What Patton Did When Eisenhower Asked the Impossible at Bastogne
December 19th, 1944. Verdun, France. Three days after the largest German offensive on the Western Front since 1940 has shattered the American line in the Ardennes, General Dwight Eisenhower asks the impossible and George Patton says he can do it in 48 hours. The room at the Verdun conference is thick with the specific tension of a military command whose entire operational planning for the winter campaign has been inverted by events in the past 72 hours.
Inverted, not partially, not in one sector, but fundamentally from the planning of an army that has been pressing the German border to the planning of an army that is dealing with the largest German offensive on the Western Front since 1940. The German Ardennes Offensive, Hitler’s last major strategic gamble in the West, the assault by three German armies through the supposedly impossible forest of the Belgian Ardennes whose 80-mile front had been held by fewer American divisions than the threat warranted has been running since the
pre-dawn darkness of December 16 and has torn a 50-mile gap in the American front whose implications are still being calculated by the staff officers whose job is to calculate such things and whose calculations are producing numbers that the commanders in the room are not yet ready to fully accept. The three-pronged German assault has been moving since the pre-dawn darkness of December 16 in the specific and operational momentum of a force that has been planning this attack since September.
The 6th SS Panzer Army under SS Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich is driving northwest toward the Meuse. The 5th Panzer Army under General Hasso von Manteuffel is driving due west and two of its armored divisions are converging on the small Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne with the specific and operational urgency of an advance that understands what Bastogne means.
The seven roads that converge on Bastogne from every direction of the compass make it the logistical node through which the German advance west must pass if it is to maintain its operational coherence. And those same roads make it the position whose defense by the American forces can stop or slow the German advance with an efficiency that no other position in the Ardennes offers.
The 101st Airborne Division under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe rushed to Bastogne from its rest area at Mourmelon in Belgium in the trucks of the 101st’s organic transport on December 18th has arrived at Bastogne ahead of the German encirclement and is organizing the defense of the town whose roads are the prize that both sides understand as the key to the Ardennes campaign’s outcome.
Other units, remnants of the 10th Armored Division’s Combat Command B, the 705th Tank Destroyer Battalion, assorted artillery and engineer units whose retreat from the German breakthrough has brought them to Bastogne have also been incorporated into the defense. They are surrounded or will be surrounded within hours.
They need relief. The question is from whom and when? Eisenhower turns to Patton. He asks how soon the Third Army can attack toward Bastogne. The professional calculation that Eisenhower is asking Patton to perform is the calculation of a commander who must swing a major army from its current axis of advance.
The Third Army has been pressing northeast toward the Siegfried Line. Its divisions oriented east and its logistical infrastructure aligned for that direction of attack to a new axis pointing 90° north into the Ardennes over 100 mi of Belgian winter roads against the flank of a German offensive that has 250,000 men and 600 tanks committed to it.
Normal military planning projects this kind of reorientation as requiring a minimum of 5 to 7 days. The relief force must be assembled from the divisions currently in contact with the enemy, must be supplied with the ammunition and fuel for a different direction of attack, must be given the orders and the time to reorient its march columns, and must then conduct the 100-mi road march to Bastogne on Belgian winter roads before the actual attack can begin.
Eisenhower is asking how soon. He is probably expecting to hear a week. Every professional calculation in the room produces a week. Patton says 48 hours. The room goes silent. The silence is not the silence of disbelief, not the silence of men who think Patton is lying or boasting or performing the theatrical self-confidence that is his public reputation.
Patton’s fellow senior commanders in the room have been working with him long enough to know that his operational estimates are more reliable than his social behavior, and that when Patton says he can do something in a specific time, the professional evidence of the Lorraine campaign and the race across France suggests that he has the operational foundation to back the claim.
The silence is the silence of men who are recalculating the possible, >> [music] >> recalculating their own estimate of what the situation requires and what the forces available >> [music] >> can produce against the estimate that Patton has just delivered, and that the professional record says is not a boast. If Patton can attack toward Bastogne in 48 hours with a relief force strong enough to break the encirclement, then Bastogne can be held.
