Why German Observation Posts Lost Sight of Patton’s Column the Night Before It Reached Bastogne

December 25th, 1944. The German southern perimeter outside Bastogne, Belgium, where the 5th Fallschirmjäger division’s defensive positions in the snow-covered fields and the farm buildings of the Ardennes winter have been holding the southern face of the Bastognian encirclement since December 21st.

The observation post sergeant of the 5th Fallschirmjäger division has been watching the road from Arlon since midnight. His binoculars and his ears trained on the road from the south that the intelligence assessment has told him is the American approach route. He is watching the wrong road. The 4th Armored Division is not on the Arlon road.

It is on the Voie des Rosiers road, 3 km to the west of the road the sergeant is watching. Moving through the Belgian December night in a darkness that the cloud cover and the absence of lights has made as complete as darkness gets in winter with a noise discipline that a veteran armored column achieves when its commanders have told it that noise discipline tonight is the difference between reaching Bastogne and being ambushed on the approach.

The column is led by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’ 37th Tank Battalion, the same officer who positioned his Shermans in hull-down positions in the fog at Arracourt in September and whose battalion destroyed 63 Panthers in 11 days of fighting that the German Army Group G’s intelligence section described in its after-action analysis as the most effective single American armored defense of the autumn campaign.

The 37th has been pushing north through snow and frozen Belgian farmland since December 22nd when Patton ordered the 4th Armored Division to [music] break through to Bastogne’s besieged garrison. Pushing north through Burnon on December 22nd through the ambush at Chaumont on December 23 where the leading tank company walked into a German anti-tank position and lost four Shermans before the second company could flank it.

Through Warnach on December 24th, where the house-by-house fighting in the village streets cost the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion 42 men killed and wounded. And through Bigonville on December 25th, where the lead elements commander had to order his drivers to push the burning German vehicle off the road with their tank’s hull because there was no other way through.

The German observation post has been given a route assessment based on the most likely American approach. The Arlon road, the most direct route from the south. The road that a standard advance would use. The road that the German intelligence summary has designated as the primary approach corridor for any American relief attempt.

The assessment is wrong. The column is not on the most likely route. It is on the unexpected route that Abrams has chosen. Because it avoids the German defensive positions that the most likely route would walk the column into. And the observation post sergeant watching the Arlon road in the Christmas night’s darkness is watching the road that the 4th Armored is not on.

By the time the error is discovered, by the time the artillery preparations first rounds landing in Assenois at 03:55 on December 26th, tell the 5th Fallschirmjäger Division’s southern perimeter that the American column has arrived from the direction no one was watching. The column will be 6 hours closer to Bastogne.

The siege of Bastogne has been running for 7 days when Abrams’ column disappears from the German observation network on the night of December 25th. The 101st Airborne Division under Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe has been holding the town’s perimeter since December 19th. 11,840 soldiers in a 16-mi defensive ring surrounded by four German divisions whose attacks have been coming in from every direction, but whose assault has not been sufficient to break the perimeter’s coherence.

The garrison is running low on ammunition at the rate that 7 days of sustained combat against German attacks from multiple directions simultaneously has been consuming it. Consuming it at the rate of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment’s defensive fights on the western perimeter and the 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment’s engagement at Foy and the artillery battalion’s daily support missions to every sector of the 16-mi ring.

It is running low on medical supplies in the specific and most consequential way. The sulfanilamide and the morphine and the whole blood whose availability is the difference between recoverable and unrecoverable wounds in the field surgical conditions that the Bastogne defenses medical staff are working in. Its wounded accumulating in the cellars of Bastogne’s buildings because no evacuation route to the rear hospitals exists and because the German fire on the roads out of the town makes vehicle movement toward the perimeter’s edge prohibitively costly, number in the

hundreds and are being treated by the 101st Airborne’s medical staff under conditions whose limitations have been building since December 19th. The overcast sky that has been keeping Allied air power grounded since December 16 has not lifted until December 23rd when the first C-47 supply drops reach the garrison after the pilots fly through anti-aircraft fire to reach the perimeter’s drop zones.

