first few days

was a great success for Skorzeny.

Aided by the chaos and the weather,

the Germans' 5th Panzer Army drives towards the Belgian towns

of St. Vith and Bastogne,

both strategically important targets on the route to the port of Antwerp.

For the Germans, Bastogne and St. Vith were, like, vital,

because these were the essential road hubs,

and if the Germans could take them,

they could then continue the advance towards Antwerp.

And without them, the whole motorized, mechanized defensive would stall.

An elite SS Panzer unit introduces a trusted weapon

in their assault on Allied morale… terror.

The most shocking atrocities are carried out

under the orders of the infamous panzer commander,

SS Colonel Joachim Peiper.

Peiper used to burn a lot of villages with a lot of civilians inside.

You know, his battalion was known as the blowtorch battalion

as a result of that.

The whole idea of the Battle of the Bulge

and the German advance was to have a Waffen-SS battle group

which should march through the Ardennes,

speed, speed, speed, reach the river Meuse, make a bridgehead,

and then they'd try to advance further north.

And the commander of that battle group, Standartenführer Joachim Peiper,

was a veteran from the Eastern Front, a fanatical Nazi,

an ardent Nazi, and he was massively under pressure.

Peiper knows he has to get to the river Meuse

before the sky is clear and filled with Allied fighter bombers.

Near the town of Malmedy,

he captures 125 prisoners from the US 7th Armored Division.

The captives will only slow down his unit’s progress,

so on the 17th of December, 1944,

Peiper's SS troops open fire on them.

Fire!

So, the first day he realized we are too slow,

we have to speed up, speed up, speed up, speed up.

And this situation of pressure

was one explanation for the Malmedy massacre.

The Americans discover eighty-four American corpses

lying, you know, shot in this field.

Many of them frozen, because of the cold,

with their hands in their air.

So, this spreads like wildfire among the American troops,

and this further motivates them to counterattack

and drive the Germans back.

Warren Schmitt witnessed the savage slaughter.

I was down in this stream

and, uh, I was looking up and watching it…

and it was horrible.

A little later on, the Germans got out

and one of 'em walked over to where I was

and I was just laying there like I was dead.

And he stood there for a while and I thought: "Oh, I'm gonna get it."

But he didn't shoot me.

I didn't look up. I was down deep as low as I could get.

Just a whole lot of praying.

Just a whole lot of praying.

Fighting around the crossroads town of St. Vith

approaches a climax,

as the Germans launch an all-out assault to seize the town.

The Germans take around 8,000 Americans prisoner

in an attack on St. Vith.

And on the 21st of December,

they take the strategically important town.

The Germans have secured their first significant victory

of the offensive.

The Germans are striking forward, they've got to reach these fuel dumps

that the Allies have, they've got to replenish themselves,

they've got to keep going. It's all about speed, speed, speed

just as it was back in May, 1940.

Building on the success,

the German 5th Panzer Army besieges the town of Bastogne.

Morale in the German ranks is running high as Hitler's plan unfolds.

In the Ardennes, Bastogne is a hub for seven major roads,

a crucial junction for supply lines.

It's important that Bastogne is taken with as little damage as possible.

Of course, there was the danger that, possibly, the American troops

in Bastogne would lose their nerve and would surrender to the Germans.

There were other groups of American troops who surrendered,

and the Germans took thousands of thousands of American prisoners.

So, of course there was a danger,

and it was a German offensive, and you have stop it.

Running low on ammunition, the besieged Americans

are completely surrounded by German tanks.

The temperature is -12.

The overwhelming odds and the appalling conditions

put the defenders under immense strain.

The artillery shells were just continuous for days.

Killed many of our men and wounded many more.

But some of the men actually went insane from the shells.

We were out of ammunition, and we were hungry,

and I guess we were just scared.

But we weren't gonna give up.

So many men got frostbite.

They had taken off their boots to rub their feet,

and when they did that, their feet would swell up

and they couldn't get their boots back on.

