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

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That Saturday Colonel Harry Kinnard radioed from Bastogne that it was “getting rather sticky around here,” and that Patton’s 4th Armored “must keep coming.” Enemy tanks had broken through the southern perimeter. “Request you inform 4th Armored Division about our situation and ask them to put on all possible pressure.” Headquarters at the 101st estimated in Christmas terms that Bastogne had “one more shopping day.” Yet the weather was indeed changing. A “Siberian high”—whatever its source—was clearing the skies, and Allied aircraft again flew.

As fighter-bombers hammered German vehicles, Patton radioed John Millikin impatiently—and unreasonably. “There’s too much piddling around!” Patton complained from the safety of Luxembourg City. Tough German resistance, Millikin reported, had disabled eleven more American tanks. “Bypass those towns and clear them up later,” Patton ordered. “Tanks can operate on this ground now.”

Buoyantly, Patton credited his chaplain for the change in the weather. He later awarded the baffled Chaplain O’Neill a Bronze Star. Happily, if prematurely, Patton radioed to McAuliffe on the morning of the 24th, referring to Brig. Gen. Hugh Gaffey’s forward tanks: “Xmas Eve present coming. Hold on.” Preliminary Christmas presents had already begun to arrive, beginning at 1:30 p.m. on the 23rd. Bastogne’s citizens, hearing the throb of aircraft engines, climbed from their cellars to wave. Resupply was underway, by glider and color-coded parachute drops.

With Colonel Codman, Patton went to a candlelight Communion at the frigid Episcopal church in Luxembourg City, which, below the Bulge, had remained quiet. The church huddled in the shadows of an enormous Catholic cathedral. “It was very nice,” Patton wrote, “and we sat in the former Kaiser Wilhelm’s box.” In World War I, “Kaiser Bill’s” army had overrun Luxembourg.

By radio, Patton had already learned that his 318th Infantry, after a six-hour truck ride in a long convoy, had arrived behind General Gaffey’s tanks to help force the way north. The drive toward Bastogne had ground down. Patton blamed himself. After the battle he explained: “I had been insisting on day and night attacks. This is all right on the first or second day of the battle and when we had the enemy surprised, but after that the men get too tired.”

Blunting the Bulge would not be easy, nor would it be cheap. Patton had underestimated the desperate resilience of the enemy. Most Volksgrenadiers and Panzergrenadiers were not fighting for Hitler now, but for their homeland. Beyond the dead and wounded in battle, many others perished, more than the numbers given in the official figures.

A Belgian-manned troopship, Léopoldville, built to accommo­date 360 passengers but loaded with 2,223 66th Division replacements, was torpedoed in the English Channel. In the darkness the crew saved themselves; 802 GIs were lost. The sinking was covered up for years. Allied prisoners by the thousands were shunted off to Germany with little food or water in freezing and nearly airless freight cars. Many did not survive.

On the morning of the 25th, Patton noted in his diary, “A clear cold Christmas, lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing whose birthday it is.” Bastogne was still encircled. The guns of relief elements could be heard but not seen. Patton spent much of his day visiting units of his active divisions to ensure, where possible, that his orders that every soldier in the Third Army have a hot turkey dinner on Christmas Day were carried out. (For most, it was welcome but less-than-festive hot turkey sandwiches with gravy.) Boisterous and noisy to stir enthusiasm in the sharp frost, he turned up day and night, helmeted but unescorted, driven by the ubiquitous Sergeant Mims in an open jeep with extra-large mud flaps, Plexiglas doors, and a .30-caliber machine gun mounted on a post. “He’d stop and talk to the troops,” Mims recalled, “ask them did they get turkey, how was it, and all that.” On one inspection, Patton stumbled over the feet of a GI who was zonked out under his jeep. “God damn it!” the groggy soldier complained. “Can’t you see I’m sleeping?”

Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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