ENGLISH PAPER

WORLD WAR II : THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

submitted as one requirement of English course

lectured by

Dra. NurHasanah, M. Ed.

By :

Lutfi abdul latif 1601605

Class I-A

HISTORY EDUCATION DEPARTMENT

FACULTY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES EDUCATION

INDONESIA UNIVERSITY OF EDUCATION

2016
Outline of the article

Title :World War II : The Battle of the Bulge

Introduction :

The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was the last major
German offensive campaign of World War II. It was launched through the densely
forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg on the Western
Front towards the end of World War II in the European theatre. The surprise attack caught
the Allied forcescompletely off guard. American forces bore the brunt of the attack and
incurred their highest casualties for any operation during the war. The battle also severely
depleted Germany's armored forces on the Western Front, and they were largely unable to
replace them. German personnel, and later Luftwaffe aircraft (in the concluding stages of the
engagement), also sustained heavy losses.

Outline 1 : German plans

Outline 2 : Drafting the offensive

Outline 3 : Attack in the central

Conclusion :

Although the Germans managed to begin their offensive with complete surprise and enjoyed
some initial successes, they were not able to seize the initiative on the Western front. While
the German command did not reach its goals, the Ardennes operation inflicted heavy losses
and set back the Allied invasion of Germany by several weeks. The High Command of the
Allied forces had planned to resume the offensive by early January 1945, after the wet season
rains and severe frosts, but those plans had to be postponed until 29 January 1945 in
connection with the unexpected changes in the front.

References :
 1. Sejarah Terjadinya Perang Dunia
II(2016)..[Online].availableat.[https://www.seniberpikir.com/sejarah-terjadinya-
perang-dunia-ii/
2. Wikipedia (2016).Battle_of_the_Bulge.[Online].availableat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge
3. Bimbie (2016)
Battle_of_the_Bulge.[Online].availableat.[http://www.bimbie.com/perang.htm
4. cain,bill. And frands .(2008) battel of the bulge. Jakarta

No. Outline Resources

1. Operation Barbarossa: Summer

- What is the purpose of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_o

operation barbarossa f_the_Bulge
summer ?
- How operation
barbarossa summer ?
Moscow and Rostov: Autumn
2.
- How Moscow and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_o
Rostov Autumn ? f_the_Bulge
- What the purpose of
Moscow and Rostov
Autumn
3. Soviet counter-offensive: Winter

- What is the purpose of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_o

the Soviet counter- f_the_Bulge
offensive: Winter
 References

Outline 1 :