But the air supply has been partial and dependent [music] on the weather’s daily assessment. And the German pressure has been increasing as the German High Command watching the failure to quickly reduce Bastogne and watching the threat that the Bastogne position poses to the entire Ardennes offensive southern flank, commits additional forces to the encirclement.

On December 24th, the 15th Panzergrenadier Division attacks the western perimeter of the Bastogne encirclement in the most sustained assault the perimeter has faced since the siege began. An attack that comes in from the Hemroulle direction, and that the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment and the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment hold through 4 hours of fighting, whose cost in casualties and ammunition consumption has further depleted the garrison’s already critical reserves.

On December 25th, the Führerbegleit Brigade attacks from the northwest. In the specific and Christmas ironic circumstances of American soldiers spending Christmas defending positions whose names, Champs, Flamierge, Flamizoul, have a Belgian pastoral quality that the machine gun fire and the German armor’s engine noise in the December darkness are converting into something entirely different.

The perimeter holds, but holding is not enough. Bastogne needs to be reached. It needs the ammunition whose consumption rate the 7-day siege has been driving faster than the air supply can replenish. The medical supplies whose depletion has been forcing the 101st medical officers to make the triage decisions that no doctor wants to make, but that a besieged garrison’s medical situation inevitably requires.

The reinforcements whose arrival would allow the perimeter’s defenders to consolidate and the wounded to be evacuated. And the relief that only a ground corridor can provide. Patton has promised Eisenhower that he will break through. He has told Eisenhower’s staff on December 19th, at the Verdun conference, in front of Bradley and Eisenhower and the assembled senior officers of the Allied Command, that the Third Army can attack north within 48 hours.

The staff has not believed him. Not because they doubt Patton’s sincerity, but because 48 hours is the kind of promise that only a man who does not fully understand the logistical and operational requirements of a 90-degree army level turn in winter conditions, the requirements for moving supply depots, and repositioning artillery, and reorienting the road nets that carry fuel and ammunition and replacements from the rear to the front would make in a room full of men who do understand those requirements and who are calculating them as they listen. Patton

has understood the requirements. He has been planning the turn since the offensive’s first reports reached his headquarters on December 16, when the scale of the German attack and the direction of its thrust became clear enough for a commanding general of Patton’s strategic intuition to understand that Bastogne was the crisis point and that the third army would be the relief force.

He is the kind of commander who plans for contingencies before the contingencies exist, who keeps his staff working on the problems that might arise rather than the problems that have arisen because the problems that have arisen are already being handled and the problems that might arise are not yet. The Ardennes contingency has been in his planning portfolio since October 1944, when his intelligence chief, Colonel Oscar Koch, estimated that the Ardennes was the most likely location for a German counteroffensive in the winter,

and when Patton authorized the preliminary planning that would allow the third army to turn north quickly if the estimate proved correct. The attack north has begun on December 22 with the specific and documented momentum of an army whose commander has been planning the attack for 6 days and whose troops have been given the orders and the ammunition and the fuel and the forward movement of the supply dumps that a prepared attack requires.

Three cores on three separate axes grinding north through the snow and the frozen roads and the Belgian terrain whose rolling hills and forested valleys have been providing the German defensive positions with the cover and the concealment that make each successive ridgeline a new defensive problem for the American infantry and armor.

The Fourth Armored Division, the southernmost of the relief forces [music] and the formation whose axis is most directly oriented toward Bastogne’s southern perimeter, has been fighting its way north for four days through the German defensive positions that the XLVI Panzer Corps has been establishing with the available forces and the available time, which is not enough of either, but which has been sufficient to slow the Fourth Armored’s advance to the 6 mi per day rate that feels to the garrison in Bastogne like the difference between

rescue and extinction. The road to Bastogne is 30 mi long from the line of departure at Arlon. In four days of fighting through Burnon and Chaumont and Warnach and Bigonville, the Fourth Armored has covered 24 of them. Six miles remain between the 37th Tank Battalion’s lead element and the Bastogne perimeter’s southern edge.

