Inside the Battle of the Bulge: A Private Comes of Age

Blunt gives an account of the final European campaign of World War II from a combat infantryman's foxhole. Blunt's adventure--his heroism, his failures, his bad luck and his good, his anger and his suffering--is a passage from innocence to experience. It is, in short, an account of his coming of age. And because it happens during World War II, during the Battle of the Bulge--and because one of the key moments of his account is his sighting of a displaced person and its aftermath--Blunt and his vision transcends his personal experience and reflects America moving into a global society. War always leaves its participants with stories to recall, accounts that illuminate historic grandeur with the smaller, perhaps more poignant dramas of individual lives. In December 1944, a young GI named Roscoe C. Blunt Jr. became part of one of World War II's grittiest, most challenging episodes--the Allies' desperate, but successful counterattack against the German counteroffensive at Marche, Belgium, where Field Marshal Karl von Runstedt had laid siege in the dead of winter, a winter the Belgian people described as the worst in four decades. In this book, Blunt relates his own story of The Battle of the Bulge--chronicling the historic adventures that propelled him from emotional innocence to manhood. England's Prime Minister Winston Churchill afterwards described the Ardennes Campaign: This is undoubtedly the greatest American battle of the war and will, I believe, be regarded as an ever famous American victory. In candid retrospect, Blunt describes how the 84th Railsplitter Infantry Division embarked from Camp Kilmer, New Jersey, in September 1944 and trained in England before beginning its long, grueling journey across Normandy, France, and into history. He details the overwhelming ordeal of the march inland from Omaha Beach, the Siegfried Line attacks, the news of German advances, and the crippling cold and snow coupled with dwindling resources. From his combat infantryman's foxhole, the author relates the initial encounter against the German Wehrmacht at Geilenkirchen, Germany, the Roer and Rhine River crossings, the almost uncontested dash across the Northern Germany plains, the growing awareness that the Germans' cause was lost, the mixed horror and jubilation that met the advancing U.S. Army at liberated concentration camps, and the waning days of the war on the Elbe River, scant kilometers west of Berlin. Inside the Battle of the Bulge concludes with a nostalgic return to the Ardennes Forest battlefields a half century later and the enduring patriotic gratitude toward Americans still shown by the older Belgian population--especially those who still vividly recall the winter of 1944. In the midst of history is one man's story--his heroism and failures, his anger and suffering, his encounters with the certainty of death--of how he managed to sustain hope and, with the others in his division, turned the spectre of impending defeat into victory.