Your wrong calling the whole 106th sorry ass.Many of those guys died fighting.And the whole fucking chain of command put them there with no indication or intelligence of what was Brewing.And Vonnegut and those guys made the right decision when finally cornered to give up as the Reich had like a 5-1 advantage at that time.They had no chance of reinforcement or resupply.Maxwell Taylor was stateside at a wedding(thank fully McAuliffe filled in prolly better"NUTS").Montgomery on December 15th said the Reich couldn't mount another offensive and wasn't on the continent.Many in command were celebrating the Holidays and spread around many in Parris rubbing elbows with Movie Stars.It was a novel Heller wrote,it's his narrative so that's a whole different thing
"Sorry ass" was probably the wrong term. But the division was inadequately trained and prepared for combat. It was not a combat-effective command. Shame on the Army for putting a unit like that into a combat zone.
There's a chapter by Maurice Matloff titled "The 90-Division Gamble" in the book
Command Decisions, edited by Kent Roberts Greenfield. That's one of the books that made up the Army's post-war "Green Book" official history
"Green Book" official history. We entered the war estimating that we would need to field 200 divisions. Later, that was upped to over 300 divisions. But in January 1943, that was cut back to 90 divisions, and ultimately we only fielded 89. That meant that by the time of the Battle of the Bulge, the U.S. Army in the ETO was running out of infantrymen. Infantrymen took by far the heaviest losses of any specialty in the Army. In desperation, Eisenhower even asked for black soldiers to give up a pay grade and accept transfer into previously all-white divisions. It was a very close thing.
We made that decision because the U.S. was also providing the bulk of industrial production for the Allies, the bulk of the airpower, and the bulk of naval and amphibious forces. All of that drew off manpower that otherwise could have gone into Army infantry divisions.
The result was that we had the smallest percentage of our population in the armed forces of any major combatant, and we suffered the smallest percentage of our population as casualties of any major combatant.
Yes, the Allied high command--with the exception of Patton--was complacent and caught unprepared for the German attack.
As far as Vonnegut and his buddies making the right decision when they surrendered, that's debatable. It's to be expected from inadequately trained troops in an inadequately trained division, though. OTOH, and we may be thankful for it, every other U.S. division fought better than the 106th. There were many small American units in the Ardennes that fought until being wiped out or overrun in the Germans' initial penetration, and it was stopping to eliminate those little outposts of resistance that bit by bit slowed the Germans down and threw them off their timetable.
At the end of the day, it was the greatest pitched battle in the U.S. Army's history, and it was a victory. Hitler had shot his last bolt, and Germany's eventual defeat was hastened.