Despite a lull along the front after the Scheldt battles, the German situation
remained dire. While operations continued in the autumn, notably the Lorraine
Campaign, the Battle of Aachen and fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, the strategic
situation in the west had changed little. The Allies were slowly pushing towards
Germany, but no decisive breakthrough was achieved. The Western Allies already
had 96 divisions at or near the front, with an estimated ten more divisions en route
from the United Kingdom. Additional Allied airborne units remained in England. The
Germans could field a total of 55 understrength divisions.
Adolf Hitler first officially outlined his surprise counter-offensive to his
astonished generals on September 16, 1944. The assault's ambitious goal was to
pierce the thinly held lines of the U.S. First Army between Monschau and
Wasserbillig with Army Group B (Model) by the end of the first day, get the armor
through the Ardennes by the end of the second day, reach the Meuse
between Liège and Dinant by the third day, and seize Antwerp and the western bank
of the Schelde estuary by the fourth day.
Hitler initially promised his generals a total of 18 infantry and 12 armored or
mechanized divisions "for planning purposes." The plan was to pull 13 infantry
divisions, two parachute divisions and six panzer-type divisions from
the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht strategic reserve. On the Eastern Front, the
Soviets' Operation Bagration during the summer had destroyed much of
Germany's Army Group Center (Heeresgruppe Mitte). The extremely swift operation
ended only when the advancing Soviet Red Army forces outran their supplies. By
November, it was clear that Soviet forces were preparing for a winter offensive.
Meanwhile, the Allied air offensive of early 1944 had effectively grounded
the Luftwaffe, leaving the German Army with little battlefield intelligence and no
way to interdict Allied supplies. The converse was equally damaging; daytime
movement of German forces was almost instantly noticed, and interdiction of supplies
combined with the bombing of theRomanian oil fields starved Germany of oil and
gasoline.
 One of the few advantages held by the German forces in November 1944 was
that they were no longer defending all of Western Europe. Their front lines in the west
had been considerably shortened by the Allied offensive and were much closer to the
German heartland. This drastically reduced their supply problems despite Allied
control of the air. Additionally, their extensive telephone and telegraph network meant
that radios were no longer necessary for communications, which lessened the
effectiveness of Allied Ultraintercepts. Nevertheless, some 40–50 messages per day
were decrypted by Ultra. They recorded the quadrupling of German fighter forces and
a term used in an intercepted Luftwaffe message Jägeraufmarsch (literally "Hunter
Deployment") implied preparation for an offensive operation. Ultra also picked up
communiqués regarding extensive rail and road movements in the region, as well as
orders that movements should be made on time.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge)
Outline 2
German leader Adolf Hitler felt that his mobile reserves allowed him to mount
one major offensive. Although he realized nothing significant could be accomplished
in the Eastern Front, he still believed an offensive against the Western Allies, whom
he considered militarily inferior to the Red Army, would have some chances of
success.] Hitler believed he could split the Allied forces and compel the Americans
and British to settle for a separate peace, independent of the Soviet Union. Success in
the west would give the Germans time to design and produce more advanced weapons
(such as jet aircraft, new U-boat designs and super-heavy tanks) and permit the
concentration of forces in the east. After the war ended, this assessment was generally
viewed as unrealistic, given Allied air superiority throughout Europe and their ability
to continually disrupt German offensive operations.
Given the reduced manpower of their land forces at the time, the Germans
believed the best way to seize the initiative would be to attack in the West against the
smaller Allied forces rather than against the vast Soviet armies. Even
the encirclement and destruction of multiple Soviet armies, as in 1941, would still
have left the Soviets with a numerical superiority.
Hitler's plan called for a classic Blitzkrieg attack through the weakly
defended Ardennes—mirroring the successful German offensive there during
the Battle of France in 1940—aimed at splitting the armies along the U.S.—British
lines and capturing Antwerp.[38] The plan banked on unfavorable weather, including
heavy fog and low-lying clouds, which would minimize the Allied air
advantage.[39] Hitler originally set the offensive for late November, before the
anticipated start of the Russian winter offensive. The disputes between Montgomery
and Bradley were well known, and Hitler hoped he could exploit this disunity. If the
 attack were to succeed in capturing Antwerp, four complete armies would be trapped
without supplies behind German lines.
Several senior German military officers, including
Generalfeldmarschall Walter Model and Gerd von Rundstedt, expressed concern as to
whether the goals of the offensive could be realized. Model and von Rundstedt both
believed aiming for Antwerp was too ambitious, given Germany's scarce resources in
late 1944. At the same time, they felt that maintaining a purely defensive posture (as
had been the case since Normandy) would only delay defeat, not avert it. They thus
developed alternative, less ambitious plans that did not aim to cross theMeuse
River (in German and Dutch: Maas); Model's being Unternehmen
Herbstnebel (Operation Autumn Mist) and von Rundstedt's Fall Martin ("Plan
Martin"). The two field marshals combined their plans to present a joint "small
solution" to Hitler. When they offered their alternative plans, Hitler would not listen.
Rundstedt later testified that while he recognized the merit of Hitler's operational
plan, he saw from the very first that "all, absolutely all conditions for the possible
success of such an offensive were lacking. Model, commander of German Army
Group B (Heeresgruppe B), and von Rundstedt, overall commander of the
German Army Command in the West (OKW), were put in charge of carrying out the
operation.
In the west supply problems began significantly to impede Allied operations,
even though the opening of the port of Antwerp in late November improved the
situation somewhat. The positions of the Allied armies stretched from southern France
all the way north to the Netherlands. German planning for the counteroffensive rested
on the premise that a successful strike against thinly manned stretches of the line
would halt Allied advances on the entire Western Front.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge)
Outline 3 :

