I had some friends who restored secondhand military vehicles. Your interest in the battle began with a schoolboy epiphany. It was adopted pretty soon after the battle, and it stuck. And the word "bulge" popped into his mind. The journalist needed a unique, American-sounding word that could become shorthand for the battle. An American journalist was interviewing George Patton. The word for that in the First World War was "salient." But that sounded too formal, perhaps too British. It was a German penetration into the American lines, which the Americans had then surrounded and eventually sealed off. To begin with, soldiers weren't sure what to call the battle. How did the battle get its name? What was the Bulge? Speaking from a British military base in Germany, he talks about Hitler's reasons for launching the offensive, why crystal meth was the drug of choice for the Wehrmacht, and what lessons the battle can teach us today. Now, British military historian Peter Caddick-Adams is drawing on his years spent reconstructing the epic battle in his just-published book, Snow and Steel: Battle of the Bulge 1944-45. Winston Churchill called World War II's Battle of the Bulge "the greatest American battle of the war." Steven Spielberg engraved the 6-week ordeal on the popular imagination with Band of Brothers, which dramatized the attack on the village of Foy by three companies of the 101st Airborne Division, the Screaming Eagles.
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