I’ll be home for Christmas, you can plan on me, please have snow, and mistletoe, and presents by the tree, Christmas Eve will find me, where the love light gleams, I’ll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams.
It may not be sung in church, nor get as much play on the radio as Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer or Jingle Bells. But one still hears the Christmas classic I’ll Be Home for Christmas with some regularity — and it always prompts at least a moment’s thoughtfulness. Not everyone, after all, can get home for Christmas, even in our travel-friendly times. (READ MORE: The Paradoxical Christmas Nostalgia of Truman Capote)
Military families, in particular, appreciate the pangs of distance as Christmas draws near. Despite the best efforts of unit commanders, no amount of special consideration can make Christmas feel the way it should for young men and women on ships or bases halfway around the world. But military or civilian, most folks these days have simply forgotten — or more likely never knew — the significance of the song or the heartache that lurked behind the lyrics.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas was first published just before Dec. 25, 1943, as the rapidly expanding U.S. military was deeply engaged in combat around the world, from Monte Cassino to New Guinea. The young soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines scattered across the globe, and the families waiting anxiously each day for news of their whereabouts — or their fate — responded powerfully to the song, making it an immensely popular hit on radio stations throughout the U.S. and on Armed Forces Radio. As Christmas 1944 approached, the song became a massive hit once again, particularly its Dec. 7 Bing Crosby performance on the Kraft Music Hall radio show, recorded and distributed worldwide by the War and Navy Departments.
[E]ven as 6,000 soldiers died in the Ardennes battle, thousands more were dying elsewhere.
For soldiers in the European theater, the coming of Christmas was accompanied by disappointment. The post-D-Day slugging match in the Normandy hedgerows, the breakout, and pursuit across France, culminating in the liberation of Paris, made optimists of everyone, from privates to generals. Operation Market-Garden, Field Marshal Montgomery’s daring combined airborne and armored thrust through Holland and across the Rhine, was promoted to Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower and the SHAEF staff as an “end the war in the West by Christmas” strategy.
But the operation didn’t quite achieve that objective. Market-Garden became a “bridge too far” and General Patton’s Third Army’s dramatic dash across France ended, not in the hoped-for leap across the Rhine, but in a muddy slogging match in Lorraine. When the Crosby recording of I’ll Be Home for Christmas started reaching the troops, “Home for Christmas” had been reduced to the stuff of dreams once again. The war slowed down along the European front as expectations were lowered.
Nowhere was the war slower than along a roughly 80-mile stretch that guarded the Ardennes forest in Belgium and Luxembourg. Discounting the French experience in 1940, when German panzers had plunged through the “impenetrable” forest, and stretched thin along a front stretching from the North Sea to Switzerland, this front was held by four infantry divisions and a scattering of smaller units. Two of the infantry divisions, the 4th and the 28th, had been savaged in the Hurtgen Forest and had been assigned to the Ardennes to rest, recuperate, and absorb thousands of green replacements. Two others, the 99th and the 106th, lacked even the leavening of veteran survivors of previous combat. They were wholly green and placed alongside the crippled veteran divisions for a gentle “battlefield inoculation” before being assigned to more active sectors.
But Hitler had other plans, and, in the predawn hours of Dec. 16, 1944, three German armies, with 13 infantry divisions and 7 panzer divisions, nearly half a million men, 2,000 tanks — including the monstrous 63-ton King Tiger, in numbers not yet seen on the Western Front — other armored vehicles, and over 4,000 artillery pieces smashed into the Ardennes front, having achieved virtually total surprise in what constituted one of the most profound intelligence failures of the war. Hitler’s plan was based fundamentally on contempt for the American soldier as soft and the American people as too decadent to absorb crushing defeat without coming to the negotiation table. (READ MORE: White House Anti-Christmas Video Has Side Effects)
Almost from the beginning, Hitler would be proven wrong. The green 99th, who would come to call themselves “battle babies,” fought tooth and nail until the veteran 2nd Infantry could come to their aid. Together with the rapidly responding 1st Infantry Division, the northern shoulder of the line would be fixed firmly in place along Elsenborn Ridge. In the south, the battered 4th hung tough in northern Luxembourg, buying just enough time for General Patton, in one of the most remarkable feats of the war, to turn the bulk of the Third Army some 90 degrees, relieving the 4th in a matter of days, and building the southern shoulder. Together these shoulders would squeeze the German offensive into what would come to be called “the bulge,” from the shape it took on maps of the American lines.
