The Phone Call That Left Eisenhower in Tears — Patton Changed Everything

5:30 in the morning, December 16th, 1944. Foxhole outside a Belgian village nobody in America has heard of, a 19-year-old private from Scranton, Pennsylvania is finishing a letter to his mother. He is cold. He is bored. He is thinking about the coffee he will drink when his watch ends in 40 minutes.

He will not finish that letter. He will not drink that coffee. The next 4 minutes, nearly 2,000 German guns will open fire along 130 km of forest. 105-mm howitzers, 150-mm field guns, rockets from Nebelwerfer batteries howling through the fog like something out of a nightmare. Radios will go dead. Field telephones will cut out mid-sentence.

The largest battle the United States Army has ever fought will begin. 10 days from now, one American general will pick up a field telephone in a French Army barracks, pick two words, “Play ball.” Behind those two words stand a quarter of a million American soldiers, a general who has been threatened with dismissal twice, an intelligence colonel almost no one is willing to believe, and 18,000 men freezing to death in a town called Bastogne.

Two words fail, the war in Europe goes on for another year, maybe two. Tens of thousands of American boys who would have come home will not come home. If the two words succeed, they succeed by minutes. This is the story of the phone call that saved a battle. 10 days that made it possible. The Germans call it Operation Wacht am Rhein, Watch on the Rhine.

200,000 men in the first wave. Thousand tanks and assault guns waiting behind them. Three field armies moving through the fog like ghosts. Adolf Hitler has gambled his last reserves on a single strike aimed straight through the Ardennes toward the Belgian port of Antwerp. The gamble works, the Western allies split in half. British to the north are cut off.

The Americans to the south are pushed back to the sea. War in Europe drags on for another year, another two. Gamble very nearly works because on this frozen morning in every headquarters from London to Versailles, one truth is being denied. The Germans are not supposed to be able to do this. Intelligence services have said so.

The staff colleges have said so. War is nearly over. Everyone knows it. Everyone except one American colonel. And the general who listens to him. But before we get to that colonel and to that phone call, you have to know three men. Cuz everything that happens in the next 10 days will hinge on who they are and on what they carry into that December morning.

First sits 300 km from the front inside the Trianon Palace at Versailles. Dwight David Eisenhower, 54 years old, five stars on his shoulders, though the promotion has not yet been formally announced. Once a lieutenant colonel with no combat command, now the supreme commander of every Allied soldier in Western Europe.

He smokes four packs of Camels a day. He sleeps four hours a night when he sleeps at all. Hair, once sandy blonde, has turned to a dull gray in less than three years. First reports of the German attack reach his desk that morning, Eisenhower reads them slowly. He does not shout. He does not rise from his chair. He asks a single question, “Where is Patton?” 300 km to the east at the headquarters of the Third United States Army in Nancy, a 59-year-old man is bent over a map.

Hair is white. His voice, when he speaks, is unnervingly high-pitched, almost feminine, a fact that has embarrassed him since boyhood. He wears cavalry breeches, riding boots polished to a mirror, and on each hip a revolver with ivory grips. He has been photographed in this outfit so many times that half of America thinks it is a costume.

It is not. This is George Smith Patton Jr. And he dresses this way every day of his life. Patton is not planning a rescue. He does not yet know one will be needed. He is planning an attack of his own, an offensive against the German Siegfried Line in the Saar region, scheduled to begin in 3 days. Third Army has been driving east for months, chewing through German defenses at a pace that has embarrassed every other Allied commander.

Now, on the morning of December 16th, Patton is impatient. He wants to be inside Germany by Christmas. He does not know that Christmas will find him somewhere else entirely. Third man is younger, 46, a brigadier general with a soft round face and a reputation for calm judgment under pressure.

His name is Anthony Clement McAuliffe. He commands artillery, not infantry, and he has never in his life led an airborne division into combat. On the morning of December 16th, he is at Camp Mourmelon in France, sitting in for Major General Maxwell Taylor, who has flown back to Washington for a staff conference.

101st Airborne Division, Taylor’s division, is officially resting. Men are drinking, chasing French girls, sleeping in dry beds for the first time since September. They fought at Normandy, they fought at Market Garden. They are exhausted, understrength, and low on almost every kind of ammunition. 72 hours, Anthony McAuliffe will find himself in temporary command of these men, surrounded in a Belgian town he has never heard of, running out of everything, waiting for someone to come.

