All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And now, your host for today's program, Dale Throneberry.
Hey, welcome to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry.
I'm a CW2 helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
I was a slick jockey.
And now, I'm welcoming you to our program today.
We're going to be talking about the Battle of the Bulge.
It's the 80th anniversary.
It's incredible how time flies.
Unfortunately, we have a lot of difficulty trying to find any survivors in the Battle
of the Bulge to be on the program today.
But we got a few stories that we're going to be telling.
We've got a couple of guests today.
One is Bob O'Connor.
And those of you that were listening to our program back in November, he wrote the book
The Jeep Show.
And he also did a lot of research on the Battle of the Bulge.
So he'll be joining us with some anecdotal stories about what occurred.
I've got Kevin Himmel is also going to be on.
And Kevin is a historian, a writer for the United States Army.
And he'd been on our program with Bob Gould.
Back in 2014 and 2017, talking about the Battle of the Bulge and, of course, the role that
George Patton had in it.
So hopefully, Kevin will be able to join us in a little bit.
He's actually on another broadcast right now.
He's hopefully going to jump over and join us in just a little bit.
And then we've got our local good friend, Brian Bayoff here.
He's listening in and he's going to tell us what he's learned about the Battle of the
Bulge.
He's a Marine, so they were on the other side of the world at the time.
Yep.
Yep, is right.
All right.
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All right, let's get right on into this.
So as I mentioned at the top of the hour, we were going to be talking about the Battle
of Bulge, the 80th anniversary.
Let's kind of flip around here, but it's from December 16, 1944, up until middle to the end
of January 1945.
So our guest, as I mentioned before, number one is Bob O'Connor.
Bob is the author of the Jeep Show, A Trooper in the Battle of the Bulge.
Those that were listening, Bob was on back in November to talk about his book.
And some figure in his guts, I know we did a lot of research for that.
So Bob, welcome back to Veterans Radio.
Thank you.
It's really a pleasure to be here with you and your listeners.
And joining me after quite a long hiatus is Kevin Hemel.
And Kevin is a historian and writer for the United States Army Air Force.
He's done all kinds of stuff written for the National Naval History, World War II history,
World War II quarterly, a couple of books.
And he's got a new book coming out.
His article, I just saw this too, his article about WAC Corporal Lena Dericott and a 6th
Triple 8th Central Postal Battalion has been made into a movie.
In fact, it's on Netflix right now.
So we'll talk about that later on in the program.
Wow.
Hey, Kevin, welcome back.
Hey, thanks for having me.
Can you hear me okay?
I can hear you just fine.
Thank you very much.
Fantastic.
All right, so I'm going to go to historian first, Kevin.
So let's tell me, tell me what happened on December 16, 1944.
Not much.
No.
So December 16, 1944, that is the launching of three German armies at the American lines,
what the Germans are calling Operation Autumn Mist, which we all remember as the Battle
of the Bulge through the Ardennes Forest in both Belgium and Luxembourg.
It's a night attack.
It's going to start with an artillery barrage on American front lines.
Some of the German troops are going to reflect.
They're going to use large searchlights and reflect them off the clouds and light up the
American lines and shell them and then just try to drive a big wedge through the American
and British armies.
Now the plan, according to Adolf Hitler, is to make this huge drive to Antwerp, a very
vital port, and the idea is that it's going to split the British and American troops.
They're going to go reeling in confusion.
They're going to sue for peace.
And then Germany can turn all of its troops towards the Soviet Union and overwhelm and
defeat Joseph Stalin.
That is the way over ambitious plan by Adolf Hitler.
It is basically ground down within a week or two by the American troops in the north.
They basically fight a defensive line against the Germans and just wear them down.
In the south, the town of Bastogne becomes surrounded and elements of Patton's Third
Army are going to break north and drive through German territory basically and relieve Bastogne.
It's the largest campaign fought by the United States Army in its history.
It's Hitler's last gasp to really try to win World War II.
It's an abject failure and an incredible American victory.
Well, thank you all for listening and now we're right along.
Good night everybody.
Good night.
That's the main story.
Well let's kind of figure it out, try to figure this out a little bit more, Kevin.
Let's back up because six months earlier everybody was really excited and stuff because
D-Day occurred and we had finally landed on the continent and we're pushing our way
towards Germany.
But from my understanding that we kind of got bogged down there in October and November.
We actually get bogged down in June and July.
The initial landings are successful but then we get kind of stuck up in the hedgerow fighting
and it's not until Operation Cobra where they usually use big bombers to bomb the German
lines and then break a bunch of cores which a couple cores make up an army.
We break cores through the German lines and then just go racing across France and that's
Patton's famous pursuit of the enemy, the breakout in pursuit.
