On the afternoon of December 26, 1944, a lone Sherman tank came down the road into the village with every gun firing. Behind it rolled a column of perhaps twenty more—all that remained of a tank battalion that had gone to war with seventy. Ahead of them sat the town of Bastogne, ringed by German infantry and armor. Inside that ring, the surrounded men of the 101st Airborne Division were running out of food, ammunition, and time.
For six days, the Germans had held the circle closed. This worn-down column was going to try to break it in a single rush. They made it. A little before five o’clock, the lead tank reached a concrete pillbox on the edge of town and found engineers of the 101st waiting in the trees.
The siege of Bastogne was broken. Ask most Americans to name the great tank general of World War II, and one name comes back: Patton. Patton earned his fame. But Patton commanded armies.
He was not in a turret. The officer who planned this breakthrough and rode into it was a lieutenant colonel who spent the war killing German tanks from a few hundred yards away—and who, in the words of the United States Army itself, was the one man George Patton called his equal. His name was Creighton Abrams. To understand how good he actually was, you have to go back to where he learned it.
Abrams took command of a tank battalion in the summer of 1942. He was twenty-seven and still a captain. On paper, he did not look like a coming legend. He had graduated from West Point in 1936, ranked 185th in a class of 276.
He came out of the horse cavalry, short and thick-set, with a gravel voice and a face one reporter later said looked like an unmade bed smoking a cigar. The cigar was real, and almost always there. What set Abrams apart was not his class standing. It was the way he thought about a fight.
His biographer Lewis Sorley, in the book Thunderbolt, describes an impatient, aggressive man with no use for the cautious option. Abrams believed a tank was something you drove hard and straight at the enemy, fast, before the enemy could set himself. That belief would make his name. In the autumn of 1944, in the fields of Lorraine, it would be tested against the best tanks the Germans had left.
By the summer of 1944, Abrams commanded the 37th Tank Battalion in the 4th Armored Division, which was turning into one of the best fighting units in the American army. After the breakout from Normandy, it ran across France so fast its own supply lines could barely keep up, and it quickly became a favorite of Patton’s. Abrams led from the front the entire way. Standing on the bank of the Moselle River, staring east toward Germany, he pointed across the water and said, “That is the shortest way home.
” That line is in the army’s own biography of him, and it tells you exactly how he saw the war: not a map to be managed, but a distance to be closed as fast as possible. Then came Lorraine and the battle that made him. In September 1944, the Germans threw two fresh panzer brigades at the 4th Armored near the town of Arracourt. This was armor against armor, one of the largest such engagements on the Western Front up to that point.
The Germans came with Panthers—heavier tanks carrying a better gun than the American Sherman. On paper, the Sherman should have lost that fight. It did not. Abrams and his tankers used the ground and the morning fog.
They let the Panthers roll forward, hit them from the flank and from behind low ridgelines where German gunners never saw them coming, and counterattacked the instant the enemy hesitated. According to Hugh Cole in the official United States Army history of the Lorraine Campaign, on one single foggy morning the American command destroyed more than forty German tanks, most of them factory-new Panthers, while losing six men killed. Across several days of this, Sorley writes, Abrams’ battalion knocked out around fifty-five German tanks while losing fourteen of its own. Abrams did not win because he had the better machine.
He won because he understood better than nearly anyone in the American army precisely what his tank could and could not do, and he built an entire way of fighting around that knowledge. He took an outgunned tank and used it to beat the tank that outgunned it. For that battle, including a night attack he led straight into the German force in his own command tank, Creighton Abrams was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross. He did not do it alone.
The 4th Armored Division was built and trained by John Wood, the commander his men called Tiger Jack, one of the finest armor trainers this country produced. The German brigades at Arracourt were brand new, their crews half-trained, their Panthers barely out of the factory. The fog helped, the artillery helped. But somebody still had to see each opening and seize it repeatedly under fire.
The man doing that was Abrams. The hardest test was still in front of him. In December 1944, the Germans launched their last great offensive in the West: a surprise armored thrust through the Ardennes Forest, remembered as the Battle of the Bulge. At the center lay Bastogne, a hub where seven roads met—a place the Germans needed and could not have while the Americans held it.
The Germans surrounded it, with the 101st Airborne trapped inside. Then Patton did what much of the Allied high command thought impossible: he pulled his Third Army out of one battle, wheeled it ninety degrees north, and drove it through winter roads to relieve Bastogne. At the very tip of that drive, the division handed the job of breaking through the German ring was the 4th Armored. Leading one of its columns was Creighton Abrams.
