On the afternoon of December 21, 1944, at the temporary American Third Army forward headquarters in Luxembourg City, Colonel Walter James Mueller placed a stack of supply reports on Lieutenant General George Smith Patton Jr.'s desk. Patton read them. Among the reports was one detailing the ration situation of the forward tank companies of the 4th Armored Division, then positioned about 70 miles south of the surrounded Belgian town of Bastogne.
The forward tank crews had been eating cold K rations for three days. Forty miles north, in the basement of the Heintz barracks in Bastogne, Brigadier General Anthony Clement McAuliffe had the previous morning read a German surrender ultimatum, laughed, and answered with one word: "Nuts."
Five days later, at approximately 4:50 p.m. on December 26, First Lieutenant Charles Persing Boggas Jr. climbed down from the turret of a Sherman tank named Cobra King in the frozen woods on the approach road to Bastogne. He shook the hand of an American paratrooper of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division. The German encirclement was broken.
Exactly 360 days later, on December 21, 1945, Patton died in a hospital bed in Heidelberg, Germany, of injuries suffered in an automobile accident 12 days earlier. He was 60 years and 40 days old. He was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, in the first row and the first grave, among the 5,076 American soldiers of his Third Army killed in the Ardennes and Rhineland campaigns of the winter and spring of 1944 and 1945.
This is the story of what George Smith Patton Jr. did in the eight days between the start of the German Ardennes offensive on December 16, 1944, and the moment his Sherman tanks reached McAuliffe's paratroopers on the afternoon of December 26 — and what he did in the 360 days that followed.
The man at the center of this story had, by the winter of 1944, spent 35 years of his life inside the United States Army. He was born on November 11, 1885, on the family ranch at San Gabriel, California, in the coastal foothills east of Los Angeles. His father was George Smith Patton Sr., a California lawyer and Democratic politician who had inherited a tradition of Southern military service stretching back through Confederate General Hugh Mercer of Virginia to the American Revolution.
His mother was Ruth Wilson Patton, of an old Los Angeles family that traced its California residency to the first American settlers of the coastal ranches of the 1850s. Young George grew up on horseback. He rode before he could read. He rode through the coastal foothills of San Gabriel with his sister Anne and with his cousin Beatrice, the young girl from Boston who would eventually become his wife.
He was raised in a household where the books of the classical military historians were read aloud at evening meals, and where the expectation that George Jr. would grow up to become a soldier had been established by his father from his earliest childhood. He could not read. In the technical medical vocabulary that did not yet exist in the 1890s but would later be applied to his condition, he was dyslexic.
He could not decode written words. He could not spell. He struggled with basic arithmetic. His mother read to him aloud day after day from Homer, Xenophon, Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte, and he memorized what he heard. By the time he was 10, he could recite long passages of the Iliad from memory in the Alexander Pope translation. He could describe the tactical dispositions of the Roman legions at Cannae and Zama. He could not himself read a single word of any of it.
He learned to read at the age of 11, through the brute force of his mother's patient instruction. He never learned to read comfortably or quickly. He never learned to spell. Throughout his adult life he dictated his correspondence to secretaries because he could not trust his own written English to be free of embarrassing misspellings.
He believed from an early age that he had lived previous lives. He believed he had been a Roman legionary who fought under Julius Caesar in the conquest of Gaul in 58 BC. He believed he had been a cavalry commander in the army of Hannibal Barca of Carthage during the Second Punic War. He believed he had been a Napoleonic marshal in the Grande Armée that marched on Moscow in 1812.
These beliefs were religious convictions for him, held with the same seriousness as his inherited Episcopalian Christianity. He would describe dreams in which he had witnessed battles from perspectives he could not have known from his historical reading. His fellow officers, when he told them of these dreams, generally kept their opinions to themselves.
He was, in the personality that would define his American military career, a contradiction that could not be resolved. He was a Southern gentleman who cursed like a sailor. He was a reader of Napoleon who had learned to read at 11. He was a practicing Episcopalian who believed in reincarnation. He was a man who wept openly at funerals and who called his men names that could not be printed in the American newspapers of the 1940s.
He was a millionaire through his wife's inheritance who had never needed his army salary. He was a brilliant tactician who had spent his entire career preparing for the one battle he believed his reincarnations had been preparing him for. That battle would begin on December 16, 1944.
The other man in this story was Anthony Clement McAuliffe. He was born on July 2, 1898, in Washington, D.C., where his father, John McAuliffe, worked as a mid-level civil servant in the United States Department of the Interior. His mother was Mary Vance McAuliffe. He was one of eight children in an Irish Catholic family of modest means.
He was 13 years younger than Patton. He was quieter, less flamboyant, and more religious in the Catholic tradition than Patton was in his Episcopalian one. He did not curse. He did not believe in reincarnation. He grew up in the streetcar suburbs of Washington, D.C., and attended West Virginia University for a single year before receiving his appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in the class of 1919.
By December 16, 1944, he had spent 25 years in the United States Army as an artillery officer. He had commanded artillery in the interwar peacetime army. He was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division in 1942 as the divisional artillery commander. He jumped into Normandy on June 6, 1944, in the D-Day parachute assault. He jumped into the Netherlands on September 17, 1944, in the Market Garden operation that failed to reach the bridges at Arnhem.
He had returned with the 101st Airborne Division to the American training base at Camp Mourmelon-le-Grand in the Champagne region of France in the first weeks of December to rest and refit. He had married Helen Whitman. They had one son and three daughters.
He was, in the personality that would define his American military career, the opposite of Patton in almost every measurable way. He was quiet; Patton was loud. He was Catholic; Patton was Episcopalian. He was born in Washington, D.C., of Irish civil servant parents; Patton was born in San Gabriel, California, of Confederate landed gentry. He did not believe in reincarnation. He did not curse. He did not weep at funerals. He was, in the reputation that had followed him through the 1930s peacetime army, the most competent artillery officer of his generation.
He was in Bastogne in December 1944 because the commander of the 101st Airborne Division, Major General Maxwell Davenport Taylor, was in Washington, D.C., on an administrative visit that had begun on December 12 and would not be completed until after the German offensive began. Maxwell Taylor missed his division's finest hour. He would arrive at Bastogne on December 27, 1944, one day after the German encirclement was broken.
The problem facing the American command in Europe on the morning of December 16, 1944, was immense. In the pre-dawn darkness of the coldest European winter in 40 years, approximately 250,000 German soldiers, supported by roughly 2,600 artillery pieces and about 950 tanks and assault guns, launched the coordinated attack Adolf Hitler had personally designed as the final German offensive of the Second World War.
The attack was directed against the thinly held American line in the Ardennes forest of eastern Belgium and Luxembourg. The Ardennes had been considered a quiet sector. It was held by the inexperienced 106th Infantry Division, which had arrived in Europe only in the first week of December, and by the battle-worn 28th Infantry Division, which had been withdrawn from the Hürtgen Forest fighting of the previous autumn to rest and refit in what everyone believed would be a safe rear area.
Neither division was prepared for what happened on the morning of the 16th. The 106th Infantry Division was shattered. Two of its three regiments were surrounded within 48 hours. Eight thousand of its soldiers were captured by the Germans in what would become the largest single American surrender in the European theater during the Second World War.
The 28th Infantry Division was driven back across the breadth of Luxembourg by the German Fifth Panzer Army under Lieutenant General Hasso von Manteuffel, at a cost of approximately 5,000 additional American casualties.