Town is called Bastogne. It is a market town of about 4,000 people, sitting in the middle of the Ardennes Plateau in southern Belgium. There is nothing special about Bastogne. No factories, no mines, no monument worth remembering. But if you unfold a road map of the region, you see something the Germans have already noticed.

Seven paved roads meet in Bastogne. Seven. Every major route through the Ardennes passes through this little market town and in a winter offensive fought across mud and forest and impassable trails, whoever controls the paved roads controls the war. Hitler’s planners know this. General Hasso von Manteuffel, the Prussian aristocrat commanding the 5th Panzer Army, knows it, too.

Manteuffel is a small man, just over 5 ft tall, with a soldier’s precision and a courtier’s manners. He has fought on the Russian steppes. He has seen what happens when armor loses its roads. He has orders to take Bastogne within 48 hours of the attack’s start. If he holds it, his tanks can race west to the Meuse River, then north to Antwerp.

If he loses it, or even if it delays him too long, the entire offensive stalls. He does not take it in 48 hours. He does not take it at all. December 18th, Eisenhower orders the 101st Airborne into Bastogne. McAuliffe and his men climb aboard open trucks and drive through the night freezing rain, without helmets for some, without ammunition for others.

They arrive on December 19th. On December 21st, the German ring closes behind them. Approximately 18,000 American soldiers are now surrounded. 11,000 paratroopers of the 101st, 4,000 men from Combat Command B of the 10th Armored Division, 3,000 stragglers, engineers, tank destroyers, medical staff, cooks, clerks.

Every man who could hold a rifle is holding one. Their commander is a brigadier general who does not consider himself an airborne officer. Ammunition, at the moment of encirclement, is enough for perhaps 4 days of serious fighting. Air support cannot reach them because the sky remains locked under low gray cloud. Behind the German ring, the roads to the west lie open.

If Bastogne falls, the offensive succeeds. If Bastogne holds, the offensive dies in the snow. Everything now depends on relief coming from somewhere. Asked, which brings us back to the one man who saw this coming. His name is Oscar Koch, Colonel, 47 years old, chief of intelligence for Patton’s Third Army. Koch is not a famous man.

History books do not write about him. He works from a small operations tent, chain-smoking, pouring over aerial photographs and radio intercepts, and the movement reports of German trains through the Rhineland. 9th of December, 1 week before the German attack, Colonel Oscar Koch walks into Patton’s office and delivers a briefing that almost no other intelligence officer in the Allied command is willing to give.

“The Germans,” he says, “are massing armored reserves opposite the Ardennes. Rail traffic has spiked. Radio silence has descended over entire units.” Patton is unmistakable. They are going to attack. Supreme Headquarters, 12th Army Group, and First Army, similar warnings have been dismissed. Consensus at every senior command is that the Germans are finished, that they cannot mount a major offensive, that any troop movements are defensive posturing.

Even Bradley, Patton’s own commander, will later admit he did not believe an attack was likely. Patton believes Koch. He does not shout about it. He does not warn Eisenhower. He does not send a memo to SHAEF. Instead, on the 12th of December, 4 days before the German guns open fire, Patton calls in his chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, the man everyone calls Hap.

And he gives Gay a quiet order that no one outside the Third Army Headquarters will know about until it is too late for anyone else to matter. “Draw up three contingency plans,” Patton tells him. Three possible axes of advance. If the Germans strike into the Ardennes, the Third Army must be able to disengage from its eastern offensive and pivot to meet them from any direction. Gay stares at him.

Pivoting a field army is not a maneuver you improvise. It takes weeks of planning under normal conditions. He does not argue. He goes to work. By December 15th, one day before the German attack, the plans are finished. Three different routes, three different objectives. To each plan, Patton assigns a single code phrase.

Phrases so short and so unremarkable that anyone overhearing them on a phone line would think nothing of them. One of them, the one Patton will remember for the rest of his life, is two words long. Play ball. Three sealed envelopes locked in Hap Gay’s desk drawer in Nancy, waiting for a phone to ring. The Germans attack the next morning at 5:30.

