Arditi than concentrate for a deep pincer maneuver into the exposed flanks as Patton and Montgomery wanted, may have delayed the end of the battle and led to higher casualties than necessary It also permitted many Germans to escape, albeit without their heavy weapons or fighting morale intact Even given that failure to pinch off and destroy most German units inside the bulge, the Wehrmacht’s losses were severe: 100,000 men, 800 tanks, and 1,000 combat aircraft It thus proved impossible to hold the Western Allies along the Rhine or keep the Soviets from the Carpathians or the east bank of the Vistula: the Red Army launched the Vistula-Oder operation on the other side of Germany on January 12 The Ardennes offensive was among Hitler’s last great blunders of the war, one of the few in which he was principally responsible for operational failure because he acted against clear advice from his generals The offensive spent Germany’s final military reserves More importantly, it broke the will of most ordinary Landser to continue to resist in the West It thereby hastened the collapse of resistance once the Western powers crossed the Rhine It probably quickened the end of Hitler’s regime, and hastened his death, by several months One unforeseen consequence was that the attack in the Ardennes thereby spared Germany attack with atomic bombs, which only became operational two months after the Nazi surrender in May See also V-weapons program Suggested Reading: Hugh Cole, The Ardennes: Battle of the Bulge (1993); John S Eisenhower, The Bitter Woods (1969); C Macdonald, Battle of the Bulge (1984) ARDITI Italian elite assault troops during World War I Many arditi veterans were members of the original fascist gangs of thugs, or “squadristi,” which plagued Italy in the immediate aftermath of the Great War AREA BOMBING British term for mass bombing of enemy cities and urban populations Americans called the same practice “carpet bombing.” The first area or city attacks were carried out by the Luftwaffe against Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London In Richard Overy’s words, the practice was adopted by RAF Bomber Command “by a process of elimination.” It was not accepted until after British airmen tried precision bombing, then slowly came to accept that they could not hit specific targets at which they aimed gravity bombs The key moment for the RAF came in 1941 when a secret bombing study proved the inefficacy of RAF efforts and methods The study was ordered by Winston Churchill’s scientific adviser, Frederick Lindeman, and carried out by D M Butt The “Butt Report” assessed accuracy based on hundreds of aerial reconnaissance photos: more were available because bomber cameras were more widely used from 1941 Butt concluded that one-third of RAF bombers never reached or bombed their targets He noted that just 30 percent even dropped their bomb loads within five miles of a designated target, a number that plunged to just 10 percent over the critical and heavily defended region of the Ruhr Valley That conclusion had the paradoxical effect of becoming instrumental in Bomber Command adopting a strategy of area bombing, while also seeking to improve accuracy in the long term An additional inducement to 68