Dirt: Battle of the Bulge

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...the overall operational effectiveness of the infantry arm is determined most fundamentally by the performance of its smallest units and their leaders.

John A. English, A Perspective on Infantry

1974

When the three old men gathered in the mess hall at Fort Campbell, Kentucky in 1974 it was the first time that they had ever discussed with each other their fight in the Ardennes. Back then, thirty years earlier, they had been too busy to talk about it. They had more battles to fight. Although each had been interviewed by Army historians during the war and had told their stories at various other times, they had never had the opportunity to remember together.

Now they were in a company mess hall of their old regiment, the 327^th Infantry. They were the wartime regimental commander, one of his battalion commanders, and a company commander of the battalion. The current brigade commander was there and the audience was his serving officers. Maps of the Ardennes were mounted on easels and each man was going to tell a new generation of officers, the Vietnam and post-Vietnam generation, what their unit had done in the Battle of the Bulge.

I noticed how close in age the three men seemed to be. It could not have seemed so thirty years earlier. Then, as now, rank and age seemed to go together. A colonel is supposed to be much older than a captain. But even if the colonel had been forty and the captain twenty-five that winter morning in 1944 (and the battalion commander, a lieutenant colonel, somewhere in-between), there was an even greater distance in authority. Now at seventy and fifty-five they looked much closer in age. Nevertheless, between them, the men who had been a colonel, a lieutenant colonel and a captain, there was still a distance.

The first to step to the maps was the Colonel. He was very clear and concise as he described his assessment of the situation. He told what he knew about the German attack, when he knew it, what locations he thought were critical, how he disposed his battalions, and how he plotted his artillery fires. As he described it, the information was carefully drawn in military symbols on sheets of clear acetate covering the maps.

Then the man who had been a lieutenant colonel and one of the battalion commanders stepped up to the map. He studied it for a while and turned to his old boss. 

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what was happening here.” He pointed to a spot on the map.

He went on to explain the orders he had given to his company commanders. These were drawn on more sheets of acetate and placed over the maps. They were not quite the same as what the colonel had told him to do.

Then the man who had been one of the lieutenant colonel’s company commanders came up to the map. He smiled.

“I got your orders, sir, but I didn’t think you really understood what needed to be done at the road junction right here.” He pointed to a spot on the map as the rest of the men in the room chuckled.

The Lieutenant Colonel turned to the Colonel. “Told you that sonofabitch never followed orders. He’s the hard-headedest infantryman I ever saw.”

The Colonel shot back, “He had a good example. I didn’t notice you following my orders all that well.”

The Captain turned back the map and went on to describe how a small hill controlled the intersection and where he’d put his machine guns and anti-tank weapons, and where he’d plotted artillery fires.

They all then went on to tell the stories of the confusion of the days that followed, the back and forth in the cold and mud, and how they stayed and fought and won until they were at last relieved.

This is a delicate, delicate balance, this web of relationships that spreads across the infantryman’s earth. One foxhole relates to another foxhole. One platoon’s set of foxholes and machine guns relates to another platoon’s. Company to company, battalion to battalion, brigade to brigade, the web spreads beyond any one person’s capacity to control. But if that one foxhole is right, and in the right place, and the web is built on the competence of each person in it, then everything can hold together.