Lessons in Sacrifice

It was a cold winter in the forested Ardennes region between Belgium and Luxembourg when German forces launched a surprise attack on the Allies on December 16, 1944, beginning what is now known as the Battle of the Bulge.

Over the next few weeks of fighting, the 551st Parachute Infantry Battalion, which was stationed north of the town of Bastogne, was decimated from 643 soldiers to just 250. The remaining men, beleaguered from the harsh conditions and suffering from trench foot and frostbite, were ordered to attack the town of Rochelinval over open ground and without arterial support.

Among those men was David Rogers I, the great-grandfather of Dawson Rogers ’25, a current accounting major and ROTC cadet at Â鶹ŮÀÉ.

“He actually never shared that much with us about his military history, so when I found out I was going on this trip to visit the Battle of the Bulge, we started digging through his army documents and awards to learn more,” Rogers says.

In researching the 551st Battalion’s eventual victory and overwhelming losses—only 14 officers and 96 men survived the battle—Rogers was able to contextualize his memories of a serious man with inner struggles.

“When I realized that 90 percent of the people he shipped off with died in battle, it made a lot more sense as to why he was the man he was.”

The Battle of the Bulge was the single deadliest WWII battle fought by American forces and one of the war’s most decisive battles, leading to the Allies pushing Germany into a permanent retreat. It’s a battle represented in countless tactical and strategic decisions on both sides—but behind each decision is a human life caught in the balance.

To learn from these stories, every year, seniors in ROTC practice something called a staff ride. During a staff ride, cadets study various leaders on both sides of a single historical battle, going through their strategic decisions and how they impacted the rest of the battle and war.

While Santa Clara’s ROTC program typically does its staff ride around a tactical map—since most historic battlefields are outside driving distance—a generous donation from an alumni family allowed cadets the once-in-a-lifetime chance to do their staff ride on the Battle of the Bulge with boots on the actual ground.

“When we decided on this staff ride, we knew we were going to read ‘Band of Brothers,’ which focused on one of the key units and several significant leaders in this battle,” explains battalion executive officer Anna Horan ’25. “The expectation from our cadre was to have everything prepared to tell a single person in a unit’s story as best as you can.”

During spring break, Horan and Rogers joined seven other cadets and two SCU instructors in Belgium and Luxembourg, focusing on the area around the town of Bastogne, where the 101st Airborne Division held off besieging Germans until the arrival of General Patton’s reinforcements. There, the cadets drove across over 30 miles of frontline, unpacking how decisions from Eisenhower and Hitler played out in reality.

“We’re in a very different world from those soldiers back then, but we need to know our history to do better than before,” Horan says. “As a medical service officer in training, I’m thinking about how I can protect my soldiers, my doctors, my PAs. Studying this battle, I learned about a medical company that was decimated right at the start of the fighting because they didn’t have proper security. And now, that’s immediately something I’ll think of when I go into my next position.”

Walking beside pockmarked buildings, forest foxholes, and artifacts in museums made that educational experience all the more immersive and impactful, adds Horan, who recalled the claustrophobia of a museum basement simulating what the barrage of bombs was like for sheltering civilians in Bastogne.

“One of the most impactful stories I learned was of Augusta Chiwy, a Black Belgian civilian nurse who volunteered on the frontline in Bastogne, even when facing racism from the American soldiers,” Horan recalls. “She ended up living into her nineties, and it was just one of those stories that hit you in the heart and made you feel grateful.”

For Rogers, the staff ride's visit to the U.S. Military Cemetery in Luxembourg provided a deeper connection to his great-grandfather’s compatriots who didn’t survive the war.

“Seeing where thousands of service members who died in the Battle of the Bulge were buried, including General Patton, just shows the lengths that our ancestors have gone to defend democracy around the world.”

These kinds of immersive, life-changing lessons will continue in the Military Science program, says director and professor Lieutenant Colonel David Von Bargen, with the ROTC planning to visit Korea for next year’s staff ride.

“We’ve been so lucky to get such generous donations from our alumni on Day of Giving and beyond to be able to give our cadets this kind of incredible tactical training.”