Yesterday we announced the launch of The Doomsday Clock, an original 18th Airborne Corps podcast series telling the incredible story of the Corps' Cold War history.

Today we're going to tell you more about some of the guests who will appear on the program.

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BATTLE OF THE BULGE DAY 3: DECEMBER 18, 1944

Battling Bastards of Bastogne

~2:15 AM, Major General Matthew Ridgway, unaware of the fighting in Ardennes, and sleeping in his HQ, is awakened by a call from Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, commander of First Army.

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Hodges, calling from the town of Spa in Belgium, tells Ridgway that the Germans are smashing through the Ardennes & the XVIII Airborne Corps had been released from theater reserve and assigned to First Army to help push back the offensive.

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Until just recently, with the creation of the 18th Airborne Corps, there was no traditional "reserve" in the European Theater. Now, the 18th was the reserve.

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Ridgway sends the 101st and 82nd into the teeth of the ferocious German attack.

Here’s Jim Gavin, 82nd commander, who would push east to Werbomont, Belgium.

The 101st would drive into the wood chipper outside of Bastogne, Belgium.

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The 101st, in particular, was in no shape to go back into the fight.

1 of 16: WE ARE ALL JEWS HERE: THE STORY OF RODDIE EDMONDS

One of the most moving and relevant stories of the Battle of the Bulge, or any American Soldier in any war, is that of Master Sergeant Roddie Edmonds, a Knoxville, Tennessee native, who served with the 106th Infantry.

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Roddie was captured early on in the Battle of the Bulge, on December 19th, when Panzer forces plowed through his unit.

He, along with almost his entire regiment, was forced to surrender.

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The men were transported to the Stalag IX-A POW camp in Ziegenhain, Germany.

Roddie was the senior enlisted American Soldier at the site. As such, he was the conduit between all American Soldiers and their German captors.

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In late January, the camp’s commandant, Major Siegmann [pictured here], ordered Roddie, a Christian, to identify all Jewish Soldiers and order them to stand in formation by themselves the next day.

[Jewish Soldiers were a minority within American units]

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Throughout WWII, captured Jewish Soldiers were often tortured and then killed by their German captors.

In fact, Jewish Soldiers had been told to bury their dog tags before capture. The dog tag identified Jews with the letter “H” for Hebrew.

1 of 19: TANK YOU FOR YOUR SERVICE

You crazy for this one, #TankTwitter

The Battle of the Bulge was among the largest tank battles in US history.

[If you are here seeking something other than straightforward analysis of a historical event, please look elsewhere]

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After the war, a narrative developed that American tank units (7th, 9th, 10th Armored Divisions, in particular) overcame a German tank superiority in the Battle of the Battle.

[3 of 19] We'd like to put that idea to the test.

We've discussed Kampfgruppe Peiper outmaneuvering our tanks early on with the newest German tank, the 70-ton Tiger II.

The remaining German forces had the Tiger I and Panzers.

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Lt. Colonel Robert Erlenbusch commanded company A, 31st Tank Battalion in St. Vith during the fighting. After the war, he wrote a paper for III Corps in which he stated that German Panther and Tiger tanks were far superior to the American Sherman and Stuart tanks.

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American tanks had success in Ardennes only if they hit "lucky shots" according to Erlenbusch. Many historians still reference Erlenbusch's findings.

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By Jan 13, 1945, the Allies entered the final (and most historically overlooked) phase of the Battle of the Bulge

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By midday 75 years ago, all final Allied offensive actions were in motion.

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So, to set the table, let's remember who is who here.

CAST OF CHARACTERS

In the South, Patton's 3rd Army is still slowly making its way northeast to Houffalize (remember, they've been making progress that way since Jan 3rd).

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In the North, you've got
Robert Hasbrouck (commander of 7th Armored Division)

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In the North, you've also got Leland Hobbs who commanded the 30th Infantry Division. Hobbs and Hasbrouck reported to...

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DECEMBER 22, 1944: NUTS!

As a practical matter, the fight was over.

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When describing the 101st Airborne Division and the remnants of the 60th and 28th Divisions in Bastogne, many historians will tell you that the Americans were surrounded.

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That is accurate but it is insufficiently descriptive. "Surrounded" does not really come close to representing the odds stacked up against our Paratroopers by mid-day on Friday.

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A group of 18,000 Paratroopers, including approximately 2,000 untrained replacement troops who had never seen combat, were facing 45,000 fighters from the Fifth Panzer Army’s XLVII Panzer Corps with the newest Tiger tanks.

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The Paratroopers were led by an acting commander.

They were low on ammunition, and their medical detachment was destroyed earlier that morning.

The Tiger tanks severed the last open road south out of Bastogne, completing a full encirclement of our boys.

For those who haven’t heard, we are witnessing a globally coordinated plan (conspiracy) to use fear and safety as cover for a #GreatReset of the world economy & society. This is a planned and internationally coordinated strategy by the most powerful global elites-the ruling class

The aim of the global ruling class is to refashion global capitalism into what we can call neo-feudalist technocratic bio-fascism-or ‘global fascism’ for short.

The aim is for remaining liberal democratic rights and freedoms that have been in place at least formally in the ‘west’ for the last few hundred years to be eroded and withdrawn.

There’s lots of different terminology and branding, for example: Great Reset, Fourth Industrial Revolution, Technocracy. The main aim of this plan is the concentration of power over capital, wealth, people and nature in the hands of a the very largest corporations and monopolies.

This plan for a new phase of global capitalism is enabled by national states and governments, international organisations & quangos (EU, UN, NATO, IMF, WTO, WHO, Gates, GAVI). With no clear lines between state and non-state actors, this is also a form of global corporatism.

One of the arguments for permitting monopolies is that they are "efficient." That's the logic under which Universal was allowed to acquire Comcast and NBC - the "vertical integration" would make all three companies better and we'd all reap the benefit.

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It turns out that there are DISeconomies of scale, what Brandeis called "the curse of bigness" and really, the Universal-NBC-Comcast octopus is a poster child for that

Comcast has just informed its subscribers that they are at risk of losing access to "Bravo, CNBC, E!, Golf Channel, MSNBC, Olympic Channel, Oxygen, Syfy, Telemundo, Universal Kids, NBC Universo, USA Network and NBC Sports

That is, Comcast has warned its customers that Comcast might not license its channels to Comcast anymore.

This is a "carriage dispute" - a dispute over how much the cable operator will pay the broadcaster. It's a common dispute to have.

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But in this case, Comcast's dispute is over the accounting fiction of how much one division of a vertical monopolist will nominally charge another to access its products.

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