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Snow and Steel: The Battle of the Bulge, 1944–45

By Peter Caddick-Adams. 872 pp. Oxford University Press, 2014. $34.95.

 The World War II battle pantheon mostly reads like the index to an atlas: Anzio, Iwo Jima, Stalingrad, Tobruk, etc. One exception in the name game traces to a flinty European forest, which we speak of today, thanks to an imaginative newshawk, by employing the subtitle to Peter Caddick-Adams’s masterful new book. In this tank-size volume, the gifted Briton, a major in the British Territorial Army who lectures at the U.K. Defence Academy and who most recently wrote with élan of another conflict (Monte Cassino: Ten Armies in Hell), illuminates the Battle of the Bulge until he has run out of facets. He layers context and connections with an inclusive style. Both the reader who knows nothing or little of this battle and the maven steeped in Bulgeiana will come away from Snow and Steel educated and sated.

Engagement by engagement, unit by unit, atrocity upon atrocity, heroics atop heroics, and humiliation upon humiliation, Caddick-Adams explicates with dynamic clarity the complicated final gasp in the West of Hitler’s ground forces—one that American media and memory too often distill to GI paratroopers’ deservedly famous stand at Bastogne. He shows why, when Brigadier General Anthony McAulife barked defiantly at German demands for surrender—“Nuts!” was all he said—McAulife and his besiegers, whose edge on him and his troops was thin and fragile, all knew very well that they were in a face-of far more complex than a reductionist narrative allows. The Ardennes campaign tangled onto itself, and Caddick-Adams unknots its intricacies without dumbing down the nuances. He understands and analyzes battle as a universe of colliding details.

Two weeks into the fray, for example, United Press reporter Larry Newman interviewed Lieutenant General George S. Patton. A long-time source, Patton explained that circumstances in the Ardennes recalled a situation at Ypres, Belgium, in 1914–1918 that embodied what soldiers call a “salient.” A wire service story needed a “more American” word, Newman thought. So he coined the phrase “Battle of the Bulge.” In explaining the battle’s origins Caddick-Adams observes that Hitler based his understanding of the United States not on serious study but on German writer Karl May’s highly imaginative adventure novels, set in the American West and known in Germany as “cowboys-und-Indianer Geschichte.” That May was writing folderol did not matter to Hitler. He had decided he knew America and needed to know no more.

Dissecting the psychology of the Ardennes attack, often understood in thumbnail simply as a reprise of the surprise 1940 German advance that undid the French and British, Caddick-Adams paints Europe’s deep woods almost as a boreal alter ago for the dictator. He observes that Hitler clearly loved to wallow in Richard Wagner’s death-besotted operas, which his fellow anti-Semite often located in forests. In addition, the Austrian spuriously draped himself in the cloak of Arminius, a Germanic chieftain who in AD 9 led rebel forces that slaughtered three Roman legions in the Teutoburger Wald—“mountain forest of the Teutons”—near what is now Osnabrück.

In that gory triumph’s aftermath, the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of “…fragments of weapons and limbs of horses, and also human heads, prominently nailed to trunks of trees. In the adjacent groves were the barbarous altars, on which they had immolated tribunes and first-rank centurions.”

Nearly two millennia later, the ever-self-aggrandizing Nazis recast Arminius as the ur-Aryan—ostensibly first in a line of German rulers leading to Hitler. “This was, of course, rubbish,” Caddick-Adams declares. Rubbish and real, this and the myriad other nuggets he has sieved and brilliantly strung together make Snow and Steel a treasure.

—Michael Dolan is the senior editor of World War II.

Originally published in the February 2015 issue of World War II. To subscribe, click here.