Somewhere in the fog above the Ardennes, the war in Western Europe hangs on a phone call that has not yet been made. Phone rings in Nancy on the evening of December 18th. Bradley on the line. Omar Nelson Bradley, 51 years old, commander of the 12th Army Group, Patton’s immediate superior, and the closest thing Patton has to a friend among the senior American generals.

Bradley’s voice is measured, tired. He speaks the way he always speaks, like a school teacher explaining something difficult to a class that does not want to hear it. “There is trouble,” Bradley says, “serious trouble. First Army has been broken open. The Germans are through in three places. Eisenhower wants every senior commander at Verdun tomorrow morning at 11:00.

Bring maps, bring answers.” Then Bradley delivers the part that stings. “Patton is to release his 10th Armored Division immediately, transfer it north, hand it over to First Army. Right now, tonight.” For a long moment, Patton says nothing. 10th Armored is one of his best units. Losing it means postponing his own offensive, the one he has been building toward for weeks.

Every general in his position would protest. Patton does. He argues. He curses. He tells Bradley the transfer will gut his attack against the Siegfried Line. Bradley waits him out. When Patton is finished, Bradley simply repeats the order. “Release the 10th. Be at Verdun at 11.” Then the line goes quiet.

Patton hangs up the phone and stands there in the cold room looking at the map on his wall. Staff officers watch him. They expect an outburst. They do not get one. Instead, Patton speaks almost to himself. “There is absolutely no reason to assume the Germans are mounting a major offensive here. That is what the intelligence people at Supreme Headquarters have been saying.

” He lists the arguments, weather, fuel shortages, manpower, every reason the Germans should not do this. Then he turns to his staff and says the sentence that will decide the next 10 days. “For I believe that is exactly what they are going to do.” His officers understand. They have worked for this man long enough to know what the tone means.

He is telling them the war has changed. He is telling them to move. Night, no one at Third Army Headquarters sleeps. 7:00 the next morning, December 19th, 1944. Two hours before Patton must leave for Verdun, he gathers his senior staff and his two core commanders in a room heated by nothing but breath and cigarette smoke.

He tells them what he believes will happen at the meeting he is about to attend. Eisenhower will ask when the Third Army can attack north, not east, not against the Siegfried Line, north into the German flank of the Ardennes Salient, toward Bastogne. The staff has already worked all night on the three contingency plans.

Patton confirms the code phrases out loud. If the phone rings from Verdun and Patton speaks the first phrase, one route. Second phrase, another. If he says play ball, they are going north through Arlon toward Bastogne. Three divisions in the first wave, the Fourth Armored, 26th Infantry, the 80th Infantry. “Every man, every truck, every fuel dump must be ready to move within 24 hours of the code word being spoken.

All are accustomed to rapid movement,” Patton tells them, “Now we must prove we can operate even faster.” Then he climbs into his open command car, wraps a blanket around his knees against the cold, and drives to Verdun. 11:00 in the morning, December 19th. Meeting is held in a French Army barracks, a stone building of the old style dating from before the last war.

The room the generals gather in is dim. The single pot-bellied stove in the corner has almost no coal. Men in the room can see their own breath. Eisenhower with his staff. Witnesses will later describe him as looking gray, almost ashen. He has slept perhaps 6 hours in the last 3 days. His new fifth star, formally awarded the day before, hangs on his shoulder as if it weighs something.

He walks to the head of the table, looks around at the 12 men gathered there, and speaks the first words that will be written into every history book of this battle. “Present situation,” he says, “is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster.” Pauses. Then he adds, more slowly, “There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table.

” Nobody laughs. Nobody smiles. Kenneth Strong, Eisenhower’s British intelligence chief, delivers a 15-minute briefing on the German situation. Red arrows on the map push west and northwest. The town of Bastogne appears on the map with a small circle drawn around it. “Circle is closing.” Eisenhower listens. Bradley listens.

Devers and Tedder and the rest of the staff listen. Then Eisenhower turns his head and looks at the man sitting three chairs down, the man in the polished boots with the ivory-handled revolvers on his hips. “George,” Eisenhower says, “when can you attack?” The room goes still. Every officer at that table knows what Patton has been doing for the last month.

