Bastogne!

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m. <br />
Bastogne! <br />
Saving Western Civilization on Christmas. <br />
<br />
By Joseph Morrison Skelly <br />
<br />
“Welcome to the ‘Alamo!’” With this greeting from a seasoned warrior of the 1st...

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m.
Christmas on the Frontlines
Back at the Bulge.

An NRO Q&A

He’s covered the 1914 Christmas Truce and Washington’s Christmas Farewell, among other books. This year historian Stanley Weintraub travels back to 11 Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge, 1944. He recently talked to NRO Editor Kathryn Lopez about his latest and Christmas at war.

Kathryn Jean Lopez: What was Christmas like for General Patton in 1944?

Stanley Weintraub: Ordered to turn his tanks and troops of the Third Army around and race north to rescue the besieged crossroads town of Bastogne in southern Belgium, Patton faced the twin enemies of the Wehrmacht and the weather. Slow and sleet slowed down his movements and kept covering aircraft from the skies. A traditionally religious Episcopalian, Patton believed that an occasional personal appeal to the Almighty was useful. Just before Christmas, he went to a Roman Catholic chapel near his headquarters in Luxembourg, fell to his knees before the altar, and as if the Deity were a general senior to him, prayed, “Sir, This is Patton talking. . . . Who’s side are you on anyway?” He asked for four days of clearing weather, “to kill Germans.” His chaplain protested the abuse of prayer, but, Patton later wrote to his wife, Beatrice, “My prayer seems to be working still as we have had three days of good weather and our air [force] has been very active.” Bastogne was reached the day after Christmas. Patton prayed again, reporting that the “awful weather which I cursed so much” actually hindered the Germans more than the Americans. “That, Sir, was a brilliant military move, and I bow humbly to a supreme military genius.” Others thought that Patton was often off-the-wall, but as a fighting general he had no peer.


Lopez: You have Patton asking God which side the Almighty was on. Did he really feel the need to ask, though?

Weintraub: The war was going badly. Patton never lacked confidence, but he questioned everything.


Lopez: What about Christmas for Hitler?

Weintraub: Born in Austria a Roman Catholic, Hitler eschewed all vestiges of faith and religious observance, decreeing instead Nazi substitutes for traditional ritual. But a holiday dinner of roast goose was a German tradition beyond religion, and if few could manage that in the straitened circumstances of the war’s last Christmas, Hitler’s headquarters could — and did. While his staff masked defeatism with feigned festivity on Christmas Eve, Hitler had his usual vegetarian meal, and with a hand that still trembled from injuries after a failed assassination attempt in July, he even accepted a rare glass of wine as everyone toasted him — and the victory they all knew was now an illusion. The next day he returned to Berlin.


Lopez: I imagine it would have been relatively easy to ignore the German point of view. Why didn’t you?

Weintraub: There are always two sides in a war. German troops had been propagandized that they were the Master Race, and sure to win whatever the odds. Early and easy victories had validated that assurance. One SS grenadier painted in block letters on a farmhouse wall, “Fuehrer befiehl, wir folger dir!” (Our leader commands; we follow!) Discipline remained firm. Their tenacity was fierce. The Germans knew they were now battling to keep Allied forces from the Homeland — which strengthened their resolve to fight on. This was their last chance to do that.


Lopez: Is the question the Germans blared across the lines via loudspeaker, “How would you like to die for Christmas?” a good motivator?

Weintraub: The Germans knew the Americans were not fighting to defend a threatened Homeland, but for such lesser matters as values — Mom, apple pie, faith, etc. Who wants to be killed for values? The aim was to demoralize the enemy. The opposite happened. The challenge evoked anger, determination, aggressiveness.


Lopez: You have some remarkable novel-like details in your book. Where do you get them from?

Weintraub: Interviews with survivors, letters, diaries, memoirs privately published for family members, histories of the Bulge gathered by and for individual units (the source of “How would you like to die for Christmas?”), past chronicles of the Bulge. Sometimes what seems to be a trivial memory encapsulates the experiences of many veterans — as with the miniature doll christened “Purple Heart Mary” (it had arrived in the mail, damaged), or the flowers wired home in advance for Christmas which led the family to think that the sender was dead. Or prisoners of war singing carols, to keep spirits up, in a sealed, dark, railway boxcar attacked by one’s own planes. Fact is often far stranger than fiction.


Lopez: How does Ernest Hemingway irreverently fit in 11 Days in December?

Weintraub: Hemingway as an ambulance driver had been wounded in World War I, and covered the Spanish civil war as a highly paid reporter. Two of his novels deal with those wars. He wanted to experience another world war as a correspondent, for the excitement and possible material for more fiction. When he pulled strings with brass hats he knew to cover the Bulge, he had been ill with flu in a hotel in Paris. In the snow and cold, he jeeped out, ill, and largely covered the war, bedridden, from inside a house near the front abandoned by a priest. In it he found a hoard of sacramental wine. I leave it to my readers to find out what happened, most irreverently and unexpectedly, next! Call it comic relief.