Six miles that the German observation posts on the approach roads are supposed to be watching. On the night of December 25, Patton’s column disappears from the German observation network. Tomorrow, it arrives. The Third Army’s turn from east to north in the third week of December 1944 is one of the most extraordinary logistics and operational achievements of the entire war.

When Eisenhower’s conference at Verdun on December 19 convened to address the Ardennes crisis, the conference at which Eisenhower asked his generals what they could do and at which Patton responded that the Third Army could attack north within 48 hours, producing the specific and documented reaction of the assembled senior officers, whose professional assessment of what a 90° army-level turn in winter conditions required was that Patton was either exaggerating or had not fully understood the question.

The Third Army was oriented east toward the Saar, preparing the attack on the Siegfried Line that had been the operational priority since November, >> [music] >> and for whose execution the supply lines and the command structures and the fire support networks had been organized. To turn north, to reverse the attack’s direction by 90°, to reorient the supply lines and the communication axes >> [music] >> and the fire support networks and the command relationships that have been built for an eastward attack in the span of the 48 hours that Patton has promised

requires the specific and documented operational genius of a staff that has been planning precisely this turn since October 1944, when Patton’s intelligence chief, Colonel Oscar Koch, assessed the Ardennes as the most likely sector for a German counteroffensive. And Patton authorized the planning staff to develop the contingency turn as an emergency operational option.

 And a commander whose relationship to the impossible is the relationship of a man who has spent his life deciding that impossible is a question rather than a fact, and who has been answering the question before anyone else has finished formulating it. The Third Corps under Major General John Millikin leads the attack north with the Fourth Armored Division on the left, the 26th Infantry Division in the center, and the 80th Infantry Division on the right.

Each division is attacking against German forces that have been given the dual mission of continuing the Ardennes offensive’s westward thrust while simultaneously preventing the relief of Bastogne, a mission whose dual character has been producing the divided attention and the divided resources that dual missions always produce in a command that has insufficient forces to accomplish both assignments fully.

The German LXVII Panzer Corps under General der Panzertruppen Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz has been assigning its forces between these two missions since December 22nd, and the assignment process has been producing the specific and documented confusion of a core commander who has been given two operationally incompatible missions and insufficient forces to accomplish either one of them fully.

The intelligence picture at LXVII Panzer Corps headquarters on December 25 shows the Fourth Armored Division’s approach from the south on the Arlon road, the road that the observation posts are watching, the road that the German defensive assessment has designated as the primary threat axis, and the German defensive disposition has been organized to meet the threat on that road.

Meeting the threat on the Arlon road requires forces. The forces being used to meet the threat on the Arlon road are forces that are not being used to continue the westward thrust toward Dinant and the Meuse. The result is that neither mission is being accomplished at full [music] strength, the specific and inevitable consequence of a dual mission that requires more forces than are available.

The westward thrust is stalling because Bastogne’s encircled garrison is tying down the forces that the thrust needs to maintain its momentum. The relief is being slowed, but not stopped, because the German forces blocking it are insufficient for the task. And the road that is not being watched, the Vaux lez Rosières road, >> [music] >> the road that Abrams has chosen, is undefended.

By December 25, the Fourth Armored has fought through Burnon and Chaumont and Warnach and Bigonville through the snow and the German defensive positions and the terrain whose frozen ground has been killing tank tracks and wearing down the maintenance crews who have been working through the December nights to keep the column moving. The column has covered 24 miles.

Six miles remain between the 37th Tank Battalion’s lead element and the Bastogne perimeter’s southern edge. The German observation posts watching the approaches are the last layer of intelligence that stands between Abrams’ column and the surprise arrival that Abrams is planning for December 26. December 25, 1944.

2300 hours. The road junction at Vaux-le-Rosiere, Belgium. Abrams is meeting with Lieutenant Colonel George Jaques of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion and Major Charles Boggs of Company C, 37th Tank Battalion. The meeting is brief in the way that combat planning meetings at 2300 hours on a road junction in Belgium in December are brief.