The 4th Armored was worn down. It had only come out of the line days before, after five straight months of combat. It was short hundreds of men and more than twenty tanks before the Bulge even started. The road march north covered well over a hundred miles in roughly a single day and broke tanks down by the dozen.
Patton’s order to his commanders was blunt: drive like hell. When the attack bogged down, he got on the phone and told them to stop piddling around, bypass the strong towns, and punch through. By the afternoon of December 26, Abrams’ column had fought to within a few miles of Bastogne and was almost spent, down to about twenty running tanks. His orders pointed him at a village called Cobre, where the Germans were waiting in strength.
Standing near a hamlet called Chaumont, Abrams and his infantry commander watched transport planes dropping supply bundles into Bastogne—close enough now to see. Abrams made his decision. Rather than grind head-on into Cobre as ordered, he would shift the point of attack. He would send everything he had left straight up the road through a small village called Assenois, betting that raw speed would carry his tanks into Bastogne before the Germans could close on them.
This is not the part where one rogue officer defied orders. Abrams proposed the change; it went up the chain to the division commander and to Patton, and it was approved. But the idea was his, the nerve was his, and it matched Patton’s instruction to the letter: skip the strong point, go through the weak one, go now. He radioed the plan to the tank at the head of the column, a Sherman named Cobra King, commanded by First Lieutenant Charles Boggess.
Abrams told his men simply to get to the men in Bastogne. Thirteen batteries of American artillery came crashing down on Assenois to tear open a path. Boggess led off in the fading light with every gun firing. His gunner later said he worked the 75mm cannon like a machine gun, firing twenty-one rounds in minutes as they tore up the road.
They went through so fast that the German infantry sealed the road behind them with mines, and only a small handful of tanks made that first breakthrough. A little before five o’clock, Cobra King reached the pillbox on the far side, and Boggess called out to figures in the trees—careful, because German infiltrators had been slipping through American lines speaking English. One figure stood up. He was Lieutenant Duane Webster, an engineer of the 101st Airborne.
The ring was broken. Shortly afterward, Abrams himself walked into the American lines and shook hands with Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, the officer who had led the defense of Bastogne. The corridor was open, and this time it stayed open. Breaking through cost the 4th Armored somewhere around a thousand men killed and wounded.
Abrams, once again well forward in his own command tank, personally destroyed a German gun holding up his advance—an action that earned him a second Distinguished Service Cross. One of his own officers put it simply: a lot of colonels stay back at the flagpole. Abrams did not. When Creighton Abrams died in 1974, the United States Army’s official biography set down that George Patton had once said: “I am supposed to be the best tank commander in the army, but I have one peer—Abe Abrams.
He is the world champion. ” The line cannot be pinned to a date; it appears in no diary or letter as far as anyone has found. The earliest written version is that army biography released on the day Abrams died. But Patton did not throw praise like that around, and everything he actually did with the 4th Armored suggests he meant it.
He called the relief of Bastogne the most brilliant operation his army carried out in the entire war. And the comparison he was drawing was tanker to tanker—Patton had commanded America’s first tank brigade in World War I and knew from inside a turret exactly what the job demanded. When he weighed himself against every man doing that job in his own army in 1944, the one name he reached for was Abrams. Abrams was not buried by the system.
He climbed it. He went on to four stars, commanded the entire American war in Vietnam, and finally became Army Chief of Staff, the highest uniformed post in the United States Army. The crews inside those Shermans, cranking their turrets around by hand, took the fire and did the killing, and Abrams himself said the real weapon was never any single tank or gun, but teamwork inspired by good and selfless leadership. He was the leadership.
The last piece of the story is the best one. For decades, the army named its main battle tanks after its greatest armor commanders: the Patton family across the 1950s—the M46, M47, M48. Fine tanks, named for the general everyone knows. Then, in 1980, the army rolled out a brand-new main battle tank, the most advanced in the world at the time, the tank that would define American armored power for the next forty years and more.
They did not name it after Patton. They named it the M1 Abrams—after the lieutenant colonel who fought from the turret, after the man Patton is said to have called his one peer, after the officer who took a battalion down to its last twenty tanks and broke the siege of Bastogne with them. The army had every celebrated name in its history to choose from, and when it came time to put a name on the machine that would carry American soldiers into combat for two full generations, it chose the tanker.
It chose Abrams.