Battle of the Bulge

I’ve never really been interested in military history. I’ve never even seen Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers. When reading history, I’ve always focused on the political struggle and not the military. So while I have fairly good working knowledge of the political events of WWII, I have to confess a certain amount of ignorance as to the military details. Troop movements, battle plans, casualty figures, they all blur together. The benefit of this is that when I do learn something about past military battles, it is something “new” to me.

The Battle of the Bulge is one of those past military events that I realize is important (they made a movie of the events, right?) but don’t really know anything about. So I found myself on the Wikipedia Battle of the Bulge
page and was fascinated to learn the following:

1. The battle lasted 38 days in the middle of winter;
2. Over 1 million German and American soldiers were involved in the battle:
3. 19,000 American soldiers were killed (a rate of 500 per day);
4. 23,000 American soldiers were captured by the Germans;
5. German casualties were around 90,000;
6. Germans shot 150 American prisoners of war in an event now termed the “Malmedy Massacre”.

Most readers probably knew all this already, but for me it is all new. With Iraq in the news everyday I also feel like I now have a context to understand some of these numbers. The conflict in Iraq is sometimes compared to WWII and I understand that those comparisons are inevitable. But to me such a comparison also underscores a certain lack of historical perspective. After all, imagine if we were losing 500 Americans per day in Iraq?

In reality, the two conflicts are completely different and it is a little unfair to both conflicts to compare them. WWII was a full scale war fought over an entire continent. Iraq is a low intensity guerrilla war fought in mostly urban environments.