General George S. Patton and the Battle of the Bulge

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

At a presidential press conference a dozen years after the December 1944 Battle of the Bulge, President Dwight D. Eisenhower confessed, “I didn’t get frightened until three weeks after it had begun, when I began to read the American papers and found…how near we were to being whipped.” On the enemy side, with Lieutenant General George S. Patton below the southern flank of the surprise German thrust, the high command under Feldmarschall Gerd von Rundstedt realized the hazards of the Bulge from the start. Whatever the initial momentum, the operation had to succeed quickly. As bespectacled General der Panzertruppen Erich Brandenberger acknowledged in ironic self-congratulation after­ward, “Patton had [already] given proof of his extraordinary skill in armored warfare, which he conducted according to the fundamental German conception.”

Whether or not he practiced the German mode of war, Patton, who wrote martial verse all his life, penned a rude rhyme in 1944 that roughly paralled Brandenberger’s principles. Advocating relentless pressure on the enemy, Patton urged unrhapsodically:

Patton was never a role model for Sunday schools, and could be trouble even when the going was good. In army hospitals in Sicily in 1943 he had slapped two GIs whom he accused of malingering. General “Ike” Eisenhower, his commander, covered it up until the press was about to break the story. The embarrassment cost Patton, the engine of the Sicilian campaign, a prized command on D-Day in Normandy.

Then, performing the innocuous job of offering greetings at the opening of an English “Welcome Club” for servicemen in Knutsford six weeks before D-Day, he remarked that until that evening “my only experience of welcoming has been to welcome Germans and Italians to the ‘Infernal Regions’”—and he went on to predict the “evident destiny of the British and Americans, and of course the Russians, to rule the world.” He said he hoped that the war would come to “a quick conclusion, and I will get a chance to go and kill Japanese.” Subtlety was lost on Patton. Some British accounts of his talk omitted the Russians; others focused on his jovial brutality.

Exasperated with what seemed like another of Patton’s indiscretions, Eisenhower was ready to order him home—until Chief of Staff George C. Marshall cautioned, “Patton is the only available Army commander…who has actual experience fighting Rommel [who was then in charge of Atlantic Wall defenses] and in extensive landing operations followed by a rapid campaign of exploitation.” After enduring a dressing down from Eisenhower, Patton was left in England commanding a shadow disinformation army near Dover until, on August 1, 1944, seven weeks after D-Day, he was turned loose with the Third Army in France. He made up for lost time. He told his staff to hustle—an ounce of sweat was worth a gallon of blood.

The Third Army spearheaded the breakout from the Normandy bridgehead, stoutly defended by the Germans, who intimidated both U.S. Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, south of Cherbourg, and pompous Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, checked at Caen, while Patton raced across central France—until he ran out of fuel in Lorraine. “We are going so fast,” he wrote in hasty, often misspelled entries on slips of paper, “my only worries are my [military] relations not my enemies.” If he could keep it up, he wrote cockily, “I will be quite a fellow.”

Unable to maintain his momentum, Patton blamed his shortfall in fuel and supplies on Eisenhower’s need to placate the demanding, if sluggish, Montgomery. Patton was left to conduct a prolonged battle of attrition that ended only when von Rundstedt launched his unanticipated counteroffensive in mid-December, intending to take Antwerp, Belgium, and split Allied forces in Western Europe.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

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.