It would be horrible. They would just die

if they didn't get any help, and most of 'em didn't.

One time, I was in an area where there was a rock wall

and I seen a pair of American gloves on the wall,

and I didn't have any, so I went over to pick these gloves off of the wall

and there was a hand in each glove,

so I didn't take the gloves after that. I just left 'em.

Despite the conditions, the Americans

defending the strategic hub at Bastogne refused to surrender.

The Americans took huge casualties at Bastogne,

which will just give you an indication of the savagery of the fighting.

You know, up to 3,000 casualties were taken there.

But crucially, they held on.

Sensing the Americans are close to collapse,

four Germans approach American lines

waving a white bedspread as a flag of truce.

They deliver an ultimatum.

Unless the Americans surrender,

they will flatten the town and all civilians.

Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe sends the briefest reply.

All armies need legends and heroes and anecdotes,

and of course, one of the most famous of the US Army in the Second World War

was that of the German demand

to the US Airborne at Bastogne to surrender.

But McAuliffe only knows one answer to the German suggestion.

He answers with a single word, "nuts!" In German, "nonsense!"

And the reply of Brigadier McAuliffe… "nuts."

It is surely a one-word suicide note.

But then, the weather turns.

During the night of the 22nd of December,

the heavy fog in the Ardennes clears.

When the sky clears, the situation changes fundamentally.

Now, the Allies can finally use their air power again

and bomb the German supply convoys,

and attack the German panzer columns on the roads,

and cut off the frontline troops

from all their supplies and reinforcements.

The troops in Bastogne start receiving airdrops of vital food

and ammunition from American supply planes.

Vehicles on German-held roads

are bombarded by swarms of fighter bombers.

By nightfall, every road leading into the Ardennes from the east

is lit up with blazing vehicles.

All of a sudden, the Allied air armada could get into the air

and cause an awful lot of damage,

not only by attacking the German troops on the ground,

but also attacking their rear areas and making sure, frankly,

that the resupply of the forward panzers was incredibly difficult.

The advantages of surprise and overcast skies

are both now gone.

Hitler's army are sitting ducks.

If you base your own offensive on bad weather…

I mean, what kind of plan is that?

How can you base a whole offensive on bad weather?

There was no way whatsoever that they could defeat the Allied forces.

I mean, if the only… the main ally is the weather god,

I mean, then we are done.

From the start, the offensive seemed desperate and irrational.

We now know that it reflected the political and mental turmoil

of the man who planned it: Adolf Hitler.

Earlier that year, a growing group of German officers were so concerned

that on the 20th of July, they smuggled a bomb into a meeting

in Hitler's eastern headquarters, the Wolf's Lair.

Stauffenberg comes into the conference room in Hitler's bunker

and he places the briefcase with the bomb under the conference table.

But it's an oak table with a very thick surface,

and then it has a couple of stumpy legs that absorb the blast when it goes off.

Four people are killed in the blast, but Hitler survives.

If the attack was supposed to bring the war to an end,

it has precisely the opposite effect.

It's a very deadly bomb, and this contributes

to Hitler's messiah complex,

that he is going to be spared these mortal threats

and that he is a man of destiny, that he's evaded this deadly threat,

and now, he's gonna go on and purge the armed forces of dissidence

and impose his will on Germany even more than before.

At the funeral for one of the victims,

Nazi newsreel cameras captured a defiant and strong Nazi leadership,

unshaken by the traitors in their midst.

Unseen is the execution

of some 200 senior army officers behind the coup.

From now on, Hitler will trust his instincts

above the advice of Wehrmacht generals.

The effect of the Stauffenberg plot is immense and dramatic

and terrible for the German people.

Hitler is already deeply paranoid by this stage of the war.

He's addled with drugs, he's not a well man,

and all this does is just drive his paranoia to new levels.

He'd never much trusted the generals.

But now, it was only the Waffen-SS and its commanders

whom he really felt that he could place his faith in.

