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

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On December 27, Patton returned to offer a thank-you at the Pescatore chapel, anticipating that the Bulge was the enemy’s final counteroffensive—as it proved to be:

The Bulge was indeed the last chance for the Wehrmacht to create a situation that might have forced, through frustration and disillusion in the West, some form of negotiation that might have forestalled the invasion and destruction of Germany itself. That did not happen.

Pressing eastward as the Bulge was flattened, Patton passed through the Belgian town of Houffalize, above Bastogne. He was appalled by its utter destruction as the Germans withdrew after mutually costly fighting. “I have never seen anything like it in this war,” Patton wrote. Giving in to his profane streak, yet still close enough to Christmas to exploit a carol, he penned yet another verse:

At Oppenheim in Germany late in March, lost for words, Patton flamboyantly peed in the Rhine. Still, he seemed never lost for language that would plunge him into trouble. In defeated Germany he later explained to newspapermen pragmatically that to keep experienced civil servants working one needed to ignore their past Nazi Party membership that seemed to him mere “lip service.” Paying party dues to keep jobs had been “nothing but a form of blackmail….If we kick them out, all this bunch, we will retard the reorganization of Bavaria….”

It was not the first of his unwelcome postwar remarks, and the sum of them cost him his military governorship. Patton had an outsized genius for war, but not for peace. Transferred by Eisenhower to a paper-pushing post until he could return to the States, Patton got no farther than the American military hospital in Heidelberg. Critically injured in a staff car collision with an army truck on December 9, 1945, he did not see another Christmas. Patton died on December 21, 1945, and was buried in a cemetery in Luxembourg for Americans who died in the Bulge, six thousand of them from his beloved Third Army. It was Christmas Eve.

Stanley Weintraub, author of Silent Night: The Story of the World War I Christmas Truce (2001) and Iron Tears: America’s Struggle for Freedom, Britain’s Quagmire (2005), has recently published Eleven Days in December: Christmas at the Bulge (all published by Free Press/Simon and Schuster).

This article by Stanley Weintraub was originally published in the Winter 2007 issue of MHQ Magazine. For more great articles, subscribe to MHQ magazine today!

Tags: Historical Conflicts, Historical Figures, World War II

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