Forget Merry and Bright

“How would you like to die for Christmas?” A German loudspeaker kept asking American troops this question in late December 1944, at the Ardennes, the dense forest where the borders of France, Germany, Belgium and Luxembourg meet. Around this question, equally resonant on both sides of the combat, acclaimed historian Stanley Weintraub builds 11 Days in December, a compelling and intense story set during the last days of the tragic Battle of the Bulge. At the risk of sounding cliché, it really does read like a novel. Weintraub is a professor of arts and humanities at Penn State and author of many books—on the Spanish Civil War, the Korean War and even on George Bernard Shaw and Lawrence of Arabia—including two previous outings in the curious little corner of military accounts set at Christmas: Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce and General Washington’s Christmas Farewell: A Mount Vernon Homecoming. Talk about specialization. (Weintraub is also the father of David Weintraub, the Vanderbilt astronomer who has just published the scientific detective story Is Pluto a Planet? Both men will appear at Davis-Kidd.) This book, like the desperate situation it recounts, is fraught with what can only be called bitter irony. “A clear, cold Christmas, lovely weather for killing Germans,” wrote Lt. Gen. George S. Patton in 1944, and he couldn’t help adding, “which seems a bit queer, considering whose birthday it is.” Patton is only one of many vividly painted figures in this dramatic story. There is Brig. Gen. Anthony C. McAuliffe, who was in charge of Allied forces at the Belgian town of Bastogne when the Germans completely surrounded it. Presented with a German demand for surrender, McAuliffe famously exclaimed, “Nuts!” As he tried to formulate an official reply to the German letter, his colleagues suggested that his first response might be the most apt, so he sat down and wrote, “To the German Commander: Nuts! A. C. McAuliffe, American Commander.” The colonel delivering the message had to explain that “Nuts!” means, basically, “Go to hell!” McAuliffe’s defiance in the face of what had seemed unavoidable doom helped raise Allied morale. Characters in this story include Ernest Hemingway, already famous and now a celebrity correspondent with Collier’s, as well as his mistress and future wife Mary Welsh, a correspondent for both Life and Time. The famous author provides Weintraub with a scene that no storyteller could resist including: when a feverish Hemingway learned that the hospital in which he was recuperating had formerly been the home of a Nazi-sympathizer priest, he emptied bottles of sacramental wine and replaced their contents with his own urine. But this irreverent prank is not the end of the story. Later, fumbling around in the dark, Hemingway accidentally opened one of the desacralized bottles. Clearly Stanley Weintraub is interested in more than just troop movements. Nor does he attend only to the American side. He moves behind the German lines, too, describing scenes from the strategizing of commanders such as Gerd von Runstedt to the travails of a teenage soldier named Stephan Roth. Consider this letter home from a German panzer officer: “We shall throw these arrogant big-mouthed apes from the New World into the sea.... If we are to save everything that is sweet and lovely in our lives, we must be ruthless at this decisive hour in our struggle.” Weintraub also shows Adolf Hitler denying until the last moment the inevitable end. “Mein Führer,” says his frantic secretary, as they stand watching Allied aircraft stream toward German targets, “we have lost the war—haven’t we?” Hitler insists that they have not, blaming others for what he calls the “unexpected setbacks.” Smoothly cutting between scenes like an experienced film editor, Weintraub provides a succession of quick vignettes, from the frigid trenches to the flagged maps back home. For example, Franklin Roosevelt asked for an atomic bomb for the Ardennes, only to be disappointed when he learned that not only had no trigger yet been devised by the top-secret Manhattan Project, but also that, with its massive fallout, a nuclear bomb could never be used as a tactical weapon. Ultimately, of course, the gods seemed to side with the Allies. When weather cleared, General Patton exclaimed of his chaplain, “God damn! That O’Neill sure did some potent praying.” But before this turn of events, Weintraub describes the memorable scene of Patton—always cocky enough to march into God’s office and demand a chat—standing before troops in a medieval chapel in Luxembourg and asking the celestial commandant during his public prayer, “Sir, whose side are you on?” Weintraub doesn’t answer for the Almighty, but Allied troops can be forgiven for drawing their own conclusions.