McAuliffe’s 101st Airborne can be supplied and reinforced, and the seven roads through Bastogne can be denied to the German advance at the precise point where the disruption of that advance is most operationally valuable. But can Patton actually do what he is saying he can do? The answer requires understanding what Patton has already done, what he did before he was asked. General George S. Patton Jr.
in December 1944 is the most operationally effective army commander in the American military, a professional whose specific and documented contribution to the Allied campaign since the Third Army’s activation in August 1944 has been the operational art of the mobile advance. The Third Army’s drive across France from the Avranches breakout through the Seine crossing, >> [music] >> the Lorraine campaign whose advance to the Saar and the Siegfried Line has been building through September and October and November.
The operational record of an army that has advanced further, faster, and against more consistent German opposition than any other American formation in the European theater. >> [music] >> He is the commander who believes in speed as a military virtue, who has been building the Third Army’s institutional culture around the offensive momentum that the mobile exploitation produces when the commander is willing to push faster than the logistical systems’ conservative planners project as safe.
He is also the commander who, unlike every other senior officer in the Allied command, had been anticipating the German offensive before it happened, had been reading the German military’s operational situation across the autumn of 1944 with the professional attention of a tank commander who has studied the German Army’s doctrine and its operational behavior since the 1930s and who has been arriving at the professional conclusion that the German command’s strategic situation in late 1944 required a risk, not predicting the
offensive with the intelligence specificity that the Ultra intercepts were failing to provide, not identifying the precise time and location of the Wacht am Rhein attack in the intelligence analysis, whose failure the December 16 surprise documents as a collective failure of the Allied intelligence system from SHAEF to the Army Group level.
But reading the German military’s operational situation with the professional assessment of a commander who has been fighting the German Army since 1942 and who has been telling his staff since early December that the Germans are going to do something in the Ardennes before the winter is over, Patton has been preparing for this.
Before the Verdun conference, before the German attack, before anyone asked what Patton has done before the Verdun conference is the operational preparation that makes the 48-hour promise not a boast, but a plan whose existence the room does not yet know about and whose revelation Patton is about to deliver with the specific and characteristic combination of professional pride and operational precision that his staff has been watching for years.
In the days before December 19th, before the German offensive began, before the Verdun conference was called, before anyone was asking the question that Eisenhower is now asking his staff officers, Colonel Paul Harkins and the Third Army G3 section, have been working on the contingency planning that Patton ordered in early December when his professional assessment of the German military situation convinced him that a German offensive in the Ardennes was not a theoretical possibility but an operational probability whose timing he
could not identify precisely and whose direction he had identified with the professional accuracy of a commander who has been reading German operational doctrine for years. The contingency plans are specific in the specific and operational sense that the Third Army staff culture under Patton requires specificity, not the general contingency paper that says, “We will attack north if required.
” and leaves the planning details to be worked out when the requirement arrives, but the specific planning document that names the divisions, identifies the march routes by route number and code name, calculates the fuel and ammunition requirements for the 100-mile march and the first 3 days of combat at the rate of consumption that the Lorraine campaign’s experience has established as the baseline for three core level offensive operations and specifies the communications reorganization that the 90° reorientation requires for the core
and division command posts whose radio nets have been oriented for east-facing operations. If the Germans attack through the Ardennes and the Third Army is ordered to reorient north, the plan specify which divisions will form the relief force, the three cores, Fourth Armored, and the 26th and 80th Infantry Divisions, which routes they will take north through Luxembourg and Belgium, what the logistics requirements are for a force of approximately 50,000 soldiers conducting a 100-mile road march in December, and how the communications
will be reorganized for the new axis. The plans exist before December 16th. They are not theoretical planning exercises whose implementation would require days of staff work. They are operational planning documents whose existence allows Patton to say at Verdun when Eisenhower asks the impossible, that the orders are already written and the march can begin within hours of the conference’s conclusion.
When he tells Eisenhower he can attack in 48 hours, he adds that he can have the fourth armored division and two infantry divisions moving north within the day. Not will have them moving, but can have them moving because the orders that would make it happen are already written and already in his staff’s hands. He is not improvising.
