Description Text in French On 16 December 1944, there started the most powerful artillery barrage that the forces of the Third Reich in its death throes were ever to launch on the Western Front after the Normandy landings six months earlier.
It smothered the American lines holding the thinned-out front in the Ardennes.
The most powerful armored force ever assembled by the Germans for an offensive on this front was then to have struck out in the direction of Antwerp.
All this .