After writing Beatrice, “The Lord came across again,” Patton celebrated his fifty-ninth birthday, November 11, by going to the forward area “where the dead were still warm.” Along one of the roads he went down, the bodies of nearly a thousand Germans, “all neatly piled like cordwood,” were waiting to be buried by U.S. Graves Registration Service teams. It being a Sunday, he then went to church “where I heard the worst service yet.” Patton sent for the army’s chief of chaplains, who had the offender relieved and a new chaplain installed.
Patton’s two armored divisions remained stalled in the horrible weather and trench foot among the men was causing more casualties than German fire.ǁ The new attack on Metz also held up the advance and tempers rose among the various corps and division commanders. When asked to surrender, a German general at Metz declared he would fight to the death. “We are trying to satisfy him,” Patton remarked.
Third Army battle casualties as of November 15 had risen to 49,606 and nonbattle casualties were 29,857—of which up to a half were the results of trench foot. The Germans had suffered some 290,000 casualties at the hands of Third Army.
Patton then had another go at Metz, and this time he was successful. When it was finally cleared of Germans on November 22 Patton, visiting a hospital, asked a wounded soldier if he knew Metz had been captured. When the soldier nodded yes, Patton took him by the hand, smiled, and said, “Tomorrow, son, the headlines will read ‘Patton Took Metz,’ which you know is a Goddamn lie. You and your buddies are the ones who actually took Metz.”
Patton had the greatest respect for many officers of the German army, whom he saw for the most part as “gallant,” but he had little use for members of the SS, Gestapo, or other Nazis. When an SS general was captured following the Battle of Metz, Patton had him brought to his headquarters where he made him stand while berating him at length, accusing him of being a liar, a coward, and “a viper.” When the Nazi begged to be turned over to the Americans, Patton threatened to throw him to the Free French, which in all likelihood would have been the end of him. Patton later referred to this general as “the most vicious-looking person I’ve ever seen,” adding, “He is the first man I have ever browbeaten, and I must admit I took real pleasure doing it.”
Patton next interrogated a German regular army colonel, trying to discern why the German army continued to fight and die when it appeared there was no way it could stand up to the American army. This officer was offered a chair and Patton was extremely solicitous toward him. The officer replied that there were three reasons why the Germans continued. First, there was hope in Hitler’s promise of “miracle weapons,” such as the V-2 rocket; second was the awful prospect of the Russians, who it was believed would absorb the prostrated country, rape and enslave all the women, and kill all the men; third, Germans are accustomed to following orders and “would not quit until such orders were given.” It was a fatal flaw in the Germanic character in more ways than one.
By December 8 the Third Army had driven to the river Saar and the infamous Siegfried Line, or West Wall, guarded by a string of concrete pillboxes and dragon’s teeth,a and were poised to break through to the Rhine and the heart of Germany. But in mid-December, because of horrid weather, the advance again bogged down around the city of Saarlautern, where a German counterattack was threatening the timetable. Patton wrote Beatrice that he had never seen such a “hell hole” of a country. “There is about four inches of liquid mud over everything and it rains all the time.” He concluded that only divine intervention would break the stalemate and called in the Third Army chaplain for a conversation about composing a prayer, during which the following colloquy took place.
“Chaplain, I’m tired of these soldiers having to fight mud and floods as well as Germans,” Patton said. “I want you to publish a prayer for good weather.”
“Sir, it’s going to take a pretty thick rug for that kind of praying,” the chaplain responded.
“I don’t care if it takes a flying carpet. I want the praying done,” Patton told the startled clergyman.
“Yes, sir,” said the chaplain, adding as clarification, “May I say, General, that it usually isn’t customary among men of my profession to pray for clear weather to kill our fellow men.”
“Chaplain,” Patton frowned, “are you trying to teach me theology or are you the chaplain of the Third Army? I want a prayer.”
