Here I am at the edge

 Ardennes 1944 While the weekend of the 24th of November will be celebrated in the USA as Thanksgiving , I give my thanks at Christmas to the 19,000 US soldiers who died during the winter of 1944 in the Ardennes Offensive AJA The Battle of the Bulge  without whose help Europe would have fallen to the Nazi jackboots as the French Generals said the Germans would not drive tanks through the forest, even though it almost happened only 20 years before.

 The USA saves Europe. To me, Christmas is a time of remembrance and thanksgiving. I am thankful for the entrance of the USA into WW2; without them, there would be no life as we know it today. In the winter of 1944, the Germans made a final push to cut the Allies off from the port of Antwerp ; if they had succeeded, Europe would have been under German control within weeks.  The tank onslaught known as The Battle of the Bulge resulted from  French stupidity; again, the same result almost happened in WW1. Only the reluctance of the Imperial German Army commander halted the von Schlieffen plan,  which was the same as what happened in 1944; only Hitler almost pulled it off. The French's error is that tanks could not be driven through the Ardennes woods; the Germans proved they could, and if bad weather hadn't slowed them down, they would have probably succeeded. Another major factor was that the rains forced the fronts to be massed rather than act as a twin attack. The A...