A Christmas to remember 70 years ago

Rich Lowry:

‘What’s merry about all this, you ask?”

Thus began a Christmas Eve message from Gen. Anthony McAuliffe to his troops besieged at the Belgian town of Bastogne.

Adolf Hitler had launched a desperate counteroffensive against the allies in the West in December 1944.

As described in the book “No Silent Night: The Christmas Battle for Bastogne,” the town became a linchpin of the Battle of the Bulge.

Hitler hoped to split the Allied armies and retake the crucial harbor at Antwerp. His attack through the Ardennes forest, accompanied by a withering artillery barrage, caught the Allies by surprise and met with initial success.

But he needed Bastogne, a crossroads that Gen. Dwight Eisenhower quickly decided must be held.

The American general rushed the 101st Airborne (the “Screaming Eagles”) to the town, together with other units. Seventy years ago, the heroes of Bastogne, or, as they were fondly dubbed, “the battered bastards of Bastogne,” spent Christmas breaking the advance of the German army in one of the most storied fights in American history.

It is Bastogne that gives us some of the great statements of American military defiance. When the Germans demanded surrender of his forces, Gen. McAuliffe shot back with his famous rejoinder, “NUTS!” A soldier’s quip captured the spirit of the American defenders: “They’ve got us surrounded, the poor bastards.”
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This had been the case for weeks, leading to Gen. George Patton’s famous prayer, reading in part: “Grant us fair weather for Battle.

Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies.”
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The clouds lifted and the planes came and helped clear the way for Patton's army to relieve the siege.  I was a couple of months old at the time, but I never get tired of reading about how US forces defeated an evil enemy in a snowy battle to save the world.