A Time for Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge - Charles B. MacDonald

A Great View Of A Great Battle From Someone Who Was There

The Battle of the Bulge was the largest battle on Western Front during World War II and involved forces from Germany, the United States, and Great Britain. It was the only time in 1944-45 that the Germans took the initiative away from the Allies even for a short stretch.

This books does a very good job of giving you the big picture along with the small battles that made up the larger ones. The author goes to great lengths to show how the results of one action affected another one which may not be close by, but is connected.

I would highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to know about the battle since it covers all of the major topics involved. If someone is a wargamer (like myself), this book provides lots of information for battles to be recreated and refought.

The Comprehensive Account of the Battle of the Bulge

Charles MacDonald, a veteran of the Battle of the Bulge and later an official historian for the U.S Army, wrote "A Time for Trumpets" as the comprehensive account of that battle. MacDonald covers the battle from the foxhole to the highest headquarters on the Allied and German sides.

In late 1944, Hitler's armies were in retreat across Western Europe, only able to consolidate a defensive line at the German frontier thanks to the fact that Eisenhower's Allied Expeditionary Force had outrun its own supplies. Hitler gambled much of his remaining military resources on a lightning counter-offensive through the difficult terrain of the Ardennes to cripple the Allied armies and restore the military balance in the West.

As MacDonald recounts, the Allies had been lulled into dangerous complacency in the Ardennes sector and were taken badly by surprise. MacDonald's theme is how individual American units, often at great odds, nevertheless stood their ground and slowly fought the German offensive to a standstill, and eventually retook the area known as the Bulge. While famous units such as the 101st Airborne Division get their due, MacDonald does a superb job of capturing the action from the perspective of a variety of participants on both sides as the battle unfolded. Of note are the accounts from the green and unlucky 106th Infantry Division, many of whose small units fought surprisingly well despite being bypassed and cut-off in the opening hours of the German offensive. MacDonald also captures the fierce infighting at the Allied Command level, as Eisenhower's efforts to stem the tide in the Ardennes triggered a crisis of command among Allied leaders.

At over six hundred pages, MacDonald's account is not only exhaustive but verges on exhausting. The dedicated reader will be rewarded with an excellent account of the battle that holds up extremely well despite its 1984 publication date.

Outstanding Read.

I purchased this book in 1985 at the bookstore in the German Reichstag of all places. I was attending college in Germany and needed a good reference work on the battle prior to visiting Bastogne. This book more than fit the bill and prepared me well as my train traveled from Aachen along the Meuse to Namur, Liege, Libramont and finally to Bastogne.

One of the most interesting aspects of this particular work is that you quickly learn that the German timetable for success was disrupted right from the start. The American combat infantryman put up a serious fight from start to finish. MacDonald's accounts of indiviual American efforts, especially those of the CCR's is particularly informative.

Overall, just a great and interesting read.

Best Book on the Bulge from a Soldier Who Was There

This is considered one of the four great books on the Battle of the Bulge. The others are John Toland's Battle, Hugh Cole's official US Army History: The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge and John Eisenhower's The Bitter Woods. I have read all but Hugh Cole's book and will review each of them.

If one wants to know what was happening at the individual soldier's level, this is the book. Charles B. MacDonald fought in the Battle of the Bulge as a company commander and wrote his personal account of the European Theater of War, Company Commander. He knows what it was like to fight in that bitter cold battle with units widely spread out. MacDonald was at the critical Elsenborn Ridge in the North and helped prevent the Germans from spreading and enlarging the Bulge.

His book takes you into action with the sometimes ragtag groups of units that fought overwhelming forces. In some cases platoons of around 20 men fought battalions of 500 and larger.

This detail requires the reader to really look at the many included maps to keep track of this battle that stretched almost 80 miles from north to south. While the other books mentioned above have details of individual soldiers fighting, this is the most extensive. It is about twice the size of John Toland's book.

MacDonald builds on and cites the earlier books by Toland and Eisenhower. Because his book came out around the 40th anniversary of the Bulge he was able to incorporate the information released on the German Enigma intercepts. While this information builds on how the Germans conducted the deception that led to the Bulge, it does not greatly change anything previously known. It is interesting, though. What did the intelligence officers really know?

