Tomorrow is December 16th. 75 years ago my father was 20 years old and serving in the U.S. Army as it attempted to push across Europe and destroy Nazi Germany. I have asked Dad a number of times if he felt the irony of being a young man who was born in Leipzig Germany and was
now part of an effort to defeat his homeland. He usually looks at me with a mixture of pity and bewilderment before telling me his entire world was about 500 to 1,000 meters and had no room for irony. But now, things are different. Tomorrow is the 75th anniversary
of the Battle of the Bulge, also known as Bataille des Ardennes, and in Germany as Unternehmen: Wacht am Rhein. When the battle began Dad's company was in the Hürtgen forest. Confined to his 1,000 meter world, he would not know a major operation was underway for several days.
During that time the German offensive had advanced south of them towards the Belgian coast. Dad remembers the next 4 weeks as the coldest and most uncertain of his life. We spoke today and he'd like to share those four weeks by going through the unit history prepared by
his Company in June of 1945 after the war's end. So we decided we'll talk every day using his unit history as a guide and write a bit for @Twitter. As for the night before the beginning of the battle, Dad remembers he had just come off his only leave of the war in Aachen.
They had bedded down in some cellars in a small town in the Hürtgen Forest and were warm and for the moment safe. Here's a picture of Dad from the summer of 1944 shortly after the Normandy invasion. 
@threadreaderapp unroll