On December 17, 1944, at the crossroads village of Baugnez near Malmedy, Belgium, elements of the German 1st SS Panzer Division under the command of SS Obersturmbannführer Joachim Peiper captured approximately 120 American soldiers of the 285th Field Artillery Observation Battalion. Peiper's men marched the captured Americans into an open field and machine-gunned them. Eighty-four American soldiers were killed.
The rest either escaped by playing dead or were captured a second time by other German units and survived the war. The event became known in American military historiography as the Malmedy massacre. It hardened American resistance across the entire Ardennes front. American soldiers who learned of the massacre stopped taking German prisoners in the days that followed.
On January 1, 1945, at the Belgian village of Chenogne, elements of the American 11th Armored Division shot approximately 60 German prisoners of war in what would be documented by the American army after the war as a direct retaliation for the Malmedy killings. Two atrocities in the Ardennes winter, two war crimes — one German and one American — would not be prosecuted in the postwar tribunals for reasons of American strategic policy.
On the afternoon of December 16, 1944, at the American First Army headquarters in Spa, Belgium, First Army commander Lieutenant General Courtney Hicks Hodges, aged 57, of Perry, Georgia, was informed by his staff that the German offensive had penetrated his line to a depth of 10 miles and was still advancing. Hodges did not respond well.
According to his chief of staff, Brigadier General William Kean, Hodges retreated into his private quarters. He did not appear at the evening briefing. He did not give orders. He sat at his desk staring at his maps while Kean directed the initial American defensive response in his place. Hodges recovered by the morning of the 17th, but the American First Army command structure had, in the critical first 18 hours of the German offensive, effectively failed.
The American 12th Army Group commander, Lieutenant General Omar Nelson Bradley, aged 51, of Clark, Missouri, at his headquarters in Luxembourg City, 50 miles south of Spa, could not reach Hodges by telephone through the evening of the 16th. The Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces, General Dwight David Eisenhower, aged 54, of Denison, Texas, at his headquarters at Versailles outside Paris, was informed of the German attack only in the late morning of the 16th and did not fully grasp its scale until the evening.
The American command was, in the first 18 hours of the German Ardennes offensive, in a condition of strategic paralysis. One American commander was not paralyzed. That commander was George Smith Patton Jr.
He had been receiving intelligence reports of the German buildup opposite the Ardennes for the previous six weeks from his Third Army G2 intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Winton Koch, aged 47, of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Koch was a career intelligence officer who had served with Patton since the North African campaign of 1942 and 1943, and who was, in the assessment of the American military intelligence community of the 1940s, the single most competent army-level G2 officer in the American Army in Europe.
Koch had been watching the German buildup opposite the Ardennes since the first week of November 1944. He had been reporting the concentration of German panzer and infantry divisions, ammunition dumps, and gasoline supplies in the Eifel region east of the American Ardennes front. He had been noting the radio silence that German formations opposite the American line had maintained since the first week of December.
He had been correlating that radio silence with air reconnaissance photographs showing German trucks moving forward in the darkness of the Eifel forests, with human intelligence reports from German-speaking American agents placed with Belgian and Luxembourgish civilian populations, and with interrogation reports of German prisoners of war captured on other sectors who had reported hearing rumors of a major German operation in preparation.
On the morning of December 9, 1944, in a special briefing Koch had personally requested of Patton and the full Third Army staff at the Third Army headquarters in France, Koch presented the composite analysis of the evidence he had been gathering. He concluded that the Germans were preparing a major counteroffensive in the Ardennes.
The room was silent when Koch finished. Patton stood up. "We'll be in a position to meet whatever happens," he said, in words preserved in the minutes of the December 9 briefing that survive today in the Third Army after-action reports at the National Archives.
He then ordered his Third Army operations officer, Colonel Halley Green Maddox, aged 47, of Hopewell, Virginia, to develop contingency plans that would permit the Third Army to pivot from its current eastward attack toward Frankfurt to a northward attack toward whatever point the Germans might attempt to reach. The plans were developed. The plans were staffed. The plans were shelved in Maddox's safe at Third Army headquarters in Nancy on the evening of December 15, 1944.
The German Ardennes offensive began at approximately 5:30 a.m. on December 16. Patton was already prepared.
The outcome of the Battle of the Bulge was determined, in the final analysis, not by American or German command decisions but by the physical terrain of the Ardennes region and by the single Belgian road-junction town at its center, whose occupation for the 96 hours between December 22 and 26, 1944, would determine the German operational timetable and, with it, the fate of the German offensive.
The Ardennes is a mountainous, forested region of eastern Belgium, Luxembourg, and northern France, extending approximately 100 miles from north to south and about 60 miles from east to west, covering roughly 4,000 square miles. Its terrain is characterized by dense pine forests, narrow river valleys running north to south, mountainous ridges rising to elevations between 600 and 2,300 feet, and narrow country roads that in most sections are single-lane paved surfaces passing through dense woods without alternative routes.
The winter of 1944 was the coldest European winter in 40 years. Temperatures in the Ardennes reached minus 20 degrees Fahrenheit on the coldest nights. Snow depth reached three to six feet at higher elevations. The fog that had grounded the American Ninth Air Force from the first days of the German offensive would not lift until the morning of December 23, 1944.
The mud in the lower elevations, where the ground was softer and where American and German tanks and trucks would have to operate, was in the documented experience of the American soldiers who fought there the worst mud they encountered in the entire European campaign. It was worse than the Norman mud of July 1944, worse than the Lorraine mud of November 1944, worse even than the Rhineland mud of the spring of 1945.
At the center of the Ardennes, at the intersection of seven major roads running in seven different directions across the mountainous, forested region, was the small Belgian town of Bastogne. Bastogne had a pre-war population of approximately 4,000. It was a market town in the Luxembourg province of southeastern Belgium, 20 miles from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg's western border, 70 miles from the German frontier, and approximately 100 miles from the French city of Nancy, where Patton's Third Army headquarters was located.
Bastogne had no strategic value in the traditional military sense. It had no manufacturing capacity the Germans needed. It had no significant political importance. It had no defensive terrain that would have made it a naturally strong position. It had, in the practical assessment of the American and German officers who studied the tactical situation in December 1944, exactly one attribute that made it worth fighting for: seven roads.
The seven roads that converged at Bastogne were, in the practical operational situation of the German Ardennes offensive, the single most important transportation asset in the entire Ardennes region. The German plan of attack required armored columns to push west across the Ardennes toward Antwerp on the Belgian coast, in the hope of splitting the American First Army in the south from the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery in the north, and of forcing the Western Allies to negotiate a separate peace with Germany that would allow German forces to be redeployed to the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union.
To reach Antwerp, the Germans needed to move tanks, trucks, fuel, and ammunition across approximately 130 miles of Ardennes terrain. The seven roads at Bastogne were, in the practical sense, the only way to do it. If the Germans could take Bastogne, they could use its road network to move their armored columns forward at a rate permitting them to reach Antwerp within the two-week timetable Hitler had established.
If the Germans could not take Bastogne, they would have to bypass it on country tracks and forest paths that would slow their advance by a factor of three or four, and would, in the practical mathematics of German fuel supply, guarantee that they would run out of gasoline before reaching the Meuse River, much less Antwerp.
The 101st Airborne Division was rushed to Bastogne on the evening of December 17, 1944, and the early morning of the 18th, in the emergency movement ordered by Eisenhower after his realization on the evening of the 16th that the German offensive was in fact the major operation Koch had been warning of for six weeks.
