I'll Be Home for Christmas a Sentimental Favorite with US Troops Through Six Wars

Bing Crosby recorded Irving Berlin's "White Christmas" for the movie 'Holiday Inn' in 1942, and it became an immediate hit and instant classic. But did you know?

Der Bingel followed that success a year later with 'I'll Be Home for Christmas' in 1943 and it instantly topped the charts as one of America's most popular holiday songs. Jimmy Gannon wrote the lyrics and the music was the work of Walter Kent. It was Crosby's fifth gold record, back when a gold record was a really big deal.

"I'll Be Home For Christmas" was a perfect sentimental wartime song with deep meaning to U.S. troops overseas. Once the Allies landed in Normandy in June of 1944 and pushed their way through France and much of Hitler's Festung Europa, they were knocking on Germany's door by early December, 1944. "I'll Be Home For Christmas" was on the lips of GI's and civilians back home alike. It was the number one seasonal hit for the second straight year. Everyone, well, almost everyone, felt the war would be over soon and that the troops truly would be home for Christmas.

Home for Christmas. Maybe it would be over by Christmas.

That feeling, or wish, was widely held by U.S. troops not only along the so-called 'Ghost Front,' but throughout Europe on December 16, 1944, the 1,105th day since the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and other military installations in Hawaii brought the U.S. into the war.

The Ghost Front, as it was commonly called, was so named by U.S. troops because nothing of significance was expected to happen there. It was an area in the Ardennes Forest near Belgium's border with France. Troops who had been rotated out of combat for R&R were stationed there, as were new, green troops. Reserves.

But Hitler had a plan, codenamed "Watch on the Rhine," for an all-out German counteroffensive against the Allies. It wouldn't be further south where U.S., British, and other Allied troops were at full, combat strength, it would be up and around their flank and directly through the Ardennes forging a German salient, also called a 'bulge.'