"The snow turned red," machine gunner Vincent Speranza recalled, as the hastily dug-in troops of the 101st Airborne Division opened up on attacking German infantry and tanks to defend the Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne 80 years ago.
Then-Pvt. 1st Class Speranza, the son of Italian immigrants, said his lieutenant had ordered the first-line defenders to hold fire until the unsuspecting Germans were within 400 yards as they moved at an easy pace across an open field in the bitter cold of first light on Dec. 19, 1944.
"When they got to the 400 yards, the lieutenant said, 'Now! Now!' and we opened up with everything we had. It was a slaughter," Speranza recalled in a 2021 talk at the American Veterans Center.
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The Germans gave up on frontal assaults after that initial defeat and instead surrounded the town. On Dec. 22, the German commander, Gen. Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz, sent messengers under a white flag with a note to demand surrender from Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, the American commander.
"There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: That is the honorable surrender of the encircled town," von Lüttwitz said in his note. "In order to think it over, a term of two hours will be granted beginning with the presentation of this note."
McAuliffe scribbled a quick reply. "Nuts," he famously wrote, although some accounts suggest that he used much stronger language. One of McAuliffe's aides, Col. Joseph "Bud" Harper, gave the confused German messengers a paraphrase of what McAuliffe meant in his one-word reply -- "Go to hell!"
The siege of Bastogne was lifted on Dec. 26, 1944, when a tank column from the 4th Armored Division of then-Lt. Gen. George Patton's Third Army reached the city led by a Sherman tank nicknamed the Cobra King -- now on display at the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
As his troops entered Bastogne, Patton wrote in his diary: "What a glorious day for killing Germans!"
To mark the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, more than 100 troops from the Fort Campbell, Kentucky, base of the 101st Airborne Division were in Bastogne for a series of events that began Friday with a commemoration ceremony hosted by the American Battle Monuments Commission at the Battle of the Bulge Monument at Bastogne.
The monument, in the shape of a five-pointed American star, honors the estimated 19,000 U.S. troops killed and more than 75,000 wounded, sick or missing in the Battle of the Bulge, which Winston Churchill called "undoubtedly the greatest American battle" of World War II.
The 101st Airborne Division's casualties from Dec. 19, 1944, to Jan. 6, 1945, were 341 killed, 1,691 wounded, and 516 missing.
Air Force Brig. Gen. Matthew Jones, deputy director for operations, J3, on the Joint Staff at the Pentagon and a member of the American Battle Monuments Commission, said those who fought in the Battle of the Bulge "changed the course of the war" in repelling the last German offensive on the Western Front.
Jones, who was to speak at the ceremony Friday, told Military.com earlier this week that the American GIs who went into the battle without cold weather gear to stop the German advance set the example for today's U.S. military with their "sense of calling, their sense of purpose higher than themselves."
Jones also noted that what was then called the Army Air Forces "did make a big difference" in stopping the German advance and allowing U.S. ground forces to take the offensive.
But the overwhelming U.S. airpower advantage was of little use in the early days of the battle as snow, sleet and freezing rain kept the American aircraft grounded. Then on Dec. 23, the skies cleared and P-47 Thunderbolt attack aircraft began tearing up German columns, retired Army Col. Frank Cohn recalled at a National Archives event in November.
Cohn, then a private first class with an intelligence unit in Belgium, said "the sky was blue and our planes started to fly. We cheered those planes so hard that maybe they heard us."
What became known as the Battle of the Bulge, named for the wedge that German forces drove into allied lines, began on Dec. 16, 1944, when more than 200,000 German troops and 1,000 tanks under the command of Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt launched an offensive through the hilly and wooded Ardennes region aimed at splitting Allied forces and capturing the Belgian port of Antwerp.
The Allied high command was caught completely by surprise, but Army Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the overall Allied commander who was in Paris at the time, sensed quickly that the effort to drive back the Germans would rely on small-unit tactics and the grit of individual soldiers.
"These were the times when the grand strategy and the high hopes of high command" would take a backseat to what would be a "soldiers' war," in which success would be measured by the "sheer courage, and the instinct for survival" of the individual GI, Eisenhower wrote in his order to the troops in Belgium.
The enemy "is fighting savagely to take back all that you have won and is using every treacherous trick to deceive and kill you," Eisenhower wrote. "In the face of your proven bravery and fortitude, he will completely fail."
On Saturday, the 101st Airborne Division troops in Belgium will join in solemn remembrance ceremonies at the Luxembourg American Cemetery, the last resting place for more than 5,000 U.S. service members who died in the Battle of the Bulge and the advance to the Rhine.
The 101st troops will then join in a parade to the Bastogne town hall, where the tradition under Mayor Benoit Lutgen is to throw fistfuls of walnuts from the town hall balcony in honor of McAuliffe's famous reply to the German surrender demand.
Former Army Private 1st Class Harry Miller, who has returned to Belgium several times since he served in a Sherman tank during the Battle of the Bulge, recalled what his mind's eye saw when he visited the Luxembourg American Cemetery.
At a National Archives event in November, Miller said that, instead of neat rows of white crosses, "I see GIs, dirty GIs, unshaven, dirty as the devil, cold, miserable, worn-out boots -- that's the kind of people I see instead of crosses. That's tough, that's tough."
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