Defiance at Losheimergraben tells the story of a small, ad hoc infantry outfit that played a crucial role in the opening days of Germany’s Ardennes offensive (which would later become known as the Battle of the Bulge.) The unit, led by Lt. Dewey Plankers, held a key crossroads in the village of Losheimergraben on the Belgian-German border. The Germans knew that seizing this intersection, one of very few junctions of two major paved roads in the Ardennes, was critical to the capture of the port of Antwerp, Belgium, a major objective of the German offensive.
Although the author is not a historian (actually, she is a retired teacher and Plankers’s daughter), the book is well-researched and sourced. It has an extensive bibliography with over one hundred entries, including many unit histories, and these entries support over 250 endnotes. There are several appendices that mostly provide more historical context for the unit, including a list of those who were present at the crossroads and key leaders for the battalion, regiment, and division.
Defiance at Losheimergraben sets the table for the battle by describing the 99th Division and the 394th Infantry Regiment’s training in the United States and deployment to Europe in 1944. We meet Plankers, the main character of the book, and his family as he drives them home to Washington state before his movement overseas.
The book gives an in-depth, detailed description of the fight for the intersection at Losheimergraben and the actions nearby, starting with the heavy artillery bombardment early on 16 December 1944 and up through the eventual withdrawal of Plankers’s force late on the night of 17 December. The story frequently skips around to other parts of the battalion and regiment, with much of it taking place at the individual, squad, and platoon levels. The writer does a very good job of describing the harsh environment—the gullied, thick forest that shortened lines of sight and engagement distances to a few meters, and the bitter cold and snow that made survival even more difficult.
For the most part, these shifts in both time and space give the reader a broader picture of what was going on around the crossroads, but on occasion it is not immediately clear where the reader is in the battle.
The book goes on to describe Plankers’s unit’s movement back to friendly lines—over the course of the battle, their parent battalion and regiment had fallen back over three miles. The 394th then moved further back to more defensible terrain along Elsenborn Ridge. At this point, Plankers is evacuated back to England due to battle injuries and trench foot. An epilogue describes the rest of his life up to his passing in 1973.
Defiance at Losheimergraben is a very good book. It tells the story of a small unit that played a big part in a strategically important engagement of World War II, the kind of story that often gets overlooked in history. There are a few pages of maps, both large and small scale, at the beginning of the book that help the reader follow the battle. Additionally, there are eight pages of black-and-white and color photographs, showing Plankers and some of his men and the area around the crossroads a few years after the war and in current times.
This book is highly recommended to anyone interested in military history and small-unit actions during World War II and the Battle of the Bulge.