Heather Cox Richardson is a political historian who uses facts and history to put the news in context. Part One January 24, 2025 (Friday) “NUTS!” That was the official answer Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe delivered to the four German soldiers sent on December 22, 1944, to urge him to surrender the town of Bastogne in the Belgian Ardennes. In June 1944, on D-Day, the Allies had begun an invasion of northern Europe, and Allied soldiers had advanced against the German troops more quickly than anticipated. By December the Allied troops were stretched out along a 600-mile (1,000 km) front and were tired. General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his staff decided to hold the most fatigued troops in the easily defended Ardennes region over the Christmas to let them rest. To reinforce them, they sent inexperienced troops. The Allies anticipated little trouble. So they were surprised on December 16, 1944, when the Germans launched more than 400,000 personnel, more than 1,400 tanks and armored vehicles, 2,600 pieces of artillery, and more than 1,000 combat aircraft directly at a 75-mile (120 km) stretch of the front in the Ardennes in an offensive designed to punch through the Allied lines. And thus began the Battle of the Bulge. This German counteroffensive moved forward fast, creating the bulge that gave the battle its name. But the German advance hit bottlenecks at Bastogne and other places, while isolated soldiers defended important crossroads and burned gasoline stocks to keep them out of German tanks. On December 22, 1944, as Allied troops were reeling, German soldiers brought to McAuliffe a demand that he surrender Bastogne. “The fortune of war is changing,” their missive read. “This time the U.S.A. forces in and near Bastogne have been encircled by strong German armored units…. There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation: that is the honorable surrender of the encircled town…. If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne.” It was that request that prompted McAuliffe’s “NUTS!” Members of his staff were more colorful when they had to explain to their German counterparts what McAuliffe’s slang meant. “Tell them to take a flying sh*t,” one said. Another explained: “You can go to hell.” By the time of this exchange, British forces had already swung around to stop the Germans, Eisenhower had rushed reinforcements to the region, and the Allies were counterattacking. On December 26, General George S. Patton’s Third Army relieved Bastogne. The Allied counter offensive forced back the bulge the Germans had pushed into the Allied lines. By January 25, 1945, the Allies had restored the front to where it had been before the attack and the battle was over. The Battle of the Bulge was the deadliest battle for U.S. forces in World War II. More than 700,000 soldiers fought for the Allies during the 41-day battle. The U.S. alone suffered some 75,000 casualties that took the lives of 19,000 men. The Germans lost 80,000 to 100,000 soldiers, too many for them ever to recover. The Allied soldiers fighting in that bitter cold winter were fighting against fascism, a system of government that rejected the equality that defined democracy, instead maintaining that some men were better than others. German fascists under leader Adolf Hitler had taken that ideology to its logical end, insisting that an elite few must lead, taking a nation forward by directing the actions of the rest. They organized the people as if they were at war, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that business and politicians worked together to consolidate their power. Logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, fascists demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate, dividing their population so they could control it. In contrast to that system was democracy, based on the idea that all people should be treated equally before the law and should have a say in their government. That philosophy maintained that the government should work for ordinary people, rather than an elite few. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt inspired the American people to defend their democracy—however imperfectly they had constructed it in the years before the war—and when World War II was over, Americans and their allies tried to create a world that would forever secure democracy over fascism. The 47 allied nations who had joined together to fight fascism came together in 1945, along with other nations, to create the United Nations to enable countries to solve their differences without war. In 1949 the United States, along with Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the U.K., created the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), a peacetime military alliance to stand firm against aggression, deterring it by declaring that an attack on one would be considered an attack on all. At home, the government invested in ordinary Americans. In 1944, Congress passed the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act, more commonly known as the G.I. Bill, to fund higher education for some 7.8 million former military personnel. The law added to the American workforce some 450,000 engineers, 180,000 medical professionals, 360,000 teachers, 150,000 scientists, 243,000 accountants, 107,000 lawyers, and 36,000 clergymen. In 1946 the Communicable Disease Center opened its doors as part of an initiative to stop the spread of malaria across the American South. Three years later, it had accomplished that goal and turned to others, combatting rabies and polio and, by 1960, influenza and tuberculosis, as well as smallpox, measles, and rubella. In the 1970s it was renamed the Center for Disease Control and took on the dangers of smoking and lead poisoning, and in the 1980s it became the Centers for Disease Control and took on AIDS and Lyme disease. In 1992, Congress added the words “and Prevention” to the organization’s title to show its inclusion of chronic diseases, workplace hazards, and so on. Congress invested in the nation’s infrastructure with projects like the Interstate Highway System, funded by the 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, which fueled the economy not just by providing jobs and tying together the states, but also by creating a market for new cars and for motels, diners, and gas stations along the new roads.
“The new Trump administration fired about 17 inspectors general on Friday from a number of departments and agencies, including State, Defense and Transportation. The inspectors general are there to work against fraud, corruption and abuses of power. Federal law states that the White House has to inform Congress 30 days in advance of the firing of an inspector general. Several of those who lost their jobs Friday night were appointed during Trump’s first term. Alaska Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski said, “What I do understand is that it is relatively unprecedented in that there was no notice.” Maine Republican Senator Susan Collins noted that Trump’s firings didn’t adhere to his stated goal of fighting corruption.” Isn’t this the sort of thing dictators do?