The 101st was at Camp Mourmelon-le-Grand in France when the alert was received. Some 380 American Army 2½-ton trucks arrived at the division encampment during the evening and night of December 17. The division's 11,000 paratroopers were loaded onto the trucks in the freezing rain and snow of the Champagne countryside, in a movement conducted at night by a division that had spent the previous month recovering from the Market Garden operation and that was, in the assessment of the division surgeon, at approximately 70 percent of its authorized strength.
Many of the paratroopers did not have winter overcoats. Many did not have proper boots. Many did not have complete complements of ammunition. Many did not have the K ration and C ration provisions that would have been standard for a division moving into combat. The division was moved forward in the fastest emergency deployment of an American airborne division in the history of the United States Army during the Second World War, at the cost of accepting the logistical shortcomings that would define its supply situation during the 96 hours of the Bastogne siege.
The trucks arrived at Bastogne on December 18 and 19. The paratroopers dismounted and deployed into the defensive perimeter established by the 10th Armored Division's Combat Command B under Colonel William Roberts, which had arrived at Bastogne on the evening of the 18th from the Third Army sector and which was the initial tank force that would form the armored core of the Bastogne defense.
By the morning of December 20, 1944, the perimeter around Bastogne had been fully established. Twenty thousand American soldiers were inside it. They were the 101st Airborne Division at approximately 70 percent strength, the 10th Armored Division's Combat Command B at full strength, elements of the 75th Tank Destroyer Battalion, elements of the 969th, 755th, and 333rd Field Artillery Battalions, and stragglers from the 106th and 28th Infantry Divisions who had been shattered in the first days of the German offensive and had reached Bastogne in individual and small-group withdrawals over the previous 72 hours.
They were commanded by Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe. On the afternoon of December 20, 1944, the German 47th Panzer Corps under Lieutenant General Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz completed the encirclement of Bastogne. The last American supply road out of the town was cut.
The American forces inside were cut off from the American supply system, from the American medical evacuation network, from the American reinforcement pool, and from the American air support that would ordinarily have been available under normal weather conditions but was grounded by the fog and overcast that had covered the Ardennes since the first day of the German offensive.
McAuliffe accepted responsibility for what came next. He made dispositions of his defensive resources. He established his command post in the basement of the Heintz barracks in the center of Bastogne. He designated his chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Ned Moore, as coordinator of the tactical intelligence being gathered from skirmishes around the perimeter. He designated his operations officer, Lieutenant Colonel Harry William Osborne Kinnard II, aged 29, of Dallas, Texas, as the principal drafter of the defensive orders that would coordinate American responses to the German attacks everyone in the American command structure understood were coming. He waited.
The German attacks began on the afternoon of December 20 and continued with increasing intensity through the 21st and the first hours of the 22nd. The 47th Panzer Corps under Lüttwitz probed the American perimeter at multiple points, seeking a weak spot that could be exploited for a breakthrough into the town center. The American perimeter held.
At approximately 11:30 a.m. on December 22, German officers arrived under a white flag with a surrender ultimatum. The ultimatum had been personally drafted by Lüttwitz and was addressed to the American commander of the encircled town of Bastogne. It read, in the German English of Lüttwitz's translator, that the fortune of war was changing, that the American forces in and near Bastogne had been encircled by strong German armored units, and that more German armored units had crossed the river Ourthe near Ortheuville, taken Marche, and reached Saint-Hubert.
It noted that Libramont was in German hands and that there was only one possibility to save the encircled American troops from total annihilation: the honorable surrender of the encircled town. The ultimatum concluded with a warning that if the proposal were rejected, one German artillery corps and six heavy anti-aircraft battalions were ready to annihilate the American troops in and near Bastogne, and that the order for firing would be given immediately after a two-hour term.
McAuliffe read the ultimatum. He was standing in the basement of the Heintz barracks in the glow of a single kerosene lantern, surrounded by his staff officers and by representatives of the various American units defending Bastogne. He was, in the documented physical description that appeared in the after-action reports of the officers present, tired, dirty, and cold.
He read the ultimatum once. He handed it to Kinnard. He said one word: "Nuts." He walked to the corner of the basement and began to consider the formal reply he would send. He drafted several versions in his head. None satisfied him. Kinnard interrupted him. "General, that first remark of yours would be hard to beat."
McAuliffe looked at him. "What did I say?" "You said, 'Nuts.'" McAuliffe considered. He nodded. The reply was typed on a piece of American Army stationery by a division clerk. It read in its entirety: "To the German Commander: Nuts. The American Commander."
The typed reply was folded and given to Colonel Joseph H. Harper, aged 43, of Ellinwood, Kansas, commanding officer of the 327th Glider Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, who had received the German officers at the perimeter under the white flag and who was to return with the American reply.
Harper walked out to the German officers at the American forward outpost. He handed them the typed reply. The senior German officer, a major of the German 47th Panzer staff, read it. He looked at Harper. "What does this mean?" he asked in English. Harper answered: "In plain English, it means go to hell. And I'll tell you something else. If you continue to attack, we will kill every goddamn German that tries to break into this city."
The German officer saluted. He turned. He walked back to the German lines. He carried the American reply back to Lüttwitz's command post. The German artillery bombardment of Bastogne began within the hour.
At approximately 11 a.m. on December 19, 1944, in the old French military barracks at Verdun, France, 70 miles south of Bastogne, General Dwight David Eisenhower convened the emergency meeting of his senior American commanders that would determine the American response to the German Ardennes offensive.
The attendees were Eisenhower; General Omar Bradley of the 12th Army Group; General Jacob Devers of the Sixth Army Group in the south; General Patton of the Third Army; and their principal staff officers. General Courtney Hodges of the First Army was not present. He had been unable to leave his headquarters at Spa because of the tactical situation, and some historians have argued because his personal condition had not fully recovered from the collapse of the 16th.
The meeting began at 11 a.m. Eisenhower opened it. "The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster," he said, in words preserved by the American historians who documented the meeting. "There will be only cheerful faces at this conference table."
Patton laughed. "Hell, let's have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris," he said. "Then we'll really cut them off and chew them up." The remark was not appreciated by Eisenhower.
Eisenhower moved to the business of the meeting. "George," he said, addressing Patton directly, "I want you to command this move under Brad, of course. When can you attack?"
Patton had been preparing for this question for six weeks. He had received Koch's December 9 briefing. He had ordered Maddox to prepare the contingency plans. He had reviewed the plans on the evenings of December 15 and 16. In the hours before the Verdun meeting, he had telephoned his Third Army chief of staff, Major General Hugh Gaffey, and had communicated a series of code phrases that would, if transmitted, initiate the 90-degree pivot of the Third Army from its eastward attack toward the Saar to a northward attack toward whatever point Eisenhower would designate as the relief objective.
He knew the relief objective would be Bastogne. He knew because Koch had told him it would be. He answered Eisenhower's question with three divisions. The room was silent. The American officers present were, in the documented recollections of the meeting that appear in the memoirs of General Bradley and of Patton's staff officers, in a state of stunned disbelief. Bradley thought Patton was joking. Devers thought Patton was exaggerating for effect. Eisenhower, who knew Patton better than any of them, understood that Patton was serious.
Patton continued. "This time the Kraut has stuck his head in a meat grinder," he said. "And this time I've got the handle." He turned to his staff officers. He walked out of the meeting room. He telephoned Gaffey at Nancy. He communicated the code phrase Gaffey had been awaiting for the previous 72 hours: "Play ball."