Because MacDonald concentrated on the soldier level so much he does not concentrate as much on the senior leadership level as Eisenhower. He does have some telling comments on the issue of Field Marshall Montgomery's belief that he should take control of the entire ground battle from General Eisenhower, the overall commander. MacDonald generally demolishes Montgomery's arguments.

MacDonald also does not spend much time on the strategic context, before or after the battle.

If you are looking for the best book on the Battle of Bulge that gives you the view of the battle from the soldiers' level and someone who was there, A Time for Trumpets is the best book.

Battle of the Bulge comes to life in this book's pages......

On December 16, 1944, elements of four German armies -- 14 infantry and five panzer divisions in all -- attacked part of the American First Army along an 80-mile front along Germany's border with Belgium and Luxembourg. The sudden and unexpected counteroffensive hit the Americans in an area the Allies thought would be a nice, quiet sector for combat-weary divisions to rest and refit while green divisions fresh from the States could be acclimated to life on the line: the dark and deep forests of the Ardennes. Planned and ordered by Adolf Hitler himself, this massive onslaught was launched with one objective in mind: penetrate the American lines, pass through the "impassable" Ardennes Forest, cross the Meuse River, and capture the vital port of Antwerp. At the very least, the Allied supply situation would deteriorate enough to slow the Anglo-American advance to the Reich's industrial heartland by a matter of months and buy time for Hitler and his tottering empire. At the very best, a German victory would split the Grand Alliance in three, trap the Anglo-Canadian 21st Army Group on the northern sector of the front, and the Fuhrer could attempt to convince the Soviets that further fighting was useless now that the Western Allies had been defeated at the Reich's very doorstep.

For a few snowy, foggy, and bitterly cold days, things seemed to be going Hitler's way. Caught off-guard by the sheer size of the counteroffensive, hampered by bad weather which prevented Allied air power to provide ground support to the tankers and infantrymen along the front, confused and misdirected by a small number of English-speaking German commandos wearing American uniforms, and, at some points along the 80-mile "Ghost Front," isolated, outnumbered, and forced to surrender, GIs fought a seemingly losing battle against hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. But even when some units panicked or were overrun, many American soldiers -- sometimes in dribs and drabs -- stood fast and delayed the enemy, giving Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Allied Supreme Commander, and his generals valuable time to plan a riposte and turn what seemed to be a disaster into a strategic opportunity. And sure enough, after a month's of heavy fighting in the awful cold of a European winter, the German counteroffensive was slowed, halted, and gradually pushed back to where it had started.

The late Charles B. MacDonald, one of America's premier military historians and himself a company commander in the Ardennes campaign, captures the chaos, misery, bravery, and drama of the U.S. Army's largest battle in history in A Time For Trumpets: The Untold Story of the Battle of the Bulge. The author of such acclaimed works as Company Commander and The Mighty Endeavor, MacDonald uses his skills as a writer and his knowledge of the infantryman's combat experiences to paint a vivid picture of Hitler's last gamble to gain even a temporary victory in the West and the efforts of over 600,000 U.S. and several thousand British troops to contain the salient or "bulge" that gave the Ardennes counteroffensive its popular moniker.

A Time for Trumpets not only covers the well-known episodes of the small teams of German soldiers wearing American uniforms (they actually did very little material damage, but their very existence caused jumpy GI's to quiz each other about baseball teams, state capitals, even popular singers and bandleaders), the heroic stand of the 101st Airborne at Bastogne and the infamous Malmedy massacre, but delves into the Allies' biggest intelligence failure of the war and the bitter recrimination between British and American commanders when Eisenhower placed the northern half of the "bulge" under the command of Field Marshal Bernard L. Montgomery. Attention to detail is also given to the German high command's reluctance to execute Hitler's plan by the letter, knowing in their professional soldiers' hearts and minds that the Nazi dictator was overreaching.

Despite the complexity of the battle, A Time For Trumpets is highly readable and engrossing. There are helpful maps and many pages of photos to help the casual reader keep his or her bearings in this sprawling month-long battle, and the various appendices are valuable tools that illustrate the composition of a standard U.S. infantry regiment and the various Orders of Battle for the Allied and German forces engaged in the Battle of the Bulge.