And the attitude of the soldiers prior to this is we're going to die in a few weeks.
Once they start racing across France we're going to be home for Christmas.
So it really changes the attitude of the American military but in the beginning of September
we start getting into that sort of rough territory along the Moose River, I'm sorry, the Moselle
River in the south and then all the canals in Holland in the north.
And just as we're reaching this really rough terrain we run really thin on fuel and food
and supplies and clouds start rolling in.
You get that autumn cover over the sky so we don't have that air support element.
So it's kind of like all these bad things kind of happening at once and they sort of
slow install the Allied armies trying to break into Germany and it's at this point that Hitler
starts organizing his armies for this one last huge counterattack campaign.
Well, he was trying to figure out where he got all these people from because he was involved
in the east side of Germany with the Russians and that seemed like that wasn't going too
well and now we've got the Allies coming across from the west so he's going to end
the south and they're coming up through Italy and he's kind of got a last gasp attempt to
do something.
I'm guessing this was not really a popular decision by his generals, was it?
No, not at all.
They thought that the troops would be better used, slowing down the Soviets in the east
instead of going against the Allies in the west.
To answer your question about where the troops come from, roughly 50,000 Germans escaped
from what was called the Filet Pocket when Montgomery's 21st Army Group was pushing down
from Normandy and Omar Bradley's 12th Army Group kind of encircles mostly under General
Patton and tries to sort of create a bag and catch them all.
About 50,000 do escape from that and there were a lot of Germans in Scandinavia that
they could pull out and they even thin the lines a little bit in Italy to make this possible
and pulled some armored divisions off the Russian front to make this happen.
Kevin, I've also read that because the Luftwaffe was kind of on its last leg, by that time,
yeah, turned into the Luftwaffe almost, that they were able to transfer a lot of ground
support type personnel and turn them into infantrymen, which I'm sure didn't throw the
general.
No, the same thing with the Kriegsmarine or the German Navy.
So yeah, they were basically pulling everybody they could into this.
So you had an overwhelming army of very poorly trained soldiers.
One of the first operations of the war of the campaign was called Operation Stosser
and that was dropping German paratroopers behind American lines.
And these guys, a lot of them, it was their first jump ever and it was basically at night
in a snowstorm.
You talk about the 101st and 82nd Airborne, they were highly trained to the razor's edge
and launching in relatively good weather.
Where you've got a lot of green paratroopers jumping for the first time ever, they do cause
confusion behind the lines, but not as effective as they could have been if they had trained
specifically for this mission and had a little bit of experience under their belts.
There was some confusion when you're talking about those paratroopers when I was reading
another story.
There was a World War II veteran who was talking about, he was an MP and he said that one of
the guys in his company came running back in and he says, there's guys dressed in white
that are jumping out of the sky here and he says they're speaking German.
What the heck is all of that all about?
So they ran back to the company area and got to, you know, woke up the general and all
this other stuff and they drove out there but they couldn't find one.
And so they said, well, no, I think, you know, he's just imagining this.
That's the leadership right there.
Well, yeah, you know, well, that's a whole other program.
Dale, this jump by the German paratroopers, they were dressed in American uniforms, many
of them and they were intended to create chaos.
And as Kevin says, they did, they really weren't effective as a fighting force but they did
create a high degree of paranoia behind the American lines.
And I have a, my fictional character who has retreated from the very front lines of the
attack to Clairvaux, which was the regimental headquarters of the 110th regiment, meets
up with a very nervous sentry on the outskirts of Bastogne and who asked for a password.
I could read you a couple of paragraphs of that conversation if your listeners would
like it.
Yeah, I think that would be interesting.
Okay, so the Jim Tanser, the entertainment soldier has just escaped from the host in
Jen, the very front line and walked to Clairvaux, regimental headquarters of the 110th regiment
and very much the next place to be overrun by the German forces within the first 24 hours.
Okay, private Tanser, you say, from a GI two hours later holding the map in one hand and
pointing a rifle at Jim with the other.
The GI is Johnny Kucharski before the draft a soda jerk at the West Philadelphia Rexalls,
now mess cook in the 110th regimental headquarters company.
Kucharski is deeply unhappy to be on sentry duty east of Clairvaux during what rumor and
his own ears tell him is an escalating emergency.
He is also slightly drunk, who don't know the code word, don't have no dog tags, don't
know Danny Litwiler plays for the Phillies nor whiz means whiz onions.
I know Rip Sewell and Paul Weiner, Jim says.
Nobody cares about them pirates.
Leo DeRosher cookie bombs, handy hook, keep your hands high.