The 90-degree pivot of the Third Army began. It was the single most complex operational movement in the history of the United States Army during the Second World War. It was executed by an army of approximately 150,000 men, 20,000 vehicles, and 133,000 tons of supplies, in the worst European winter in 40 years, over narrow country roads choked with retreating American units and Belgian civilian refugees, in 96 hours.
The Third Army executed it. The 4th Armored Division under Major General Hugh Gaffey, the 26th Infantry Division under Major General Willard Paul, and the 80th Infantry Division under Major General Horace McBride, all serving under III Corps under Major General John Millikin, turned north on the evening of December 19.
They began their attack toward Bastogne at approximately 6 a.m. on December 22, exactly as Patton had promised Eisenhower they would. They advanced through freezing rain, snow, ice, and fog. They advanced through narrow country roads that in some sections would accommodate only a single tank at a time. They advanced through German rear-guard actions that in some sections cost them heavy casualties.
They advanced at an average rate of approximately seven miles per day, the fastest sustained rate of advance of an American armored formation in the European theater during the winter of 1944 to 1945. They also advanced, in the documented physical situation that appeared in the after-action reports of the 4th Armored Division, without hot food.
The field kitchens of the 4th Armored Division could not keep pace with the armored advance. The supply trucks that ordinarily would have brought hot rations forward to the tank crews were stuck in the traffic congestion of the main supply road behind the advance, unable to reach the forward tank companies until late in the days, when the tank companies had already moved further forward.
The tank crews ate cold K rations. They ate them from cans in the interior of their Sherman tanks, in temperatures that had frozen the water in their canteens and that made the meat components of the K rations inedible without prolonged thawing between their gloved hands. They ate for three days without hot food.
On the afternoon of December 21, 1944, Patton was informed by his Third Army G4 logistics officer, Colonel Walter James Mueller, aged 49, of Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that the ration situation of the forward tank companies of the 4th Armored Division had reached a critical point.
Mueller had been Patton's logistics officer since the North African campaign of 1942 and 1943. He had been the man who stretched the Third Army supply lines 400 miles across France during the rapid advances of August 1944. He had been the man who, at Patton's specific personal instruction, diverted gasoline shipments intended for General Hodges's First Army during the fuel shortages of September 1944, in the documented incident that produced a formal complaint from First Army headquarters and was quietly settled by General Bradley at the 12th Army Group level.
Mueller understood Patton's logistical priorities: fuel first, ammunition second, medical supplies third, food fourth. But on the afternoon of December 21, 1944, Mueller reported to Patton that the fourth priority had reached a point that was going to affect the first three. The forward tank crews of the 4th Armored Division, in their third day of cold rations, were beginning to show the physical symptoms of the cold-weather injuries that would in the next 48 hours begin to reduce their combat effectiveness: frostbite, exhaustion, and reduced hand mobility that affected their ability to operate their tank controls, their radios, and their weapons. The men were not going to be able to fight if they did not eat.
Patton understood. He issued specific orders on the evening of December 21 that would, in the practical operational sense, direct every division commander in the Third Army to prioritize the forward delivery of hot rations to the tank companies during the December offensive. The orders were not preserved in a single formal document. They were transmitted through the Third Army chain of command in the verbal instructions Patton gave to his corps commanders in the communications of December 21 and 22.
The effect was documented in the after-action reports of the divisions involved. Hot meals reached the rear echelons of the 4th Armored Division by Christmas Eve. They reached the main body by Christmas Day. They did not reach the forward tank companies of the 37th Tank Battalion until the afternoon of the 26th, hours after the breakthrough had been made.
The tank crews of the 37th Tank Battalion ate their Christmas dinner in the interior of their Sherman tanks from cans, in the temperatures of the coldest Belgian winter in 40 years. Their Christmas dinner was cold. They kept moving.
In Bastogne on the afternoon of the 22nd, McAuliffe said "Nuts" and returned to the defensive coordination of his 20,000 men. The German artillery bombardment of the Bastogne perimeter began at approximately 2 p.m. on the 22nd and continued through the 23rd. The perimeter held. Ammunition stocks fell. The 101st Airborne Division's 105mm howitzer battalions, which had entered the perimeter with a standard load of approximately 300 rounds per gun, were reduced to a ration of 10 rounds per gun per day by the evening of the 23rd.
On the evening of December 24, Christmas Eve, German Luftwaffe bombers struck the American aid station that had been established in the Sarma building on the Rue de Vivier in the center of Bastogne. The bombs killed 28 American wounded and one Belgian nurse. The nurse's name was Renée Lemaire. She was 30 years old.
She had been a Belgian civilian nurse from Bastogne who, at the outbreak of the German encirclement, volunteered to work in the American aid station because the American medical staff was severely understaffed and because she spoke both French and English. She had been born in Bastogne in 1914. She had trained as a nurse in Brussels in the 1930s. She had returned to Bastogne to work in a local hospital.
In the first four days of the American siege, she treated approximately 350 American wounded soldiers, sharing her medical training with the American doctors and nurses who were, in the documented recollection of the American medical staff who worked with her, more grateful for her bilingual assistance than they were able to express in the practical circumstances of the siege.
She was at the moment of her death treating a wounded American paratrooper on the ground floor of the aid station in the Sarma building. The German bomb struck the building at approximately 8:30 p.m. The Sarma building collapsed. Renée Lemaire was killed by the collapse. Her body was recovered by American soldiers from the rubble in the days following the bombing.
She was buried in an initial interment in the American military cemetery that had been established in the Bastogne area during the German siege. She was later reinterred in her family plot in the Bastogne civilian cemetery in the first months of 1945. She is remembered today in American military historiography of the Bastogne siege as the Angel of Bastogne.
On the afternoon of the 22nd, in the personal action that would define his relationship with the historical memory of the American Second World War, General George Smith Patton Jr. called for his Third Army chaplain, Colonel James Hugh O'Neill, aged 51, of Chicago, Illinois, an American Catholic priest ordained in the Diocese of Peoria in 1919 who had served as an army chaplain since the interwar period.
Patton had asked O'Neill to write a weather prayer at the first meeting he held with him in early December, when the weather was already affecting operations. The prayer O'Neill drafted read in its entirety: "Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend. Grant us fair weather for battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen."
Patton had ordered the prayer distributed to every soldier in the Third Army in the days preceding Christmas. The cards were printed on an American Army printing press at Nancy and distributed by division chaplains to individual soldiers in the days before Christmas. On the afternoon of the 22nd, Patton personally awarded Chaplain O'Neill the Bronze Star Medal for his work in drafting the prayer. "You're the most popular man in this headquarters," Patton said, in words O'Neill preserved in a 1971 recollection. "You sure stood in solid with the Lord and the soldiers."
On the morning of December 23, 1944, the weather cleared. A high-pressure system moved south from the Soviet Union across the eastern European plain and reached the Ardennes region in the pre-dawn hours of the 23rd. The overcast that had covered the Ardennes for the previous seven days lifted. The fog that had grounded the American Ninth Air Force dissipated. The sky over Bastogne, gray and closed for the entire week of the German offensive, was at approximately 8 a.m. on the 23rd clear and blue.
The Eighth Air Force flew. Between the morning of December 23 and the evening of December 27, the Eighth Air Force flew approximately 13,113 sorties over the Ardennes region. It was the single most sustained air support effort of the American Army Air Forces in the European theater during the entire war.
