Work For Class….hopefully

Just to update, I recently got three of the books that I had asked for through inter-library-loan.  They are all  first hand accounts of soldiers who were actually fighting in the battle.  One book in particular will be very interesting because it was written by a riffle man in patton’s Ghost Corps.  My hopes for this book is that it will be able to not only help me with my topic but also allow me to compare Pattons view, not with just some soldier who was fighting somewhere in the Ardennes, but actually served under him.  So it is a good source to use. 

I am hopeful that i will soon be able to have enough works to paint a clear enough picture.  first I am going to try to find a few more upper level people to help level out the playing field.  As it stands right now I have roughly 5-7 soldier accounts and only 2 General accounts.  A little more time and hopefully more inter-library-loans will yield the accounts that I am looking for.  If not i should be able to work well with what i have found, but the conclusion will be somewhat open for debate due to the lop-sided sources.

So this is a quick over view of the secondary sources that I am using and how they relate and how they are different

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as of recently i have changed my topic slightly to help narrow my search topic.  I now plan to write about the conflicting views seen by the generals  and the soldiers on the front lines. 

so far the research that i have found shows an enormous difference between the two sides.  The a couple of memoirs that i have gotten my hands on have seem to show that the generals focused more on the tactics and deployment of goods/provisions.

The soldier diaries that i have found seem to be very different and much more human.  The main topics of discussion are: a lack of food, the freezing temperatures, constantly being shot at, and survival.  The two different views are conflicting and severly effected the choices made by the higher ups while at the same time a huge number of casualties were on account of the problems that acctually faced by the soldiers.

It seemed like the fact that the the generals were off site and often found a warm house and bed in which to sleep.  This is a problem that seemed to be a much greater problem than could be seen at first glance.  The front lines are not a safe place to have for fear of injury, which would leave the men in a vulnerable state and without any leadership.  Although it is a problem, it is of course a necessary evil which will always lead to unneccessary casualties.

here is a copy of a short annotated bibliography compiled of only five of my secondary sources.annotated-bibliography

hello,

     not quite sure how some of you have found my blog but i have recently found two sites that have helped me alot with my info.  If you need them….well here they are.

http://ww2db.com/                         and the other is  a journal or rather a couple of journals one german the other an american soldier.

http://ice.mm.com/user/jpk/wardiary.htm

Ok, so I have a working bibliography ready to be published here.  They are not all necessarily books that have been used but books that I have read,  some of which are books on The Bulge as a whole…..or maybe not. 

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            so far i have come up with a working question that has been loosely followed in my quest for problems during the battle of the bulge.  It will follow “who was more well prepared and outfitted for the harshness of the French winter, the Allied forces or the Nazis.”  I am shooting mainly to talk about the conditions that they were both forced to survive under.

            Before starting my research i had the idea that the Nazi troops would have been more well provided for given the fact that they were closer to home and were coming from a land with a harsher winter.  So far the research that i have found concludes that the German forces may have been more ill-equiped than the Allied forces.  One source that i found, George S. Patton,  said that one of the prisoners of war that had been taken just prior to the battle had “stated that they had not recieve any regular rations fror some three to five days”(Patton 20).  This very clearly contradicts the hypothesis that i had concluded.  At the same time though, the Allied forces were very poorly prepared for the hardships.  The heads of command, as another source states, had skipped over shipping winter clothing in favor of more ammo and gas.(neilland 124)  In fact many sources have stated that they did not even get the proper attire until the middle of January.

            These facts came as a shock to me.  I will continue to update my progress

Hey everyone,  obviously i am writing this for my History 299 class to try to update the world on my essay.  I have chosen to write on the topic of the battle of the Bulge.  I pivotal battle that marked the beginning of the end for the Nazi army.  Stuck during the harsh French winter months the two sides were stuck in a stale mate for months.  At the current time I am hoping to research and compare the conditions of the two sides.  At first glance this does not appear, to me at least, to too broad of a topic.  Hopefully someone will stumble into my blog and correct me soon before I get too far along.  After i reach a certain point i might get angry like the hulk but its ok.

I plan to meet with Blakemore tomorrow, Thursday January 15, morning to get some general hints on where to start looking and hopefully get more of a direction of what I am going to be writing.  In the following months i will keep everyone up to date on my progression and hopefully stick in little pointers that people will find interesting an be able to use in other classes.  But….fer now im out of stuff to report