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thirty-seven Germans. As they routinely disarmed and searched their captives, they were taken aback to find that one of them was female. Sergeant Clifford Laski reported laconically: “It wasn’t until she took her helmet off and revealed those long locks of hair that we knew her to be a woman, because she wasn’t particularly chesty.” Staff-Sergeant Charles Skelnar’s last memory of Bastogne after its relief was of a 101st Airborne sergeant herding prisoners towards the cage. Every time he saw a German wearing GI boots, the NCO smashed his rifle butt down on the man’s feet. “They fought to the bitter end,” recorded a sardonic Allied intelligence report on 29 December, on the interrogation of 1st SS Panzer prisoners, “and they are still insolent.” Yet Private George Sheppard of the 319th Infantry enjoyed taking prisoners, and found their arrogance broken: “I felt proud. Here was the army of the Master Race, they’ve got their hands up, they’re shouting ‘Kamerad!’ they’re down on their knees begging for you not to shoot them.” Interestingly, a British expert on the Waffen SS believes that Joachim Peiper, symbol of German fanaticism and brutality in the Ardennes, suffered some kind of moral or physical collapse following the offensive’s failure. Peiper’s name disappears from all Waffen SS unit records until he emerges again in Hungary late in February 1945. If this is true, it reflects a tendency to hysteria not uncommon among fanatical young Nazi warriors. More than a few killed themselves, like Hein von Westernhagen of the 501st Heavy Panzer Battalion, under the stress of defeat. Not unreasonably, the Americans shot eighteen of Otto Skorzeny’s men whom they captured in GI uniforms. The night before their execution, their captors allowed some German nurses who were also prisoners to sing carols to them in the cells.

“LIGHTNING JOE” COLLINS said he was convinced the Bulge battle had shortened the war by six months. While the drastic depletion of Sixth SS Panzer Army and Fifth Panzer Army was obviously significant, it is hard to accept Collins’s judgement. At the summit of American command, the most notable consequence of victory was a despondency which persisted even after German failure was plain. Colonel Chester Hansen, Bradley’s aide, recorded: “There was a serious discussion at the top about sitting down and waiting for spring.” During the half-hearted German offensive in Alsace, there was talk at SHAEF about allowing 6th Army Group to retire into the Vosges. The battle inspired a resurgence of caution among Allied commanders and intelligence staffs. Alan Brooke believed that it “considerably retarded the defeat of Germany.” The victors recognized that the battle had destroyed Hitler’s principal armoured reserve. But they failed to perceive how desperate the overall predicament of the Third Reich had in consequence become, and thus to exploit the new situation with vigour. Fears were expressed at SHAEF that, unless the Allies could finish the war quickly, new German weapons, above all jet aircraft, would enable the enemy to continue the war through the summer of 1945. “Upon the conclusion of the Ardennes campaign,” declared the official U.S. army post-war report on the campaign, “it was estimated that the Allies had no marked superiority over the Germans in ground force strength.” This assertion would have aroused hysterical mirth at any German headquarters. SHAEF determined to establish the Allied armies in “strong defensive positions” along most of the front, “to free others for attack . . . In late January, the enemy’s combat strength was not considered markedly inferior to that of the Allies.”

The Bulge offensive cost the Germans between 80,000 and 100,000 casualties. The Americans lost 4,138 men killed, 20,231 wounded and 16,946 captured or missing, between 16 December and 2 January. In the second phase of the battle between 3 and 28 January, American casualties totalled a further 6,138 killed, 27,262 wounded and 6,272 captured or missing. Defeating Hitler’s winter offensive thus cost an overall total of 80,987 men,