Abrams has already made the plan, has already assessed the route and the target and the timing and the meeting is the transmission of the plan to the officers who will execute it rather than the development of the plan from the discussion that a different kind of planning environment would provide. In the German defensive map captured from a Fifth Fallschirmjäger Division prisoner earlier in the day whose translation by the Fourth Armored’s intelligence section has provided the most accurate picture of the German defensive arrangement south of Bastogne that the

division has had since the advance began, the village of Assenois, 4 miles north of Vaux-le-Rosiere on the road that the German observation post is not watching, is the last fortified position before the Bastogne perimeter’s southern edge. It is held by elements of the Fifth Fallschirmjäger divisions 14th Fallschirmjäger regiment, approximately 200 men with machine guns and Panzerfaust anti-tank weapons, positioned in the villages buildings and in the cellars of the stone farmhouses that the German defensive doctrine has

been converting into fighting positions since the fifth Fallschirmjäger occupied the Bastogne perimeter’s southern sector on December 21st. Abrams’ plan is simple in the way that effective combat plans are often simple when the man making them has spent 3 months learning this division’s specific capabilities and has decided that the capabilities are sufficient for the task if the task is clearly enough defined.

The plan: drive directly up the Assenois road in the darkness before dawn on December 26th with the 37th Tank Battalion’s Company C under Major Charles Boggess in the lead and the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion’s Company C following through the gap that the tanks will create. Break through the Assenois position with tank and artillery fire before the fifth Fallschirmjäger’s defenders can organize a cohesive response to the assault and push through to the Bastogne perimeter before the German defensive reserve elements of the 26th Volksgrenadier

Division that are positioned east of the approach route and whose movement to block the corridor will require approximately 90 minutes once they receive the alert can be committed. [music] The plan requires the artillery preparation that Abrams has coordinated with Lieutenant Colonel Harold Cohen’s 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalion, whose 12 105 mm howitzers have been pushing north with the Fourth Armored for 4 days and whose crews know the difference between a preparation that suppresses and a preparation that merely

announces. A preparation that will begin at 0400 on December 26th and will last 4 minutes. Precisely 4 minutes. Enough to suppress the Assenois positions defenders and destroy the ammunition and the communication equipment in the fighting positions, while the tank and infantry column accelerates from its start line to the position before the preparation smoke has cleared.

The plan requires the coordination with the Bastogne Garrison that Abrams has requested through Third Army’s radio network. A coordination that would allow the Garrison’s forces to press outward toward the relief column from the perimeter’s southern edge at the moment the Assenois assault begins, creating the simultaneous pressure from both sides that would compress the German force between the corridor and the perimeter and accelerate the linkup.

The coordination is uncertain. The request has been transmitted. Its receipt by McAuliffe’s headquarters cannot be verified from Abrams’s position south of Assenois because the German jamming of the radio frequencies connecting the relief force and the Garrison has been one of the consistent operational frustrations of the four-day advance.

A jamming operation conducted by the German Army’s signals intelligence section, whose specific and documented function has been to prevent exactly the coordination that Abrams is attempting. The plan requires, above all and as its foundational assumption, that the German observation posts watching the southern approaches have not identified the 37th Tank Battalion’s concentration at Vaux les Rosières during the night of December 25.

They have not. The observation sergeant watching the Arlon road has spent the night watching the wrong road, and the consequence of his watching the wrong road is that Assenois will wake to artillery preparation rather than to the organized defensive response that 6 hours of warning would have produced. December 26, 1944.

0355 hours. The Assenois road, 5 miles south of Bastogne, in the darkness before the Belgian December dawn, whose arrival at approximately 0830 will be too late to matter either way. The 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalion’s 12 105 mm howitzers open simultaneously in the artillery preparation that Abrams has coordinated.

Open at a range of approximately 4,500 [music] m, the precise range from the battery position to the Assenois village center that Cohen’s fire direction center has calculated, and that the howitzer crews have set before the order to fire is given. The rounds fall into Assenois in the darkness with the specific and terrible concentration of a 4-minute preparation [music] whose target is a village whose every building the German defenders are using, and whose every cellar the German defenders are sheltering in. The crack

and the flash and the specific heavy sound of a 105-mm round hitting a stone [music] building, and the secondary explosion of the round that has found an ammunition position in the village schoolhouse, and the sounds underneath the artillery, the German military communication sounds of men trying to report what is happening to positions that cannot hear them over the artillery, are the sounds of the Assenois position’s coherence being disrupted in the specific and intended way of artillery preparation.

