Electric Bison

A True story about American character lies buried under two feet of snow along the borders of Germany with Belgium and Luxembourg. The “cooled blood” of sacrifice under that snow is our American blood. In January 2017, two of us, friends from Helena, Montana, drove east from Brussels, Belgium to uncover the complex battlefield remembered in the kitchens of our childhood as the Battle of the Bulge, but which the Belgians call the “Rundstedt Offensive,” after German Field Marshal Gerd von Runtsedt, Supreme Commander in the West.

Before our visit we had heard from two veterans of combat in “the Bulge” area. Bob Crowe, a veteran of the 501st Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division recalled the rat that shared his hole under a barn at the outskirts of Bastogne. “Over there we jumped a lot because our Colonel liked to jump. I had only one combat jump and that was Market Garden. The Colonel got killed but we came through in pretty good shape. The British landed on top of some German divisions and caught hell.” Bob later became one of the many airborne troops to jump after the war with the U.S. Forest Service Parachute Project in Missoula, Montana. Later, as a widower living alone in a walk-up apartment, he spent his post-smokejumper and forester years helping where he might around the old Veterans Hospital in Miles City, Montana. One of his jobs was helping other veterans in and out of their vehicles.

Another veteran of that area was Sergeant Ed Miller of Helena, sent into combat with the 69th Infantry Division at the tail end of the Bulge. Still in winter, he helped continue the advance into Germany. Ed said, “The guys from out here in the west seemed to have better luck taking care of their feet. We worked at it constantly. If you ever lost or gave up on your overshoes you were in real trouble.” At the end of one particular day’s infantry movement, he went back with his Captain to collect weapons and ammunition off the stiffened Bodies of other men from his own platoon. Quite a few had been killed in one clearing, running across under their heavy packs. “As I pried rifles from the other guys frozen hands, I heard organ music as though we were in a church.”

During our visit to the battlefield in 2017, we went into some churches but heard no organ music in them, or in the snow-quieted woods. We did experience humbling respect for the individual American soldier who fought their enemies night and day in a numbing cold. We trudged through the deep snow at temperatures of minus-six to minus-ten Centigrade, or about fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, slightly warmer than the cold winter of 1944. With the wind and moisture and knee-deep snow in many places, we felt cold even with knit caps pulled down over our ears, thermal underwear, layered sweaters and for one of us, a Harris Tweed wool coat long enough to sweep the snow banks. In Bastogne’s Jacques Woods, looking down on the exposed foxholes till evident and shaded by tall pine trees, we walked fast to keep warm. After eight decades it’s still impressive that Bulge veterans performed even simple acts in bitter cold. They fed ammunition into machine guns, pushed loaded clips don into their M-1 rifles, climbed up onto the unforgiving iron protrusions of bone-freezing armor vehicle, or sat quiet, still and cold in a darkened two-man foxholes with no warming fire.

In the best of weather, the terrain seemed confusing and full of surprises for us as strangers, especially when gray clouds blocked the sun. From two Belgians accompanying us at different times, we sensed the human social terrain as no walk in the park either.

The first Belgian owned the three-story bed and breakfast we stayed at in Stavelot. He and his wife had refurbished a mansion. He complained that it cost him 7,000 Euros to repair the first floor lobby damaged by an American combat engineer back in December 1944. The soldier sprayed the floor and wall with bullets from his Thompson submachine gun to convince the woman who owned the house to let his unit establish a defensive position. The same Belgian remembers his mother refusing to ever shop in near-by Malmedy, because, she said, “Boche lived there.” Boche is an unflattering term, carried forward from the tragedy of World War I, used by French speakers to label Germans, of any political persuasion.

The second Belgian was Henri Mignon, a retired Belgian Army officer and guide, who took us around the Bastogne area for three days. Henri grew up on his family’s farm near Houffalize, an hour north of Bastogne, in a sector occupied by the Germans for most of the battle. We heard his story as a boy of ten with seven sibling helping their parents on the farm, trading eggs for German food and money, living at ease with the relatively benign German regular army occupiers, but facing artillery rounds and bombs.