Hitler's overwhelming faith in his own infallibility

is being fed by daily supplements from his doctor.

Theodor Morell has been Hitler's physician since the late 1930s.

The Führer has become increasingly reliant on his daily "vitamin" injection.

In fact, Morell is giving him cocaine and eukodal,

a chemical cousin of heroin.

After his morning cocktail, Hitler feels energized and invincible,

but his decisions are becoming increasingly irrational and delusional.

Well, his relationship with Morell is that

he thinks this absolutely ludicrous quack,

um, is someone he can trust and, you know,

everything that Morell says, you know, he believes in.

And, you know, he's just a massive hypochondriac.

People who are with him at the time

talk about him as being increasingly jittery,

and talks too much, and as a strategic decision-maker,

he's making no sense whatsoever.

The doomed offensive started at a secret meeting laced with paranoia.

On the 12th of December, 1944,

Hitler's commanders are taken from the Western Front to Koblenz.

They are put on a bus that deliberately meanders

through the forest for 30 minutes until they lose their bearings.

Eventually, they arrive at a Medieval castle

and are marched into a massive concrete bunker.

This is the Eagle's Eyrie,

Hitler's secret command post on the Western Front.

Just five months after the assassination attempt,

Hitler is obsessed with security.

And then, when they arrive at the bunker where his HQ is,

SS guards are lined up who then disarm,

take the personal weapons, off all these senior commanders,

because clearly, Hitler doesn't trust them,

and they're then led into the bunker where he is then going to brief them.

Hitler was, himself, in very bad shape,

and some generals saw him for the first time

since four years, and they were shocked.

"What… what kind of old guy is that now?

We had a totally different view of Hitler."

He was only 55 years old,

but he looked like a very, very old person in his 80s or something like that.

We're talking about just a handful of years.

He was totally mentally, physically, totally collapsing.

So, this had an impact, definitely.

So, the day that Hitler comes up with this plan

for a kind of armored counterattack through the Ardennes…

is a day in which paranoia is extreme,

he is absolutely humming from the amount of drugs he has taken.

The addled mastermind of the Battle of the Bulge

sets out his attack plan.

He gave a speech and tried to persuade the generals

that this is the final moment of the Second World War,

and if we are able to have now a big victory

against the Western Allied forces, the Western Coalition will be broken

because the American's don't know what to fight for,

they only fight for money.

But as Hitler lays out the details of his plan,

the commanders become concerned.

I mean, it is absolutely bonkers.

It's pie-in-the-sky fantasy stuff

dreamt up by someone who's lost all grip on reality.

It has absolutely zero chance of success whatsoever.

And what is extraordinary is that his generals

and his personal staff could see this. They could see that they were dealing

with somebody who'd been always semi-deranged,

and was now completely deranged, and yet, still, they go along with it.

Still, they obey the orders.

And the drug-induced euphoria is extremely dangerous

because it then lends credence in Hitler's own mind to his crazy plans.

And he says he's feeling so good

that there's no way these things won't work,

when any grounded, rational general beside him

can say there's no way this is gonna work. We don't have the capability.

All Hitler's interested in is he wants can-do German commanders

that will do his bidding and won't throw in the towel,

who won't surrender, who won't give up a yard of German soil,

unless they absolutely have to.

And after the cull following the failed coup,

few generals are willing to appear disloyal.

He is simply in no fit physical or mental state

to make any decisions whatsoever.

But it's kind of nothing they can do about it.

You know, he is still the Führer.

His grip on Nazi Germany is still absolutely iron tight.

Against the advice of his generals,

Hitler forces through his plan.

And against all the odds, the initial stages runs smoothly.

The Germans successfully move a quarter of a million men into position,

right under the Allies' noses.

The initial attack was also textbook.

But at Bastogne, reality sets in.

As Allied aircraft destroy supply routes, the offensive turns into a disaster.

Meanwhile, General Omar Bradley's troops

have been desperately holding on to Bastogne

in the face of the German onslaught.