Kucharski says, has this German map dressed like the Pope face covered in blood shaking
life a leak, shaking like a leaf, no cigarettes.
Tell us your story again and better this time so we don't turn you over you and your map
over to the MPs, the miserable pricks, he says under his breath.
I'm just cold, Jim says untruthfully.
Well, crowds don't chew gum, so I'll give you another chance.
That was my my fictional take on some of the confusion and the effects thereof on ordinary
GIs.
Well, you know, what was interesting, I thought, you know, a lot of the little research that
I did for this is, you know, it was we were unorganized as well.
Right, Kevin, it seemed like we were surprised we were we were sending replacements up to
the front by the thousands, you know, with no experience and and and so on and so forth
and kind of nobody really expected that Germans were going to do this thing again.
And, you know, and Hitler, you know, Hitler and his delusional genius decided that this
was a great way to do it.
And he, you know, he had talked to meteorologists and found that, you know, there was going
to be cloud cover and terrible weather and, you know, we wouldn't be able to, you know,
have any airplanes in the air.
So that would give them an advantage going in, right?
Right.
Yeah.
And in fact, speaking of the complete surprise on the American side, the movie Patton portrays
him as predicting the Battle of the Bulge, and it's been written about for decades.
But in my research, I realized that all of these statements are based on a November 25,
1944 diary entry, in which he says, you know, Troy Middleton's corps is sitting around,
they should be up and active.
If not, the Germans could attack through there.
That was something that his wife did to his diaries.
That sentence is not in the handwritten diaries.
It's only in the typed up version.
In the handwritten diaries, he does write it, but he writes it on December 27, the day
after he liberate, he broke through the bastone.
So she took that sentence and moved it back to November 25.
And every historian, including myself, since 1952 has been telling that story.
So fortunately, I was able to course correct research and have that in my volume, but really
nobody saw this coming.
And I don't mean to be stuttering about this because it was such a massive undertaking
on both sides, really, but especially on the German side.
I mean, I don't know how many pans or tanks they've had.
I mean, anybody who wants to, you know, find out more about the Battle of the Bulge, of
course, all they got to do is type it in on, you know, on Google and there'll be all kinds
of videos that will come up and you'll see how terrible the weather was.
And I mean, maybe you can, Kevin, you can give us a little history of what was going
on at the time, weather wise.
Sure.
So as far as the weather is concerned, the weather was not that bad when they launched
the attack.
There was a lot of heavy cloud cover, but there was no snow for at least the first two
days.
And then the snow kind of just kind of sprays the area.
It's not until after Bastone is relieved that the temperatures start going below zero and
there's just snowstorms left and right.
In fact, a lot of the photographs that we think of when we think of the Battle of the
Bulge were taken in January, not December.
There was a news blackout because of the German attack.
And in my research for Patton's Drive to Bastone, I think I found like three or four
photographs.
And that's it.
If you really are looking at the dates and everything, one was of, I think, the 80th Division
marching north and the other one was the 26th Division marching to get into position for
the attack.
And then there's several pictures the day after Bastone's relief of tanks rolling up
into Bastone and almost every photograph after that is January.
It's January and it's cold.
And it's cold, like I said, below zero.
You know, guys had to urinate on their rifles and machine guns because they would freeze
up and try to think some other things.
I remember they captured some Germans and the Germans stank real bad.
And what they realized to stay warm, the Germans would take Kalmanur and mix it with
straw and put it in their boots.
And that would keep their feet warm, but it really stank.
Whoa.
Isn't that one of those things we have to learn to attack downwind, right?
One of those things you don't see in the textbooks.
Yeah.
I don't remember studying that in World War II history.
It wasn't actually flat terrain either, was it?
No, no, no.
You know, when you look at the area between Normandy and Paris, that's very flat.
And then as you get to the border with Germany, there's lots of ravines, lots of rivers running
north to south, heavy forest areas.
So it really is good for fighting on the defensive, not so much the offensive.
I would think so.
Yeah.
I was thinking, and only when you're talking about cold, I just saw an article, a little
clip at this morning of talking about the pitcher Warren Spahn, for those of our elderly
generation now, used to pitch for the Braves, Paul Boehmert and all that.
From Buffalo, New York, he says, I figured I'm used to cold weather.
This isn't going to bother me at all, but he's never been so cold in his whole life.
And then a lot of them weren't really prepared for the cold either.
No, no, no.
The American uniforms and equipment was not getting up.
They were wrapping towels around their boots to stay warm.
Don Malarkey with Easy Company, he would actually pour water on the towels around his boots
so it would freeze under the logical conclusion that it was insulating his feet, which the
other soldiers thought was stupid.
I met, I spoke with a guy from the 82nd Airborne, and he said, and he had grown up on a farm.
