50.2°N 5.7°E Western Europe Battle of the Bulge
Briefing
On 16 December 1944 Germany threw 200,000 men through the snow-bound Ardennes in a final gamble to split the Allied armies and retake Antwerp. The surprise was total, the defence of Bastogne became legend, and the month-long battle that followed was the largest in US Army history, costing some 19,000 American dead.
Books Covering This Event (11)
Popular History
The definitive history of the Battle of the Bulge, by a historian who fought in it as a company commander.
The story of Easy Company, 506th PIR, from D-Day to Hitler's Eagle's Nest.
The American soldier's experience from the Normandy beaches to the fall of Germany.
The final battle for Germany on both fronts, from September 1944 to the surrender.
Eighteen men of an intelligence platoon hold off a German battalion on the first morning of the Bulge — then vanish into POW camps.
The final volume of the Liberation Trilogy: from D-Day to the fall of the Third Reich.
Memoir
A 21-year-old captain leads a rifle company through the Siegfried Line and the Bulge.
Patton's war diary from Morocco to the Rhine, published two years after his death.
The Supreme Commander's own account of the war in the West, from Torch to the German surrender.
A replacement infantry officer from Normandy to the Bulge — of his original company, almost no one else lasted.
Easy Company's commander tells his own story — Brécourt Manor, Bastogne, and the burden of leading men you love.
This Event on Screen
Screen adaptations of books on this page, each linked to the book it came from: Band of Brothers (2001).
The War in Books: The Battle of the Bulge
Winter in the Ardennes, as seen from the foxhole and the command post.
Charles B. MacDonald holds a unique place in the literature of this battle, since he wrote it twice. Company Commander is the memoir of a very young captain leading a rifle company through the fighting. Decades later, by then an established military historian, he wrote A Time for Trumpets, the standard history of the battle. Reading both is a rare experience: the same man looking at the same events, first from inside the snow and then from far above it.
George Wilson’s If You Survive is another outstanding infantry memoir, from a replacement officer who saw almost everyone around him become a casualty. Stephen Ambrose’s Band of Brothers made Easy Company and Bastogne known to millions, particularly through the television series. Rick Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light and Max Hastings’s Armageddon place the battle within the final push into Germany, and Hastings is particularly useful on the strengths of the German army and the difficulties of the Allies. Start with MacDonald’s memoir. Few books capture so clearly how much responsibility a young man could be handed, or how quickly the winter war used up the men who carried it.