One day in February 1944, Mignon’s father, a forester, was wounded when a B-24 crashed where he was working. In January 1945, while he had not yet completely recovered, he ventured outside their farmhouse to gather snow to melt for water since the well was not working. This was a common practice. As the father stepped out he was mortally wounded by a stray artillery round. He managed to make it back into the house to say goodbye to each of the children before dying, and his body was taken to the basement while the fighting went on around the town. While the family was in the cellar, the Germans came by to see if any Americans were hiding in the house. Later the American soldiers of the 2nd Armored Division passed through. After the German retreated east, the Americans set up camp in Houffalize, where young Henri Mignon was sent to live with his uncle. The now-fatherless brothers and sisters were farmed out. Fortunately, the Americans opened the canteen to all the orphaned Belgian children like the Mignons, who now at least had food.

We often heard about the Americans being forced to bomb or shell crossroad villages occupied by the Germans, forcing the Germans out, but destroying the villages in the process and driving the civilians into cellars. The Belgians, including Henri, never blamed the American, their liberators, only the cruelty of war that necessitated such tactics.

Traveling around Bastogne, we could feel Henri’s sadness and appreciate the Belgians’ suffering. Their’s is a country often visited by war: World War I’s Somme in the west, the Napoleonic War’s Waterloo outside Brussels, and now Houffalize. There are a myriad of stories about German revenge against the Belgians and Luxembourgers for their support of the Allied cause. Massacres of families are memorialized on markers in Stavelot and the Bastogne area in particular, and throughout Luxembourg. The Germans were mad at the Belgians’ and Luxembourgers’ expressions of joy when the Wehrmacht was pushed out in September as the Allies advanced to the German border, short-lived joy for being freed of German occupation, only to be re-occupied during the Bulge in December. The Wehrmacht and SS, followed by the SD, the Nazi Party intelligence agency, did not forget.

In Stavelot alone 137 Belgian were killed. Even Belgians in what had been the German part of Belgium annexed by Hitler in 1938, including St. Vith and Malmedy, were not spared. They had not left their farms and jobs to move into Germany proper, just miles away, as ordered by Hitler. Thus, they were suspected of being disloyal Germans even though their sons had been drafted into the German army and were fighting in Stalingrad and elsewhere. Many deserted the German army when the end was in sight, taking off their uniforms and hiding in Belgian forests near their home towns, hunted by the Allies and later denied German military pensions given all other German soldier after the war.

From Henri, we also learned about SS soldiers. He remembered, as a ten-year old begging for scraps of food around Houffalize, German soldiers giving him friendly ad…

Hitler’s plan for Operation “Herbstnebel,” or “Autumn Mist,” the final code name for the Ardennes offensive, involved a massive surprise attack on December 16, 1944, along a sixty-mile front stretching south from Monschau, Germany to Echternach, Luxembourg. The initial 270,000 German troops, comprising three new German armies, assigned to the task included four SS Panzer (armor) and three Panzergrenadier (mechanized infantry) divisions. Facing this twenty-division onslaught, the U.S. had 80,000 troops in defense, organized in four novice or battered U.S. infantry divisions plus part of one armored division.

The German generals assumed they had four days before the Allies could react to the massive surprise offensive. By then, they needed to reach the logical Allied barrier, the Meuse River, and make it across to open tank country on the other side, striking ahead to Antwerp. If successful this Blitzkrieg, following the path of the May 1940 attack on France, would drive a wedge between the U.S. and British forces advancing across Europe to the German border, capture the main U.S. port and supply depot in Europe, and cut the allied supply line to Germany forcing the allies to go back to using far-away Normandy beaches to stage a final assault on Germany, giving Germany breathing space to deal with Russia on the east. Hitler was optimistic. Allied supply lines were stretched thin even with the newly opened Antwerp port and Eisenhower was running out of men. He had been forced to pause at the Siegfried Line to resupply in the face of stiffened German resistance, an interlude the Germans called the “miracle in the West.”

In the north, called the Northern Shoulder, General Sepp Dietrich’s Sixth SS Panzer Army drove forward on two parallel lines, with the 12th SS (“Hitler Youth”) Panzer Division at the top edge of the Bulge hoping to cross the high ground at Elsenborn Ridge on the way to the Liege area. Just below this, the 1st SS Panzer Division (“Leibstandarte”), led by a mobile “spearhead,” or Kampfgruppe under SS Colonel Joschim Peiper, pushed quickly towards Stavelot to clear the way, hoping to seize and hold the Meuse River bridges. The Northern sector offered the shortest route to Antwerp and was crucial to blocking sixteen Allied divisions massed north of the Bulge near Aachen. Accordingly, it was given priority and assigned to the SS, with sixty percent of the Bulge armor. Dietrich was given four SS Panzer divisions, two in reserve, plus few attached regular army Volksgrenadier infantry divisions and a parachute division for the initial task.