His army is oriented east. Its supply lines run east. Fuel dumps are east. To attack north into the German flank, he must disengage from an active front, pivot 90 degrees, redirect fuel and ammunition, and drive divisions across ice-covered roads into an area they have never operated in.

Every man at that table has run the math in his head. The answer is at least a week, possibly two. Patton does not blink. “Can attack,” he says, “with three divisions in 48 hours.” For a moment, nobody speaks. Then someone in the room lets out a soft, involuntary laugh. Not mockery, astonishment. Bradley leans forward and says gently, “Well, George, I would give myself some leeway if I were you.

” Eisenhower’s face hardens. He looks straight at Patton and says the words that everyone in the room remembers for the rest of their lives. “Don’t be fatuous, George. If you try to move that quickly, you will not succeed.” Patton meets his gaze. He does not argue. He simply says again that his men can do it.

Three divisions, 48 hours. What no one else in the room knows, what Bradley does not know, what even Eisenhower does not know, Patton is not guessing. Plans have already been drawn. The code words already assigned. Maps already marked. All he needs is permission. Meeting continues for another hour. Objectives are discussed. Boundaries redrawn.

When it ends, Eisenhower gives his approval. Third Army will attack north with three divisions beginning December 22nd. Patton rises, walks out of the barracks, and finds a field telephone. He picks up the receiver. He asks the operator to connect him to Third Army headquarters in Nancy. Hap Gay comes on the line.

Patton says two words. “Play ball.” Then he hangs up. 200 km away, Gay puts the receiver down and turns to a room full of officers who have been waiting for this call for 3 days. He tells them the axis. He tells them the code word has been spoken. 20 minutes, teletypes are chattering across the entire Third Army. Poor headquarters wake up division commanders.

Division commanders wake up regimental commanders. Regimental commanders wake up battalion commanders. At the end of the day, more than a quarter of a million American soldiers know they are moving. Where? They do not yet know, only that the directions is north and the pace is impossible. Pivot begins. To grasp what happens in the next 48 hours, you have to understand what a quarter of a million men look like on the move.

250,000 soldiers, approximately 133,000 vehicles, 62,000 tons of supplies, all of it must be turned. All of it must be routed onto a handful of narrow country roads leading north through Luxembourg and southern Belgium. All of it in weather that has now become the worst European winter in 50 years. 20,000 march orders are issued in 48 hours.

Traffic control officers stand [music] at every major crossroads day and night, waving convoys through, sending others onto side routes, and keeping the columns from choking themselves. Trucks skid on black ice, half-tracks slide into ditches. Men sleep sitting up in the beds of 2 and 1/2 ton trucks, rifles between their knees, boots frozen to the floor.

Fuel tankers move alongside armored columns because there is no time to establish new supply depots. Whole villages watch American vehicles roll past for 18 hours without a break, headlights blazing, engines roaring in defiance of every doctrine of blackout discipline. It is the largest and fastest operational movement of an army in the history of the United States.

And inside a small Belgian town at the center of the German ring, 18,000 men are watching the sky, waiting to hear engines that are not there yet. Stone is now surrounded on all sides. The German gunners have registered their artillery on the crossroads at the center of town. Multiple divisions of the Fifth Panzer Army wrap around the town from every direction.

Armored units to the west, panzer grenadiers to the east, parachute infantry to the south. Fuel is running low. Medical supplies are almost gone. Morphine is being reserved for the worst cases. Cellar of the old seminary at Rue de Neufchâteau, more than 400 wounded men lie on straw. There is no penicillin.

There are almost no bandages. Doctors are washing dressings and using them again. McAuliffe has been walking the perimeter since sunrise, sleeping in short snatches on a cot in the headquarters basement. His men have dug foxholes in ground so hard they had to blast it with grenades. Ammunition rationing has begun.

Artillery batteries are ordered to fire no more than 10 rounds per gun per day unless a major attack is underway. Then, at 10:30 on the morning of December 22nd, four German officers approach the American lines under a white flag. They’re received by an American sergeant, blindfolded, and led to a foxhole where a lieutenant meets them.

The Germans hand over a typewritten document. It is addressed to the commander of the surrounded American forces in Bastogne. Demands the honorable surrender of the encircled town. Gives the Americans two hours to reply. It threatens the annihilation of the garrison by German artillery core if the answer is no.

