Giving our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present

Did you know that seventy years ago today American troops

spent Christmas breaking the advance of the German army in one of the most storied fights in American history.

Rich Lowry brings us the story.

Adolf Hitler had launched a desperate counteroffensive against the allies in the West in December 1944. As described in the book No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne, the town became a linchpin of the Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler hoped to split the Allied armies and retake the crucial harbor at Antwerp. His attack through the Ardennes forest, accompanied by a withering artillery barrage, caught the Allies by surprise and met with initial success.

But he needed Bastogne, a crossroads that General Dwight Eisenhower quickly decided must be held.

It is Bastogne that gives us some of the great statements of American military defiance. When the Germans demanded surrender of his forces, General McAuliffe shot back with his famous rejoinder, “NUTS!” A soldier’s quip captured the spirit of the American defenders: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”

Then German armor and infantry massed for an attack early on Christmas morning that punched through American lines and came within a mile and a half of Gen. McAuliffe’s headquarters.

But it was blunted and ferociously chewed up, leaving a devastated landscape of dead bodies and burned-out German tanks, the wreckage of the Germans’ last chance to take the town. With the worst seemingly past, General McAuliffe enjoyed a makeshift Christmas dinner of canned salmon and biscuits, complete with a Christmas tree fashioned from spruce branches.

The next day, General Patton finally arrived to relieve Bastogne. The siege had been broken, and so had the Ardennes offensive. Hitler’s grand gambit had failed.

In his message on Christmas Eve, General McAuliffe had continued: “We’re fighting — it’s cold — we aren’t home. All true.” But when the Germans had surged ahead at the start of the Battle of the Bulge, “the Eagle Division was hurriedly ordered to stem the advance. How effectively this was done will be written in history; not alone in our Division’s glorious history but in world history.”

“We are giving,” it concluded, “our country and our loved ones at home a worthy Christmas present and being privileged to take part in this gallant feat of arms are truly making for ourselves a merry Christmas.”

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