In the center, the Fifth Panzer Army under General Hasso von Manteuffel attacked with three corps parallel and south of Dietrich’s Army with the objective of running to the Meuse River and capturing the important road centers of St.Vith and Bastogne along the way. His was a regular Wehrmacht Army, without the SS, but included three Panzer divisions, a Panzer brigade, and four Volksgrenadier infantry divisions.

In the south, the 7th German Army under General Erich Brandenberger attacked west from the Luxembourg border but with a more limited objective, not trying to reach the Meuse, but only to protect Manteuffel’s southern flank and block General Patton’s Third Army coming up from the Saar. Brandenberger’ Army was comprised of three Volksgrenadier infantry divisions and one paratroop division. They had little armor in support.

The German generals were right about the estimated timeline for a massive U.S. response. After about four days, the U.S. was able to start pouring in significant reserves and assembling a new secondary line of resistance before the Meuse River. However, even without definitive “Ultra” code intercepts, Eisenhower had quickly recognized the German offensive for what it was, not just a feint or readjustment, and he understood immediately the importance of compressing the northern and southern shoulders of the German salient, or “Bulge,” to keep the intrusion narrow and stop the most of it before it could cross the Meuse.

By the second day, December 17, 60,000 fresh U.S. troop had been rushed into the northern and central sector of the Bulge. Three veteran U.S. infantry divisions, the 1st (“Big Red One”), 2nd (“Indianhead”), and 30th (“Old Hickory”) were quickly sent down from the U.S. First and Ninth Armies located above Aachen to the Bulge’s nearby northern shoulder. The 2nd Infantry Division went to the immediate breakthrough area near the twin villages of Krinkelt-Rocherath along the Belgian-German border where the U.S. 99th Infantry Division (“Checkerboard”) was in trouble. Here, they would take on Dietrich’s northernmost thrust by the 12th SS Panzer Division in a battle of heavyweights. The 1st Infantry Division was put on notice to create a defensive line, including massive artillery, on high ground at nearby Elsenborn Ridge. They would end up blocking the 12th SS Panzer at Dom Butgenbach on the Malmedy road after their panzers had failed to take Elsenborn Ridge. The 30th Infantry Division was sent to block the Peiper spearhead further to the west along the Ambleve River at Malmedy, Stavelot, and Stoumont, not far from the Meuse crossing south of Liege.

We were also bolstering the center. The U.S. 7th Armored Division (“Lucky Seventh”) and 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion were send through Malmedy down to the central sector to St.Vith and Bastogne, respectively, while the U.S. 9th Armored (“Phantom”) Combat Command B (CCB) was sent south as well to help in St.Vith where we were in trouble. The U.S. 10th Armored Division (“Tigers”) was sent up from Patton’s Third Army to assist the southern sector in Luxembourg and at Bastogne. The U.S. 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions were sent late on December 17 from Reims, France to Bastogne and to Werbomont, the latter on the St. Vith salient. By December 19, U.S. troop strength in the Ardennes had doubled, from 90,000 to 180,000 in ten infantry and three armored divisions. By December 24, a quarter-million U.S. replacements would arrive.

During the first three days of the battle, the German offensive was stuck in first gear, going slow and falling behind schedule. Winter conditions caused problems of terrain and logistics and made it difficult for infantry and armor to mesh on their narrow fronts. The Germans did make some initial progress on the northern shoulder, with the Kampgruppe Peiper spearhead breaking free and following the road from the Losheim Gap to Stavelot. But even this started slowing when German paratroopers who were expected to secure the forward bridges along this route were shot down and blown off course. Worse, the SS Panzer elements following Peiper’s spearhead found it nearly impossible to break through from behind him once American infantry consolidated on the high ground and blocked road junctions.

Thus, in the north, the most reliable and well-supported SS Panzer units had the advantage of roads west, following the Ambleve River and it feeder streams. But even with their well-guarded surprise and unrestricted violence, Hitler’s spearhead started running out of fuel. It found American engineers in front of them blocking their way by blowing up bridges over the Ambleve River. Even with Peiper’ fast-moving armor out in front and slowing, a more fundamental problem faced the massive German Sixth SS Panzer Army effort. Except for the Peiper’s spearhead, the SS Panzers were being blocked in the north.