American transport aircraft, C-47 Skytrains of the 9th Troop Carrier Command, dropped supplies on Bastogne beginning on the morning of the 23rd. The parachute drops delivered ammunition, food, medical supplies, and blood plasma to the defenders inside the perimeter. On the 23rd alone, 144 tons of supplies were dropped on Bastogne in approximately 850 individual parachute containers. On the 24th, an additional 160 tons. On the 25th, an additional 120 tons. On the 26th, an additional 90 tons.
The defenders of Bastogne, who had eaten only what they could scavenge from Belgian farmhouse cellars for the first four days of the siege, now had K rations, C rations, chocolate, coffee, and the first hot-cooked meals that had reached them since their arrival on December 18. The 101st Airborne Division had a Christmas dinner on the 25th. It was not the American Army Christmas dinner they would have received in a rear area. It was heated K ration components prepared in field kitchens improvised in the ruins of Bastogne buildings, in the temperatures of the coldest Belgian December in the memories of the Belgian civilians who had lived in Bastogne their entire lives. But it was hot food. It was eaten in the company of the American soldiers who had shared the previous seven days of the siege.
At the same time, on the same Christmas Day, the American tank crews of the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division were operating 20 miles south of Bastogne, on the approach roads that ran north through Assenois toward the southern perimeter of the town. They had eaten cold K rations that morning. They kept moving.
The 37th Tank Battalion was commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Williams Abrams Jr., aged 30, of Springfield, Massachusetts, West Point class of 1936, an armor officer who was, in the assessment of the American armored community of the 1940s, the single most competent battalion-level tank commander of his generation.
Abrams was, in the documented personal descriptions of the officers who served under him, quiet, thoughtful, and personally brave. He smoked cigars in the manner of American armored officers of the 1940s. He drove his command tank, a Sherman named Thunderbolt VII, from a position well forward in his battalion column, at the practical operational risk that would eventually make him the most decorated American armored officer of the European theater.
He commanded the 37th Tank Battalion from Company C, which was led by First Lieutenant Charles Persing Boggas Jr. Boggas would command the single most important tank in the American armored inventory in the final days of the Bastogne relief operation. That tank was Cobra King.
Cobra King was an M4A3E2 Sherman assault tank. The M4A3E2 was a limited-production variant of the standard American M4 Sherman medium tank. Only 254 M4A3E2 tanks were built during the entire Second World War. They were characterized by 66-inch frontal armor, approximately twice the thickness of the standard Sherman frontal armor, intended to permit the M4A3E2 to survive frontal impacts from the German 75mm and 88mm anti-tank guns that had destroyed standard American Shermans at what the American armored community had come to describe as unacceptable rates.
The M4A3E2 was nicknamed the "Jumbo" by the American tank crews who operated it, in reference to its enlarged turret and thicker armor. It was, in the tactical role it was designed to fill, the American armored breakthrough tank of the 1944–1945 European campaigns.
Cobra King had been produced at the Fisher Body Grand Blanc Tank Arsenal in Grand Blanc, Michigan, in the spring of 1944. She had been shipped to Europe in the summer and issued to the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division in the autumn. She had been knocked out in action against a German anti-tank gun in the French village of Château-Salins on November 1, 1944, in the fighting that produced the American Third Army advance through Lorraine. She had been repaired at an American ordnance depot in the rear area over the following four weeks and returned to the 37th Tank Battalion in early December.
She had been assigned to Company C in the first week of December and had been commanded in the first three weeks of December by a lieutenant named Charles Trover of Cincinnati, Ohio. On the afternoon of December 23, 1944, in the vicinity of the Luxembourg village of Schumann, Lieutenant Charles Trover was standing in the turret of Cobra King, directing the tank's movement forward through the snow-covered fields of the Luxembourg countryside, when a German sniper concealed in a treeline to the east shot him in the head. Charles Trover was killed instantly. He was in his mid-20s.
He was replaced as commander of Cobra King in the hours following his death by First Lieutenant Charles Persing Boggas Jr., the commander of Company C, who took over the tank because his own Company C command Sherman was unavailable and because Cobra King was the senior Company C tank available.
Boggas had been born on October 1, 1919, in Greenup, Illinois, in the agricultural southeastern corner of the state. His father was Charles Persing Boggas, a farmer of German American descent who had named his son after the American general John J. Pershing. His mother was Ethel Boggas.
Boggas grew up on the family farm. He attended Greenup High School and graduated in the class of 1937. He worked on the family farm for two years. He enlisted in the United States Army in 1940, before the American entry into the Second World War, in the belief that the war was coming and that he would rather choose his service than be drafted into it.
He was assigned to the Armored Forces. He trained at the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky. He was commissioned as an officer in the American Army's accelerated wartime officer training programs of 1942 and 1943. He was assigned to the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th Armored Division in the summer of 1944 and commanded a tank company through the French campaign. He was 25 years old on December 23, 1944.
When he took command of Cobra King in the hours following Lieutenant Trover's death, he would command the tank for the next three days. He would drive it in the approach march that ran through the Luxembourg villages of Schumann, Warnach, and Assenois, and the final approach to Bastogne, at the head of the Company C column of the 37th Tank Battalion.
He would fight it through the rear-guard German infantry and anti-tank positions established by the German 5th Parachute Division under Major General Ludwig Heilmann on the approach roads to Bastogne. He would lose four Company C Shermans to German anti-tank fire in the fighting on December 25 and 26.
The crew of Cobra King on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, consisted of five men: First Lieutenant Charles Persing Boggas Jr., commander; Corporal Milton Dickerman, driver; Private Hubert S. Smith, assistant driver and bow gunner; Private Harold Hafner, gunner on the 75mm main gun; and Private James G. Murphy, loader.
They rode inside the armored steel hull of a tank whose total interior habitable space was less than that of an American automobile. They ate cold C rations for their Christmas dinner on the afternoon of the 25th. They slept in shifts in the interior of the tank during the brief halts of the column advance. They kept the tank's interior temperature above freezing through the body heat of the five of them and through the heat generated by Cobra King's Ford GAA V8 engine, which they ran at low RPMs during overnight halts to prevent the engine oil from freezing. In the four days between December 23, 1944, and the afternoon of the 26th, they did not once eat a hot meal. They kept moving.
On the morning of December 26, 1944, the 37th Tank Battalion column reached the Luxembourg village of Assenois, three miles south of Bastogne. The village was held by elements of the German 5th Parachute Division. Abrams ordered a coordinated tank and infantry assault on the village. The infantry support was provided by elements of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel George Jaques.
The assault began at approximately 3 p.m. The American artillery preparation on the German positions in Assenois was intense. American 105mm and 155mm howitzer battalions fired approximately 4,000 rounds on the village in the 20 minutes preceding the tank assault. The German 5th Parachute Division defenders were forced to withdraw into cellars and bunkers. The American tank column moved through the village at high speed, firing into the windows and doorways of the buildings on either side of the main street.
Cobra King led. She broke through the northern edge of Assenois at approximately 3:30 p.m. and continued north on the approach road toward Bastogne. The approach road ran through a strip of woods. Boggas, standing in the turret with his field glasses, spotted American soldiers in the woods to his left front at approximately 4:30 p.m.
The soldiers were wearing American uniforms. They appeared to be American paratroopers. Boggas was cautious. The American command had received intelligence reports that German special operations troops under Otto Skorzeny had been infiltrating American lines in captured American uniforms since the first days of the Ardennes offensive. Boggas did not know whether the soldiers in the woods were real American paratroopers or German infiltrators.
