Army considered could be held by as few troops as possible. Another reason was that the Ardennes was not considered a likely area for a German assault, but rather a “safe” place to send those veterans who were worn down by the unexpectedly rapid advance of the Allied offensive, and for untried recruits. Not only would the Allies not suspect any self-respecting tank commander to choose that ground, they would think he was out of his mind. And that’s one reason the Germans chose this uninviting terrain. One criticism of the film is that it was shot in Spain, with much open ground for maneuvering, while the Ardennes, the area in which the battle was actually fought, covers Luxembourg and Belgium, and spills over into Germany and France, a total of 2,768,000 acres. It is mountainous and heavily forested, and, therefore, not a good canvas for tanks of any size or form. Therefore, the movie script followed one American division as representative of all the Allied defensive forces, and one German Panzer division as representative of the German offensive. The Battle of the Bulge was so named because that long front bulged westward, pushing back the Allied line.
The front was stretched thin over an 80-mile line and continued from December 16,1944, to the end of January 1945. This was a movie that did a more than credible job of showing us “flashes” of the real events. No movie, however ambitious, could have replicated that “battle”, which was not, in essence, one battle, but an entire campaign counteroffensive carried out by the Germans to cut off the Allied armies from each other. Especially after I did some research on the matter. Kind of like all I remember of reading War and Peace years ago was that it had something to do with Russia.Īt the end of the movie, the producers gave the qualification that it was a composite of events of the battle and not meant to be of quintessential historical accuracy. What I carried away from it was a desire to know more about this battle, of which, I must confess, all I knew was that it was a battle in World War II. When I watched it with Mike the other evening, I was prepared to be bored. And it still wears well as a movie today. The 1965 war movie, Battle of the Bulge, starring Henry Fonda, has a lot more going for it than its naysayers have given it credit for.
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