He said the key was to keep moving around.
And the guys had just huddled in their foxholes.
They were dooming themselves to frostbite and trench foot, things like that.
And then with all the moisture and stuff, as you mentioned, prior to the snow, some
of their foxholes and stuff that they dug out ended up with water in them.
And that ended, of course, with the trench foot and everything else like that.
And trying to sleep, especially, I'm sure, that once the weather turned to below zero,
now you're in an icebox.
They talk about during the siege of Bastone how the Germans shot a flare over the 101st
Airborne's front lines at night, and the guys kind of poked out of their foxhole to look.
And they realized that everyone's faces were black, because what you would do in your foxhole,
you put the tarp over it, and you could light a sterno, because you had the tarp over it.
But all the oil from the sterno would get on your face and basically blacken it.
And so that was part of the living conditions for the 101st and the perimeter of Bastone.
Oh, man.
I mean, the conditions are just awful.
You mentioned earlier on, and Bob, I know you mentioned this also, the idea of these
Germans coming in and dressed as Americans.
And there was so much back and forth travel, I guess you could say it before World War
II.
Germans would come to America and go to schools and all this other stuff and go back and we
had the same type of thing.
Can you think of any examples of what they ran into?
What would give the Germans away?
Well, one of the things that my weeks...
Other than chewing gum.
Well, they wouldn't...no, they'd be chewing gum to act like Americans.
I think Americans were the only people in the world that chewed gum like that.
They would certainly, as the fictional soldier does on Sentry Duty outside of Clairvaux,
they'd go deeper than the easy passwords.
So it wouldn't be just, you know, give me the pledge of allegiance or something like
that, but it would be, you know, who's the relief pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates?
What kind of, you know, they'd go deeper on that.
They also, I read and I think Kevin probably knows a good deal more than I do about it,
but I read that when they stripped some of these German imposters down, they were wearing
gray, German issue underwear.
And that confirmed it.
And of course, these men were shot out of hand.
They were not, you know, sent to prison for a month and, you know, given a trial as, you
know, when you put on the other guy's uniform, you are, my understanding is you are subject
to immediate execution when caught.
And they pretty much were.
I'm sure they were interrogated.
But Kevin, what, is that right?
Yeah.
So they were considered spies if you're wearing the other countries.
Right.
And they actually wasn't just German underwear.
They wore their entire uniforms underneath the American uniform because they wanted to
be able to change quickly if they were surrounded.
And I should stress this.
So there's two operations.
Grief, which was guys on the ground in American uniforms going to change sides and guard bridges.
And then Stasser, which is the paratrooping guys going in and they kept on their German
uniform.
I see.
And so, and like I said, they're the guys wearing American uniforms.
Their job was to guard bridges that we wanted to keep, that Germans wanted to keep intact
and take down street signs.
But when they interrogated one of the guys, he just said, yeah, we're out to get big generals.
And that causes the real grief on the American lines.
Suddenly, you know, a battalion of MPs is guarding Dwight D Eisenhower.
So in that sense, their size is small compared to the impact they have on the battlefield.
There was something else I was going to add about this.
Kevin, let me tell you something.
I heard from, I went to a conference at the World War II Museum and one of the speakers
was a Bernard Montgomery expert.
So of course, he talked about how Ike during the battle, Eisenhower gave part of the American
forces over to Montgomery and took them away from, you know, essentially took them away
from Omar Bradley, which absolutely infuriated Bradley.
This speaker said that Bradley became so concerned about the German spies going after generals
that he rarely, you know, rarely left his headquarters in Luxembourg City.
And this speaker intimated that this was part of why Eisenhower took the forces in the north
and turned them over to Montgomery was that Bradley seemed trapped in Luxembourg City by
his fear of these overblown spies.
Yeah.
I'm not sure that guy understood what was happening.
The reason that Eisenhower gives First Army under Courtney Hodges to Montgomery is because
the German attack basically disrupts all the communications between Bradley's 12th Army
headquarters and First Army.
And it's something that is discussed amongst Eisenhower's staff of British and Americans,
Beetle Smith being the chief of staff, and he's infuriated by this idea when the British
come to him and say, well, it would be better if Montgomery commanded First Army because
then the communications would be directed to get the hell out of my office.
And he thinks about it.
He goes, you know what?
You guys are right.
And they go to Eisenhower and Eisenhower understands the political aspect of this.
But in this case, Eisenhower acts as a military general.
He looks at the situation on the map, makes this logical deduction that, yes, it's smarter
to have an Army group commander in the north in charge of this unit than one in the south
that's getting cut off.
And I think if that was an entire American force in Europe, there wouldn't have been
that political impact.