He ordered his driver, Corporal Dickerman, to halt Cobra King. He remained in the turret. He called out to the soldiers in the woods. "Come here," he called. The soldiers did not respond immediately. Boggas called again. One of the soldiers emerged from the woods and walked forward toward Cobra King.
He was in an American uniform. He was carrying an American rifle. He looked, in the initial visual assessment Boggas made from the tank turret, cold and tired and dirty. The soldier walked to within 20 feet of Cobra King. He stopped. He looked up at Boggas. "I'm Lieutenant Webster," he said, "of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion, 101st Airborne Division. Glad to see you."
Boggas climbed down from the turret of Cobra King. He walked forward to Lieutenant Webster. He shook his hand. The time was approximately 4:50 p.m. on December 26, 1944. The German encirclement of Bastogne was broken.
Approximately 20 minutes later, at approximately 5:10 p.m., Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, still in the command turret of his command tank Thunderbolt VII, arrived at the American forward outpost. He was met by Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, who had come out from his command post at the Heintz barracks to receive the American relief column personally. Abrams saluted McAuliffe. McAuliffe returned the salute. "The Third Army has arrived," Abrams said. "Glad to see you, Colonel." The two officers shook hands.
The corridor between the American relief column and the American defenders of Bastogne was, in the practical operational assessment of the American command that evening, still narrow, still contested, and still vulnerable to German counterattack. It would not be fully secured for another three days. German attempts to close it would continue through the first week of January. But the siege was broken.
The wounded of the 101st Airborne Division were evacuated through the corridor over the following 48 hours. Supplies flowed north. Ammunition, medical supplies, replacement soldiers, and hot food reached the American defenders in the first significant quantities they had received since December 20. The American defenders of Bastogne ate their first hot meal in six days on the evening of December 27, 1944.
The American First Army under General Courtney Hodges and the American Third Army under General Patton continued to squeeze the German bulge from the north and the south for the following four weeks. German counterattacks were repelled. German withdrawals began on January 25, 1945. The American forces had, in the practical operational assessment of the American command, eliminated the German bulge and restored the American line to approximately the position it had occupied on December 15, 1944. The Battle of the Bulge was over.
American casualties were 19,000 killed, 47,500 wounded, and 23,000 captured or missing — a total of approximately 90,000 American casualties in the single largest American battle of the Second World War. German casualties were 15,600 killed, 41,600 wounded, and 27,600 captured, a total of approximately 85,000. Belgian civilian casualties were approximately 3,000 killed.
The 101st Airborne Division suffered approximately 2,000 casualties in the defense of Bastogne. The 26th Infantry Division suffered approximately 2,156 casualties in the 100-mile advance from Nancy. The 4th Armored Division suffered approximately 1,500 casualties in the advance from the Third Army sector to Bastogne.
The war in Europe continued for another four months. The Third Army under Patton crossed the Rhine River in late March 1945. The American forces under General Bradley reached the Elbe River in mid-April. The German army in the west surrendered at Reims on May 7, 1945. The war in Europe ended.
Patton was assigned as the military governor of Bavaria. He served for approximately five months. He was in the personal and political controversy that would define his final months of American army service, publicly criticized by American journalists and government officials for his decision to retain former Nazi Party members in the civil administration of Bavaria, on the practical operational grounds that they were the only Germans available with the administrative experience necessary to keep the occupation functioning.
Patton's defense of his personnel decisions, delivered at a press conference in Bavaria on September 22, 1945, included the remark that "this Nazi thing is just like a Democrat-Republican election fight," which would define his public reputation in the final weeks of his American army career.
On October 7, 1945, Patton was removed from command of the Third Army by Eisenhower. He was reassigned to command of the ceremonial 15th United States Army, a paper headquarters established to prepare the American Army's official history of the European campaign. He served in the position for approximately two months.
On the morning of December 9, 1945, Patton left his 15th Army headquarters at Bad Nauheim, Germany, to travel by American Army staff car to a hunting trip he had been invited to attend by his chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, in the hunting grounds near the town of Speyer, Germany. He was accompanied by Gay and by his driver, Private First Class Horace Woodring, aged 19, of Louisville, Kentucky.
At approximately 11:45 a.m. on the road between Bad Nauheim and Speyer near the city of Mannheim, Germany, Patton's Cadillac staff car collided with a 2½-ton American army truck driven by Technician Fifth Grade Robert L. Thompson, aged 20, of Camden, New Jersey, who was returning from an American Army supply depot at Mannheim to his unit.
Neither Gay nor Woodring was seriously injured in the collision. Patton was flung forward against the partition between the rear passenger compartment and the driver's compartment. His head struck the partition at an angle that severed his spinal cord at the level of the third and fourth cervical vertebrae. He was paralyzed from the neck down.
He was taken to the 130th Station Hospital in Heidelberg, Germany, where he was placed on traction to attempt to stabilize the spinal injury. Beatrice Ayer Patton was informed of the accident by American Army officers who arrived at the Patton family home at Green Meadows in Hamilton, Massachusetts. On the afternoon of December 10, she flew to Germany immediately. She arrived at Heidelberg on the evening of the 11th. She sat with her husband for the following 10 days.
He was, in the medical assessment of the American Army physicians who attended him, mentally alert but physically incapable of independent movement for the majority of the hospitalization. He communicated with Beatrice through movements of his eyes and quiet whispered words. He was cared for by American Army nurses who performed the extensive medical procedures his paralysis required.
He asked American Army medical officers on December 15 whether he had a chance of recovery. They told him honestly that he did not. He accepted the medical assessment. On the evening of December 21, 1945, he died. He was 60 years and 40 days old. He died exactly 360 days after Lieutenant Charles Boggas had commanded Cobra King through the frozen woods on the approach road to Bastogne and had shaken the hand of Lieutenant Webster of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion at approximately 4:50 p.m. on December 26, 1944.
He had specifically requested burial with his men. He was buried, according to his request, at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial at Hamm near Luxembourg City on December 24, 1945, among the 5,076 American soldiers of his Third Army killed in the Ardennes and Rhineland campaigns of the winter and spring of 1944 and 1945. His grave was placed at Row 1, Grave 228. It was the first grave in the first row of the cemetery. Patton's position at the head of his Third Army had been maintained in the arrangement of the graves.
Beatrice Patton attended the funeral. She stood at the graveside in the Luxembourg cemetery in the rain of December 24. She was surrounded by her daughters Beatrice Jr. and Ruth Ellen and by her son George Patton IV, then a 22-year-old lieutenant in the United States Army. The funeral was attended by the senior American commanders of the European theater still in Europe — General Bradley, General Bedell Smith, General Gay — and by representatives of the French, Belgian, and Luxembourgish governments. McAuliffe was not present. He had returned to the United States in the autumn of 1945 and had been reassigned to administrative duties at the War Department in Washington. He was informed of Patton's death by American newspaper reports.
Beatrice Ayer Patton returned to the United States in the first weeks of January 1946. She lived at Green Meadows in Hamilton, Massachusetts, for the following seven years and nine months. She spent the years reorganizing her husband's papers, diaries, and correspondence, which she donated to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and which would form the documentary basis for the two-volume Patton Papers edited by Martin Blumenson and published in 1972 and 1974.
