December 16 marks the 80th anniversary of the Battle of the Bulge, a decisive moment in World War II and the largest battle in United States military history. Of the 500,000 American soldiers engaged in the bitter struggle, Springfield’s Ralph K. Manley was among the fighters.
By December 1944, Allied commanders believed the German Army was all but defeated. Plans were underway for transferring troops from Europe to the Pacific Theater for what was expected to be a bloody invasion of the Japanese home islands. A massive Allied intelligence breakdown, however, failed to detect that the Germans had assembled three armies in the Ardennes Forest of Belgium. On December 16, 200,000 Germans launched an offensive that drove back thousands of American troops. The attack created a massive bulge in the line that threatened to separate Allied forces.
All available troops were rushed to the front, including the 101st Airborne. Accustomed to jumping onto the battlefield from airplanes, now the paratroopers were loaded onto trucks and sent to Bastogne, Belgium. A crucial road junction, the town and its transportation network had to be held at all costs. Ralph Manley was one of the men riding to the battlefield.
Manley had joined the army with his twin brother, Roland, halfway through their final year at Springfield’s Senior High School. The army would not allow twins to serve together, so Roland was sent to the 82nd Airborne Division. Sadly, he was killed during the invasion of Sicily when his plane was shot down over the Mediterranean Sea in July 1943. After Roland’s death, the army offered to send Ralph home, but he chose to remain in the service. Ralph participated in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and the invasion of the Netherlands that September. He was on leave in Paris when he received orders to return to his unit in Belgium immediately after the German breakthrough.
Manley and his comrades arrived in Bastogne with the temperature of 0 degrees and a foot of snow and ice on the ground. They quickly secured the roads and formed a circle around Bastogne, but there had been no time to equip the troops with proper cold weather gear. Worse yet, bad weather grounded American planes, so they could not receive supplies from the air. This made the elements as dangerous as the Germans. The outnumbered division famously refused a demand to surrender, so the men hunkered down in foxholes and held their ground.
In his autobiography, The Sky is the Limit, Manley recalls a couple of close calls during his time at Bastogne. Once, while taking shelter under a group of trees, a German shell sent limbs and chunks of ice raining down on the men. A piece of ice knocked his helmet off, and Manley thought, “I’ve had my head blown off.” Another time, the Germans shelled a building where Manley was firing from a second-story window. He broke a bone in his foot while jumping to safety.
The weather cleared enough on December 22 for American planes to bomb German positions and drop supplies to the defenders of Bastogne. General George Patton’s Third Army arrived on December 26 and relieved the siege. With 600,000 troops involved, what came to be known as the Battle of Bulge remains the largest engagement in American military history. Although bitter fighting continued until May 1945, Germany’s defeat at the Bulge ensured the Allied victory in Europe.
After the war, Manley returned to Springfield and attended Drury College through the G.I. Bill. In 2004, Manley told the Springfield News-Leader that he planned to be a teacher “because I didn’t want young people to ever experience war like that again.” His goal changed, however, when he turned a profit on a small house he built. That led him to a career in real estate, building more than 2,000 houses in Springfield. In the 1960s, Manley started teaching an evening course at Drury, and for 20 years he was an assistant professor of finance and business at Southwest Missouri State University.
Over the decades, Manley became a prominent member of the Springfield community. A longtime city council member, Manley was perhaps best known for his enthusiastic personality. “I’m a very positive person, and the war made me that way,” he told the News-Leader in a 2004 profile. “I look for the good things in everybody… And if I look for good things, then that’s all I see. And it makes me happy all the time.” Always friendly, Manley gave encouragement and silver dollars to strangers at community events. The coins featured Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, and Manley once estimated he had given away more than 22,000.
In his lifetime, Manley was awarded two Bronze Stars, five Purple Hearts, and a Presidential Unit Citation for his service. Ralph Manley died at the age of 95 on May 6, 2019 at the Missouri Veterans Home in Mount Vernon. He is buried in Springfield’s Hazelwood Cemetery.
The photographs accompanying this article were taken by Dean Curtis and published in the Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader on June 6, 2004
Resources:
Ralph K. Manley, The Sky is the Limit: The Autobiography of Ralph K. Manley (Marshfield, Mo.: Birch Tree Publishing, 2006), 69.
Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, World War II: The Encyclopedia of the War Years, 1941-1945 (Dover Publications: Mineola, New York), 97-99.
“A heavy place in a light heart,” Springfield (Mo.) News-Leader, June 6, 2004, 1 A, 8 A.