But because Montgomery was so, Montgomery was seen as so obnoxious by the American generals
that it just causes an explosion, Bradley on the other hand, he's kind of left out of
a job.
He's in charge of one Army and that's Patton's third Army.
And Patton's the one who's got his hands on the levers and is driving around checking
on everything.
But they meet every day several times a day.
And I think Patton was very conscious of Bradley's sort of embarrassing position.
And they had an Army taken away from him.
But in that same sense, the real pressure is on Patton.
If this attack north fails, it's going to be on Patton.
And it succeeds again.
It is on Patton.
So the real pressure was on him.
But I think he respected Bradley through the whole thing.
And Bradley's attitude or whatever had zero to do with Eisenhower's decision.
Let's halt right there.
We're going to take a real quick break for our Medal of Honor segment, which happens
to be John Fox from the Battle of Pestone.
And so we'll come right back.
We're talking with Bob O'Connor and Kevin Himmler about the Battle of the Bulge.
If you'd like to get in on the conversation, feel free to give us a call 734-822-1600.
We'll be right back.
You're listening to Veterans Radio.
The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor in combat, given a member of the Armed
Forces of the United States.
There have been over 3,400 recipients of the nation's highest award.
This is one of them.
Lieutenant John Fox called in artillery fire on his own position.
Details after this.
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Veterans at 1-800-693-4800.
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Their number again, 1-800-693-4800.
On Christmas night in 1944, enemy soldiers in civilian clothes gradually infiltrated
the town Fox and his men were in, and by early morning, the town was largely in hostile hands.
An organized attack by uniformed German units began at 4 a.m.
Being greatly outnumbered, most of the American forces were forced to withdraw from the town,
but Fox and other members of his observer party voluntarily remained on the second floor
of a house to direct defensive artillery fire.
Fox reported the Germans were in the streets and attacking in strength.
He then called for defensive artillery fire to slow the enemy advance.
As the Germans continued to press the attack towards the area that Fox occupied, he adjusted
the artillery fire closer to his position.
Finally, he was warned that the next adjustment would bring the deadly artillery right on
top of his position.
After acknowledging the danger, Lieutenant Fox insisted that the last adjustment be fired
as this was the only way to defeat the attacking soldiers.
Here when a counterattack retook the position from the Germans, Lieutenant Fox's body
was found with the bodies of approximately 100 German soldiers.
The Metal Otter series is a production of Veterans Radio.
Military veterans touch everyone's life.
I'm guessing right now you're thinking of a veteran, a close friend, relative, maybe
it's you.
Even the toughest of us sometimes need help, but don't know where to turn for support.
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We can all help someone going through a difficult time.
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We're back here on Veterans Radio and we're talking all about the Battle of the Bulge.
It is the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, which is, you know, it's an amazing
event, a historical event.
And we're talking with Kevin Hemel.
He's a historian, army historian.
And Bob O'Connor is an author of a recently, a book about the Battle of the Bulge, a fictionalized
version of it.
And also my good friend Brian May has here too.
And I wanted to ask about, you know, Kevin, if you could kind of draw us a mental picture
of the, you know, where the Bulge occurred and, you know, it kind of gets, you know,
surrounding best on that area.
Sure.
So I guess I'll start off by saying where the Bulge did not occur.
And that was France.
And that was one of the goals was to reach the Muse River, which divides Belgium from
France and then start heading north to Antwerp.
And so on the border of Germany is Belgium and Luxembourg.
And so they imagine that the border between Germany and France kind of splits like a Y.
The center of that Y would be Luxembourg in the south and Belgium in the north.
And so the idea was to launch through the forests of Belgium and Luxembourg and basically
drive the west and then northwest to the port of Antwerp and capture that.
Now, the terrain is, like I said, a lot of woods, a lot of twisty, turny roads, a lot
of ridges, a lot of bridges over streams and small, you know, rivers.
I shouldn't even say rivers.
It's really, you know, streams and creeks and small farming villages sort of in between.
And so that is where the Americans really make their defenses in these small towns.
Now, I was talking about, we were talking about armies and of course, corps make up armies,
divisions make up corps.
Troy Middleton, whose eighth corps is right in the line of the attack here.
His headquarters is in the town of Bastogne.
And his strategy, because he knows he realizes after about a day or two, he cannot stop this
offensive.
The best he can do is slow it down.
So he's putting together small packets of tanks and infantry and sending them to these
different crossroads and small towns to stall the Germans as they push towards Bastogne.
Now, Bastogne has seven roads coming in and out of it.
So whoever holds it is going to be able to control this sort of road network that you're
going to need, you know, for that big drive up to Antwerp.