He has been ready for this for two weeks. When the telephone rings from third army headquarters to the three core that will execute the plan and the orders go out on the night of December 19th, Patton is not writing the orders. He is transmitting the orders that his staff wrote before the German offensive began. The question on December 19th at Verdun is whether the plan whose existence Patton has been building in secret for two weeks, building while the rest of the Allied command was not yet aware that the crisis existed, will produce
the relief of Bastogne before the 101st Airborne’s defense is broken by the German encirclement whose completion will happen within hours of the Verdun conference’s conclusion and whether the 48-hour promise, delivered with the professional confidence of a commander who has the plan in his pocket, will be the promise that holds when the Belgian winter roads and the German blocking positions and the operational friction of a 90-degree pivot have had three days to test it against the reality of what 50,000 men and their equipment and their
logistical support can actually do. December 19th to 20th, 1944. The orders go out from Third Army headquarters. General John Millikin’s Third Corps is designated as the relief force. The specific and documented assignment of the core command and the three divisions that are to be the instrument of Patton’s 48-hour promise.
Millikin has 12 days of core command experience. This is his first major operation as a core commander. He is inheriting the Third Corps at the precise moment when the core is being asked to perform the most demanding operational task on the Western Front. General Hugh Gaffey’s Fourth Armored Division, >> [music] >> whose operational record as one of the Third Army’s most effective armored formations has been building since the breakout from Normandy and through the Lorraine campaigns armored operations, will drive the armored spearhead north
from Luxembourg toward Bastogne on the Arlon-Bastogne Road. The 26th Infantry Division under Major General Willard Paul, whose soldiers have been in the Saar fighting since October and whose transfer to the Bastogne relief corridor will secure the Fourth Armored’s eastern flank against the German forces along the Sauer River.
And the 80th Infantry Division under Major General Horace McBride, whose western flank assignment will protect the armored corridor from the German forces that the German command will attempt to concentrate against the relief drive’s flanks when the drive’s direction becomes apparent, will provide the infantry mass that the armored operations flanks require.
The three divisions are pulling out of their current positions along the Saar front in the specific and operationally complex choreography of a simultaneous disengagement and reorientation. Extracting from contact with the German forces, they have been pressing along the front that the third army has been attacking since November.
Reversing their march columns on roads that have been aligned for east-facing operations and reorienting north on the Belgian road network, whose December ice and snow are adding the specific and operational complications of a winter road march to the already demanding task of a 90° pivot under combat conditions. The roads north are narrow.
The columns are long. The Belgian winter is specific in its hostility to motorized military movement. The ice that forms on the asphalt, the snow that narrows the road surface and covers the ditches on either side, the darkness that arrives at 4:00 in the afternoon and persists until 8:00 in the morning, and in whose hours the column must move by blackout light on roads it has never traveled before.
The columns are moving on the night of December 19th through 20th in the darkness and the cold of the Belgian Ardennes winter. The specific and grinding cold of a December night in southern Belgium that has been producing the black ice on the roads and the frozen mud in the fields that the soldiers’ boots break through with each step and that the vehicles’ tracks churn into the ruts that the next vehicle must navigate.
The soldiers in their trucks and their half-tracks and their tanks understand from the direction of movement that something has changed, that they are going north when they have been going east, >> [music] >> that the direction of the army has turned like a compass needle swinging toward a new bearing, but they do not yet know what the bearing points at, and the officers who know are not telling them until the morning.
December 21st, 1944. The relief drive meets its first serious resistance. The 4th Armored Division’s Combat Command B, driving north on the Arlon-Bastogne Road, encounters the German 5th Parachute Division’s defensive positions in the rolling terrain of the Belgian Ardennes, south of Bastogne. The fighting is close, expensive, and slower than the operational timeline requires.
The 5th Parachute Division has been positioned across the Bastogne relief corridor by the German command’s recognition that the Americans will attempt relief from the south, and its defense of the road network between Arlon and Bastogne is the specific and professional blocking operation of an elite infantry formation whose job is to keep the relief force away from Bastogne long enough for the 101st Airborne’s defense.