“Yes, sir,” the chaplain replied, and the next day an entreaty was produced and circulated among Third Army personnel.
Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy Great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously harken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the opposition and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.
The day after the prayer was issued the weather turned crystal clear and remained that way for a week. Patton was exuberant and called in one of his aides. “God Damn! Look at that weather! That was some potent praying. Get that chaplain up here. I want to pin a medal on him.”
Patton’s headquarters at that point was in the process of moving, but the chaplain was duly produced and Patton awarded him the Bronze Star. “You’re the most popular man in this headquarters,” Patton told him, shaking his hand. “You sure stand in good with the Lord.”12
LATE IN THE NIGHT OF DECEMBER 16, Bradley’s chief of staff phoned Patton that trouble was in the air. The Germans were attacking First Army in great force through the Ardennes Forest, a hundred miles north of Third Army. This was the great German counteroffensive they had feared. It would become known as the Battle of the Bulge—for the Americans, the deadliest battle of the war and Patton’s finest hour.
Patton had suspected something like this was in the making; recent ULTRA intercepts had told Third Army’s intelligence that the Germans were amassing men, tanks, and guns from the Eastern Front, but there was no indication of a time or place for an attack. At any rate, having to wheel the Third Army in a different direction to help repel a large enemy counteroffensive had been in the back of Patton’s mind. He reacted to Bradley’s news by immediately alerting his staff that they might have to head north and that planning should be made along those lines.
Patton groused to his diary next morning that the reason the Germans could have prepared such a large offensive was lack of aggressiveness on the part of Ike, Bradley, and the First Army. “One must never sit still,” he wrote. From what he could tell of the German attack, it reminded him of General Ludendorff’s last-ditch offensive in 1918, “and I think will have the same results.”
Patton ordered his 80th Infantry and Fourth Armored Divisions to prepare immediately for the move north. That night Bradley phoned him saying, “the situation up there is much worse,” and that an 11 a.m. conference with General Eisenhower was scheduled at Verdun. The Germans had struck First Army’s VIII Corps in the heavily forested and lightly defended area of the Ardennes with 250,000 men and numerous panzer divisions. Most of the American units in that area consisted either of green troops who were still being trained or of outfits that had been in heavy combat and then sent there for rest and recuperation. An embarrassingly large number of U.S. soldiers fell prisoner to the Germans.
At the Verdun conference, Eisenhower told Patton to proceed to Luxembourg, take charge of the luckless VIII Corps and other units that were being gathered, and lead the battle against the German incursion. It was Hitler’s intention to thrust through the Allied line for Antwerp, which had fallen to Montgomery in November and was now the Allies’ most important shipping port and distribution center for equipment, fuel, and supplies. Its loss would be a tremendous blow and would also split the American and British armies.
Eisenhower told Patton that he wanted him to assemble six divisions to strike at the Germans as soon as possible. “When can you attack?” Ike asked on December 17.
/> “On December 22, with three divisions,” Patton replied calmly, noting that his response “created quite a commotion—some people seemed surprised, others pleased.” As Patton’s biographer Martin Blumenson notes, “This was the sublime moment of his career.”
The reason Patton said he would attack with three instead of six divisions was that the other three “existed only on paper … [they] had been virtually wiped out by the Germans.” When Eisenhower expressed concern that Patton’s force might not be strong enough, Patton argued he’d rather gain the element of surprise by attacking immediately rather than wait to assemble additional divisions.
It was the most daring and audacious operation in Patton’s long career. It reflected his supreme confidence in himself and his twin mottos: De l’audace, encore de l’audace, toujours de l’audace!, an axiom attributed to the French revolutionary Georges Danton, and “Take not the counsel of your fears,” an expression said to have originated with Stonewall Jackson.