She continued to ride. She rode her horses in the hunt country of the North Shore of Massachusetts through the autumns and springs following her husband's death. She hunted with the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, of which she had been a member for the majority of her adult life. On the morning of September 30, 1953, at the Myopia Hunt in Hamilton, she was thrown from her horse. She landed on her head.
She was taken to Beverly Hospital in Beverly, Massachusetts, where she was diagnosed with a fatal cerebral hemorrhage. She died approximately six hours after the fall, at the age of 67, without regaining consciousness. She was buried beside her husband at the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, according to her request included in her will. The two of them lie together in the first row of the cemetery at the head of the American Third Army they had, in their different ways, both served for the final year of the European war. They are the only two American civilians buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery.
Anthony Clement McAuliffe, who had said "Nuts" in the basement of the Heintz barracks on December 22, 1944, retired from the United States Army as a four-star general in 1956. He died on August 11, 1975, at his home in Chevy Chase, Maryland, at the age of 77. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30, Grave 1, next to his wife Helen, who died in 1998.
Lieutenant Charles Persing Boggas Jr., who had commanded Cobra King on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, was awarded the Silver Star for the relief of Bastogne. He returned to civilian life in 1946. He married Blanche Elder in 1946 and had two children. He worked as a salesman in Rantoul, Illinois, for the majority of the following 25 years. He died on April 5, 1971, at the age of 51, of a stroke at his home in Rantoul, Illinois. He is buried at the Union Cemetery in Rantoul. He never knew what happened to Cobra King.
Cobra King, after the Bastogne relief, continued in service with the 37th Tank Battalion through the breach of the Siegfried Line, the advance into Germany, and the final campaigns in Czechoslovakia. She ended the war at the American Army Ordnance Depot at Pilsen, Czechoslovakia, in May 1945. She was retained by the American army during the occupation period and transferred to an American army depot in Germany. She was designated a display vehicle at Rose Barracks in Vilseck, Germany, in 1955. She stood at the back gate of Rose Barracks for the following 50 years, unrecognized and unidentified, as an American Army monument tank believed to have been an ordinary M4A3E2 Sherman of no particular historical significance.
In the summer of 2008, American Army historians of the United States Army Europe Command, working in cooperation with the United States Army Patton Museum of Cavalry and Armor at Fort Knox, Kentucky, initiated a systematic effort to identify the serial numbers and registration numbers of American Army monument tanks then located at American Army installations across Europe. The tank at Rose Barracks was examined. The serial numbers were matched against the American Army production records of the M4A3E2 Sherman Assault Tank series maintained by the American Ordnance Corps since 1944.
On December 26, 2008, exactly 64 years after Lieutenant Charles Boggas had shaken hands with Lieutenant Webster in the frozen woods on the approach road to Bastogne, the United States Army Europe headquarters formally announced that the tank at the back gate of Rose Barracks in Vilseck, Germany, was Cobra King. She was moved to the Patton Museum at Fort Knox, Kentucky. In 2009, she was moved to the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. When the museum opened in 2020, she went on display there. Approximately 15,000 American visitors per year walk past her. Most of them do not know who Charles Persing Boggas was.
Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Williams Abrams Jr., who had commanded the 37th Tank Battalion during the relief of Bastogne and who had shaken hands with McAuliffe at 5:10 p.m. on December 26, was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for the Bastogne relief. He was promoted rapidly through the American Army in the postwar decades. He commanded American armor formations in Korea. He served as commander of American forces in Vietnam from 1968 through 1972. He was appointed Chief of Staff of the United States Army in October 1972. He died in office on September 4, 1974, at the age of 59, of a pulmonary embolism following surgery for lung cancer. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 21. The main American Army battle tank of the late 20th century, the M1 Abrams, was named for him.
Chaplain James Hugh O'Neill, who had written the weather prayer at Patton's request in the first week of December 1944, retired from the United States Army as a colonel in the Chaplain Corps in 1962. He died on March 12, 1972, at the age of 78, at his home in Chicago, Illinois. He is buried at Fort Sheridan National Cemetery in Illinois.
Colonel Oscar Winton Koch, who had briefed Patton on December 9, 1944, on the possibility of a German counteroffensive in the Ardennes, was promoted to brigadier general in the postwar American army. He commanded the 25th Infantry Division in Korea from 1953 to 1954. He retired from the American Army in 1954. He died on October 23, 1970, at the age of 73, at his home in San Antonio, Texas. He is buried at Fort Sam Houston National Cemetery in San Antonio.
Colonel Halley Green Maddox, who had developed the Third Army contingency plans that permitted Patton to promise Eisenhower an attack in 48 hours at the Verdun meeting on December 19, 1944, retired from the American Army as a brigadier general in 1953. He died on March 15, 1968, at the age of 71, at his home in Hopewell, Virginia. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30.
Colonel Walter James Mueller, who had reported the ration situation to Patton on the afternoon of December 21, 1944, and who had implemented the logistical priorities that would define Third Army supply operations during the December offensive, retired from the American Army as a major general in 1955. He died on April 22, 1967, at the age of 72, at his home in Bethesda, Maryland. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.
Lieutenant Colonel Harry William Osborne Kinnard II, who had suggested to McAuliffe on the afternoon of December 22, 1944, that the single word "Nuts" would be difficult to improve upon as a reply to the German surrender ultimatum, was promoted rapidly through the American army in the postwar decades. He commanded American forces in Vietnam. He retired as a lieutenant general in 1969. He died on January 5, 2009, at the age of 93, at his home in Arlington, Virginia. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 34.
Colonel Joseph H. Harper, who had delivered the American reply to the German officers on the afternoon of December 22, 1944, and who had told the German major that in plain English it meant "go to hell," retired from the American army as a brigadier general in 1957. He died on January 8, 1990, at the age of 88, at his home in Ellinwood, Kansas. He is buried at Fort Leavenworth National Cemetery in Kansas.
Major General Maxwell Davenport Taylor, who had missed his division's finest hour because he was in Washington, D.C., on December 26, 1944, arrived at Bastogne on the 27th and resumed command of the 101st Airborne Division. He was promoted rapidly through the American Army in the postwar decades. He commanded American forces in Korea. He served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1955 through 1959. He served as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1962 through 1964. He served as United States Ambassador to South Vietnam from 1964 through 1965. He died on April 19, 1987, at the age of 85, at his home in Washington, D.C. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30, Grave 428, approximately 50 yards from McAuliffe.
Renée Lemaire, the Belgian nurse killed by German bombs at the Bastogne aid station on the evening of December 24, 1944, was posthumously nominated for the American Medal of Freedom by the American medical staff who had worked with her at the Sarma building aid station. The nomination was denied on the administrative grounds that the Medal of Freedom could not be awarded to foreign civilians. She received no American recognition during the 20th century.
She was, however, remembered by the American soldiers who had known her. Her name appears in the after-action reports of the 101st Airborne Division prepared in the first weeks after the Bastogne siege. Her work in the aid station is documented in the personal papers of the American medical officer Major John T. Prior, the senior American medical officer at the Bastogne aid station, whose personal recollection of her death was published in a 1972 issue of the Onondaga County Medical Society bulletin under the title "The Night Before Christmas — Bastogne, 1944."
She was reinterred in her family plot in the Bastogne civilian cemetery in the spring of 1945. Her grave is visited today by approximately 3,000 American, Belgian, and Luxembourgish visitors per year. It is located approximately two miles from the American memorial erected in the center of Bastogne in the 1950s to commemorate the American defense of the town. She is remembered as the Angel of Bastogne.
