Question about U. S. combatants killed during the Battle of the Bulge

I have often seen the 19,000 figure but other figures pop up as low as 9,000. There seems to be some controversy about the actual cutoff date for the Battle of the Bulge as well. Your thoughts?

 

Although I've never seen that 9,000 KIA count before, the 19,000 KIA is very familiar.

Here's what I've found in wiki:

Casualty estimates for the battle vary widely. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, American forces suffered 89,500 casualties including 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded and 23,000 missing. An official report by the United States Department of the Army lists 108,347 casualties, including 19,246 killed, 62,489 wounded, and 26,612 captured or missing. A preliminary Army report restricted to the First and Third U.S. Armies listed 75,000 casualties (8,400 killed, 46,000 wounded and 21,000 missing). The Battle of the Bulge was the bloodiest battle for U.S. forces in World War II.

I have nothing on the cutoff controversy. Always understood it to be at or near the 25 Jan 45 timeframe.

Also the end of the campaign

 

If you check Tab L in the US Army's "Battlebook, Senior Leader Staff Ride: The Battle of the Bulge" you will find the info for which you search. I suppose if you wanted to go the extra mile and look into the status of missing you might want to look, and admittedly in this case I have not, at the final accounting of "Army Battle Casualties and Non-battle Deaths" published in 1946. As I recall it has some statistics about numbers of missing being returned to US Army control.

Senior Leader Staff Ride document can be had from the Combined Arms Research Library collection:
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/singleitem/collection/p4013coll8/id/4068/rec/1
Tab L also includes a list of equipment lost that is very detailed.

Army Battle Casualties and Non-battle Deaths can also be had from the CARL collection. It is in four parts; the first is here:
http://cgsc.contentdm.oclc.org/cdm/compoundobject/collection/p4013coll8/id/130/rec/1

Bottom line, according to the US Army losses for the period 16 Dec 1944 through 2 Jan 1945 in the Ardennes were:
Killed: 4,138; Wounded: 20,231; Missing: 16.946; Total: 41,315.

For the period 3 Jan 1945 through 28 Jan 1945:
Killed: 6,138; Wounded: 27,262; Missing: 6,272; Total: 39,072.

And so, for 16 Dec 1944 through 28 Jan 1945:
Killed: 10,276; Wounded: 47,493, Missing: 23,218; Total: 80,987

I do not believe any of these numbers include weather casualties. The Tab L has a couple of tables on non-battle related injuries and illnesses which would probably shed some light on that subject.

Rich

 

Thank you, Rich and A-58.

 

There actually is a cutoff "controversy", where as "controversy" might be to strong a word! Some historians, such as Cole, stop their narrative once the last German attack on Bastogne was repulsed, most authors include the fighting actions to retake the terrain lost after December 16th into their accounts.

 

Thanks, SLD. That is what I thought. Cutting off the Bulge thusly, whether one agrees or not, dramatically alters the casualty figures.

 

Yes, it never was a "controversy". Doc Cole's volume ended when it did, on 2 January 1945, because coverage of the counterattack was planned for inclusion in another volume of the 'Green Books', originally Mac MacDonald's The Last Offensive. That was pretty much an executive decision by the Chief of Military History way back in c. 1950 when they were planning out the entire series. Otherwise, a common ending point is 25 January 1945, simply because the 'battle' of the Bulge falls into the framework of the Ardennes-Alsace Campaign credited by the U.S. Army, which temporal parameters are 16 December 1944-25 January 1945 (the geographic parameters are another matter). When we wrote Hitler's Last Gamble, we kept it as 16 December 1944-16 January 1945, simply because that was the parameters given us by the U.S. Army's Concepts Analysis Agency (later renamed redundently the U.S. Army Center for Army Analysis) when we prepared the Ardennes Combat Simulation Data Base, which was the basis for the narrative.

In terms of casualties, using the Army Campaign credit framework is problematic, because it includes casualties incurred by the Ninth U.S. Army, First U.S. Army, Third U.S. Army, and Seventh U.S. Army which fell within the timeframe, but were not actually engaged in the 'battle'. The casualty figures we derived were - as best we could determine - only for those units engaged within the terms of the Ardennes Campaign as we defined it. Which leads to the last problem. It wasn't a 'battle', it was a campaign in every sense of the word...however "Campaign of the Bulge" doesn't come trippingly off the tongue.

Cheers!

Richard C. Anderson Jr., sole surviving author of Hitler's Last Gamble, Harper Collins, 1994

 

S'truth, I hesitated to use the word "campaign" as I felt it might sow a bit of confusion, so I punted to the common "Battle of the Bulge." If one considers the time period(s), geographic area, troop movements, and whatnot, no it was not a "battle," it was a "campaign" in the traditional military sense of the word.

 

"In terms of casualties, using the Army Campaign credit framework is problematic, because it includes casualties incurred by the Ninth U.S. Army, First U.S. Army, Third U.S. Army, and Seventh U.S. Army which fell within the timeframe, but were not actually engaged in the 'battle'."​

To my knowledge, the U.S. Seventh Army was not involved in the Battle of the Bulge, but was totally involved in Operation Nordwind. Nordwiind is often lumped in with Ardennes offensive because these two operations occurred in the same time frame and because the German units in Nordwind were originally included in the order of battle for the Ardennes offensive. So to address the question posed in the OP we need to decide if Nordwind should be considered part of The bulge.

 

Not to worry, its the pedant in me and I was sure you knew the difference Richard. Good to see you hanging out here, I've always enjoyed your posts and incredible knowledge regarding the war in the Pacific.

 

Exactly, no it was not and neither was Ninth U.S. Army, but the campaign data doesn't necessarily discriminate. It was recognized as such a problem that one of the CMH researchers was tasked to validate the campaign casualty accounting for all the ETO campaigns and found considerable problems with inclusiveness in various of them. My copy of the study is packed and at our new home in Washington State though, and I am still in the other Washington, so can't give more details now.