Kurt Vonnegut Was a Terrible Driver

I know, I saw him almost cause a bad accident

The pride of my rare book collection, the self-portrait Vonnegut drew when I asked him to sign this first edition of The Sirens of Titan. Photo by the author.

Besides being an incredibly funny and brilliant writer, Kurt Vonnegut’s life story is amazing. He survived the infamous WW II bombing of Dresden, where a fire storm caused peoples’ shoes to melt “into the hot asphalt of the streets,” according to the historian Donald Miller.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana on November 11, 1922, Vonnegut was a 22-year old intelligence scout for the US Army during the war. He fought in the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last major offensive against the Allies on the Western Front.

During a brutally cold, snowy winter, from mid-December 1944 to the end of January, 1945, Hitler threw 30 German divisions at the Americans. The battle raged across 85 miles of Belgium’s thickly-wooded Ardennes Forest.

The U.S. Army suffered terribly with over 100,000 casualties, resulting in its costliest battle ever. The fight gets its name from the emergence of a large bulge that appeared in the Allied line.

Lt. Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army (about 230,000 soldiers) and the famed 101st Airborne Division came to the rescue, restored the front and pushed the Germans back. Four months later, Germany surrendered.