“Peiper must be stopped!”
Lieutenant General Courtney M. Hodges, commanding the U.S. First Army, looked up from his maps and saw chaos everywhere. All across the Ardennes Forest, American forces were reeling from a surprise German counterattack that struck on the morning of December 16, 1944. While some frontline units stubbornly held their ground, others simply disappeared annihilated by the Nazi juggernaut.
One marauding enemy column particularly worried General Hodges. This was Kampfgruppe Peiper, the spearhead of the German 1st SS Panzer Division. Named for its commander, SS Lt. Col. Jochen Peiper, this powerful force was headed for the crossroads city of Liege, first stop toward its ultimate objective of Antwerp and the Belgian coast.
All of his generals were against his decision to attack in the West.
Here s What You Need to Know: Hitler often went his own way, regardless of the consequences.
By early autumn, he was taking 60 pills a day. They ranged from “speed” to the poison strychnine. He took pills to make him wake up; he took pills to make him sleep. Although to his entourage he seemed to have retained his old willpower and energy, it was really the tablets that kept him going.
By now, Hitler’s secretaries noticed that his knee shook all the time. Sometimes he had to control the shaking in his left knee with his right hand. What his adoring young female secretaries did not know was that his knee continued to tremble even when he was in bed. There, too, he was plagued by stomach cramps. What the secretaries did notice they could not help but do so was that the Führer passed gas all the time due to his vegetarian diet and weight-reducing tablets. His doctors there were four of them called it “mete
Troops thought the snow was colder than usual. The turkey dinner served at noon tasted good, but otherwise there was still watch to be stood, weapons to be cleaned and gloves to be thawed out. – Official Report, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Division, Malmedy, Belgium - New Year s Eve, 1944
By then, the main Battle of the Bulge had thwarted the German attacks which began Dec. 16, 1944. From defensive foxholes, the 120th, which included Wilmington-area National Guard soldiers fighting since Normandy, noted a quiet front without harassing fire. Vigilance, hunker down, and send patrols to capture prisoners.
“Three hours into the new year two platoons set out across the snow to investigate a strong point in a house 200 yards southwest of the road junction at Baugnez” in no-man’s-land, the report continued. Germans fired on the raiding party. Flanking the enemy through a field southwest of Baugnez, “Some of the men stumbled over uneven humps in the ground.”
Rows of rails for anti-tank protection follow the Maginot Line in France. Walter Sanders/The LIFE Picture Collection via Getty Images
World War I absolutely devastated France. Of the roughly 8.5 million French soldiers mobilized in 1914 to fight Germany and the other Central Powers, more than 6 million became casualties, either killed, wounded or declared missing during four years of grueling trench warfare.
In the wake of that catastrophic war, the French government vowed to protect its vulnerable northeast border with Germany from any future attacks. With fresh memories of fighting and living in squalid, open-air trenches, the French spent a decade building a 300-mile (482-kilometer) series of underground fortifications that would be both impenetrable and comfortable to live in. Behind an imposing line of pop-up gun turrets, tank traps and 12-foot (3.6-meter) concrete walls were fully equipped subterranean military bases complete with mess halls, hospitals, recreation
World War II: Was Justice Served After the Malmedy Massacre?
The SS soldiers responsible for the Malmedy Massacre were to be hung, including Joachim Peiper. But none were sent to the gallows.
Here s What You Need to Know: Peiper, Dietrich, and several other former SS men who played roles in the massacre were released from prison after serving 13 years.
It was a dismal day, Sunday, December 17, 1944, just hours after the Germans had broken through the thinly held American lines in the Ardennes Forest along rugged terrain of the Western Front.
The thunderclap of Operation Wacht am Rhein (Watch on the Rhine) had struck with sudden fury, sending the Americans reeling, units scrambling to defend against an onslaught of infantry, armor, and artillery aimed at driving a wedge between the Allied forces north and south, crossing the Meuse River, and capturing the vital port of Antwerp, Belgium. In his delirium, Hitler believed this bold counterstroke in the West, fraught with risk thou