Killing Patton The Strange Death of World War II's Most Audacious General

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TWELFTH ARMY GROUP HEADQUARTERS

VERDUN, FRANCE

DECEMBER 19, 1944

10:30 A.M.

George S. Patton is cold.

Patton hunkers down in the passenger seat of his open-air jeep, puffing quietly on a cigar. The lamb’s wool collar of his parka is cinched against his throat, and his helmet is pressed down tight on his head. He says very little as his driver navigates the streets of this ancient French town. The general ignores the arctic cold air that has been blasting him throughout the ninety-minute drive from his headquarters in Nancy. It is not Patton’s way to let the elements affect him.

Patton’s driver, Sgt. John Mims1 of Abbeville, Alabama, slows at the entrance to the old stone barrack serving as Twelfth Army headquarters. The sentry snaps to attention and salutes. In return, Patton touches the gloved fingertips of his right hand to his steel helmet. The jeep passes onto a muddy parade ground, and a quick glance at the assembled cars shows that Dwight Eisenhower and his staff have not yet arrived from Versailles. Nor is Omar Bradley’s official vehicle in view. Courtney Hodges, the general in command of the First Army, is also not in attendance—though this does not surprise Patton. Hodges failed to anticipate the German attack through the Ardennes, and then spent two days denying that it was happening. He even passed the time procuring a new hunting rifle and then actually held a raucous staff Christmas party. Now that the extent of the carnage is known, Hodges has locked himself in his office, where he sits hunched over his desk, his head buried in his arms. His staff explains to all who ask that he has the flu.



General Bradley is surprised and distraught. As recently as last night, he was still telling an aide that the German offensive did not concern him.

Bradley now looks like a fool. The German army has been decimating American forces for the last twelve hours. The situation has led Eisenhower to call an emergency meeting of the top Allied commanders. Patton’s Operation Tink is no more. As the irascible general predicted almost two weeks ago, Courtney Hodges and his First Army need to be rescued. And it is Patton’s Third Army that will have to do it.

* * *

“The present situation is to be regarded as one of opportunity for us and not of disaster,” Dwight Eisenhower tells the crowd of generals and senior officers seated at the long conference table. Ike will officially be promoted to five-star general tomorrow. But rather than looking elated, he is pale and tired. A glance around the dank second-floor room shows that British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery is not in attendance.2 A situation map covers one wall. The air smells of Patton’s cigar, other officers’ cigarettes, wet wool, and wood smoke from the fire burning in a potbelly stove. The low flame fails to warm the room, meaning that almost no one has removed his thick overcoat.

Eisenhower continues, forcing a smile: “There will be only cheerful faces at the conference table.”

“Hell,” Patton interrupts, “let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris. Then we’ll really cut them up and chew ’em up.”

Patton’s brash remark fails to get much more than a grim chuckle. But it sets a tone. As it was on the desperate battlefields of North Africa, Sicily, and France, Patton’s aggressiveness is once again vital to Allied success.

“George, that’s fine,” Eisenhower responds, once again reclaiming the room. “But the enemy must never be allowed to cross the Meuse.”

This is the line in the sand. Joachim Peiper and his SS Panzers are desperate to reach the Meuse River and secure its bridges in order to advance the German attack.

Eisenhower’s G-2 intelligence chief, the British major general Kenneth Strong, briefs the room on the current location of the American and German forces. Since late September, the German army has successfully prevented the U.S. and British forces from making any significant advances into the Fatherland. The war has become a stalemate. The Allies were foolishly assuming the Germans could never reverse the tide. That was a mistake.

If the seventeen divisions of German soldiers now marching through the Ardennes can somehow make it across the Meuse, the war could change radically—and not in the Allies’ favor.

“George,” Eisenhower states. “I want you to command this move—under Brad’s supervision, of course.” Here Eisenhower nods at Omar Bradley. Bad weather delayed Bradley on the long drive down from Luxembourg City, but he made it just in time. He is tense because he clearly was fooled by the enemy, and could be seen as to blame for the German advance. This is something no general can allow to happen in wartime.

Ike continues: “A counterattack with at least three divisions. When can you start?”

Patton is ready. He has not only come to the meeting equipped with three different battle plans, but he met earlier this morning with his staff and arranged a series of code words. Launching the Third Army’s attack is as simple as Patton calling his headquarters and saying the code for whichever of the battle plans is to be set into motion.

“As soon as you’re through with me,” Patton replies.

“When can you attack?” Eisenhower presses.

“The morning of December twenty-first,” Patton responds, referring to two days from now, “with three divisions,” he adds, still clutching his lighted cigar.

The room lapses into embarrassed silence. These career military officers know to be diplomatic when a man makes a fool of himself. And Patton has clearly crossed that line. Three divisions is not a small, nimble fighting force. It is a slow-moving colossus, spread out over miles of front lines. The idea that one hundred thousand men and supplies can somehow be uprooted and moved one hundred miles in forty-eight hours is ludicrous. If the men make it, but the guns and gasoline don’t, all will be lost. Attempting such a task in the dead of winter, on narrow and icy roads, borders on the impossible. Once again, Patton’s big mouth appears to be his undoing.