In the center, famously, the 101st Airborne took up the defense of the key road junction at Bastogne, where, less famously, the deeply inexperienced 10th Armored Division had held the line until the airborne could arrive. Other divisions had blocked and slowed the German advance at St. Vith and dozens of other small towns, ridgelines, and key crossroads. The Germans had countered on bad weather to protect them from intervention by American air power, and for a week it did. But even during that week, when American generals rushed reinforcements from all along the front, the men on the ground were already turning the battle around.
When the weather finally broke at Christmas, and American air power was unleashed, the troops on the ground commenced the grim business of crushing the German attackers. By Jan. 25, when the battle was declared over, the German army in the West had been reduced to a virtual shambles. While the war would continue until the spring, the issue would never again be in doubt.
The Battle of the Bulge has been rightly described as the greatest battle in the history of the U.S. Army, vast in scope, vast in numbers — ultimately involving 32 U.S. divisions, over a third of the entire U.S. Army in World War II — and vast in casualties. While the tallies vary, the best estimates are roughly 80,000 U.S. soldiers killed, wounded, missing, or captured, with a goodly number of the missing still unaccounted for to this very day. It was arguably the most brutal. Brutal in terms of the conditions in which it was fought, ice, snow, and cold, where fingers and toes were lost to frostbite and the wounded, if not evacuated immediately, would often freeze to death where they fell.
Brutal, too, was the way this battle was fought. In no other battle in U.S. history would American soldiers be subjected to tank attacks of the scale experienced in the Bulge, and only rarely would they experience such a pounding by artillery. The face-to-face brutality was also unmatched. Word spread quickly along the “GI grapevine” that 81 American POWs had been murdered by SS troopers at Malmedy, followed soon by multiple other similar instances. Wearers of the SS collar runes, soon found it almost impossible to surrender. (READ MORE: Keep Pasolini’s Christ in Christmas)
Hitler’s assumptions about the softness of the American GI were proven dramatically wrong. Moreover, the common soldier of the Battle of the Bulge, in large part, was not an elite volunteer. There were no Marines and only three divisions of paratroopers. The other 29 divisions were filled with 19 and 20-year-old draftees and officered by 22 and 23-year-old lieutenants and captains — the “90-day wonders” of the Officer Candidate Schools. These were ordinary Americans, not warriors by trade or volition, but, in the moment of greatest trial, often cut off, outnumbered, and outgunned, responding with courage and dedication.
They paid a terrible price, these young soldiers, roughly 6,000 of whom were killed in just over a month of fighting, a number that doesn’t include the large numbers of MIAs from this most chaotic of battles. This brings us, poignantly, to I’ll Be Home for Christmas. On Dec. 15, before the onslaught, many of these 6,000 young men were surely dreaming of Christmas with their families, if not in the coming Christmas, then, God willing, the Christmas of 1945. And their families, just as surely, were dreaming of a time when they would return to “where the love light gleams.” The U.S. population in 1944 was scarcely a third of what it is today, and even as 6,000 soldiers died in the Ardennes battle, thousands more were dying elsewhere along the Western Front, in Italy, and across the Pacific, where the brutal battle of Peleliu had just concluded and the liberation of the Philippines was hitting its stride.
So when you’re standing in the checkout line, and I’ll Be Home for Christmas comes up on the store’s piped-in music, don’t just zone out while waiting for The Little Drummer Boy or even We Three Kings to play. Pause for a moment to think of the thousands of young men, 89 years ago, who experienced their last Christmas on earth with only dreams of home to comfort them. And be grateful for their sacrifice.
Check out James McGee’s 2022 novel, Letter of Reprisal, which tells the tale of a desperate mission to destroy a Chinese bioweapon facility hidden in the heart of the central African conflict region. You can find it on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions, and on Kindle Unlimited. His doctoral dissertation on the early history of the Gestapo can be accessed online by searching “James H. McGee, III” and “The Political Police in Bavaria, 1919-1936.”
The post ‘If Only in My Dreams’: The Poignant Context of a Christmas Classic appeared first on The American Spectator | USA News and Politics.