The document travels back through American lines and up the chain of command from the lieutenant to a battalion officer, from the battalion to a division staff until it reaches the desk of Anthony McAuliffe in the basement headquarters. McAuliffe is a religious man, a quiet man. He reads the German document once.

Then he lets out a short, dismissive breath and speaks a single word, “Nuts.” He tosses the paper onto the desk. His operations officer, Harry Kinnard, hears the word and looks up. Kinnard tells McAuliffe, “Sir, I think that would be a great reply.” McAuliffe blinks. “You said nuts, sir.” McAuliffe considers it.

Then he picks up a pencil, writes on a fresh sheet of paper, and hands it to Colonel Bud Harper, the commander of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment. The message reads, “To the German commander, nuts. The American commander.” Harper delivers the note to the German envoys in person. One of the German officers, confused by the translation, asks in careful English whether the response is affirmative or negative.

Harper looks him in the eye and says, “It means go to hell.” Then he turns his back and walks away. What the newspapers back home will not report for a very long time is what McAuliffe is thinking in private. He has told his senior officers that if relief does not arrive within a few days, they will face the hardest decisions of their lives.

He does not specify what those decisions might be. He does not have to. Every man at that table knows what it means when a garrison runs out of ammunition. Nuts is a public defiance. In private, McAuliffe is counting hours. He counts them under a sky that will not open. The weather over the Ardennes has been the same for eight days. Low gray cloud.

No Allied aircraft can fly. C-47s that carry supplies cannot take off. The P-47 Thunderbolts that would break German armor cannot see the ground. Without air support, Bastogne cannot be resupplied and the German columns cannot be attacked from above. Every commander in the theater has begged the meteorologist for a change. No change.

Then, on the 20th of December, Patton walks into his own headquarters chapel and speaks to a chaplain. His name is James Hugh O’Neill, Lieutenant Colonel. 42 years old, third army chaplain. He’s standing beside a small altar when Patton walks in. Patton has not come to pray. He has come to give an order. “Chaplain,” Patton says, “I want you to write me a prayer for good weather.

I need this weather cleared up so I can kill Germans.” O’Neill hesitates. He is a Catholic priest, a New Yorker, a serious man. Praying to God to change the weather so that men may kill other men is not something he does easily. He asks Patton whether it would not be more fitting to pray for the safety of soldiers, for peace, for the wounded.

Patton looks at him and says, “Chaplain, are you going to write me the prayer or not?” O’Neill goes back to his office. He writes the prayer. He writes it carefully in the formal cadence of a Catholic collect invoking mercy and asking for clear skies so that the American soldier may prevail against those who would destroy him.

Patton reads it, approves it, and orders it printed on a small pocket card for every man in the Third Army. 250,000 cards are printed. On the reverse side, at Patton’s insistence, is a Christmas greeting from the commanding general. On the morning of December 23rd, the sky over Belgium opens. The clouds break apart in the early hours.

By mid-morning, the entire theater of operations lies under a hard, cold, brilliant blue. American pilots who have not flown a combat mission in over a week climb into their aircraft. C-47 transport planes take off from bases in England and France in numbers not seen since Normandy. By the end of the day, more than 240 transports have flown over Bastogne.

Parachutes bloom above the town like white flowers over a graveyard. Ammunition, medical supplies, rations, radios. In 4 days of air resupply, over 850 tons of material will fall into the Bastogne pocket. On the ground, exhausted paratroopers stand in the open, faces turned up to the sky, and some of them weep without shame. Third Army headquarters, Patton receives the news of the weather at breakfast.

He puts down his fork, picks up the telephone, and orders Chaplain O’Neill to report to him at once. O’Neill arrives. Patton pins the Bronze Star Medal on his chest with his own hands and says, “Chaplain, you are the most popular man in this headquarters. You sure stand in good with the Lord and the soldiers.” O’Neal will keep that medal and the memory of that morning until the end of his life.

Sky opening is not the end of the story. The sky opening only means the pieces are now in motion. Cuz on the ground in the frozen forests between Arlon and Bastogne, Patton’s promised offensive is going far more slowly than he told Eisenhower it would. Lead division is the Fourth Armored, commanded by Major General Hugh Gaffey. Gaffey is 49, a soft-spoken man, the former chief of staff to Patton, one of the few armored commanders Patton trusts without qualification.