Eisenhower has seen this play out one too many times. “Don’t be fatuous, George.”

Patton looks to his deputy chief of staff, Lt. Col. Paul Harkins. Harkins says nothing, but nods, confirming that Patton is standing on solid ground.

“We can do that,” says Patton, staring straight into Eisenhower’s eyes.

Charles Codman, Patton’s aide-de-camp, will later write of “a stir, a shuffling of feet, as those present straightened up in their chairs. In some faces, skepticism. But through the room, the current of excitement leaped like a flame.”

Patton seizes the moment. Stepping to the map, he points out German weaknesses. This goes on for an hour. Omar Bradley says very little, realizing that this operation belongs to Patton and Patton alone.

Finally, as the meeting breaks up, Eisenhower jokes with his old friend. “Funny thing, George, every time I get a new star, I get attacked.”

“Yes,” Patton shoots back. “And every time you get attacked, I bail you out.”

* * *

This time, Patton might be too late.

Brig. Gen. Anthony McAuliffe is already racing to the front lines. He is part of Dwight Eisenhower’s desperate effort to stem the German advance by throwing reserve troops into the fray. A career army officer, McAuliffe is a less-than-imposing physical specimen. He stands five feet, seven inches, and his slicked-back hair makes him look even shorter. McAuliffe is trying to reach the city of Werbomont, Belgium, before the Germans can capture it. But the journey is frustrating. Rather than speeding down icy roads, McAuliffe’s jeep is facing an onslaught of traffic.

Allied tanks, trucks, halftracks, and soldiers are all headed in the wrong direction—right into McAuliffe’s face.

They are not lost; they are defeated. They have done all they can to stop the German offensive, and their units have been decimated. They fought against hopeless odds to buy time for the 101st to get to Bastogne. Now they retreat from the front in droves. Their grimy, frostbitten faces are lined with grief after seeing their buddies blown to bits. The retreating men clog the narrow farm roads, utterly broken by the German advance. Never before has an American army been so devastated.

It does no good for McAuliffe’s driver to honk the horn or order a path cleared for the general. Most of the soldiers barely respond to anything. Some mumble lines of gibberish. Others are crying. Among these groups is the 110th Infantry, which has just lost 2,750 of their 3,200 men in battle. “They shambled along in shock and fear,” one eyewitness would later recall. “I have never seen such absolute terror in men.”

But McAuliffe can do nothing to halt the retreat. These men are not his concern. He has been ordered to the town of Werbomont, where he will lead the veteran 101st Airborne Division into battle. These hardened warriors now trail miles behind him aboard a ten-mile-long column of open-air cattle trucks.

The forty-six-year-old McAuliffe isn’t supposed to be in charge, but it seems that every man above him has taken Christmas leave—or, in the case of the division’s former chief of staff, shot himself. So McAuliffe rides hard for Werbomont. Rapid response is vital to stopping the Nazi penetration. In military terms, the blast hole that has been created in the Allied lines is known as a salient.

American newspapers are simply calling it “the Bulge.”

McAuliffe is a kind, plainspoken man. He is that rare West Point graduate and general army officer who doesn’t sprinkle his conversation with swearing. And he is pragmatic. These shattered soldiers are clear evidence that the Krauts, as American soldiers call their Wehrmacht opponents, are hardly defeated. They have already slaughtered thousands of Americans in just four days.

The Krauts will be striving mightily to slaughter the 101st, as well.

* * *

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The 101st had been pulled back to rest after months of hard fighting. They were quartered in Reims, one hundred miles behind the lines, where they were awarded leave in nearby Paris and allowed to catch up on their sleep. There was no hurry to supply them with winter underwear, galoshes to keep their boots dry, or even extra ammunition. The 101st didn’t need it. They were not expecting to see action until after the winter.

But that was then. Now they are on the move. They are supposed to be enjoying some well-earned rest after being dropped behind the Normandy beaches back in June, and then again at Operation Market Garden in late September. But Dwight Eisenhower desperately needs them on the front lines. Some were resting in their barracks when their orders arrived. Others were actually pulled, drunk or hungover, out of Paris’s brasseries by military police. They travel in a special caravan made up of almost four hundred vehicles. Many drive with headlights blazing. This is normally forbidden in a combat zone, but now allows them to travel at a quicker speed. The downside is that if German planes are flying overhead, any member of the 101st would be butchered from the air, their silhouettes standing out in the snowy fields beside the roads, completely visible to the Nazi pilots.

But the calculated gamble is paying off. The skies are leaden with clouds and fog. The Luftwaffe is not flying tonight.3

Freezing, the American soldiers are lined up “nut to butt” for hour after hour in the swaying trucks. When the mass of retreating men slow their caravan, members of the 101st call down to them, asking for supplies. Ammunition is hurled up to them. Helmets. K-rations. Even rifles.

