(Penguin, £20) In late 1944, with Allied forces moving eastwards, Adolf Hitler mounted a counter attack of such savagery that it almost threw the course of the western war into reverse. Hitler thought he had identified an Allied weak point in the densely forested hill country of the Ardennes held by United States forces, an area extending across Belgium into Luxembourg. His plan was to punch through this region, cut the Allies in two and push back towards the crucial port of Antwerp. On 16th December the attack began with what was to become known as the “Battle of the Bulge.” The winter of 1944 was horrifically cold. Ice and snow made roads impassable to tanks and the fight descended into a meat-grinding nightmare. Antony Beevor’s description of the fighting is horrifying. The forests were littered with frozen corpses. The Nazis murdered prisoners and massacred local Ardennais. Meanwhile, the Allied high command squabbled, largely on account of the egotism of Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery, who was detested by the Americans. By January 1945 the Nazi offensive had been repulsed, with German losses of 80,000 dead—US engineers were forced to bury German corpses with bulldozers. Hitler thought the route to victory went through the Ardennes, but as he was piling more troops into the west, 6.7m Red Army troops were massing on the Eastern Front. As Beevor’s unflinching volume makes clear, he misjudged the strength and resilience of the US army. It was his last gamble and it failed.
