For history buffs, two questions.

Question 1: It wasn’t part of the treaty, or whatever agreement it had with Poland.

Question 2: communication delay would be my guess, but I’m not totally sure.

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Britain had cracked the Enigma Code and was reading German communications so how did Germany manage to surprise the Allies in 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge?

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Germany radio communication was minimized before the Battle.

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so how did Germany manage to surprise the Allies in 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge?

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The greatest intelligence failure in recorded history, the buildup literally occurred within hearing and seeing distance of American lines.

You had a great paw paw. Teach your kids and grand kids of what he and millions of others did.

#2. The Allies were using the Ardennes as a 'rest' front, for fought-out and brand-new divisions. They conned themselves that no one would attack through the Ardennes ("poor tank country"), conveniently forgetting the Germans had come through the Ardennes in the Franco-Prussian War, WW1 (1914, 1918), and WW2 (1940).

Anyone else I'm the mood for a BOB rewatch?

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Britain had cracked the Enigma Code and was reading German communications so how did Germany manage to surprise the Allies in 1944 at the Battle of the Bulge?

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It's not accurate to say they cracked the Enigma. Bletchley Park knew how the thing worked and they had automation that helped them decipher ciphertext, but it's absolutely wrong to say that they could decipher everything that came across. The Enigma wasn't a single code, but an automated encoding system that allowed one message to be encoded to an absolutely massive number of possible ciphertexts, depending on the machine's settings. Bletchley Park had the ingenuity to build bombes and to exploit certain peculiarities of the system to massively speed up the process of producing possible plaintexts from known ciphertexts, but even then there were still an astronomical number of possible plaintexts to choose from and actually decoding messages took as much social engineering as mechanical engineering and mathematics.

What Bletchley Park could do 100% of the time was produce every single possible plaintext that could be encoded as that ciphertext. That, however, took a long time, even with the automation. A LONG time. Also, let's say you got a ciphertext that read "hgksid wh cosk" and Bletchley Park has enough time to produce every possible plaintext. That could possibly be deciphered as "attack at dawn". It could also be "attack at dusk". It could also be deciphered as "return to base". Any one of those messages is a valid plaintext that could have been encrypted as "hgksid wh cosk", but which one is right? The key knowledge that is missing is the machine's settings which determine what ciphertext you get when you input a given plaintext.

The way the British got around this was to use cribs and flaws in German procedures. The Germans basically had a "day code" system that they'd use for a day. It was very difficult to transmit machine settings securely (in fact, it still is difficult to securely trade a secret) and the machine settings were what you had to know to decipher a message. Due to the difficulties in securely sharing this secret among everyone, they'd reuse the settings for a day. All the members of a given group would use the same highly guarded machine settings for all messages they sent that day. So, that's step one: If you get that machine setting, you can break all transmissions for that group from that day. Step two would be to try to get your hands on what the plaintext of a message SHOULD read. The Brits noticed that certain Enigma operators would compose plaintext messages for everyday reports the same way before encoding and transmitting. Weather would be a good example. If they knew the weather was going to be rainy tomorrow and Fritz was going to be working the Enigma and the Brits knew that Fritz would always deliver that report by encrypting the message "Rainy weather expected by morning", then they'd decode the weather report using the bombes to try different machine settings and when one spit out the weather report exactly the way Fritz always sent it, BINGO. They had the day code and could break the comms until the Germans changed the code per their routine. Sometimes the British would lay a minefield at a certain spot in the ocean and wait until the Germans reported the minefield. Knowing how the minefield report SHOULD look, they'd employ the same technique to extract the day settings. These are just some VERY rudimentary examples to get the idea across. In some instances, all they had was a group of several letters they expected to see in the plaintext. The bombes would dutifully spit out thousands of plaintexts containing the proper group of letters in the proper location. Most of those could be discarded because while the crib portion was correct, the rest was gibberish. Still, the remaining plaintexts then had to be analyzed to decide if there was anything reliable or useful, often by cross-referencing intelligence gathered other ways.

Finally, the Germans were convinced that their system was unbreakable and to protect the knowledge that it was vulnerable, the British simply didn't act on some information to keep the Germans from figuring out their communications were sometimes being read. People were sometimes allowed to die to protect the secret even though the information necessary to save them was available. War's ugly.

The difficulties in this should be apparent. First, to even begin to start to decide which of the deciphered messages the bombes would spit out was correct, you had to have a "crib", a known piece of plaintext to compare decodings against. Coming by those wasn't always easy. If Fritz worked every fourth day, for example, then for the other three days, you had no hope of decrypting anything. Second, even if you had the crib, the Enigma has a simply stunning number of possible configurations and it might be days or weeks before you stumbled upon the proper machine settings and were able to go back and decipher the backlog of communications from that day. By then, the decoded information may be out of date and useless. Finally, there were some communications they never had a crib for that never can be deciphered and there were those unfortunates who were sacrificed to protect the work of Bletchley Park.

If, going back to the earlier example, the real plaintext message was "attack at noon" instead of the other possibilities in many, if not most, instances you wouldn't know about it until the attack happened at noon, even if you handed Bletchley Park "hgksid wh cosk" at midnight.

WALL OF TEXT: ON [OFF]

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The greatest intelligence failure in recorded history, the buildup literally occurred within hearing and seeing distance of American lines.

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Most intel is in plain sight. The trick is recognizing it for what it is among all the irrelevant information, and also recognizing your own biases.

The reports from front line troops about unusual German activity plus the German radio net going dark were significant in hindsight. But the Bulge was considered a quiet sector so they were ignored. Instead of saying, "maybe it's not a quiet sector after all," they said, "it's a quiet sector so the reports are untrue or exagerrated."

While an intel failure, not nearly the greatest in recorded history IYAM.

One of my clients is Bulge veteran. Very hard of hearing but otherwise of sound mind and body. He trained as a combat engineer but there was a shortage of infantry so they made him a BAR man. He says he still hates cold weather.