In the center, Manteuffel’s three corps, trying to get to the towns of St.Vith and Bastogne, were either stuck in mud and traffic jams, or had to negotiate rivers and steep gorges and construct bridges while encountering tough resistance from the U.S. 7th Armored and 28th Infantry Divisions.

On the southern shoulder, Brandenberger’s Seventh Army was finding it slow going along the Sauer River in rugged terrain against a Combat Command of the U.S. 9th Armored Division, the 4th Infantry Division, and a regiment o…

My friend Randy LeCocq and I, John Driscoll, are two U.S. Army veterans living in Helena, Montana. We chose to study some of the key engagements during the Battle of the Bulge because together they comprised the largest land battle ever participated in by the United States, creating a wealth of folklore associated with that intensified period of brutal combat. The lore of the big battle included the initial shock on the home front as American families read hometown newspapers, watching the front line move steadily across France to the German border, only to suddenly see a large bulge showing the Allies in retreat.

Well-known stories surfaced, such as the Malmedy massacre of a hundred GIs, and the Siege of Bastogne, and General McAuliffe's response of "Nuts" to the German surrender note. Lesser-known stories were as important. Late in the tough slog from the Normandy beachhead, the Allies were running out of troops. Soldiers from the notorious replacement depots were failing to last long in combat. GIs were without winter clothing. And, U.S. intelligence had failed to detect Hitler's surprise attack, misleadingly called "Watch on the Rhine."

There are the stories about General Eisenhower being firm in the face of bad news, telling his commanders at Verdun there will be no gloomy faces around the table. And those about General Patton, saying he could reach Bastogne from the Saar, 110 miles south, with three divisions starting in two days. There are the stories of Field Marshal Montgomery versus Eisenhower and Bradley, and tales of Bastogne's brave Belgian nurses, and of the skies clearing just before Christmas so U.S. C-47s could drop supplies inside Bastogne's perimeter and gliders could land with doctors after bringing them through the flak.

There was Patton's war prayer, and the Germans missing the Allied fuel dump at Spa, and tales of bitter cold and snow and ice, and frostbite, and German 88 shells and tree-bursts. There were the huge German Tiger tanks and German posing as Americans at crossroads and brave Belgians misdirecting SS Panzer tank columns.

The Bulge was a continuous battle on several fronts in bitter cold covering a rectangle 45 miles deep by 60 miles wide in forests and hills, often where prisoners were not taken. Each side lost 500 men killed daily for six weeks with the tally of wounded and missing running three times that rate. By the end, it was "all in" for both sides, with the Germans committing 400,000 troops, and the U.S. pouring 600,000 soldiers into the vortex, pressing a million men against each other. For the U.S., the high school class of 1944 was hardest hit, going from graduation to replacement centers in France, to military cemeteries in Belgium and Luxembourg in only six months. We were running out of men in the European Theater and the Bulge was eating up two thousand soldiers each day

The National World War II Museum in New Orlean brings home the human aspect. At the museum, visitors first enter a Pullman coach of the era and sit on bench seats to watch film footage taken from the train in 1943. We are taken back in time, moving along and stopping in small towns, looking out the window at the few dusty Depression-era cars and trucks moving along narrow country highways. It is a more rural and simpler America the boys leave behind. Many of them would return to a country that would never be the same.

Leaving the Pullman car, you walk through the Pacific or European Theater galleries. The latter, "The Road to Berlin," leads you into a large tunnel with displays and videos along the route, first through the tough, mountainous Italian campaign of 1943, then on to D-Day and Normandy, through France and the hedgerows, finally reaching the Battle of the Bulge before the final section, crossing the Rhine and invading Germany itself. You emerge from the "Road to Berlin" journey with the Bulge in perspective as one very difficult campaign in a series of very difficult campaigns.

"The Road to Berlin" leaves us with something else, the realization that the Bulge was not our first rodeo. By December 1944, we had learned how to fight and defeat the Germans. Our privates, non-commissioned officers, and platoon leaders, through tough experience, knew how to handle counterattacks, even by tanks. They knew what had to be done, to grab the bazooka or, like Lieutenant George Luening of St. Xavier, Montana, lead an almost suicidal January 1945 attack up a hillside against snipers, mines and interlocking machine guns, with little cover. They knew the war was a matter of attrition, and they were mentally prepared to die to do the job. So many had already died or been carried away on stretchers, it seemed normal. They were often fatalistic. Even with supreme personal efforts, they were resigned to the random odds of death by combat.