Lopez: What is your fascination with Christmas at war?

Weintraub: I have written three books in which wartime Christmases occur. Each of them emerged from research on another book. In the mid-1980s I worked on a book about the end of World War I, beginning with the “False Armistice” of November 7, 1918, to the real thing on the 11th. It was published as A Stillness Heard Round the World. The End of the Great War. While researching it, I learned of an abortive end to the war nearly four years earlier, when the opposing sides on Christmas Eve refused to fire on each other, lay down their arms, and fraternized — even singing carols, exchanging token gifts, and playing soccer together — in chewed-up No Man’s Land. Most histories said it was a minor episode, largely myth. Curious, I spent years tracking down what really happened — even the “football” scores. The book became Silent Night (2001). When I was working on a book about how the American Revolution appeared from the losing side (losers seldom write the histories!), I found that when the British, long after their defeat at Yorktown, finally evacuated their last bastion in the American colonies, New York City, or December 4, 1783, George Washington, on retrieving the city, determined to get home to Mount Vernon for Christmas with his family. He had only been home once in seven years. Did he make it? I found that he got to Mount Vernon, after a long celebratory journey, on Christmas Eve. I put aside Iron Tears (it would be published later, in 2005) and wrote General Washington’s Christmas Farewell. A Mount Vernon Homecoming (2003).

Working on a new book, 15 Stars, to be published June 12, 2007, I found that the chapter on the Battle of the Bulge was getting greatly oversized although it dealt largely with only eleven days in a narrative that covered seventy years. It threw the story out of balance. And the crucial episode ended the day after Christmas, 1944. I pulled out the chapter and rewrote it as 11 Days in December. Christmas at the Bulge.

Christmas, although crucial to these books, is obviously more than that. Aside from its religious aspects, it is a home-and-family festival. Service personnel away from home at that time sorely miss the warmth and togetherness of the season. I recall that from personal experience during the Korean War, spending two bleak Christmases 8,000 miles from home, and seeing its impact on others. Wartime Christmases far away, and under the strained atmosphere of war and foreign parts, sticks in the memory no matter how many years pass. And “peace on earth, good will toward men” is especially ironic during a wartime Christmas.


Lopez: Are there some constants you find when you’re researching soldiers at war at Christmastime?

Weintraub: As a biographer more than as a military historian, I look for the human face of war. Conflicts may occur for all kinds of political, economic, geographical, or religious reasons over history, but they are fought by people, and people — farmers, mechanics, clerks, whatever — pay the price for the losses or gains. As a song about the Christmas Truce of 1914 observes, on both ends of the rifle we’re the same.

Ellie

[thedrifter]

December 21, 2006, 0:00 a.m.
A Lincolnian Christmas
1863, 2006.

By Michael Novak

A while back, I wrote a short column asserting that no matter whether you agree with President Bush or not, or admire him in other respects or not, it is incontestable that he is one of the bravest presidents ever to occupy the White House. All around him, pundits say that his presidency is “a failure,” that he is “the worst president ever,” and that his “war to emancipate the Middle East is a fiasco” or a “total disaster.” I have seen some write, or say on television, that Bush is too much of a simpleton and country boy even to understand how bad things have gotten in Iraq; that he is lost in a fog of religious unreality; and that his visible good humor and love of little jokes are further signs of how essentially unserious he is.

Another way to look at the same evidence, of course, is to note that the president consciously and willfully gambled his entire presidency on the war in Iraq, and on the very daring (foolhardy?) strategy of getting democratic currents started in the Middle East. To the point of boredom, and despite relentless criticism, he has been unswerving. It is not reasonable to believe that he is insensitive to the insults constantly hurled at him, nor oblivious to the course his “betters” insist that he should take.

So let us for a moment suspend judgment on whether Bush is truly brave, visionary, and far ahead of his time. Those encomiums are what we usually heap on Abraham Lincoln. . . . but only after the fact of victory in 1865. Such praise was not sent Lincoln’s way during the long, dark year from autumn 1863 until September 1864. Quite the opposite.

Many in that dark time wrote, spoke, and thought of Lincoln in much the same way people nowadays speak of George W. Bush.

“Well!” I can hear you remonstrate haughtily, “Bush deserves it. Lincoln did not.”

That is easy to say now; it was not so easy late in 1863, and under the gathering clouds of 1864, when it seemed certain that a bumbling Lincoln could not possibly win a second term, and that all he had fought for would come to naught.

Thus, even if we suspend judgment on Bush’s bravery this year, his predicament this December should remind us of Lincoln’s at Christmas in 1863. Looking ahead to an election year in 1864, Lincoln early shared the cold fear that he could not possibly win. The great Union victory at Gettysburg in July had petered out in the failure of General Meade to pursue Lee’s battered and discouraged forces retreating in some disorder southward.

Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation was received by many as a sign of Puritan moral arrogance and clumsy overreach — bound to make the South fight harder, while not really inspiring the Union forces. On all sides, journalists regarded Lincoln as a failure, a country bumpkin, an unsophisticated jokester, a homespun weaver of fantasies, outside his depth. What had his experience been, after all? A four-term member of the Illinois Assembly, then a one-term congressman from Illinois, a man of no education, save what little he gleaned by firelight sitting on a log (all this said in derision). The handsome, blue-eyed General McClellan with his reddish-brown hair, a rousing favorite to his troops, seemed to Lincoln ready to vault into the race from the outside, to steal away the spot of front-runner, and to stampede Lincoln ingloriously out of town. Not often in human history had any army taken as many dead and wounded, suffered so many bitter defeats, failed so notably to capitalize on the few victories its hapless generals had managed to win. During some 48 months of war, both sides together lost 620,000 dead — some 13,000 every month. To grasp the scale, compare that to an average of about 85 dead per month in Iraq.

Lincoln’s native pessimism was weighted down even lower by new evidence of political rebellion in state after state (even Indiana), disappointments on battlefield after battlefield — First and Second Bull Run, Fredericksburg, the Peninsula Campaign — and the immense stream of blood from the wounded and the dead, at Antietam, Chancellorsville, Gettysburg, Chickamauga, and countless battles and skirmishes in between.

No end to the bloodshed flickered in sight. There seemed to be no plan for winning the war, and no general capable even of conceiving how to lead an army to victory. Many Union generals lived in fear of losing a face-to-face battle, and again and again employed tactics that guaranteed humiliating losses, wasting the lives of innumerable brave men. Lincoln’s War Cabinet mocked him, his generals sometimes disobeyed him, but more often failed to share his serious purpose and determination to win.

Many great newspapers mocked Lincoln, and hoped soon to be rid of him. Even publishers who supported the Union had come to believe that Lincoln was a simpleton who could not win the war. Key political leaders were talking withdrawal from the fight, and urging negotiations with the South, in the hope that the unrealistic dream of Union might be traded away for peace. Compared to Lincoln, they thought themselves realists.

Meanwhile, at Christmas 1863, and in the months thereafter, Lincoln was silently deciding — there was almost no one he could talk to about such things — to take more and more direct control of his army. He began to fire failing generals, and to cast around for real fighters. He prayed for even one or two generals who shared his fire, and his determination to secure nothing less than victory. Lincoln wanted the total surrender of the South, the abolition of slavery, but most of all the preservation of the Union. His dream was shared by few and derided by very many, dismissed as outside reasonable possibility. God, it is said, takes care of children, drunkards, and the United States of America. And there were, in fact, a couple of Union Generals quite capable of getting themselves so drunk they could go two or three days unable to function. Grant was one. General William T. Sherman, although not a heavy drinker, had suffered a nervous breakdown in 1861. And somehow in the late summer of 1864, somehow pulling himself together, and racing his army through the South to Atlanta, cutting Lee’s army off from its “breadbasket,” and dramatically exposing Lee’s Southern flank, General Sherman brought total victory in sight. That suddenly, that quickly. In a way almost totally unpredicted.

Lincoln faced a dark nine months from Christmas 1863, until the next September. Was it not thus, also, for George Washington from Christmas 1776 and through much of 1777? Was it not thus during Christmas of 1941 just after Pearl Harbor, and even during the awful Battle of the Bulge just before Christmas of 1944? My father’s best friend Mickie Yuhas took a bullet in the head at that battle, and I remember how sorrowful it was in our household that bitter, cold Christmas day.

Lincoln is regularly, these days, rated as the greatest of all U.S. presidents. Historians may well know how swiftly everything turned around for Lincoln, how narrow the thread by which he hung on, how improbable the final victory. But most Americans, less detailed in their knowledge of history, have merely taken Lincoln’s late-arriving reputation for granted. At the same time, historians have often forgotten how suddenly reputations change, as when they early and wrongly predicted much lower reputations for Truman, Eisenhower, and Reagan than later evaluations warranted.

Wars are often darkest just before the light. In our day, we must pray for military leadership committed to making Baghdad secure, and Iran and Syria quite afraid. Even conceived of in these limited terms, we need top generals committed, as in 1864, to victory. Many Americans will not believe it can be done. That’s the way it was in 1777, when historians estimate that as many as two-thirds of all Americans in New York and New Jersey had come to support the British. During the meandering carnage of 1863 and 1864, many Americans also gave up hope. Americans ought never to forget Abraham Lincoln’s dark year, just before the sun of victory surprisingly broke through. Contemplating the sacrifices that so many hundreds of thousands had made to keep the Union whole, Lincoln did not believe that the God who gave us liberty when he gave us life, could in the end disregard the sacrifices of so many. That is how Lincoln held on in 1864. As did Washington (and even Tom Paine) before him in the darkest days of winter 1777. Those prayers of Washington and Lincoln would not be bad for Christmas 2006, either.

Ellie