11 days in December Christmas at the Bulge, 1944

Stanley Weintraub, 1929-

Book - 2006

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Subjects
Published
New York : Free Press 2006.
Language
English
Main Author
Stanley Weintraub, 1929- (-)
Physical Description
201 p. : ill., map
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN
9780743287104
  • Preface
  • 1. No Peace
  • 2. Christmas Gifts
  • 3. Breakthrough
  • 4. The Real Thing
  • 5. Retreats
  • 6. Madhouse
  • 7. Turning About
  • 8. "Nuts!"
  • 9. "One More Shopping Day"
  • 10. Midnight Clear
  • 11. Christmas Day
  • 12. Winding Up
  • Afterword
  • Sources
  • Acknowledgments
  • Index
Review by Booklist Review

By December 1944, Nazi Germany seemed on the brink of disintegration. The Russians were rapidly advancing in the east, while the Americans and British, after a brief pause, were primed to thrust into Germany from the west. So the German counterattack through the Ardennes was a complete surprise and, initially, a great success. Ultimately, however, the Germans failed to split the Allied armies and drive to the sea. Still, Weintraub has written a compact, fast-moving account of those critical days that largely glosses over the military technicalities to focus upon the individual experiences of ordinary soldiers. At the center of the narrative is George Patton, hardly an ordinary soldier. As one would expect, Weintraub shows Patton as brash, brilliant, and profane. Patton's part prayer, part challenge to God to provide clear weather for Allied air attacks is recounted memorably here. But Weintraub's use of the letters and diaries of lesser soldiers enlivens his account and makes this a particularly poignant saga of men in war. --Jay Freeman Copyright 2006 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The Battle of the Bulge doesn't quite fit the epic mold it's often cast in bloody, yes, but lacking in strategic consequence, with no one but Hitler doubting the Allied victory. That the carnage spoiled Christmas time is the slender irony anchoring this aimless retelling by military historian Weintraub (Silent Night: The Story of the 1914 Christmas Truce). Noting American complacency about the German buildup, and strategic and personal squabbles among the Allied commanders, he trumps up Patton's prayer for good killing weather into a dramatic turning point. Mainly, though, the book is a kaleidoscope of anecdotes, combat scenes alternating incoherently with foxhole doldrums and frontline picaresque. There's pluck and defiance " `They've got us surrounded, the poor bastards,' " quips a jaunty GI and death and despair. There are celebrity cameos: correspondent Ernest Hemingway drinks and growls and shoots a few Germans; Marlene Dietrich, on a USO tour, allows a soldier to dust her body with delousing powder. And there are many Christmas celebrations, everywhere from POW camps and Belgian orphanages to Hitler's headquarters. Unfortunately, the reader gleans neither a clear battle narrative nor a sense of pathos only a period-authentic impatience to get the war over with. 8 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (Nov. 28) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Weintraub (arts & humanities, emeritus, Penn State Univ.; Silent Night: The Remarkable Christmas Truce of 1914) again offers a holiday-themed history book, this time reviewing the Battle of the Bulge, one of the final operations of World War II. He presents the stories of those involved, covering the perspectives of everyone from the enlisted men to the top generals, both Allies and Germans. One of his major characters is naturally Gen. George Patton, whose military experience and personal idiosyncrasies always make him an interesting study. This book is not meant to be a major assessment of the battle, but by weaving in holiday facets, Weintraub offers an appealing new way to look at a topic already covered in great historic detail. Recommended for most public libraries.--Joel W. Tscherne, Cleveland P.L. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

