General George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge

By Stanley Weintraub | MHQ  | one comment  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Erich Brandenberger expected “a speedy reaction from the enemy.” He meant Patton. Yet he assumed that it would take Patton at least four days to wheel his divisions about, and the terrible weather—rain, sleet and snow—would be an additional handicap. Nevertheless, Patton’s troops began shifting north. He felt that Bastogne was as good as lost if he could not get there by Christmas. (The Germans had already taken St. Vith, on the northern shoulder.)

The 101st Airborne Division, surrounded and besieged, was holding the town precariously. Although the division and its supporting armored elements would be bottled up only for eight days, its airborne nature left it without heavy guns, and the tanks of Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division were a lightweight counterpart to the panzer divisions surrounding Bastogne. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the 101st’s acting commander, knew that Patton’s forces were being alerted, but he had his doubts about how long the fragile 101st could endure. “Most of us,” he said later, rather ungenerously of Patton, “thought he never had a very good staff but he certainly accomplished miracles with it….Well, I mean the success of moving an unwieldy mass like that; to change your lines of supply, and everything, to turn that cumbersome, heavy-going outfit in the snow, in the fog and the rain, and turn them around so quickly as he did to get them going to the north, was really a remarkable task to accomplish.”

Patton had already thought hard about the operation, for he saw no other avenue for the relief of Bastogne. More than breaking a siege, the risky turnaround was essential to reducing the burgeoning Bulge. Yet the town was 125 difficult, wintry miles from the bulk of the Third Army. In two days and nights about a hundred thousand troops, with thousands of supply trucks, tanks, self-propelled guns, and other vehicles, had to slog over roads that barely existed beneath the mud, ice, and snow. Since blackout restrictions meant nothing in the poor visibility and lack of enemy air traffic, drivers kept their lights on. In the miserable terrain, communications teams had to lay and network nearly twenty thousand miles of wire.

To his wife, Beatrice, Patton wrote that “the staff of the Third Army, which consisted of myself and Sergeant [John L.] Mims [his jeep driver] visited two corps and five division commanders, and telephoned for the engineers, tank destroyers, extra tank battalions, etc.” It was over-the-top boasting, but Patton believed in hands-on oversight, whatever the hour or the weather. When he was discovered dining in style and enjoying vintage wines in a hotel in Luxembourg City, it had no bearing on where he had already been or would be going.

No admirer of Patton—the feeling was mutual—Montgomery sneeringly cabled his ostensible boss, Field Marshal Alan Brooke, chief of staff in London, that Patton’s attack “went off half-cock” and predicted that the Germans would be able to keep going. In his diary on December 22, Brooke wrote, “German offensive appears to be held in the north”—now under Montgomery, but with almost no British troops committed—“but I am a little more doubtful about the south. Patton is reported to have put in a counter attack. This could only have been a half baked affair and I doubt it’s doing much good.”

On the same day, Patton wrote to Beatrice that the Third Army had “progressed on a twenty-mile front to a depth of seven miles.” He had “hoped for more but we are in the middle of a snow storm and there were a lot of [enemy] demolitions. So I should be content which of course I am not….We moved over a hundred miles [since] starting on the 19th.”

To augment his forces, Patton extracted eight thousand men from rear-area service troops, including clerks and cooks and bandsmen. “If others would do the same,” he wrote to Beatrice—he knew how swollen support staffs were in Paris and Brussels and even in Luxembourg City—“we could finish this show in short order.” His combined attacking force, including Maj. Gen. Willard Paul’s 26th Infantry and Maj. Gen. Horace McBride’s 80th Infantry, numbered 108 armored, infantry, and artillery battalions, with 1,295 guns of 105mm or larger. “I don’t see how the Boche can take this much artillery,” he said.

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Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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