It was a vast and complicated undertaking: withdrawing from the fighting front an army of a quarter million men locked in combat with the enemy, wheeling it 90 degrees, and then transporting it with all its accoutrements over icy roads in subfreezing weather more than a hundred miles north to fight a battle against an attacking force. As Blumenson observes, “It was an operation that only a master could think of executing.”13
As they were leaving, Ike—who had been promoted to four stars right before the Kasserine Pass fiasco and had recently received his fifth star—remarked to Patton, “Every time I get a new star I get attacked.” Patton responded, “Yes, and every time you get attacked, I pull you out!”
By that point in the war, Allied airpower had nearly knocked the Luftwaffe out of the fight, but Hitler had evened the odds by making sure the German offensive would begin at a time of bad weather so the Allied planes would also be grounded. As it was, the attack coincided with a time of snow, sleet, and fog that was forecast to outlast the week. Not only had the Germans attacked in force, they had assembled a large unit of English-speaking German soldiers who, dressed as Americans, were creating havoc behind American lines—turning signposts, giving false information, sabotaging, and spreading confusion. To counter this tactic, U.S. MPs installed extraordinary identification measures, including passwords and countersigns that only Americans should know. (General Bradley himself was momentarily caught up in this dragnet when an MP insisted that Chicago—not Springfield, which Bradley had correctly answered—was the capital of Illinois.)
On December 21, the eve of his big counterattack in a snowstorm, Patton wrote Beatrice, “Though this is the shortest day of the year, to me it seems interminable … Destiny sent for me in a hurry when things got tight. Perhaps God saved me for this effort.” He dismissed the German attack to her this way: “Remember how a tarpon makes one big flop just before he dies? We should get well into the guts of the enemy.”
Before daybreak and in the middle of a giant snowstorm, Patton’s three-division army hit the German flank along a twenty-mile front and drove it in seven miles. The flashes of 1,296 heavy guns lit the sky with a fiery glow even through the snowstorm. Patton took time to write in his diary, “The men are in good spirits and full of confidence. The situation at Bastogne is grave but not desperate.” He was referring to the Germans having surrounded and trapped the 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne, where the Americans were putting up a heroic defense. (When the German general sent a surrender demand under a flag of truce, the 101st’s commanding officer Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe famously replied, “Nuts.”)
As the American attack began slowly crowding the Germans out of the salient, or bulge, that they had created in the Allied lines, Patton became a kind of one-man force majeure; he was everywhere—observing, suggesting, urging, cajoling, praising, and pinning on medals. When he passed through part of his 90th Infantry Division moving up to the battle through a raft of ambulances bringing back the bloody wounded, the riflemen—who had been riding all day in open trucks in minus-six-degree weather—stood up and cheered when they identified him by the hood of his jeep famously adorned with the big three stars of a lieutenant general.
On December 25 Patton told his diary, “A clear cold Christmas, lovely weather for killing Germans, which seems a bit queer, seeing Whose birthday it is.” But Montgomery, he said, had told Bradley that the army was too weak to attack and should fall back to the Saar-Vosges line or even the Moselle River, a notion that Patton found “disgusting.”14
The day after Christmas, Patton’s Fourth Armored Division broke through and liberated Bastogne, creating a narrow, five-hundred-yard-wide corridor through the German defenses. The Germans counterattacked, but the corridor remained open. Four days later Patton drove through it in a jeep (“passing quite close to the Germans. Luckily they were not firing”) into Bastogne where he decorated General (“Nuts”) McAuliffe with the Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second-highest honor.
The Germans launched continual counterattacks against Bastogne, but all were repulsed with heavy losses. Patton told Beatrice December 29, “This is my biggest battle. I have 16 divisions, but four have strings tied to them”—meaning they were not entirely his.
Asked at a press conference how important the Battle of Bastogne was, Patton compared it to Gettysburg in the Civil War and told the reporters, “I don’t care where he fights, we can lick the Germans any place … We’ll find him and kick his teeth in.” Privately, however, he told his diary, “We can still lose this war. The Germans are colder and hungrier than we are but they fight better … They are vicious fighters.”