His division has been on the move almost continuously since the code word play ball reached Nancy. Tanks are cold, his men are exhausted, his fuel trucks are struggling to keep pace over roads that have been reduced to sheets of ice. The German defenders in front of him are the Fifth Parachute Division and elements of the Führer Grenadier Brigade.

They are not the best troops in the Wehrmacht, but they are dug in on high ground. They have artillery, and they are fighting for their lives. Every village on the road to Bastogne must be cleared house by house, farm by farm, hedgerow by hedgerow. Every kilometer costs American lives.

By the evening of December 24th, 3 days into the attack, the Fourth Armored has advanced only about 11 km. Night in his headquarters at Luxembourg City, George Patton opens his personal diary and writes a sentence that almost no one will read for many years. “We can still lose this war.” The most aggressive American general of the war, the man who told Eisenhower he would attack in 48 hours, the man whose face is on the cover of Time magazine, alone in a farmhouse at midnight on Christmas Eve, wondering if he has failed.

Outside his window, the temperature drops to 20 below zero. Somewhere in the darkness, on a frozen road between Arlon and Bastogne, a 30-year-old Lieutenant Colonel named Creighton Abrams is looking at a map and beginning to consider a plan that has not yet been ordered. Story is not over. It has barely begun. Christmas Day, 1944.

Sun rises over the Ardennes on a battlefield that has not yet been won. Front of the 4th Armored Division, 30-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Williams Abrams stands beside his command tank, a Sherman he has named Thunderbolt. He is short. He is stocky. He chews on an unlit cigar because his cigarettes have run out 3 days ago.

37th Tank Battalion has been fighting north for 4 days without meaningful rest. The 54 Shermans that started the drive from the Saar, 20 are still running. The others are burning in Belgian fields or being cannibalized for parts by his mechanics under artillery fire. Abrams is not a famous man yet. He will be decades from now, the army will name its main battle tank after him.

On this Christmas morning, he is simply a Lieutenant Colonel with too few tanks, too little fuel, and orders that say keep going. Patton drives up to the front that afternoon in an open jeep wearing a fur-lined jacket and no helmet. He wants to see the ground for himself. He finds Abrams standing beside Thunderbolt looking at a map spread across the hull.

Patton listens as Abrams describes the situation. The direct road to Bastogne is blocked by strong German positions. Every attempt to punch through has cost tanks and men. Every hour of delay is another hour that the men inside the perimeter are dying. Patton studies the map. Then he says the words that will decide the next 24 hours. “Colonel, get to Bastogne.

” Then he climbs back into the jeep and drives away. Night night, in a farmhouse behind the American line, Abrams meets with Lieutenant Colonel George Jaques, commander of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion. Jaques is exhausted. Abrams is exhausted. They spread a map on a wooden table by the light of a single kerosene lamp.

Direct route through Sibret is blocked. The route through Hompre is barely moving. But there is a third road, a back road through a small Belgian village called Assenois. Undefeated perhaps, or nobody quite knows. Abrams looks at Jaques. Jaques looks at Abrams. The plan they agree on is a plan no textbook would have taught them.

They will not wait for the rest of the division to catch up. They will not build a coordinated attack. They will take Company C of the 37th Tank Battalion, five Shermans, plus a rifle company from the 53rd, and they will charge straight through Assenois in daylight, under fire, without stopping. If they die, they die. If they get through, they open the corridor.

Afternoon of December 26th, 1500 hours. Five tanks of Company C form up in a wooded draw a mile south of Assenois. Commander is a 23-year-old first lieutenant from Illinois named Charles Boggs. Boggs has been in the war for 18 months. He has been in tanks for most of that time.

He has never done anything like what he is about to do. Abrams gives the order over the radio. Move out. Boggs leads the column at maximum speed. American artillery, coordinated by radio from Boggs’ own tank, walks a curtain of high explosive shells across Assenois seconds before the tanks arrive. Shells burst in the streets, in the churchyard, in the roofs of the houses.

