For Americans who lived through it or were born in its immediate wake, the Battle of the Bulge was as famous as any event of World War II. It evoked freezing and half-starving G.I.s refusing to surrender a besieged town to an atrocity-prone German army. To younger generations it evokes almost nothing. The British historian Antony Beevor’s “Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge” may return the Bulge to collective memory by democratizing it, adding the feats and sorrows of obscure men and some unseemly quarrels among famous ones.  Mr. Beevor has written six celebrated popular histories on the war, including “Stalingrad” and “The Fall of Berlin 1945.” The story of the Battle of the Bulge is a much-told tale, and while Mr. Beevor does not offer a new interpretation, he gives us the voices of ordinary soldiers on both sides, as well as those of civilians caught in the middle. He also provides lucid explanations of the German failure: allied air power had produced a logistical nightmare — its most dramatic effect being a fatal shortage of fuel for the German panzers — while the Americans fought with unexpected savagery on the most crucial terrain.  The American soldiers who fought in the Ardennes were mostly conscripts — citizen soldiers if one is being polite, Shakespeare’s warriors for the working day if one is being lyrical. Some celebrants of today’s volunteer Army think that the last centuries’ conscripts were comparatively inept, but Mr. Beevor, himself a former professional soldier, shows that many of these amateurs became pretty good at their trade.  Mr. Beevor begins with the terrible fighting in the Hurtgen Forest in 1944, the end of the great advance that had begun when the allies broke out of the Normandy beachheads. The allies then settled in for what they thought would be an uneventful winter. They were mistaken: Late in the year, three German armies attacked in the Ardennes, and Mr. Beevor’s book describes both their initial successes and the defensive battles that ensured their final and total failure.  The Germans struck with absolute surprise near the juncture between what Hitler thought were the more amateurish Americans and their British allies, creating the bulge in the American line that gave the campaign its durable nickname. Some Americans panicked, among them a few generals. Germany’s 1940 attack through the Ardennes had been its greatest success of the war, and for a moment Hitler’s fantasy of repeating this triumph seemed plausible. But what initially looked like the renaissance of the German armies was actually the violent spasm that preceded their death. More than a million men fought in the Battle of the Bulge; by the end of January the Germans had inflicted more than 90,000 casualties, almost all of them American, but the Americans had gutted Hitler’s Fifth and Sixth Panzer Armies, and German losses were probably comparable.  Like his great teacher at the Royal Military Academy in Sandhurst, England, John Keegan, Mr. Beevor is deeply interested in the combat experience of enlisted men and junior officers. He shows the asymmetry of combat, in which like rarely fights like: Germans and Americans are slaughtered by artillery they cannot see, while American infantry stalk German tanks with bazookas. He describes the profoundly unglamorous costs of war: surgeons working amid heaps of amputated limbs; a battlefield tracheotomy performed with a parachute knife and a fountain pen; the dysentery that afflicted men who could not wash their mess kits during the coldest winter of the war; frozen German corpses used as sandbags.  If readers are tempted to imagine besieged and hungry American snipers shooting wild boar as characters who’ve wandered in from “The Last of the Mohicans,” that temptation will subside when Mr. Beevor describes those snipers seeing their intended dinners eat the intestines of German and American corpses. This is Mr. Beevor at his very best, linking war to cannibalism in an insight as old as Homer’s when recounting Achilles’ vow to eat Hector’s meat raw.  Mr. Beevor is also good at describing the devastating effects of surprise. Until Dec. 16, the Ardennes had been a quiet sector where exhausted American divisions were sent for rest and green ones were sent for seasoning. In the center of the American line, the very green 106th Infantry Division held a front three times as long as American military doctrine prescribed. The Germans attacked. At some points they outnumbered the 106th by 6 soldiers to 1, infiltrating gaps in the line and overrunning some American artillery. Two regiments of the 106th were quickly surrounded. Running low on ammunition and medical supplies, shelled by artillery to which they could not reply, 7,000 men surrendered on Dec. 19, the largest American mass surrender in the European theater.  Some nonsense has been written about this, a bit of which Mr. Beevor quotes without comment. Godfrey Blunden, an Australian journalist who at the war’s end encountered starving prisoners from those two regiments, wrote: “They were more pitiful because they were only boys drafted from nice homes in a nice country knowing nothing about Europe, not tough like Australians, or shrewd like the French or irreducibly stubborn like the English. They just didn’t know what it was about.”  Similarly, Mr. Beevor quotes Kurt Vonnegut, who 50 years after the battle, said of his fellow soldiers in the 106th Infantry Division that “few had received infantry training”; he called them “poor physical specimens,” college boys and petty criminals who “should never have been in the army.”  This is at best wildly overstated. Although Mr. Beevor never directly challenges any of it, he does elsewhere note that more than a third of the division would fight heroically defending St. Vith, Belgium. The training and recruitment of all the division’s regiments was identical to that of most other American infantry. Historians agree that American rifle units only improved when the college men were thrown into them. Mr. Blunden’s starvelings had simply been unlucky, their orders to retreat either misheard or misunderstood over a partially jammed radio frequency. The Americans weren’t hopelessly nice in the Bulge; some responded to serial German massacres of American prisoners and Belgian civilians by killing SS men and German paratroopers who attempted to surrender.  Contemporary voices can give great force and weight to military history, and Mr. Beevor quotes a lot of them, American, British, German and Belgian. Scornful voices can be as misleading as any others. Those who believe in soft and irredeemably un-martial Americans are a case in point: That belief was a significant part of what prompted Hitler’s strategy in the Ardennes campaign, and it remains a hardy perennial. Most of Mr. Beevor’s vivid descriptions of the fighting in the Bulge, however, show that this belief was quite grievously mistaken.  Because of an editing error, the Books of The Times review on Monday, about “Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge” by Antony Beevor, misattributed a statement about the training of regiments in the United States Army’s 106th Infantry Division, two of which surrendered in the battle. It was the reviewer, not the author of the book, who stated that the training was identical to that of most other American infantry.  Fred Smoler teaches literature and history at Sarah Lawrence College.  The Battle of the Bulge  Illustrated. 451 pages. Viking. $35.  A version of this review appears in print on December 28, 2015, on page C4 of the New York edition with the headline: Recounting a Battle That Still Resonates Seven Decades Later . Today's Paper|Subscribe
This book is Mr. Beevor’s latest on World War II and he gives voice to ordinary soldiers and civilians as he details the fighting.