Battle of the Bulge region

Usage examples of ardennes.

The three armies in which the generals held command would soon attack in an area known as the Ardennes, the sector of the front straddling the Belgian border due west of Koblenz.

Utilizing total surprise, shielded from the powerful Allied air forces by bad weather predicted for December, they would slice through the thin American line in the Ardennes and turn northwest.

It would be the French campaign of 1940 all over again: then German tanks had plunged through the Ardennes and all the way to the English Channel, splintering the British-French coalition, demoralizing the French Army and driving the British off the Continent.

Its armies had closed to the Siegfried Line, the main German defensive position in the West, and at one point, at Aachen, north of the Ardennes, they had punched a large hole in it.

Inevitably, as a stream flows around a rock, the main thrusts of the Allies had bypassed the hilly, forested Ardennes region, located at roughly the midpoint on the Western Front.

Most of the Ardennes sector was the responsibility of Major General Troy Middleton, whose VIII Corps was the weakest of the three corps making up the American First Army.

Although American patrols had managed to spot three more enemy divisions than usual opposite the Ardennes, much of the German buildup for Operation Christrose went undetect- ed.

The thick forests rimming the Ardennes concealed 1,900 pieces of artillery and 970 tanks and assault guns to be used in peeling back the American front line.

The Ardennes in winter has the look of an old-fashioned Christmas card-steep hills crowned with forests of fir trees, narrow winding rivers, and picture-book villages and quaint old stone castles tucked into deep valleys.

To German Field Marshal Walther Model, however, ordered to drive a quarter of a million men and thousands of tanks, trucks, and guns through the Ardennes in a matter of days, there was nothing charming about it at all.

Ironically, it is precisely because its terrain is so difficult that the Ardennes has a long military history.

The Ardennes covers part of Luxembourg and most of the lower corner of Belgium that separates Germany from France.

Some sixty miles from the Our, on the western edge of the Ardennes, is the Meuse River.

The roads in the Ardennes were as narrow and crooked as the rivers, full of hairpin curves and steep grades.

There was not a single good highway that went straight through the Ardennes in the direction in which the Germans wanted to go.