One of war's most graceful chroniclers (Iron Tears, 2005, etc.) visits the troops in the winter of 1944 as the Germans planned and executed a fierce, desperate attack. How do men in hell celebrate Christmas? Weintraub (Arts and Humanities Emeritus/Penn State Univ.) explores that question while delineating German strategy and the Allied response, territories he knows well. The author outlines Hitler's basic intent: to convince the Allies with a ferocious surprise attack that they could not easily win the war; perhaps to earn the Reich a treaty rather than a total defeat. Weintraub alternates regularly between the two sides, quoting from wartime diaries and postwar memoirs of the participants to let us know what is happening; he even pulls away a few times to explain what the Russians were doing on the Eastern Front. He finds space as well for celebrity news. Marlene Dietrich was around, sleeping with an officer or two. Hemingway and his estranged third wife, Martha Gellhorn, were both there; impolitic Weintraub says she "nagged" Papa from the rear of a Jeep they shared. Young Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was captured and sent off to Slaughterhouse-Five in Dresden. The tale's hero is George S. Patton, whose daring and full-speed-aheadedness the author greatly admires. Field Marshal Montgomery, by contrast, comes off as timorous and tardy; Eisenhower frolics too much with Kay Summersby; the displaced Omar Bradley pouts. The best, most affecting and effective sections are anecdotes about how individuals behaved (bravely, brutally, cravenly, bizarrely), how some men were able to convince other men to run toward gunfire, how soldiers and officers on both sides figured out how to celebrate Christmas in the absence of all evident humanity. Patton's death closes the narrative. A dark Christmas card from the middle of some frozen and very bloody ground. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Preface Sir, This is Patton talking . . . You have just got to make up Your mind whose side You're on. You must come to my assistance, so that I may dispatch the entire German Army as a birthday present to your Prince of Peace. . . . -- from Lieutenant General George S. Patton's pre-Christmas prayer, at the chapel of the Fondation Pescatore, Luxembourg, December 23, 1944 Thousands upon thousands of lofty snow-laden spruce that from a distance suggested a vast expanse of Christmas trees stood in the dark, rugged forests of the Ardennes overlapping the frontiers of Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, and France. Yet there was not much Christmas there late in December 1944. The Battle of the Bulge, the most intense fighting of World War II in the West since Normandy, and soon the costliest and the most futile, was at its peak. The Christmas tree, the most recognizable image of what had become the major family-focused holiday in Europe and America, had its likely origins just south of the Ardennes. Napoleon's armies had brought decorated Christmas trees from Alsatia into the duchies and principalities of Germany, where the peasant practice took further hold. German immigrants carried the traditional tree across the Atlantic to America, where the custom spread in the 1820s, even before Clement Clarke Moore's ballad The Night Before Christmas established, or revived, other festive symbols. In the early 1840s, Queen Victoria's young consort, Prince Albert, further popularized the Christmas tradition beyond Germany when he brought candlelit tabletop trees to England from Saxony, and London's new illustrated magazines featured them. A century later, the dark evergreen forests would be illuminated only by shot and shell. What there was of Christmas in the embattled countryside was remarkable for having survived at all. In 1944, the lethal new war had reached its sixth Christmas for the Germans and the British, its fourth for the Americans. In an inhospitable terrain nearly dark in daylight, where dense, snow-covered evergreens recalled the season, there were few other vestiges of Christmas. Most troops hardly knew what calendar day they were trying to live through. No single soldier can be said to have "saved" Christmas in the contested "Bulge" of the Ardennes. Many ordinary men did extraordinary things, and many extraordinary things happened to ordinary men. Still, one brash and theatrical general stood out, one who, as an invalided young officer at the close of the earlier world war, rushing from an army hospital to get back into the fighting before the Armistice occurred, had paused on the field to pen a poem about a dead colleague. He could always be expected to do the unexpected. As Christmas 1944 approached, at a medieval chapel near the battlefront, he knelt at the altar and asked God, as if the Almighty were merely a military colleague of superior rank, to grant a Christmas gift of proper killing weather. Although his form of worship seemed medieval, Lieutenant General George Smith Patton was an anachronism, and this was no ordinary Christmas. My look at the Christmas war in 1944 -- what there was of it on both sides -- is not a detailed military history of the Ardennes campaign. Tens of thousands of pages have been published about that, from close strategic analyses to vivid first-person accounts, and many more pages still remain to be drawn from attics and archives and memories. What follows is how it seemed then -- a look at ten days on a frozen World War II battlefront through the lens of Christmas. Stanley Weintraub Beech Hill Newark, Delaware Copyright (c) 2006 by Stanley Weintraub Excerpted from 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge 1944 by Stanley Weintraub All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.