General George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge
By Stanley Weintraub

MHQ  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

The Bulge—Eisenhower despised the label—exploited widespread intelligence failures. Americans have often been let down by intelligence lapses bred by complacency. The salient into the Allied lines was reaching perilously toward the Meuse River when, on Tuesday morning, December 19, 1944, soon after the counterattack in the Ardennes forest had gained momentum, a shaken Eisenhower convened key generals in Verdun. He traveled there from Versailles at 11 a.m. in an armor-plated Cadillac he had used since Algiers. Taking no chances, a security detail escorted him.

Adolf Hitler’s favorite commando officer, Otto Skorzeny, who had plucked Benito Mussolini from Italian partisans, had been leading Germans in GI uniforms taken from prisoners and the dead, and using captured American jeeps to misdirect units and sow confusion. One commando taken prisoner imaginatively declared that Skorzeny was out to kidnap Eisenhower. As a result, an otherwise unimportant look-alike lieutenant colonel was being driven around Versailles in Eisenhower’s hat and overcoat while the supreme commander, nearly immobilized by the empty threat, had left furtively for his meeting site.

The strategy session took place on the second floor of an old stone barrack surrounded by a sea of slush and mud. Warmed inadequately by a lone potbelly stove, the room was set up with large easels for displaying maps. There, Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Bradley, General Patton, Lt. Gen. Jacob Devers, and Field Marshal Montgomery’s deputy, Freddie de Guingand, and their aides were to work out joint moves to blunt the German thrusts. (Monty would not deign to travel to meet with lower ranks than his own.)

Eisenhower unpersuasively described the fumbled defense crisis as an opportunity rather than a disaster, appealing for “only cheerful faces at this conference table.” Farther to the east, where the frontiers of France, Belgium, and Luxembourg met, the conferees knew that dismayed American divisions were still being mauled. Although Ike warned Patton about bluster and bravado, thinking big as usual, Patton offered: “Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut ’em up and chew ’em up.” Several at the table laughed, but Eisenhower interrupted sharply with “George, that’s fine. But the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.”

Eisenhower wanted the breakthrough blunted and narrowed. It had already disrupted plans to strike into Germany. Containing the bulge between the Belgian crossroads towns of Bastogne and St. Vith would limit the few viable routes by which the Germans could move reinforcements and supplies toward the Meuse. Despite the Western Allies’ continuing insistence that only unconditional surrender loomed—to allay Josef Stalin’s paranoia that the West might make a separate peace to let the Germans fight the Russians without an enemy at their backs—a desperate Hitler dreamed of striking a deal. A two-pronged attack toward the Meuse, threatening Paris, and toward Antwerp, the key Belgian port supplying the Allies, might not only frustrate the penetration of Germany itself but also buy time to develop more “miracle” weapons.

V-2 supersonic rockets, first launched toward London in early September, were a frightening beginning. However erratic the missiles might have been, there was no defense against them. The Luftwaffe was putting into production the first jet warplanes, which might dominate the skies. American troops, now bearing the brunt of the fighting, were stretched thin. “We are taking three trees a day,” an officer conceded, “yet they cost us 100 men apiece.”

Juggling operational boundaries, Eisenhower wanted General Jake Devers’ Seventh Army to move up from the south of France into areas from which Patton had planned to jump off into the Saar, and Patton to attack the southern flank of the Bulge below Bastogne. The Saarland, east of Metz and southeast of Luxembourg, Germany’s richest source of coal and a center of iron and steel production, was crucial to its further war potential. When Patton took Metz on November 22, it was the first time it had fallen to an enemy since a.d. 415. By December 5, he had four crossings of the Saar River in place. After that, weather and weariness had bogged the Third Army down, while even German reinforcements from the rubbish heap of the last reserves were fighting hard.

Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.