The Germans fared better in the center (the 32 km (20 mi) Schnee Eifel sector)
as the Fifth Panzer Army attacked positions held by the U.S. 28th and 106th Infantry
Divisions. The Germans lacked the overwhelming strength that had been deployed in
the north, but still possessed a marked numerical and material superiority over the
very thinly spread 28th and 106th divisions. They succeeded in surrounding two
largely intact regiments (422nd and 423rd) of the 106th Division in a pincer
movement and forced their surrender, a tribute to the way Manteuffel's new tactics
had been applied.[86] The official U.S. Army history states: "At least seven thousand.
were lost here and the figure probably is closer to eight or nine thousand. The amount
lost in arms and equipment, of course, was very substantial. The Schnee Eifel battle,
therefore, represents the most serious reverse suffered by American arms during the
operations of 1944–45 in the European theater.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge)

ENGLISH PAPER

WORLD WAR II : THE BATTLE OF THE BULGE

The Battle of the Bulge (16 December 1944 – 25 January 1945) was the last
major German offensive campaign of World War II. It was launched through the
densely forested Ardennes region of Wallonia in Belgium, France,
and Luxembourg on the Western Front towards the end of World War II in
the European theatre. The surprise attack caught the Allied forcescompletely off
guard. American forces bore the brunt of the attack and incurred their highest
casualties for any operation during the war. The battle also severely depleted
Germany's armored forces on the Western Front, and they were largely unable to
replace them. German personnel, and later Luftwaffe aircraft (in the concluding stages
of the engagement), also sustained heavy losses (Available at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Bulge[online])

Despite a lull along the front after the Scheldt battles, the German situation
remained dire. While operations continued in the autumn, notably the Lorraine
Campaign, the Battle of Aachen and fighting in the Hürtgen Forest, the strategic
situation in the west had changed little. The Allies were slowly pushing towards
Germany, but no decisive breakthrough was achieved. The Western Allies already
had 96 divisions at or near the front, with an estimated ten more divisions en route
from the United Kingdom. Additional Allied airborne units remained in England. The
Germans could field a total of 55 understrength divisions. (availeble at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/battle_of_the_bulge)
German leader Adolf Hitler felt that his mobile reserves allowed him to mount
one major offensive. Although he realized nothing significant could be accomplished
in the Eastern Front, he still believed an offensive against the Western Allies, whom
he considered militarily inferior to the Red Army, would have some chances of
success.] Hitler believed he could split the Allied forces and compel the Americans
and British to settle for a separate peace, independent of the Soviet Union. Success in
the west would give the Germans time to design and produce more advanced weapons
(such as jet aircraft, new U-boat designs and super-heavy tanks) and permit the
concentration of forces in the east. After the war ended, this assessment was generally
viewed as unrealistic, given Allied air superiority throughout Europe and their ability
to continually disrupt German offensive operations(Hall,2006)
The Germans fared better in the center (the 32 km (20 mi) Schnee Eifel sector)
as the Fifth Panzer Army attacked positions held by the U.S. 28th and 106th Infantry
Divisions. The Germans lacked the overwhelming strength that had been deployed in
the north, but still possessed a marked numerical and material superiority over the
very thinly spread 28th and 106th divisions. They succeeded in surrounding two
largely intact regiments (422nd and 423rd) of the 106th Division in a pincer
movement and forced their surrender, a tribute to the way Manteuffel's new tactics
had been applied.[86] The official U.S. Army history states: "At least seven thousand.
were lost here and the figure probably is closer to eight or nine thousand. The amount
lost in arms and equipment, of course, was very substantial. The Schnee Eifel battle,
therefore, represents the most serious reverse suffered by American arms during the
operations of 1944–45 in the European theater.(Hall,2006)

Although the Germans managed to begin their offensive with complete

surprise and enjoyed some initial successes, they were not able to seize the initiative
on the Western front. While the German command did not reach its goals, the
Ardennes operation inflicted heavy losses and set back the Allied invasion of
Germany by several weeks. The High Command of the Allied forces had planned to
resume the offensive by early January 1945, after the wet season rains and severe
frosts, but those plans had to be postponed until 29 January 1945 in connection with
the unexpected changes in the front.( Availeble at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_bulge)
 References

Hall.(2006).The battle of the bulge.Jakarta:PT Kiblat buku.

Online:

Available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/battle_of the bulge[online]