Profs & Pints DC: Revisiting the Battle of the Bulge

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Revisiting the Battle of the Bulge,” with Kevin Matthews, an assistant professor of history at George Mason University who teaches courses on 20th century Europe.

We’ve arrived upon the 80-year anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, a dramatic chapter of World War II featured in numerous films, as well as television series like Band of Brothers, and once described by British prime minister Winston Churchill as the “greatest American battle of the war.” Fought in the snow and bitter cold from December 16, 1944, to January 25, 1945, it came perilously close to handing Hitler a momentous victory, and it profoundly shaped the outcome of the Second World War and the boundaries of the Cold War that followed.

Learn in depth about the Battle of the Bulge and all that hinged on it with Professor Kevin Matthews, who previously has given fantastic Profs and Pints talks about World War II and about Ireland’s fight for independence.

You’ll learn how the Battle of the Bulge represented a desperate gamble by Hitler in World War II’s last months. His plan was to hurl his armies against lightly held American lines in the Ardennes Forest so they could then take the Belgian port of Antwerp, and cut off American, British, and Canadian forces from their supplies. He thought the offensive would repeat Germany’s big 1941 victories on the Eastern Front, which had forced hundreds of thousands of Soviet soldiers to surrender. He promised his generals it would win the war, but, as one high-ranking Nazi said at the time, Hitler was “playing his last card” and knew it.

Professor Matthews will explore how a stunning breakdown in Allied intelligence made the offensive possible. The Battle of the Bulge involved some of the bitterest fighting that occurred in the West, including the massacres of American POWs, as well some of the war’s most famous generals, including Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, Omar Bradley, and British field marshal Bernard Montgomery.

In the end, countless GIs turned defeat into victory through heroic resistance in towns such as Bastogne. Nevertheless, the Battle of the Bulge remained enough of a setback for them to affect how Germany would be divided between the Anglo-Americans and their Soviet allies, with its consequences felt even today. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)