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

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

“At least one person around here knows what he’s doing,” cracked Patton, unidentifiable to the man below. His troops often swore at him, but also by him.

When Patton caught up with a column of the 4th Armored, still short of Bastogne, trucks and tanks were sliding off the icy roads—he called them bowling alleys—into ditches. “I only saw him once,” a GI told Beatrice Patton after the war. “We were stuck in the snow, and he come by in a jeep. His face was awful red, and he must have been about froze riding in that open jeep. He yelled to us to get out and push, and first I knew, there was General Patton pushing right alongside of me….He never asked a man to do what he wouldn’t do himself.”

As Patton neared the headquarters unit of the 4th Armored, an American plane strafed the area. He threw off his lap blanket and huddled in another ditch. By radio he heard from VIII Corps headquarters in the safety of Neufchâteau, to the west, that McAuliffe had called on Christmas Day to say that the finest present his troops could receive was their rescue, but that holding the Bastogne perimeter had its limits. When the 4th Armored failed to crash a corridor through by midnight, and, faced with German infantrymen riskily riding the backs of tanks and being toppled into the snow by small-arms fire from foxholes, McAuliffe called again to complain that the situation was desperate and he had been let down.

Patton was indignant—briefly. His troops were straining to their limits, and the Germans were giving up little ground. Using a favorite expression, he snapped, “There is no use getting into a pissing match with a skunk; so, unless they get too vituperative, I will leave it at that.”

Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ tanks made it through late in the afternoon of the 26th. The 101st’s greeting party, by McAuliffe’s order, was well-dressed and cleanshaven, to show that they had everything under control. With an aide, McAuliffe rode a jeep over to see Patton’s troops for himself. Captain William Dwight, second in with his tank after 1st Lt. Charles P. Boggess, scrambled out, saluted, and asked, “How are you, General?”

“Gee, I am mighty glad to see you,” said McAuliffe, happy to be reconnected. The day after Christmas was not too bad. And for the enemy, if not for McAuliffe, it was still Christmas. In Germany das zweiter Weihnachtstag persisted.

“Just now at 1845,” Patton wrote to Beatrice, “Gaffey called to say we had made contact. Of course we did not do it with much, but we did it. My prayer seems to be working still as we have had three days of good weather and our air [force] has been very active. Of course they overstate [their results] at least 50 percent but they do scare the Huns.”

Several days later, arriving in Bastogne with Marlene Dietrich, who had been entertaining Allied troops there before the German attack and now returned, Patton saw white-clad enemy bodies frozen in the snow, now with a second coating of white. “Finest battlefield I ever saw,” she recalled him crowing in his high-pitched voice.

On the northern shoulder of the Bulge, Montgomery, temporarily in full command, reflected that Bradley, “such a decent fellow” but in over his head, had mistakenly permitted Patton “to go too far,” yet Monty had done little more than hold the line with American troops. The British counted about a thousand casualties, two hundred of them dead. Admitted American casualties were 80,987, including 10,276 killed and 23,218 missing, including prisoners of war and unrecovered dead. The German count was higher. Patton’s Christmas wish was that Eisenhower would not give in weakly to Monty’s “tidying up the lines” panaceas. “If ordered to fall back,” he wrote in his diary, “I think I will ask to be relieved.”

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.