Stephen Ambrose: Corrected
One would be hard pressed, however, to find substantial information in any of the histories of the battle on what it meant for the local inhabitants to be caught in the destructive maelstrom. Indeed, even the best analysts of the battle (Toland, Elstob, Eisenhower and MacDonald, for example, as well as official U.S. Army historian Hugh M. Cole) barely acknowledge the presence of noncombatants. If they do, it is in the shape and form of brief vignettes that leave the reader unable to form an overall picture of the fate of the civilian population. All of these historians make sure to provide detailed lists of the battle’s military casualties. These routinely include the casualties suffered not only by Americans and Germans, but also those by the British, which number less than 500. Yet none of these historians bother to mention the total number of civilian casualties. As if they are unrelated or – worse – insignificant.
In fact, judged from the perspective of popular history, it appears as if in the dense forests of the Ardennes there were no civilians present to begin with. In the acclaimed television series, based on Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers, civilians in the Battle of the Bulge are no more than shadowy ghosts. Perhaps in the eyes of the GIs in E company they never were more than fleeting glimpses and the series’ episodes on the Bulge can thus be said to be realistic. But matters become entirely different when Ambrose in his book Citizen Soldiers (1998 Touchstone edition, page 235) offhandedly claims that “If a village had been or was the scene of a battle, its civilian population was usually gone.”
Unlike the average reader of this best-seller, I was in a position to know that Ambrose was mistaken. As a teenager I had spent many a vacation in the Ardennes and had listened to the bloodcurdling stories of the kind old farmers who had managed to survive the battle. It was this more than anything else that made me decide that for my new book on World War II, I would set out to expose the true fate of the noncombatants in the Bulge.
The research has resulted in The Unknown Dead: Civilians in the Battle of the Bulge, published by the University Press of Kentucky and recently made a selection of the American History Book Club. Based on substantial and often shocking evidence, the book demonstrates that Ambrose is dead wrong. Indeed, of the civilians who the best-selling military historian claims were usually gone during this battle, no less than 3,000 were killed. This roughly means that for every six American soldiers killed in the Bulge, one Belgian or Luxembourg noncombatant suffered a similar fate.
A detailed analysis of the causes of death among the civilians reveals much about the nature of the battle. Some 200 civilians were intentionally targeted by the returning German forces. A first group of about 130 people, more than half of them women and children, were the victims of war crimes committed by elements of the 1st SS Panzer Division, the same elements that were responsible for the massacre of GI prisoners of war at Malmedy. Another 70 civilians, suspected of aiding and abetting the Allies, were executed on the spot by a variety of Nazi security forces across a number of towns and villages.
More than 30 percent of the civilian dead are estimated to have been caused by air strikes. Ironically, almost all of those were Allied air strikes; though essential Germans nearly entirely lacked air support in this battle. This means that some 1,000 civilians fell victim to what can be described as ‘friendly fire’. For, of course, these Belgian and Luxembourg civilians were Allies of the soldiers in the bombers and fighter-bombers. The real targets were German vehicles and troop concentrations. But ample use of incendiaries such as white phosphorus and napalm made sure that innocents could not be spared. The real targets were key infrastructure such as bridges over major rivers. But the use of heavy bomb loads to create so-called choking points made sure that entire populations were victimized. Large sections of towns like Houffalize and La Roche were bombed into heaps of rubble just to prevent the Germans from using their bridges. The town of St. Vith, for example, was erased from the map because it happened to form a crucial road center for the Germans.
Most of the others fatalities resulted from the fighting on the ground. Many civilians fell victim to heavy artillery, which made use of copious amounts of white phosphorus. In another irony, abandoned explosives continued to kill noncombatants long after the battle was officially over. By the time specialized units arrived in April 1945, at least 165 Belgian civilians had been reported killed as a result of such devices. Most of them were men clearing fields and boys playing soldier. By September 1945 the units reported that no less than 114,000 mines had been cleared and 5,800 tons of other explosives removed.
But whatever weapon it was that killed these civilians, from the air or on the ground, almost all of the victims fall under the heading of what today in a sanitized version we have come to know as ‘collateral damage’. Because in most of these cases, of course, neither the Allies nor the Germans intentionally targeted the civilians. Which only makes each of the killings even more of a tragedy.
It is true that when Studs Terkel gave his oral history of America in World War II the title The Good War, he made sure to put it between inverted commas. But perhaps we now have arrived at a point where it would be wise to do away with that label altogether. As Harvard historian Charles Maier recently suggested in a talk about the Allied air offensive during World War II at The University of New South Wales in Sydney, we might do better in future to talk about The Good Cause rather than The Good War. That would take nothing away from the sacrifice and valor of America’s rapidly fading Greatest Generation. Yet at the same time it would do justice to the countless victims of the war’s massive collateral damage. The inhabitants of the Ardennes, like so many noncombatants on other battlefields in World War II, knew that liberation could not come without a heavy price. But that does not mean that their suffering deserves ignoring or –worse – denying.