Some of them fall short and burst almost on top of the advancing Shermans. Boggs does not slow down. He drives straight into the smoke. Inside Assenois, German paratroopers of the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division scramble out of cellars and doorways with panzerfausts and held anti-tank weapons in their fists. Machine gunfire rakes the flanks of the Sherman column.

A single panzerfaust round strikes one of the American half-tracks carrying infantry and turns it into a fireball. The men inside die instantly. Boggess keeps driving. Column bursts out the north side of Assenois with three tanks still moving. Boggess and two behind him. Ahead of him, the road curves through a stand of pines. Beyond the pines lies the southern perimeter of Bastogne.

Americans inside that perimeter have been under attack all day. No idea that friendly armor is 15 minutes away. Boggess halts his tank at the tree line. He climbs partway out of the turret. He rocks a snow-covered field at a hedgerow. Behind the hedgerow, he sees helmets, American helmets, but he cannot be sure.

Trap, it could be Germans in captured gear. He calls into the field with his gunner’s microphone patched through to a bullhorn. Come here. Come on out. This is the Fourth Armored. For a long moment, nothing happens. Then a single figure rises from the hedgerow. A young officer, Second Lieutenant Dwayne J. Webster of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division.

Webster walks slowly across the field. His boots crunch in the frozen snow. When he reaches Boggess’s tank, he stops. He looks up at the lieutenant leaning out of the turret. Says quietly, “I’m glad to see you.” The two men shake hands. Clock reads 4:50 in the afternoon. The date is December 26th, 1944. Siege of Bastogne is broken.

16:55 hours. Boggess enters the perimeter and is guided to the basement command post of Anthony McAuliffe. The general climbs the stone steps to meet him at the entrance. McAuliffe is unshaven. His uniform is dirty. He has slept perhaps 3 hours in 3 days. He looks at the young lieutenant standing in front of him, at the Sherman tank idling in the street behind, and he says the words that history will record forever after.

“Gee, I am mighty glad to see you.” That is all he says. There is no cheering. There is no celebration. There are no bands. Kieffer does not shout. He does not weep. He nods, shakes Bogges’ hand, and then he turns and walks back to the war because Bastogne is still under German artillery fire because the corridor Bogges has opened is only a few hundred meters wide and could be closed within hours as his wounded still need to be evacuated and his men still need ammunition and the Germans are still coming. This is the truth about Bastogne

that most stories will not tell you. Breakthrough on December 26th is not the end of the battle, beginning of another phase. For the next 2 weeks, the Germans will continue to attack Bastogne with fresh divisions. They will bomb the town by night. They will shell the corridor by day.

On January 3rd, 1945, the German 5th Panzer Army will launch its heaviest attack yet against the American perimeter. Men of the 101st will still be dying in the snow long after the newspapers back home have declared them saved. Battle of the Bulge does not end on December 26th. It ends on January 25th, 1945. When the smoke clears, the United States Army has lost approximately 19,000 men killed, 47,000 wounded, and 23,000 missing or captured.

It remains to this day the largest and bloodiest battle in the history of the American Army. The Germans have lost between 60,000 and 100,000 men depending on which historian you ask. They have lost 700 tanks and assault guns. They will never mount a major offensive in the west again. Patton’s Third Army in the drive to Bastogne alone has suffered thousands of casualties.

Fourth Armored Division, the tip of the spear, has lost more than 1,400 men in five days of fighting. At evening, December 26th, Patton telephones Bradley from his headquarters in Luxembourg City. He is exhausted. His voice on the line is quieter than usual. He tells Bradley the corridor is open. Then he says a sentence that Bradley will repeat for the rest of his life.

“Krauts have stuck his head in a meat grinder,” Patton says. “And this time I have hold of the handle.” Bradley telephones Eisenhower at Versailles. According to the later memoir of Eisenhower’s British driver and personal assistant, Kay Summersby, the supreme commander does not speak for a long time after he hangs up the phone.

He rises from his desk. He walks to the window. He stands looking out at the winter garden of the Trianon Palace for several minutes without moving. Summersby writes that she had never seen him so still. No source records that Eisenhower wept. No memoir claims he did. What we have is the image of a 54-year-old man alone by a window of a palace that had been built for kings looking at nothing, because for the first time in 10 days he could allow himself to look at nothing at all.

