The beginning of the end

Christmas Eve 1944 found thousands of Allied — mostly American — troops dug into trenches and foxholes along the Belgian front, where they sucked at frozen rations and, in some places, listened to their enemies singing ‘Stille Nacht’. Their more fortunate colleagues in command posts gathered around Christmas trees decorated with strips of the aluminium foil more usually dropped from planes to jam enemy radar signals. The following morning a wave of Junkers dropping magnesium flares led the German Christmas Day onslaught, soon answered by American P-47 Thunderbolt fighter bombers, dropping napalm ‘blaze bombs’ or strafing with machine guns.

On the ground, following reports of appalling atrocities, the battle was increasingly fought with ‘savage hatred’ on both sides. General Patton’s promised breakthrough had yet to materialise, but the German generals already knew their great Ardennes offensive had turned into a ‘bloody, dubious and costly struggle for what was, in the final analysis, an unimportant village’.