Ardennes Offensive (Battle of the Bulge) 16 December 1944 - 25 January 1945: Books, Audiobooks, and DVDs owned by Avn Tech Library

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With superb battle narratives throughout, and clear analysis of success and failure at every point, the author casts a new and informed light on the long-drawn-out and costly struggle for the Rhine.

A perfect complement to Weintraub's popular Silent Night, 11 Days in december tells the dramatic story of one of the grimmest points of WWII, and its Christmas Eve turning point toward victory

Hitler's last gamble, the Battle of the Bulge, was intended to push the Allied invaders of Normandy all the way back to the beaches. The plan nearly succeeded and almost certainly would have were it not for one small Belgian town and its tenacious American defenders, who held back a tenfold larger German force while awaiting the arrival of General George Patton's mighty Third Army.

In his riveting new book, Steven Zaloga describes how American foot soldiers faced down Hitler's elite armored spearhead-the Hitler Youth Panzer Division-in the snowy Ardennes forest during one of World War II's biggest battles, the Battle of the Bulge. The Hitler Youth division was assigned the mission of the Fuhrer's Ardennes offensive: capture the main highway to the primary objective, Antwerp, whose seizure Hitler believed would end the war. Had the Germans taken the Belgian port, it would have cut off the Americans from the British and perhaps led to a second, more devastating Dunkirk.

On December 16, 1944, the vanguard of three German armies, totaling half a million men, attacked US forces in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg, achieving what had been considered impossible-total surprise. In the most abysmal failure of battlefield intelligence in the history of the US Army, 600,000 American soldiers found themselves facing Hitler's last desperate effort of the war. The brutal confrontation that ensued became known as the Battle of the Bulge, the greatest battle ever fought by the US Army-a triumph of American ingenuity and dedication over an egregious failure in strategic intelligence.