That is what the phone call meant, not tears, silence. War goes on. In the months that follow, Patton drives east into Germany. Third Army crosses the Rhine in March. It races across Bavaria in early May 1945, Germany has surrendered. Patton is 59 years old. He has been at war in one way or another since he was a young lieutenant chasing Pancho Villa across the Mexican border in 1916.

He does not adjust well to peace. December of 1945, exactly 1 year and 2 days after he ordered his army to pivot north toward Bastogne, Patton is riding in the back seat of a 1938 Cadillac staff car outside Mannheim, Germany. Car collides at low speed with an American army truck. The impact is not severe. Nobody else is seriously hurt.

Patton in the back seat is thrown forward and strikes his head on a metal partition. His neck is broken. He lies paralyzed in a military hospital in Heidelberg for 12 days. He is conscious. He speaks. He asks about his men. On the evening of December 21st, 1945, a blood clot enters his heart and stops it. He dies quietly in his sleep at 1745 hours.

In accordance with the United States Army policy, he is not returned home. He is buried in the American military cemetery at Hamm in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. His grave lies among the graves of 5,000 soldiers of the Third Army who fell in the Battle of the Bulge. His marker is a plain white cross. The name on it reads George S.

Patton Jr. When Eisenhower is informed of the death, he writes a two-word note in his personal diary. Poor George. The others in this story do not all end well, either. Hasso von Manteuffel, the small Prussian aristocrat who tried to reach Antwerp, is captured by American forces in 1945. He is released two years later.

He becomes a politician in the new West German democracy, elected to the Bundestag as a member of the Free Democratic Party. He dies in 1978 at 81 years old in a country his tanks once tried to conquer. Anthony McAuliffe lives until 1975. He becomes a full four-star general. He never enjoys his fame.

In interviews, he is uncomfortable when asked about the word nuts. He says, more than once, that the real story of Bastogne belongs to the men who fought in the foxholes, not to the general who spoke a single word in a basement. Creighton Abrams becomes Chief of Staff of the United States Army.

He commands American forces in Vietnam. The Army will name its main battle tank, the M1 Abrams, in his honor. Charles Boggs, the 23-year-old lieutenant who drove the first Sherman into Bastogne, returns to the United States, becomes an educator, and lives quietly in the Midwest for the rest of his life. He is asked decades later he felt at that moment on the edge of the snow-covered field, he says only that he felt glad.

Glad his men were alive, glad the war was one day closer to ending. While David Eisenhower is elected the 34th president of the United States in 1952, he serves two terms. He warns his country in his final address against the influence of what he calls the military-industrial complex, dies in 1969, and is buried in the small Kansas town where he grew up.

Colonel Oscar Koch, the intelligence officer who saw the German attack coming when no one else did, retires from the army quietly after the war. He writes a book about intelligence work. It sells modestly. His name appears in almost no popular history of the Battle of the Bulge. Without him, the phone call from Verdun would have been impossible.

History does not always remember the right people. Lieutenant Colonel James Hugh O’Neill, the chaplain who wrote the weather prayer, returns to civilian life and continues his priesthood. He keeps the Bronze Star in a small wooden box on his dresser. When he tells the story of Patton, he tells it with a soft smile, as if he is not quite sure it happened.

And the two words spoken into a field telephone on the 19th of December, 1944, “Play ball.” They meant nothing on their own. They were a phrase from a children’s game. What made them powerful was everything behind them. A colonel who read the enemy’s mind, a chief of staff who spent nights drawing routes on maps, three envelopes locked in a desk drawer in Nancy, a quarter of a million soldiers who moved when they were told to move, a weather prayer written by a reluctant priest, a young lieutenant in a Sherman tank on

a Belgian back road, a young engineer rising from a hedgerow to shake his hand. That is what a phone call is in the end. It is only sound. What matters is who is listening and what they are ready to do. 6th of June, 1944, the world watched the allies come ashore at Normandy. It was the largest amphibious invasion in human history.

Been called the day the war was won. But 6 months later in the snow of the Ardennes, the war was almost lost. It was not lost because of one phone call and it was not lost because of one man. It was not lost because of men whose names you will never know did what they were asked to do in cold that shattered bone in the middle of a Belgian winter, 1 week before Christmas in 1944.

Thank you for watching.