The 4th Armored’s lead elements are fighting through the villages of Chaumont and Bigonville and Burnon in the December mud and snow. American tank crews working with infantry in the close-range fighting of the Ardennes winter, where the visibility is limited by the forest and the snow, and where the 5th Parachute’s anti-tank guns are extracting the price that the blocking position’s preparation has made it capable of extracting.
The progress is slower than Patton’s plan projected. The 48-hour promise is under pressure. December 22nd, 1944. The near failure of the Bastogne relief arrives simultaneously in Bastogne and on the road south of it. In Bastogne, the German 47th Panzer Corps delivers a formal surrender demand to the garrison’s commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, in the specific and documented form of a written document requesting the surrender of the surrounded force and warning of the consequences of refusal, delivered by four German officers under a white flag
to the American lines and then to the command post where McAuliffe reads it and produces the reply that will become one of the most famous responses in American military history. The single word, delivered in the same formal procedure through which the demand arrived, is the specific and public statement of a garrison commander who has been told by Patton that relief is coming >> [music] >> and who believes it.
But, from the three corps’ perspective, advancing from the south through the Belgian winter, the near failure is the specific and operational problem of the Fourth Armored’s Combat Command B having been checked by the German Fifth Parachute Division’s blocking position south of Bastogne and the relief columns not being able to find the gap that will allow the armor to break through to the town before the 101st Airborne’s ammunition runs out and its defense collapses.
The 101st Airborne is rationing artillery rounds in the specific and documented way of a garrison that has been calculating the ammunition expenditure against the assault rate and has determined that the rate of expenditure is outrunning the supply at a pace that will produce the operational inability to sustain the defense within days.
Medical supplies are critically low. The wounded in the Bastogne aid stations and the improvised hospital in the town’s buildings are being treated with reduced supplies by medical personnel who are doing more with less than the medical planning ever projected as the standard of care. The Bastogne perimeter is under constant German assault from the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and elements of the Panzer Lehr Division and the Second SS Panzer Division pressing the 101st’s circular defense at every compass point >> [music] >> probing for the weak sector whose
exploitation will collapse the perimeter whose integrity has been maintained for 9 days by the specific and desperate professionalism of elite infantry that has been told by its commander that there will be no surrender. McAuliffe has told his division that help is coming. He believes it. His soldiers believe him.
But the ammunition is running out >> [music] >> and the relief is not there yet. But the ammunition is running out and the relief is not there [music] yet. Patton is on the telephone to Millikin and to Gaffey demanding more pace, the pace that the 48-hour promise requires, the pace that the Bastogne Garrison’s ammunition supply requires, the pace that the operational situation requires regardless of what the German blocking position and the Belgian winter are producing as the constraints on what pace is achievable.
The plan [music] is in danger of being outrun by the timeline and the timeline is not elastic. December 23rd, 1944. The weather breaks in the specific and operationally transformative way that a weather change transforms a battle. Not through the change in the fighting’s character on the ground, which continues in the same cold and mud and snow, but through the change in what is happening above the ground.
For 5 days since the Ardennes Offensive began, the cloud ceiling over Belgium has been low enough to ground the Allied tactical air forces whose fighter-bombers would otherwise have been attacking the German supply columns and the armor concentrations and the troop movements that the overcast sky has been protecting from the American air power that the Ardennes Offensive’s operational calculation had specifically counted on the weather to neutralize.
The low overcast has been the German Offensive’s ally as surely as the Sixth SS Panzer Army or the Fifth Panzer Army protecting the German columns movement from the 19th Tactical Air Command and the GC Tactical Air Command, whose aircraft have been sitting on the ground waiting for the ceiling to lift. On December 23rd, the skies clear.
The P-47 Thunderbolts of 19th Tactical Air Command are in the air by morning in the specific and visceral sound of the radial engines that the German soldiers below have been dreading for six clouded days, attacking the German supply lines and the tank formations and the column of vehicles whose vulnerability to the fighter bombers cannon and rockets has been waiting for the weather window for six days.
