By Collin Hansen, TGC. (Photo: Public Domain)
Aided by digital technologies, we’ve come closer than ever before to escaping the need for God, the need for each other, even the need for our own bodies.
Christmas 1944 dawned well below freezing around Bastogne, Belgium, during one of the coldest winters on record for northwest Europe. Neither the cold nor the harassing German artillery was the worst part, though. Many in the 101st Airborne Division, along with their U.S. Army compatriots and allies from Great Britain and Canada, expected to be home by now, or at least across the Rhine in Germany.
Instead, they suffered and died under siege in Belgium. During the surprise German attack dubbed the Battle of the Bulge, more Americans were killed, wounded, and captured than in any other single battle of the Second World War. Though many knew they couldn’t win the war, Hitler’s forces proved they could still drench the Allied victory in buckets of blood.
Winston Churchill saw the battle as a blessing, despite the bloodshed. Better to fight the Germans on attack in relatively open country instead of inside pillboxes on defense. Better to bleed the Germans dry, the quicker the better, because at least the Allies could replace their dead on the front lines. “Harsh as it may seem to say, a terrible thing to say in dealing with our own precious flesh and blood,” Churchill qualified in a January 1945 update for Parliament, the war would only end when Germany turned white first. Viewed this way, Churchill celebrated what he considered the greatest American battle of the war, a victory that would be remembered for ages. Thousands of Americans still make pilgrimage to the foxholes outside Bastogne today.
Five months later, Germany surrendered. Writing two days after Victory in Europe, C. S. Lewis didn’t effuse over the end of this front in the bloodiest war of world history, from which Great Britain emerged triumphant. His homeland had been saved from seemingly certain defeat less than five years earlier and spared from utter destruction, unlike so much of exhausted Europe.