And so it's really the ninth and tenth armored divisions working with the 28th Infantry Division
that are just slowing the Germans the best they can.
And it's the tenth armored that actually comes into Bastogne and breaks into three teams
in the north, in the west, in the south, I'm sorry, the north, the east and the southeast
that are going to really stop these Germans from going into Bastogne.
So they get pushed back from their positions.
Their actions give just enough time for the 101st Airborne under Anthony McCullough to
get into Bastogne and send his troops into a perimeter to protect it.
And so you've got this one isolated town in the Sea of Germans.
Now, fortunately, the Germans, after they make several attempts to break in, send the
majority of their tanks east for the bigger objective so that when George S. Patton has
that meeting with Eisenhower and Bradley, and they decide on their strategy, he will
be able to attack to Bastogne.
And I want to stress here, because I wrote a lot about this in my book, you know, Bastogne
is really a big focal point of Patton's attack.
But when Dwight D. Eisenhower looked at the map of the German attack, being a good military
leader, he said the first thing we have to do is stabilize the shoulders of this big
bulge driving through our lines.
Now, in the north, that had already been done with a place called Ellsborn Ridge.
There was a solid, there was a nice ridge where the Americans set up their artillery
and so the Germans couldn't expand any wider.
Patton, on the other hand, is basically his shoulder is out exposed.
And so what he's going to do is launch the 5th Infantry Division, very experienced division,
into a place called Etternacht along the Sauer River.
And if he can take that, he will stabilize his side of the shoulder.
So on December 22nd, he's going to launch dual attacks, one to Bastogne and one to Etternacht.
And in Etternacht, they're going to use a new top secret weapon called the, I just forgot
the name of it, the proximity fuse.
And so this is put on artillery rounds that allows them to blow up above ground and have
much bigger impact.
So when the Americans get close to Etternacht and the hills over it, they start shelling
the town.
The Germans flee across the bridge, but the artillery fire is so intense, they turn around
and flee back into it.
And so it's not until the morning of the 26th of December that after Christmas, they take
Etternacht.
And Patton is so relieved.
He goes, my attack into Bastogne cannot be outflanked because we have Etternacht.
And he was just frustrated.
He hadn't taken Bastogne.
He had been pushing all those troops to get up there for days.
He promised Eisenhower he'd be there in 24 hours on the 23rd of December and was worried
he was going to get fired for not reaching Bastogne.
And at one point Eisenhower calls him and he goes, I'm so sorry.
Please don't fire me.
And he goes, George, what are you talking about?
As long as you're moving, you're winning the battle.
And so Eisenhower had complete confidence in Patton.
Patton showed a little bit of fear and anxiety, but he had the courage to go on the offensive.
And it really is a close run thing because Anthony McCullough inside Bastogne is in communication
with Patton the whole time.
And he's saying, when are you going to get up here?
When are you going to relieve us?
We're holding on by our fingernails.
And Patton's relaying that information to his troops below.
And when they go to make a break to get into Bastogne, in the path they think is the easiest,
a place called Chomalt, the Germans counterattack and stop it.
And so it's really this reserve unit that's circling around the rear to go defend a town
that think the Germans are going to attack under a guy named Creighton Abrams that comes
to a crossroads.
And he looks up and he sees all these cargo planes flying to Bastogne and dropping equipment
parachuting it in.
And then he's seeing the planes get shot down and says, you know what?
Why don't we just try at this crossroad to just race into Bastogne?
And what do we got to lose?
So he radios the request up the chain of command that they ever agrees.
And they're going to put in the front of this attack, what's called a jumbo tank, where
they put extra plates of armor on the hull so it can take a lot of punishment.
And they put a lieutenant named Bodges in the tank and they said, you know, go get those
boys in Bastogne.
And he begins to drive.
They get to a town called Assen-Wa and the plan is the Americans are going to shell it.
And as Bodges' tanks get close, they'll stop the shelling.
They got a guy in a jeep, you know, raiding this in.
And just as they're formulating the plan, the artillery's hitting the town, the tanks
are coming up, the Germans knock out the guy in the jeep.
So Bodges and all of his troops go into Assen-Wa in the midst of an artillery barrage.
It is very confused, fighting, things are getting bogged down.
One American soldier actually knocks out two German machine gun posts and saves the guy
in a burning half-track.
His name is Jimi Hendrix and he'll get the Medal of Honor for that.
And Bodges and two other tanks, followed by two half-tracks and another two tanks, make
it out of the town just as the telephone pole goes down in the middle of the street, blocking
all the other tanks.
Fortunately, a guy, a guy in a Piper Cups flying over calls off the artillery.