A task force of 400 men set up a roadblock

which holds up a crack SS Panzer division for six days.

When all hope of reinforcement is lost, they discard their equipment

and march 14 miles back through enemy lines.

Most of these guys have been pulled of the streets of Paris

where they were on leave and piled into trucks

on this unbelievably icy cold day,

and driven up there and plonked in Bastogne

and handed their weapons and ammunition and so on.

They became entirely dependent on parachuted supplies.

And they had a week

of some of the toughest fighting of the northwest Europe campaign,

and they did brilliantly.

Hitler has made the cardinal error

of underestimating his enemy.

The whole expectation…

"We are going to capture their fuel storage.

We're relying on American fuel,

and they were not going to fight, they would run away…

These are all bastards who are not able to fight."

All these expectations were all wrong.

Bastogne was cold as hell.

We had very little food, very little ammunition,

but again, we prevailed 'cause we were determined.

Morale was fantastic. We did a hell of a job.

I had the finest soldiers in the American Army.

Suddenly, Eisenhower's decision to keep General Patton

close to the fighting pays dividends.

Patton responds to General Bradley's call for reinforcements

with some 200,000 men.

Patton is popularly remembered as the "two-gun general"

due to his two ivory-handle revolvers worn a custom-made belt.

As a man who famously said,

"No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country.

He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."

In a way, Patton was, you know, more blitzkrieg than the Germans.

His exertions to rescue the troops at Bastogne are just stunning.

So, Patton always saw that fighting was a pleasure.

It was one of these great, lusty, animal appetites of life,

and by gum, people had to satisfy it.

Patton, above all, he thought fast, he moved fast.

He was a warrior to the roots of his soul.

And although there was a huge bullshit factor about Georgie Patton,

he did have this terrific moral effect on his troops,

and what he did… the speed with which he got his army shifted around

and driven on that road to Bastogne,

it was a terrific feat of staff works and a terrific feat

of personal energy and imagination.

Patton drives his men north to cover around 120 miles of terrain

through grueling winter conditions in just two days.

Punching through German lines,

he establishes a supply corridor into Bastogne.

Patton has a key asset:

a plentiful supply of Sherman tanks.

The Sherman is considered inferior to most of the German models.

It's under-gunned, but there's lots of 'em.

You know, it's quantity over quality.

It's, you know, mass-producing Chevys

instead of having a few burnished Mercedes and BMWs, right?

So, Patton takes advantage of this materiel advantage

and he's able to, you know, beat his way through the German flank

and break through to Bastogne.

On Boxing Day, 1944, the siege of Bastogne is broken

by the arrival of General Patton's troops.

For ten days, Hitler's legions have held the initiative,

but on the 11th day, they are routed.

Defending Bastogne costs the Americans between two and a half

and three and a half thousand casualties.

But the siege has cost the Germans far more than they could afford to pay

in men, in time, and in strategic position.

The town of Bastogne is lost forever.

The initiative is now with the Allies,

pushing back the Germans towards the River Rhine.

The feared kampfgruppe of Joachim Peiper is now stranded.

Of all the SS troops, The Kampfgruppe Peiper

got the furthest towards the west.

But they run out of fuel, like so many other German armored units.

Peiper sets fire to his remaining vehicles

and is forced to lead 800 survivors on a perilous retreat.

And there's no better illustration

of the shoddiness… ultimate shoddiness of German planning for this battle

than, you know, Joachim Peiper's panzers literally run out of gas,

and Peiper and his men dismount and end up walking back toward Germany,

leaving their tanks on the road to Antwerp.

The Kampfgruppe Peiper

has to leave behind its vehicles

and make its way back to its own lines on foot.

It is symptomatic of the whole way the Ardennes offensive was planned.

It was blitzkrieg without petrol.

The German Army is now losing its strongest asset:

the armored divisions.

On the 8th of January, reports warn Hitler

that unless an immediate retreat is ordered, disaster is inevitable.

