Civil War Echoes: The Battle of the Bulge
We are in the 79th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge (aka the Ardennes Offensive), the U.S. Army’s largest battle from December 16, 1944 to January 28, 1945.
Earlier this month I gave an online presentation jointly hosted by the Battle of the Bulge Association and the Virginia War Memorial, in which I highlighted notable Regular Army and National Guard units at the battle. You can view the video here.
In my research, I was struck by how many units have Civil War ties. Most of the regiments in the Army of the Potomac’s Regular Division fought in the Ardennes, as did half each of the Regular Brigades in the Army of the Cumberland and the Army of the Potomac Cavalry Corps. National Guard units from New England, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Nebraska, among others, also carried Civil War honors into the Ardennes. Taken together, they represent many of the most significant units in the Army’s long history.
My Dad received a head wound at the Battle of the Bulge. He was in a Pennsylvania unit
I was fortunate to spend a summer working in a German town 20 years ago about 12 km from the Belgian border in what the Germans call der Eifel, which is the German name for their part of the Ardennes. The town I was n was part of the staging or build up area for the German attack force. I actually biked to the town and along the road the Piper group started off from.
There is a beautiful German military cemetery near Bitburg that contains a lot of their fallen from the Battle of the Bulge.
My father, Joseph T. Giambrone, turned 19 on December 18, 1944 – at the time he was on a troopship headed to Europe. He landed in France a few days later, and was assigned to Troop B, 18th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron, Mechanized. At the time the battle of the Bulge started, the 18th was assigned to the Losheim Gap in Belgium, and they were hit hard by the Germans in the opening hours of the fighting. My dad was one of the replacements sent to the squadron, and he once mentioned to me that on his way to the front he saw a number of dead soldiers lying in the snow.