On New Year’s Day, 1945, Patton issued a general order to the men of his Third Army, congratulating them on their continuing victories and thanking them for his receiving the second oak leaf cluster to his Distinguished Service Medal, “not for what I have done, but for what you have achieved … Brave rifles, veterans, you have been baptized in fire and blood and have come out steel.”15
At about this same time, Luxembourg City was suddenly bombarded “with a peculiar weapon.” At first they thought it was rockets, then a long-distance shell, but presently the weapon was captured and it turned out to be a kind of high-pressure pump (Hochdruckpumpe) with a two-hundred-plus-foot tube that flung an explosive projectile with fins some thirty-five miles. The thing was wildly inaccurate but one of the explosions killed the captain commanding Patton’s Headquarters Company, Third Army, as he stepped from his hotel in the city.
Advanced weapons or not, by the eleventh of January it became clear to Patton that the Germans were withdrawing and he hoped to catch the bulk of them as they tried to cross the Saar. However, the German method of withdrawal was a constant series of deadly counterattacks in which the losses on both sides were horrific. This tactic foreshadowed Hitler’s scorched-earth policy in the final days of the war, in which he directed every German to fight to the last man, right before he killed his wife and himself.
For Patton’s part, he crowed to anyone who would listen about the stellar role of the Third Army in the fight, and then ordered more attacks—constant attacks because, he said, “If we don’t attack first the Germans will.” But there was another, selfish reason—if that is the word—that Patton continued to roam for action. Ike’s headquarters was forever taking divisions away from him to fight elsewhere and replacing them with green troops. Patton figured out that they wouldn’t pull a division away from him if it were locked in combat.
He was incessantly at the front then, morbidly fascinated at times by the grisly sights he encountered on the battlefield. He wrote of a dead German machine gunner instantly frozen at his position of feeding ammunition into the weapon. On another occasion he investigated numerous black objects sticking out of the snow only to find they were the booted toes of dead men. And in his book War As I Knew It, he described the phenomenon “resulting from the quick-freezing of men killed in battle—they turn the color of pale claret—a nasty sight.”16
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p; Third Army’s combined casualties for the week ending January 29, which coincided with the end of the Battle of the Bulge, had risen to 99,942, with 14,870 of these killed in action. Nonbattle casualties had risen to 73,011, mostly from frostbite and trench foot. A thousand U.S. tanks had been destroyed or captured. The Germans, as usual, suffered far greater losses, with battle casualties to date tallying 528,500, nearly a hundred thousand of them killed, and material losses of about two thousand tanks and twenty-five hundred pieces of artillery.
Patton wrote this glorifying monograph in his autobiography: “During this operation Third Army moved farther and faster and engaged more divisions in less time than any other army in the history of the United States—possibly in the history of the world. The results attained were made possible only by the superlative quality of American officers, American men, and American equipment. No country can stand against such an army.”17
THE NEXT STAGE OF THE PROCESS was piercing Hitler’s Siegfried Line, or West Wall. But to confirm Patton’s “worst fears,” higher headquarters (Ike) again began trying to pull divisions away from the First and Third Armies and give them either to the Sixth Army Group, operating south of Patton, or to the Ninth Army, which was under Field Marshal Montgomery in the north. In Patton’s view it was “a patent attempt to prevent an attack by the First and Third Armies to give Monty and the British the leading role.”
In any event, the normally even-tempered and subservient Bradley blew his stack to Eisenhower’s operations chief, telling him, “I want you to understand that the reputation and good will of the American soldiers, the American Army, and its commanders are at stake. If you feel that way about it, then as far as I’m concerned you can take any god-damned division, and/or corps in the 12th Army Group, do with them as you see fit, and those that you leave back will sit on our asses till hell freezes.” He concluded by telling the staff officer, “I trust you do not think I am angry, but I want to impress upon you that I am goddamn well incensed.”18