Company C’s five Shermans are already moving when the guns fire. Boggs has his lead tank at 40 km/h before the first round lands, accelerating from the start line position that the battalion has occupied during the night march, because Abrams has told him that the preparation and the assault must be simultaneous.

That the time between the last round and the first tank must be measured in seconds rather than minutes. That the defenders’ heads must still be down when the tanks go through Assenois. The near failure in the Assenois breakthrough, the moment when the German position comes closest to stopping the column before it reaches Bastogne, arrives on the road through the village itself.

When the second Sherman in Company C’s column is hit by a panzerfaust fired from a cellar window that Boggs’ lead tank has passed without suppressing. The Sherman burns. The road is narrowed. The column behind the burning tank cannot pass on the left because the ditch is too deep and cannot pass on the right because there is a stone wall.

For 90 seconds, the Assenois breakthrough is stalled 40 m short of the village’s northern edge, stalled by a burning tank and a panzerfaust fired by a defender who has survived the artillery preparation in a reinforced cellar and who has waited until the column was passed before firing. It is the correct tactic.

It almost works. It does not work because Sergeant James Hendrix of Company C, 37th Tank Battalion, a 20-year-old soldier from Lepanto, Arkansas, who has been in Belgium since September and who on December 26th, 1944, is making the decision that the specific circumstances have presented to him, the decision to get out of the vehicle and go forward.

In the darkness and the panzerfaust fire and the sound of the burning Sherman 50 m behind him, dismounts from his vehicle, runs forward through the German defensive fire of the village’s remaining defenders who are now shooting at the stopped column from every window and every doorway of the stone houses on the road sides and physically clears the cellar from which the panzerfaust shot has been fired in the hand-to-hand fighting that the documentary record describes with the specific and honest language of men who were there and who

remember it, close, dark, and violent. The cellar is cleared. The firing from that position stops. Hendrix repeats the action at two more positions on the road’s east side. The road is cleared. The column resumes. Hendrix will receive the Medal of Honor for December 26th, 1944. In the citation language that military awards used to describe in formal prose what happened in 4 minutes of darkness and noise and men fighting with whatever they had available. The column resumes.

Boggs’ tank pushes through Assenois’ northern edge at 0445 and encounters the first element of the Bastogne perimeter’s southern defensive line in the darkness. The positions of Company C, 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division, whose soldiers have been holding the perimeter’s southernmost point for 7 days.

Boggs, from his [music] tank commander’s position with his head and shoulders out of the hatch in the December pre-dawn darkness, shouts into the darkness of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion’s position in the first American military language he can think of that a friendly position would recognize and an enemy position would not immediately respond to in the same way.

A voice answers from the darkness, the voice of First Lieutenant Duane Webster of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, who has been holding this position for 7 days and who answers in the American military language that Boggs’ shout has used. The answer that confirms that this is a friendly position and not a German ambush set up to look like the perimeter.

The siege of Bastogne is over. The corridor is open, a corridor that is 4 miles long and at this moment is approximately 300 m wide, bordered on both sides by German forces who have not yet understood what has just happened on the Assenois road, who will spend the next 6 hours attempting to close the corridor that Abrams’ attack has punched through the 5th Fals chameau Yagers position. The corridor will remain open.

It is 04:45 on December 26th, 1944. 8 minutes after Bogus’ tank left the last round of the artillery preparation behind it on the Assenois road. The legacy of why German observation posts lost sight of Patton’s column the night before it reached Bastogne is a legacy that unfolds in three directions simultaneously.

