The famous battle between the United States of America and Germany is considered one of the world’s bloodiest. This is where the American forces sufferred 81,000 casualties while the Germans sufferred 100,000 casualties.

After landing in Normandy on June 6, 1944, Allied soldiers broke through the existing defenses and sped across France, and Belgium, headed for the Rhine River, in Germany. In August, Paris was liberated. In September, British troops liberated Tournai, Brussels and Antwerp in Belgium. Many thought that the war would be over by Christmas.

For the military, moving at such a rapid pace caused major problems, because supplies could not reach the men quickly enough at the front lines. To relieve this problem, Allied commanders set up what was known as The Red Ball Express, a truck transport system made up of black drivers taken from the Quartermasters Corps, who were pressed into service to deliver 400,000 tons of desperately-needed materiel to the battlefront.

The Germans, realizing the severity of their situation, withdrew to Hitler’s West Wall, or Siegfried Line, a defense system 390 miles long, with more than 18,000 bunkers, tunnels and tank traps. Built during the period from 1938 to 1940, it stretched from Kleve, in the Netherlands, to the Swiss/German border.

It was from here that Hitler would launch a massive counteroffensive in the densely-forested, hilly terrain known as the Ardennes, with a force of more than 250,000 troops, backed by 970 tanks and 1,900 artillery guns and howitzers, in an attempt to recapture

Antwerp, a vital port from which the Germans could receive much-needed supplies.

The Allies did not consider the 85-mile Ardennes sector a major threat from the enemy, so it was thinly manned. That proved to be a very costly mistake. On the morning of Dec. 16, 1944, at 5:30 a.m., the Germans opened fire on American positions with a 1,000-round artillery barrage, beginning the Battle of the Bulge, so named because of the bulge the Germans had caused by breaking through the American defenses.

So dire was the situation at Bastogne that the 101st Airborne Division (Screaming Eagles) was rushed by truck on Dec. 19 to set up defensive positions around the besieged city. The division was under the command of Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe, because Gen. Maxwell Taylor, the division commander, was in Washington