Battle of the Bulge Quotes

There were almost 11,000 American soldiers killed in Germany in April of 1945, the last full month of the war. That's almost as many as died in June, 1944. Right to the very end, it was absolutely brutal.

My father fought in World War II at the Battle of the Bulge.

If you ask the people in Europe who won World War II, they don't say the Allies; they say the United States won the war and saved the world.

Lincoln made mistakes. Roosevelt made mistakes. Eisenhower made mistakes. The Battle of the Bulge was the biggest intelligence failure in American military history, much bigger than any in Vietnam or now. We didn't know that the Soviets were moving 400,000 or 500,000 troops. We missed it.

You've gotta understand: in July of '44, the Allies were still contained on the peninsula in western France and the destruction of Europe had not really begun. War had not really touched the European continent at that point.

In the early hours of 16 December 1944, the Germans launched their last great offensive of the Second World War against weakly held U.S. positions in the Ardennes Forest, the site of their original Blitzkrieg success against the French in 1940.

Jack Buck fought through Europe during World War II.

I had a go at changing history - maybe not all by myself - I fought at the battle of Normandy, I slogged through the Ardennes, and I celebrated the liberation of Paris on the streets with beautiful French girls throwing flowers at me. I said good-bye to my first true love and discovered what I really wanted to do with my life.

Granted, it's a long time ago, it's in the 1940s, and, granted, it's warfare that we hopefully will not conduct in a similar fashion ever again, but it is crucially important. And that act, the storming of the Normandy beaches, coupled with the Battle of the Bulge, ending the spread of Nazism throughout Europe, saved the world and it saved the world for freedom. And it was the United States that did it. And it was a bunch of 19- and 20- and 21-year-old people who did it.

In 1969, at the age of 19, I was lucky enough to work with George C. Scott in the definitive portrayal of his career over a period of many months and several countries on the definitive film version of Patton's WWII career.