Charles Persing Boggas Jr. never learned that his tank, Cobra King, had survived the war and been preserved as an American military monument at Rose Barracks in Vilseck, Germany. He died in April 1971. Cobra King was identified in December 2008. The 37 years between his death and the identification of his tank were the period during which the single most historically important American tank of the European theater sat unrecognized at the back gate of an American army installation in Germany, while the man who had commanded her on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, lived and died and was buried in his hometown of Rantoul, Illinois, without ever knowing.
If you visit the National Museum of the United States Army at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, today, you can walk up to Cobra King. She is displayed in the armor gallery on a raised platform, with her 75mm gun elevated to the angle at which she was photographed in the American Army official photograph taken of her crew at Bastogne on January 1, 1945. Her hull is painted in the olive drab applied to her at the American Army Ordnance Depot at Fort Knox in 2009. Her interior is empty. Her engine has been removed for preservation. Her crew names, painted on a brass plaque affixed to her hull, are the names of the five American soldiers who commanded her on the afternoon of December 26, 1944. The names read: Boggas, Dickerman, Smith, Hafner, Murphy.
Five American names, five American soldiers, one American tank. The five men are all gone now. The last of them, Milton Dickerman, died in the first years of the 21st century. But their tank remains.
Remember George Smith Patton Jr., born on November 11, 1885, at San Gabriel, California — the son of a California lawyer and the grandson of a Confederate soldier, who could not read until he was 11 years old, who believed he had been a Roman legionary and a Carthaginian cavalry commander in previous lives, and who did what no other American general did in the European theater of the Second World War. He turned an army of approximately 150,000 men through a 90-degree pivot in the worst European winter in 40 years, marched them 100 miles in 96 hours through freezing rain and snow and ice, and broke into the American perimeter at Bastogne exactly when he had promised Eisenhower he would.
Remember Anthony Clement McAuliffe, who said "Nuts" in the basement of the Heintz barracks on December 22, 1944, and who held Bastogne for the 96 hours Patton needed to reach him.
Remember Charles Persing Boggas Jr., who commanded Cobra King on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, and who shook the hand of Lieutenant Webster in the frozen woods at approximately 4:50 p.m., and who died in Rantoul, Illinois, years later without knowing that his tank had survived the war.
Remember Charles Trover of Cincinnati, Ohio, killed by a German sniper in the turret of Cobra King on December 23, 1944, whose death made Boggas the commander of Cobra King on the day it entered Bastogne.
Remember Milton Dickerman, driver; Hubert Smith, assistant driver and bow gunner; Harold Hafner, gunner; and James Murphy, loader — the four American soldiers who rode inside Cobra King on the afternoon of December 26, 1944, and whose names are painted on the brass plaque on her hull at the National Museum of the United States Army today.
Remember Chaplain James Hugh O'Neill, who wrote the weather prayer at Patton's request, and whose prayer was, in the meteorologically documented event of December 23, answered by the arrival of a high-pressure system from Russia that permitted the Eighth Air Force to fly 13,113 sorties over the Ardennes in the following five days.
Remember Renée Lemaire, the Belgian nurse from Bastogne killed by German bombs at the American aid station on the evening of December 24, 1944, at the age of 30, remembered today as the Angel of Bastogne.
Remember Beatrice Ayer Patton, who married George Smith Patton Jr. in 1910, when they were both young and neither knew that 35 years later he would die of injuries suffered in an automobile accident in Germany on December 21, 1945, exactly 360 days after his Third Army had broken the German encirclement of Bastogne, and that she would die eight years later, on September 30, 1953, thrown from her horse at the Myopia Hunt in Massachusetts, and that they would lie together in the first row of the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm among the 5,076 American soldiers of his Third Army.
Remember the 20,000 American soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division, the 10th Armored Division's Combat Command B, and the attached artillery, armor, and infantry units who held Bastogne for six days without adequate food, without adequate ammunition, without adequate medical supplies, and without any certainty that the American Third Army under George Patton would reach them in time. They held. Patton reached them.
McAuliffe answered the German ultimatum with one word. Patton answered it with 100 miles of frozen road. Both of them answered the same ultimatum. Both of them meant the same thing. The American army does not surrender. Not at Bastogne in December 1944. Not at Saint-Lô in July. Not at Corregidor in May 1942.
The American army fought this war together. It fought it in the Belgian snow at Bastogne. It fought it in the Norman hedgerows at Saint-Lô. It fought it in the Filipino jungle at Bataan. It fought it in the Ruhr steel. It fought it in the Pacific tunnels at Corregidor. It fought it in the American training camps and American cemeteries and American families for the full four years between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945.
And when the war was over, the American army came home. Not all of it. Approximately 47,000 American soldiers did not come home from the Second World War. They are buried in American military cemeteries across the globe — in the Philippines, in Luxembourg, in the Netherlands, in Normandy, in North Africa, and in Hawaii. And they are buried in hometown American cemeteries in small American towns whose names most of us have never heard and whose residents most of us will never meet. They are all remembered.
Patton is remembered at Hamm American Cemetery in Luxembourg, in the first row of the first section, at Grave 228. Beatrice is remembered beside him. McAuliffe is remembered at Arlington National Cemetery in Section 30 at Grave 1. Boggas is remembered at Union Cemetery in Rantoul, Illinois. Trover is remembered in his family plot in Cincinnati, Ohio. Renée Lemaire is remembered in the civilian cemetery in Bastogne, Belgium. Chaplain O'Neill is remembered at Fort Sheridan National Cemetery in Illinois. Abrams is remembered at Arlington in Section 21. Kinnard is remembered at Arlington in Section 34. They are all remembered.
If you visit the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm today, you can walk to the first row of the cemetery. You can stand in front of Grave 228. You can read the inscription on the white marble cross that identifies the grave as the final resting place of George Smith Patton Jr., General, United States Army, born November 11, 1885, died December 21, 1945.
You can turn to your left and see, in the same first row, the second grave, containing the remains of his wife, Beatrice Ayer Patton, born January 12, 1886, died September 30, 1953. You can turn to your right and see, extending in the white marble crosses of the cemetery, the graves of the 5,074 other American soldiers of the Third Army buried at Hamm between the autumn of 1944 and the summer of 1946.
They are all facing east. They are all facing the direction the American army moved during the final year of the European war. They are facing the Ardennes. They are facing Bastogne. They are facing the direction from which the German Ardennes offensive came on the morning of December 16, 1944, and the direction the American army moved to defeat it. They are all facing home.
Patton would have wanted it that way. He believed, in the personal conviction that defined his religious understanding throughout his life, that he would meet these men again. He believed he had been a Roman legionary who had fought with them at Cannae in 216 BC. He believed he had been a Carthaginian cavalry commander who had fought against them at Zama in 202 BC. He believed he had been a Napoleonic marshal who had marched with them into Russia in 1812.
He believed that in each of his previous lives he had been preparing for the one battle he would fight in the final year of his American life. He believed Bastogne was that battle. He believed that his soldiers who had marched with him 100 miles through the Belgian snow to reach McAuliffe's paratroopers had been marching with him in different armies under different flags in different centuries since the dawn of the human military tradition. He believed they were coming with him wherever he was going next.
They came with him. They are with him now, in the first row of the Luxembourg American Cemetery at Hamm, on the hill outside Luxembourg City, in the quiet of the Belgian, Luxembourgish, and French countryside they helped to liberate in the final year of the European war. They are with him now. May we always remember them.