But now the entire offensive going into Bastogne is three tanks followed by two half-tracks,
followed by two more tanks.
That's the entire offensive.
And as they're driving up this road, they're firing into the woods left and right.
They don't want to engage the Germans, they just want to keep their heads down.
But as they go, the tanks separate from the troop carriers, so the Germans run into the
road and plant mines.
They just throw them onto the road and one of the half-tracks hits the mine, stalling
the rest of the column.
So now the entire attack into Bastogne is three tanks.
Lieutenant Bodges rolls up on a big bunker on the right side of the road, fires a bunch
of rounds into it, kills about 10 Germans.
And then he sees some guys kind of creeping up on his left and he turns the cannon on
them and he shouts, I'm Lieutenant Bodges, 4th Armored Division, identify yourselves.
And one of the guys stands up, he says, Corporal Miller 505th, I'm sorry, 101st Airborne, damn
glad to see you.
And that's when the siege of Bastogne is broken.
You mentioned Crete and Abrams.
Is that the same Crete and Abrams that was the commander of Vietnam?
Yes, and that's what the Abrams tank is named for.
Okay.
Well, so the guy did have some experience.
He wasn't the pencil pusher we thought he was in Vietnam.
Oh, absolutely.
The other thing, Bob, I wanted to comment and I think it was in your book, and I know
this and everybody knows this one, but I really love the comment of General McAuliffe when
Bastogne is surrounded and the Germans are telling him, offering him a chance to surrender.
What did he do?
Well, his aide, he was taken a nap because of course he was sleepless for most nights
while he, you know, while this was going on.
His aides woke him up, presented the German typed letter and he looked at it.
And I think he was still half asleep and he said, nuts.
And they, I think they said, you know, asked him to repeat that and he said, nuts.
And when they took this back to the German officers who had brought the offer of surrender,
the request for surrender, even though they were fluent in English, they did not understand
the colloquialism, nuts, and it had to be explained to them by an American.
It basically means just go to hell.
Yeah, exactly.
Forget about it, like we say now.
I was going to add, McAuliffe is such an interesting person.
It was very, you know, there's some luck in here.
McAuliffe was the highest ranking officer, of course, in Bastogne.
And as it happened, he was the artillery officer, the high, you know, the, the artillery commander
for the 101st Airborne Division.
And so he was able to use the artillery in Bastogne and basically fire around the face
of a clock.
So he could fire 360 degrees.
And my understanding, and Kevin, I'm sure you know more about this, but my understanding
is it was very difficult for the German armor to concentrate enough armor and soldiers in
one place to make a breakthrough because the American artillery was able to, you know,
again, fire at a 360 degree circle from Bastogne.
And if we hadn't run out of shells, and I believe we came somewhat close to running
out of shells before the cargo planes were starting to drop them, that was a real problem
for the Germans trying to get into Bastogne.
Yeah.
In fact, McAuliffe set up a pattern in what's now McAuliffe Square, he used ropes and basically
made a huge pie.
And so guys would radio in where they were and what was coming.
And they would use the artillery within the pie to fire and concentrate on the German
attacks, very, very effective.
I'll tell you a real quick other anecdote about, or just different perspective on the
nuts story.
When the Germans came through the line with that surrender notice, it was about 12 noon.
That morning at 6.30 a.m., Patton had launched his counterattack to Bastogne and had gone
about three miles by 12 noon.
So McAuliffe was aware that help was on the way.
But I think that reinforced his ability to deny the form of surrender.
Yes.
Well, I just, you know, so what happened after, so we got to Bastogne was not, well,
that was basically surrounded, wasn't it, until Patton broke through?
Correct, for about 10 days.
So they were cut off.
And then the reinforcement started arriving and the weather cleared and the bombers were
able to come back into action and actually pushed the Germans back into Germany, right?
Right.
Yeah.
So once Bastogne was really, what Patton really wanted to do, and Montgomery too, was
to attack at the base and close off the entire bulge.
But in the south, Bradley said, no, I want you to, after you take Bastogne, just keep
heading north because the sooner we connect with the troops in the north, the sooner I
get first army back.
So that is really Bradley's motivation.
And Patton, he doesn't really disagree or push back.
He goes, okay.
But the fighting for that section, the fighting after Bastogne is sometimes more intense and
bloodier and higher casualties than before Bastogne.
Because that's when the temperatures drop below zero, the Germans are really defending
themselves to get out of there.
And they're going to exact them as much of a toll as they can.
And then you've got troops on the north kind of going on the offensive and they're taking
casualties.
So it is a pretty bloody slog.
I think that's why so many histories and popular stories end with the relief of Bastogne
and never really go into the real bloody fighting to really erase the bulge.