Authentic American heroism emerged everywhere at the Bulge, as indicated by the astounding 18 Medals of Honor awarded there. The Bulge is a story of American boys fighting in minus-ten-degree cold and deep snow holding the line "at all costs." sometimes forced to allow enemy tanks to roll over their own fortified foxholes after calling artillery on their own position, then getting up and following the tanks, blowing them up and shooting the SS infantry off them. After all that, the GIs would go back home to the farm after the war, put their medals away and tell their family and friends they just did their job, nothing special, and they'd rather not talk about it. Sixty years later their obituaries would briefly mention their involvement in World War II, in this or that service or division, only occasionally with the added words that they "fought in the Battle of the Bulge."

Survivors were generally quiet out of respect for those who did not come back, or for fate allowing them to live and form a narrative, resentful of those veterans who claimed to have won the battle all by themselves or suggested that the battle was the only one that determined the war's outcome. The battles in the Bulge were U.S. Army actions for sure, and big ones, but during the broader World War II conflict, the U.S. Army, not to mention the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, lost nearly 300,000 service personnel, both battle and non-battle dead or missing. Add to this the massive military and civilian losses of our Allies and you see why survivors of the Bulge often said nothing. There is gratitude for the dominating role of personal luck. Plus, the true picture of what happened at a given place is a confused one complicated and clouded by "the fog of war."

Despite this fog of war, it seems possible to focus on a number of engagements during the Bulge that seemed to have been critically important to the battle's outcome. From these we tried to find any evidence that men from Montana were involved and, if they survived, to learn some of their impressions from their direct experiences.

During World War II, Montana, with .42 percent of the U.S. population, contributed .40 percent of of the total number of Americans who entered the U.S. Army. Out of those Montanans who did join the Army, 4.59 percent failed to return home alive. These 1,553 man and women from Montana represent .59 percent of the Army's total dead and missing. While only a small portion of the sacrifices were made during the Battle of the Bulge, we find it interesting to review the rapid sequence of massive engagements during the Ardennes Campaign through the eyes of our Montana soldiers to connect hometown sacrifice to the larger battlefield picture.

One of our objectives was to understand the Bulge, and especially how our troops managed to stop the German steamroller. Once we began studying the bulge in detail, we became more awed. Outnumbered four to one, and in some places ten to one, how did Americans stop the attack after being surprised by the huge German tanks of the SS Panzer, battle-tested Eastern Front veterans? As German General Manteuffel remembered, his troops were m…

I love hearing people’s stories. I’ve interviewed underground miners, rope men, electric railroaders, waitresses and smokejumpers and they’re entertaining as can be. But for and before this Christmas I want spend the next 20 episodes of the Electric Bison telling a true Christmas story from 80 years ago. Though the story lasted from December 16 to January 28, I’ll report it as a trip that my good friend Randy LeCocq and I took to the place in Belgium where it happened. If it turns out that some of you are interested in more of the nitty gritty details there are plenty of podcasts and books that probably tell it better than I will, but Randy and I did our best in a book we wrote called, The Battle of the Bulge, A Montana Perspective. Hopefully, in this post-election season all of us in Montana can still appreciate what happened on our behalf in the snowy Ardennes Forest, in a time when we might all still agree America was great. So with a heartfelt Happy Holidays, we’ll start today.

In an after election review I told the Democratic Party that there should have been opportunities made for every candidate to participate in debates with primary opponents. In the general the party should have enforced a requirement for debates between candidates. In my case my opponent refused both times to debate.

Now that I’ve had a chance to listen to and understand podcasts, I see that they perform the same function, with just fact checking as the missing piece. It looks to me like in the future people will have to choose their podcasts based on the credibility of the presenter and that person’s facts. It won’t be enough to have the podcast called “Truth Social” or the podcaster, like Elon Musk, asserting himself as an acolyte of the truth.

In the end I think I’ll run this podcast as I ran my campaign for congress, but feeling free to do as I think is necessary in the circumstances based on my life experience and ability to think critically.

I like the name Steward because it implies a respect for the truth but I also like the name Electric Bison because as a society we have become so entirely reliant on electricity, another intermediate form of energy. .as we were dependent on the bison.