From the morning of December 26th, the immediate operational direction of the Bastogne corridor’s opening and what it means for the Ardennes campaign’s trajectory, the strategic direction of what the relief demonstrates about the Third Army’s operational capability and Patton’s specific genius for the unexpected, and the analytical direction of the intelligence failure, whose specific cause, the mismatch between the German assessment of the most likely American approach route and the actual route that Abrams chose,

reflects a deeper and more consequential failure in the German intelligence system’s model of what the American command would do in the specific situation of a night advance against a prepared defensive position. The German observation posts on the approaches to Bastogne were not poorly positioned, not poorly manned, not operating with equipment that was inadequate for their mission.

They were professional military observers performing a professional military function with the tools available. They were positioned on the roads that the German intelligence assessment had identified as the most likely American approach routes. A logical deployment based on a logical assessment of what a rational advancing force would do when presented with the route choices available south of Bastogne in the pre-dawn darkness of December 26.

The assessment was built from the standard military planning methodology. Identify the objectives. Identify the routes. Assess the routes by the criteria that the advancing forces commander would use to choose between them. Distance. Road quality. Trafficability in winter conditions. The location of known German defensive positions.

The Arlon road scores well on all these criteria. It is the most direct. It has the best road surface. It is the route that a commander choosing the fastest way to Bastogne would choose. The assessment was wrong because it was based on the assumption that the American armored column would take the most direct route to its objective.

The route that a planning methodology built around the shortest path between two points would prescribe. Abrams did not take the shortest path. He took the path that would work. Which is a different thing entirely. And the difference is not derivable from the planning methodology that the German intelligence system had been applying to the question of where the Fourth Armored’s approach route would be.

The difference is derivable from 3 months of watching Creighton Abrams operate. Which the German intelligence system had not had the opportunity to do from the inside. The observation posts on the Arlon road watched through the night of December 25 and saw nothing. Because nothing was there. Because the logical road was not carrying the column.

Because the rational approach was not the approach being used. Because the assessment that the American armored relief column would take the most direct route to its objective reflected a planning methodology whose logic was sound and whose conclusion was wrong. The column they were looking for was on the next road to the west.

Moving in the darkness with the noise discipline of a unit that knew it was being watched for. And had decided to make itself invisible. Had decided this in the specific and operational way of commanders who have learned that the difference between a prepared defense and an unprepared one can be measured in the hours of warning that the observation post provides.

And who have therefore applied the lessons of 4 months of campaigning to the specific problem of removing those hours of warning from the German defensive systems equation. The 37th Tank Battalion’s crews have been told not to use lights. They are navigating by the stars and by the white line of the Belgian road surface against the snow on its shoulders.

The radio traffic has been minimized to the levels that mission critical communication requires and nothing beyond. The column moves through the Christmas night like a ghost, present, lethal, and invisible to the men watching for it on the road 3 km to the east. The entire 8-day siege of Bastogne, the 101st Airborne’s holding of the perimeter through 8 days of encirclement and 7 days of sustained assault, McAuliffe’s single word answer to the German surrender demand, the Christmas Day attacks from the west and

northwest that the perimeter survived at the cost that survival always extracts, the 4 days of the Fourth Armored’s grinding advance through the snow and the German positions and the Belgian terrain comes down at its final operational moment to one observation post sergeant watching the wrong road on Christmas night.

The German intelligence system had told him where to look, had told him based on the logical analysis of the approach routes that the logical advancing force would use. The analysis whose methodology is sound and whose conclusion is wrong because the force on the other road has not been reading the same methodology.

The German intelligence system was wrong and in the 8 minutes between when the 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalion’s guns opened and when Major Bogus shouted into the darkness of the Bastogne perimeter’s southern edge and heard Lieutenant Webster’s voice answer, the consequence of that wrong prediction became the operational fact of a corridor through the German encirclement that would expand in the following days from the initial 300 m wide gap to the full ground line of communication that would sustain Bastogne through the final

weeks of the Ardennes campaign. The corridor changed the positions’ operational significance as the fixed-point around which the German offensive’s failure would organize itself. It confirmed what Patton had told Eisenhower’s staff a week earlier that the Fourth Armored would get there. The observation posts never saw it coming because they were looking in the wrong direction, and they were looking in the wrong direction because the man they were looking for had spent his career making sure that the enemy looked

in the wrong direction, and he was not going to stop doing it on the most important night of the Battle of the Bulge.