Kevin, it was till January 25th that the lines were so that, as you say, that bloody fighting,
which gets less popular press, went on for a darn near a month.
Yeah.
In fact, there's one point they try to transfer the 101st Airborne out of the area to give
them a rest.
But the roads are so full of snow and ice, they can't even move it.
You know, that's the kind of conditions they're fighting under.
Incredible.
Yeah.
Well, I know the numbers were astronomical as far as I think they said it was one of
the bloodiest campaigns of World War II.
From both sides.
Yeah.
Like I said, it's the largest campaign fought by the US Army in its history.
Wow.
Yeah.
We're coming up toward the end of the program here.
I just wanted to give Kevin a chance to talk about this movie that has just been released.
It's called The Six Triple Eight.
Tell me about this.
You wrote an article and then they kind of adapted it.
Sure.
So The Six Triple Eight is about the Six Triple Eight Central Postal Directory Battalion.
This was the only all black, all female unit to go over season World War II.
They go over in February 45.
They're given a sort of almost impossible task of breaking a log jam of mail to the troops
in only six months.
They did it in three.
I first learned about them in 2008.
I wrote a story about the unit in 2009 and then moved on to other things.
And I had worked at Fort Leavenworth at one point and then I was working down in San Antonio
and friends were calling me from Fort Leavenworth saying, hey, there's posters going up that
they're building a monument to the Six Triple Eight.
You need to call these people.
So I reached out to him.
I didn't call him Phil Pot.
I said, how can I help you?
And he was, well, we actually found three more veterans.
I had interviewed three veterans to write the original story.
And I said, well, tell you what, give me one of the veterans.
I'll interview her.
I'll write the story.
I'll go in WW2 history magazine and it'll be a nice accompanying thing.
So I interviewed Lena Dericott King.
She was a pill.
She was hysterical at 95.
She still went out dancing every Saturday night.
And I wrote up her story and it got published.
And the publisher liked it so much.
He connected me with a Hollywood producer named Carlota Espinosa.
And then she brought in her partner, Kerry Selig, and they would just call me from time
to time.
And then one day they called me up and they said, okay, Tyler Perry is going to call you
in two days.
And I said, yeah, right.
And then the next thing I know, Tyler Perry is calling me.
And I spent pretty much every day on the phone with him, sometimes two and three times a
day for the next year as he wrote the script.
And then he was so kind to me.
He had me sitting on the table read with all the actresses and actors and then had me on
set for two days as a technical advisor.
And so I was able to add a little bit of expertise to the movie.
And it's just really kind of been a dream come true.
I mean, I never thought anything I wrote would be a movie.
I think everything I write should be a movie, but they never have been.
So I never really thought about it.
So it's just been a big gift.
And it's so nice that these women who serve their country and were basically forgotten
are now getting their story told to an audience of millions.
My magazines reach about 50,000 people.
But because of Tyler Perry, millions and millions and millions of people will now know their
story.
Absolutely.
The movie is 6888.
6888.
And it's on Netflix right now.
And I really encourage people to go out there.
Bob O'Connor, I want to thank you so much for being on our program.
His book is the Jeep back here.
Jeep show.
The Jeep show.
And maybe that movie too.
Jeep show, a trooper at the Battle of the Bulge.
It is available on Amazon in paperback audio book and ebook.
All right.
Yeah.
And it's a great story.
You could also go back in November and listen to it here on Veterans Radio when we talked
about it.
Kevin, thank you very much for being on the program.
It's good to see you again.
And let me know what's going on next time.
Both of you guys are in next books.
I'm excited to have that.
We're going to go out.
This is our last show of 2024.
And now we're going to go out on America the Beautiful again.
The version is Jimmy Fortune and Sonya Isaacs Urie.
As you know, I believe in this country.
I love this country.
That's why I go out with America the Beautiful every single week, if I can.
So until next year, this is Dale Thromberry for everybody here at Veterans Radio.
We're going to be listening to the whole song.
I'm getting my, no, I'm getting a stretch signal.
So I'm going to be listening to the whole thing, right?
So we got 10 seconds.
Here we go.
Anyway, so thank you all for listening.
As I said, we'll be back next year until then.
This is Dale, all of us.
Happy new year.
You are dismissed.
God bless America.
Land that I love.
Stand beside her.
I love her.
I love her and guide her through the night with a light from above, from the mountains,
to the prairies, to the oceans, white with foam.
God bless America.
My home sweet home
God bless America
My home sweet home
God bless America
Land that I love
Stand beside her and guide her
Through the night with the light from above
From the mountains to the prairies
To the oceans, night with foam
God bless America
My home sweet home
God bless America
My home sweet home