When the allies already believed that the Second World War had gone their way, Hitler played his last ace up his sleeve. By the end of 1944, Paris had been liberated from the Nazi yoke, British and American troops had entered Germany and even liberated the port of Antwerp. But the Nazis were not willing to accept waste without fighting to the end.
The Führer prepared a major offensive on the Western Front. His goal: try to stop the allies on the west flank and buy time to negotiate a possible peace treaty. On December 16, 1944, the Germans unloaded all their artillery on the Allied troops. The Battle of the Bulge had begun, fought for a little over a month (until January 25, 1945) through the dense frozen forests and mountains of Belgium, France, and Luxembourg.
Now, nearly 80 years after that event, archaeologists from Ghent University have used drone-mounted high-resolution LiDAR equipment to investigate a section of ground where the crash occurred, revealing the still-hidden secrets of one of the biggest and bloodiest battles of that war.
Nearly 1,000 previously unknown features have been discovered, the researchers explain in an article published in the journal Antiquity. The dense forest cover of the area meant that most traces of the conflict in the landscape remained hidden.
Because aerial photographs can't see through the treetops, and the battlefield is too large to fully survey on foot. "Although this is a 'high profile' crash, intensively studied by military historians, little has been published about its material remains," says Dr Birger Stichelbaut, lead author of the study.
The LiDAR system, widely used by archaeologists today, uses laser imaging to form landscape maps by "seeing through" forest cover. Just a few months ago, this technique made it possible to discover an ancient state hidden under the Amazon jungle.
"The system made it possible to observe the traces of the Battle of the Bulge on a scale unknown until now," says Stichelbaut. Thus, in what was the first use of this application in conflict archaeology, shelters, bomb craters and even artillery emplacements were discovered.
By visiting newly identified soil features on the ground, the experts were able to link them to specific events. This was the case, for example, when they discovered German artefacts on US artillery embankments, helping to determine that German forces made use of abandoned US fortifications.
The Germans took advantage of the fact that the territory was lightly garrisoned, barely protected by half of the American Fourth Division, and that the winter was being inclement with heavy snow storms. The first Nazi victory occurred at Saint Vith, in the province of Liège.
The great objective was, even so, the small city of Bastogne, a transcendental crossroads that allowed to control communications. The Wehrmacht siege was incessant, but not enough. The weather improved and suddenly the impetuous General George Patton appeared at the head of the Third Army. A combination that the Germans could not cope with
"Recent discoveries provide us with an understanding of the scope and importance of the battle for the first time, revealing the three phases of the fighting in the landscape itself," the researchers note in their study.
The technique could be applied to other forested areas in Europe, so it could provide a lot of information about other major World War II battlefields so that they can be protected "in the long term against destructive practices, including mechanized felling of forests." conclude.
