Before dawn, roughly 200,000 German troops and nearly 1,000 tanks struck thinly held American lines in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg, aiming to split Allied forces and seize the port of Antwerp. The offensive created a bulging salient in Allied lines that gave the battle its name, but American resistance, particularly the stubborn defense of Bastogne, blunted the attack within weeks.
Hitler had conceived the operation, codenamed Wacht am Rhein, in near-total secrecy, gambling Germany's dwindling reserves of men and fuel on one last blow to fracture the Western Allies before they could invade the Reich. He chose the Ardennes precisely because Allied commanders considered it too rugged and quiet a sector to attack, and achieved near-total tactical surprise against thinly stretched American divisions.
Fog and low clouds grounded Allied airpower for the offensive's crucial early days, letting German armor punch deep into American lines. Entire regiments were overrun or captured, and panic briefly spread through Allied headquarters as the scale of the assault became clear. At Bastogne, the encircled 101st Airborne Division famously refused to surrender; when German officers demanded capitulation, General Anthony McAuliffe's reply was a single word: "Nuts."
The skies cleared by December 23, letting Allied fighter-bombers savage German columns, and Patton's Third Army executed a stunning pivot northward to relieve Bastogne. By late January the bulge was erased, but at a staggering cost: roughly 89,000 American casualties, the bloodiest single battle in U.S. Army history, and the last major German offensive of the war in the West.
Key people: Adolf Hitler, Anthony McAuliffe, George Patton