The German advances logistics begin to crack under the air attack whose accumulation of truck kills and fuel dump strikes is producing the supply shortfalls whose operational effects the front line German formations will be experiencing within 24 hours. The fuel trucks that do not arrive, the ammunition vehicles that are burning on the Houffalize road, the supply columns whose movement the fighter bombers have been turning from the operational routine of resupply into the operational lottery of reaching the destination before being found and destroyed. And at
Bastogne, the clearing weather brings the C-47 transport aircraft whose crews have been waiting for the ceiling to lift since December 16th. The aircraft that are now dropping supplies to the surrounded garrison in the specific and documented relief of 18,000 men who have been rationing everything for nine days.
Food and medical supplies and most critically artillery ammunition whose arrival restores the 101st artillery to the rate of fire that the defense requires and that the garrisons guns have been unable to sustain since December 20, December 26th, 1944 at 1645 hours, the lead elements of the fourth armored division’s combat command R under Colonel Creighton Abrams break through the German encirclement south of Bastogne and make contact with the 101st Airborne’s perimeter at the village of Assenois. The 37th Tank Battalion and
the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion fighting together in the combined arms operation that the relief drive’s final phase has been building toward for 6 days have punched through the fifth parachute division’s blocking position in the fighting whose last hours have been the most costly and most urgent of the entire relief operation.
The corridor is narrow, a gap in the German encirclement that the fourth armored has punched through with the specific and documented determination of armored soldiers who have been fighting through the Belgian winter for 6 days with the knowledge that 18,000 men in Bastogne are depending on them to arrive and who have been watching the deadline approach with the specific and professional urgency of men who cannot afford to be late.
Abrams drives his command car through the corridor himself through the gap whose narrow width is the measure of how close the German blocking force came to preventing the relief entirely. Through the Assenois village street where the last German defenders have just been cleared by the 37th Tank Battalion’s infantry and where the Belgian civilians are beginning to emerge from their sellers to watch the American relief column arrive.
He reaches the Bastogne perimeter as the December dark is settling over the Belgian countryside and the temperature is dropping toward the specific and bitter cold of a Belgian December night that the The of the 101st Airborne have been enduring for 10 days, fighting in it, sleeping in it, treating their wounded in it, dying in it.
The siege of Bastogne is broken. The corridor will be widened in the days that follow, and the fighting around Bastogne will continue into January. But the essential operational fact is established at 16:45 hours on December 26, 7 days after Patton promised to do the impossible in 48 hours. The relief of Bastogne has been accomplished.
The legacy of what Patton did when Eisenhower asked the impossible at Bastogne is the legacy of the most operationally brilliant response to a strategic crisis in the American military’s history of the Second World War’s European theater. The response that demonstrated in the most direct and operationally measurable way what the American Army’s best commander could do when the situation required the best that any commander in any army could produce.
The numbers alone tell part of the story. >> [music] >> Patton swung three divisions of the Third Corps, approximately 50,000 soldiers with their tanks and their artillery and their trucks and the logistical tail whose management in a 90° reorientation is itself an operational achievement. 90° in 48 hours and drove them 100 miles through the worst winter weather in the Ardennes in 40 years against a German offensive force of 250,000 men and broke the encirclement of Bastogne in 7 days.
The operation preserved 18,000 American soldiers of the 101st Airborne and the attached tank destroyer and armored elements from capture or destruction. Preserved them not merely as military statistics, but as the fighting force whose continued existence in Bastogne and whose subsequent participation in the Allied counteroffensive provided the operational continuity that the Ardennes fighting required.
