Thursday, December 16, 2004
Sixty years ago today was the first day of the Battle of the Bulge. The Germans attacked unexpectedly - many thought Germany was on its knees. Some even thought the war might be over by Christmas. Back home, some of the war production economy had been shifted back to civilian production, so oddly enough there were artillery ammo shortages on the front.
It's been cold in Boston the past few days, but whenever I think of the movies I've seen and the books I've read about the battle I find it hard to complain. They didn't have winter clothes, or portable heaters. They couldn't light fires for fear of providing a target for enemy fire. They had to piss on their machine guns to get the bolts unfrozen.
I was chatting with an old veteran who came into my office who's been disabled since that time in 1944 (I had noticed there was something "off" about his arms, but I didn't ask about it.). He said he was a young private at the time. I asked him if he had seen Band of Brothers and what he thought of it. He told me he couldn't watch stuff like that...brought back too many memories - told me he had spoken to another old vet not long ago, remembering...he couldn't sleep for days.
Sixty years on.
This Day in History: 1944 Battle of the Bulge
The Germans threw 250,000 soldiers into the initial assault, 14 German infantry divisions guarded by five panzer divisions-against a mere 80,000 Americans. Their assault came in early morning at the weakest part of the Allied line, an 80-mile poorly protected stretch of hilly, woody forest (the Allies simply believed the Ardennes too difficult to traverse, and therefore an unlikely location for a German offensive). Between the vulnerability of the thin, isolated American units and the thick fog that prevented Allied air cover from discovering German movement, the Germans were able to push the Americans into retreat...
Reaching back in time, some other American Patriots deserve to be remembered.
The midnight raid, popularly known as the "Boston Tea Party," was in protest of the British Parliament's Tea Act of 1773, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company by greatly lowering its tea tax and granting it a virtual monopoly on the American tea trade. The low tax allowed the East India Company to undercut even tea smuggled into America by Dutch traders, and many colonists viewed the act as another example of taxation tyranny...
I used to work on the seventh floor of the Federal Reserve Building in Boston, and looking down on the Boston Tea Party Ship watch tourists toss crates of "tea" into Boston Harbor (the crates are then hauled back up on their ropes to be tossed in again by the next in line).
From patriots with painted faces trying to save their livelihoods and their liberty, to men storming across Europe in the Great Crusade to save others'...December 16.
Nice observation, but the Boston Tea Party was not about "patriots saving their livelihoods and their liberty". It was about about John Hancock's smuggling profits being udercut by the East India Tea Company...