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You already know the story of the Battle of the Bulge.

December 1944. The largest ground battle in American military history. A massive German counteroffensive that caught the Allied command completely by surprise. A story of American soldiers holding the line against impossible odds. Bastogne. Nuts. Patton's relief column. American courage in the snow.

That story is true. And it is incomplete.

Here is what most histories of the Battle of the Bulge leave out.

A German prisoner was captured on December 14th — two days before the attack. He told his interrogators that the German offensive would begin on December 16th. His account was filed through channels. It did not change anything.

A German woman crossed the Allied lines on December 15th. She reported that she had seen German soldiers and tanks massing in the forest east of Clervaux, twenty miles away. Her report was filed. It did not change anything.

Colonel Benjamin "Monk" Dickson — the First Army's intelligence chief — had been warning for weeks that a German offensive through the Ardennes was coming. He was sent on leave the day before the attack began. He was in Paris when the guns opened.

General Omar Bradley's intelligence staff told him — in an official assessment issued days before the attack — that it was now certain that attrition was steadily sapping the strength of German forces on the Western Front. Eisenhower's own intelligence chief drove to Bradley's headquarters to warn him personally. Bradley's response: "Let them come."

At five-thirty in the morning on December 16th, 1944, approximately two thousand German artillery pieces opened fire simultaneously along an eighty-mile line. Two hundred thousand German soldiers moved through the fog and snow against an Allied front held by four divisions.

75,000 American casualties followed. The largest American ground battle of the Second World War. A battle that the Allied intelligence establishment had not believed was possible — despite being told, repeatedly, that it was coming.

There is one exception to this story. One intelligence officer who got it right. Colonel Oscar Koch — Patton's G-2 — had briefed Patton on December 9th that a major German offensive through the Ardennes was likely and imminent. Patton listened. His staff quietly began contingency planning. When Eisenhower asked at the December 19th crisis conference how quickly Patton could pivot his army north to relieve Bastogne, Patton said: forty-eight hours. The room went silent. He did it because one man had been believed by his commander.

Season Three of WWII Unwound is called The Decisions That Shaped the Western War. It begins here — with the story of what intelligence failure looks like when it reaches its fullest expression, and what the alternative looks like when one commander simply chooses to listen.

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