It stabilized the southern shoulder of the Ardennes salient at the moment when the German Fifth Panzer Army’s advance was threatening to reach the Meuse River, threatening to achieve the operational depth that von Manteuffel’s plan had projected as the prerequisite for the drive toward Antwerp, and when the operational consequences of the German breakthrough’s continuation, the supply depots at Liège, whose fuel and ammunition the Allied armies depended on, the port of Antwerp, whose capture would have severed the Allied logistical
foundation of the 1944-45 campaign, the entire strategic coherence of Eisenhower’s northern flank were in genuine danger. The Battle of the Bulge was not ended by the Bastogne relief on December 26th. The fighting in the Ardennes continued until late January 1945 as the Sixth SS Panzer Army’s northern drive was contained by the First Army and the British 30th Corps, and the American counteroffensive pushed the German salient back to its starting point through January’s brutal winter fighting. But the southern shoulder’s
stability, guaranteed by Patton’s Third Corps’s drive north from Luxembourg and the 101st Airborne’s 10-day defense of the town, whose garrison held with the specific and documented tenacity of American Airborne soldiers, whose commander had told them that help was coming and who had believed him, prevented the German advance from achieving the operational depth that von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army’s plan required for the Meuse crossing that would have given the Ardennes offensive the strategic significance that Hitler
had projected as the basis for the ceasefire negotiations that he believed the offensive success would force on the Allied governments. The tactical cost was significant. The arithmetic of what the Bastogne operation demanded from the formations that fought it, measured in the casualty returns and the vehicle losses and the ammunition expenditure, whose accounting the after-action reports assembled.
The 4th Armored Division suffered approximately 1,000 casualties in the Bastogne relief drive, fighting through the 5th Parachute Division’s blocking positions for 6 days in the Belgian winter at the cost that blocked armored formations pay in men and vehicles. The 26th Infantry Division and the 80th Infantry Division together suffered comparable losses in the fighting that secured the corridor’s flanks against the German forces that the German command concentrated against the relief operation when its direction became apparent. The 101st Airborne
Division, whose 10-day defense of Bastogne’s circular perimeter produced the operational necessity that Patton’s drive fulfilled, suffered approximately 2,000 casualties inside the perimeter before the relief, killed and wounded in the fighting that McAuliffe’s garrison conducted against the 26th Volksgrenadier Division and the Panzer Lehr and the 2nd SS Panzer elements in the cold and the shortage of ammunition and the specific and professional determination of soldiers who had been told help was coming. These are the
arithmetic of what the Bastogne operation cost the formations that fought it. The bills that every military operation pays in the specific and human currency of soldiers killed and wounded, vehicles lost, ammunition expended. They are also the arithmetic whose alternative, the fall of Bastogne, the destruction or capture of the 101st Airborne Division’s 18,000 soldiers, the German advances acceleration through the broken southern shoulder toward the Meuse and beyond was calculated by the Allied command at Verdun on December
19th as a cost too large to bear. Patton’s pre-planned contingency orders, the operational preparation that allowed him to save 48 hours when every military calculation said a week, to promise the impossible at the moment when the Allied command needed the impossible to be promised.
Are the professional legacy of the Bastogne operation, whose importance exceeds the dramatic narrative of the relief drive itself. They demonstrate what the American military’s best operational commanders had become by December 1944. Not the commanders who respond to the crisis after it arrives, but the commanders who anticipate the crisis before it arrives, who build the operational plan for the contingency before it is required, and who arrive at the moment of Eisenhower’s impossible request with the plan already written and the orders already drafted and the
48-hour promise built on the foundation of 2 weeks professional preparation. Patton did the impossible at Bastogne because he had already done the preparation. The promise was the last step of a process that the man in the room who was making it had been building since December 1st. The lesson is not merely that Patton was a military genius, though the professional evidence of the Lorraine campaign and the Bastogne relief and the Rhine crossing at Oppenheim supports the characterization with the specific and
documented operational record of a commander whose achievements were not theatrical performances, but operational facts. The lesson is that genius in war is preparation applied to the crisis that no one else was ready for. The preparation that requires the professional to anticipate what has not happened yet.
To build the plan for the contingency before the contingency has arrived. To carry the weight of the unasked question until the moment when the question is asked and the answer is ready. The difference between the impossible and the achievable is usually measured not in the hours between the request and the response, but in the weeks between the professional who saw the crisis coming and the moment when everyone else discovered it had arrived.
Patton saw it coming. He was ready. And when Eisenhower asked the impossible, the answer was already written.
