Messengers of The Lost Battalion by Gregory Orfalea

Author:Gregory Orfalea
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: THE FREE PRESS
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

2 A bloody shirt

It was a cold, insane battle. Perhaps all battles are insane and evil at their root. Yet Hitler, after all, was human, as were Mussolini and Tojo of Japan. They had the spark that in itself is not bad—that great upstart of creation, man. But in them the spark became a fire, a firestorm, and pride-in-self somehow went out of control, or gave itself to fiendish control over others, deluding itself into thinking it was God on earth. Is it any surprise that when the good angels rally to defeat the evil ones they, too, become engulfed in the fires they must spread to defeat that hell? That war itself is hell for all? That it debases all? And that when the fires finally go out, mankind itself feels smaller?

But this battle was cold, bitterly so. Enough to scorch hands and feet black. Enough to hug a frozen mortar to your chest to transfer your last warmth to the weapon. Enough to die hugging a tree. And perfectly insane. Most of Hitler’s generals knew Germany was either defeated or on the brink of defeat; most saw no ultimate likelihood of reversing the Allied march and therefore thought the Ardennes campaign foolishness in the extreme. Even SS Obergruppenfuhrer Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, Hitler’s own chauffeur and bodyguard in the Fuhrer’s early streetfighting days and his chief hit man in the murderous purge of the Brown Shirts in the 1934 “Night of the Long Knives,” when told he was to head one of the three SS panzer armies in the Ardennes campaign, thought Hitler’s plan was mad: “All he wants me to do is cross a river, capture Brussels, and then go and take Antwerp! And all this in the worst time of year through the Ardennes where the snow is waist deep and there isn’t enough room to deploy four tanks abreast, let alone armored divisions! Where it doesn’t get light until eight and it’s dark again at four and with reformed divisions made up chiefly of kids and sick old men—and all this at Christmas!” 5 But they obeyed. They sent their men, young and old, the tatters of Germany, into Autumn Mist, the code name Hitler conceded to his generals as a replacement for Wacht Am Rhein. That fog killed and wounded almost 200,000 Americans and Germans. It was the death rattle of Germany, a very lethal rattle.

More Americans were killed or wounded at the Battle of the Bulge than at Gettysburg and Antietam combined; more in the blood-freezing six weeks in Belgium and Luxembourg than in the four years at the height of the Vietnam War, 1968-72. So overpowering was this climactic battle of World War II that those who fought in it were silenced by it for huge swaths of their lives. Gratitude that one had survived, or prevailed, could not help but run aground on the memory that one’s soul was scorched by all the dead. Or made cold. And that cold, for the rest of one’s life, too, had to be fought.

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