Hitler's dream to win back Antwerp and choke the western advance is dead.

He authorizes a withdrawal.

Hitler's Ardennes offensive… It didn't actually change much

because it's almost impossible to come up with any scenario

whereby Hitler could've succeeded with this crazy thrust

against the will of almost all his generals.

But it scared the living daylights out of the Allied high command.

Hitler and his inner circle evacuate their Western Front headquarters

and retreat to the bunker beneath the Reich Chancellery in Berlin.

He will never leave.

In order to launch the Battle of the Bulge,

the Germans have to bring a lot of forces from the Eastern Front,

where they're desperately needed to stem this Russian advance.

And so, by taking from Peter to pay Paul,

they make the Russian advance in the east

much more rapid and much more dangerous.

The day after Hitler's arrival in Berlin,

Warsaw is seized by the Red Army.

And in early February, the Russians cross the River Oder

just 50 miles from the Führerbunker.

The drug-crazed Führer is paying the price

for moving his best troops away from the Eastern Front.

It was definitely, from a German point of view,

the wrong decision to use that many troops,

that many tanks, to fight in this stark area of the Ardennes

nobody was interested in it.

So, in the end, it was a weird decision of Hitler

to use the last good troops the Germans had

at this very position.

The best tank divisions, the best tanks,

best divisions of good fighting spirit and capability were assembled…

for the Battle of the Bulge.

And we know, of course,

they might've been better used to defend east pressure in this area.

Almost all Hitler's generals had known from the start

that his bid to try and take back Antwerp was bound to fail.

Why did these generals…

Who may have been very wicked men, but they were not all stupid men…

Why did they go along with all this stuff?

And they saw no choice. They always quoted this line,

"We have sworn fidelity to the Führer." And even in December, 1944,

they still stuck with this as their justification

for going along with this madman in yet another act of madness.

The callous massacre of 84 Americans

carried out by Joachim Peiper's SS unit at Malmedy,

comes back to haunt the retreating Germans…

as some American troops exact revenge

by refusing to take prisoners, killing them on the spot.

This happened in an infamous incident at Chenogne,

after some tough fighting there, when American soldiers decided

to shoot German prisoners of war who they had in their hands.

And of course, this wasn't known at the time, it was covered up,

and when Patton was told about it, he said, "It's unfortunate.

But we need to keep this quiet."

So it was a… a revenge, so to say.

And, and, and… And Waffen-SS started that bloody game

in the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war, the brutal SS commander Joachim Peiper

is tried and sentenced to 11 and a half years in prison.

He goes to live in France, where he is assassinated in 1976

by former members of the French Resistance.

With more than 8,000 killed, over 46,000 wounded,

and almost 21,000 soldiers missing, the Battle of the Bulge

proves to be the costliest battle of the war for the Americans.

Omar Bradley returns a hero, celebrated as the winner

of the biggest battle the US Army has every fought.

But much of the credit for the victory belongs to his rival.

Old Blood and Guts,

General George Patton, dies unexpectedly in a car crash

and is buried in Luxembourg among his men

who gave their lives to win the Battle of the Bulge.

In ignoring his generals who advised him

against mounting this hugely ambitious offensive,

Hitler had made a grave mistake.

I think you can say without hesitation

that the Ardennes operation, with no chance of success,

probably shortened the war for the Germans.

What else should the Germans do?

I mean, the Germans were in a very desperate situation.

And normally, everyone would say they should surrender.

But if you don't accept surrender…

Of course, I mean, they had no chance whatsoever to stop the Allies,

and so, in the end, you could even make the argument,

by pushing all these troops

from the Eastern Front to the Western Front,

Hitler has shortened the war. And this is something positive, isn't it?

Within four months, Hitler will also be dead…

as Soviet soldiers storm Berlin,

and the war in Europe is finally over.

Re-sync & redact: BLU DUAINE blu.duaine@protonmail.com