But not heavy winter coats. Not wool socks. And certainly not long underwear. Those in retreat will not part with them.

“What’s going on up there?” a chorus of men yell. “How many Krauts are there? How close are they? Do they have tanks?”

To which one of the retreating men simply replies, “You’ll all be killed!”

Undaunted, the 101st moves ahead. Any man can break. But the advancing Americans know they don’t have that luxury. Just like the Roman legions who once fought off the Germanic hordes on this same stretch of land, they hold the fate of Europe in their hands.

Despite the last-minute call to arms, General McAuliffe and the 101st are more than ready to fight. When a captain in the command of one column of defeated men inexplicably blocks the road and refuses to move his trucks so that the 101st can pass, the paratroopers reach for their fighting knives.

An airborne officer promptly defuses the situation by unholstering his pistol and promising to put a bullet through the captain’s head.

Thankfully, the captain sees “the wisdom in prompt obedience,” in the words of a unit chaplain.

“No one would have missed him,” chimes in a paratrooper.

And so the 101st rolls on.

But Brig. Gen. Tony McAuliffe, West Point Class of 1918, never makes it to Werbomont. Nor does the 101st Airborne.

Instead, they are diverted to a tiny hamlet that is no more than a speck on the Ardennes map. The Germans call the village a “road octopus” because seven different highways sprout in seven different directions from its center. The key to success in Operation Watch on the Rhine means controlling the local roads, which allow heavy tanks to travel more quickly. Thus, the Germans covet this town.

The road octopus is more commonly known as Bastogne.

Until a few days ago, McAuliffe had never heard of it. But now, for better or worse, he is here. As his jeep roars into the town center, he finds a miserable scenario. There is little natural charm or beauty to Bastogne under the best of circumstances. But now it is a scene of utter devastation. There is no power, and the centre ville is choked with refugees and dray carts piled high with the possessions of the fleeing. Ongoing German shelling has reduced most of Bastogne to rubble.

Yet McAuliffe must defend this horrible little burg at all costs. He sets up his command post in the basement of a hotel across the street from the train station and impatiently awaits the arrival of his troops. A quick glance at the situation map boards erected along the compound walls show how desperately the Germans want to capture Bastogne: they have committed three divisions and parts of four more. McAuliffe’s eleven thousand paratroopers and Combat Command B of the Tenth Armored Division numbering three thousand tanks and soldiers are on the verge of being surrounded by a force numbering fifty-five thousand Wehrmacht fighters and Panzers.4 Once the Germans close the noose, there will be no way for the Americans to escape. Their only hope to survive is for Gen. George Patton and his Third Army to break through and rescue them.

“Now, Tony, you’re going to be surrounded here before too long,” says Maj. Gen. Troy Middleton, briefing McAuliffe before hightailing it out of Bastogne. Middleton is commander of the U.S. Army’s VIII Corps, and McAuliffe’s immediate superior. He is pulling his headquarters back to the safety of a town named Neuchateau. McAuliffe can’t help but notice that VIII Corps is so eager to pull out that they are leaving behind their ample liquor stores.

“But don’t worry,” Middleton emphasizes. “Help is on the way from Patton.”

With that, Middleton hurries to his staff car and quickly drives out of town, knowing the Germans are just two miles away. He has performed admirably since December 16, but the arrival of the 101st means that it no longer serves any purpose for him and his headquarters staff to remain in Bastogne and potentially become captured.



Soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division marching in Bastogne, Belgium

McAuliffe now assumes the full weight of command. He is distinctly aware that many might see the situation as the 101st’s version of Custer’s Last Stand.

But McAuliffe does not believe this will be the case.

Or as a medic in Bastogne’s field hospital sums up the situation, “They’ve got us surrounded. The poor bastards.”

* * *

Meanwhile, fifty miles northeast of Bastogne, as the sun rises over the Elsenborn Ridge, the Germans attack.

Firing from a forest, they zero in on the frozen American force dug in on the ridge, almost two thousand feet above sea level. Members of the Ninety-Ninth Infantry Division hear the thunderclap of a single 88 mm shell being fired. Its flight is short and intense, screaming louder and louder as it finds an American foxhole. Dirt, snow, blood, and body parts erupt into the sky. Instant death. The men of the Ninety-Ninth press their frostbitten bodies deeper into their fighting holes. For the better part of a week, the Ninety-Ninth have held the Elsenborn Ridge, knowing that sooner or later the Germans would attempt the frontal assault. Now it has begun.

That lone shell is the first of hundreds. The Germans barrage the Americans for over an hour. There is no pattern to where the shells fall. Some American soldiers become nauseated when the shells explode close by. Their ears ring. Some wet themselves without knowing it, and quietly revel in the brief sensation of warmth on this subzero day.

And then silence.

But only for a short time.

At 9:00 a.m. the German army’s Third Panzergrenadier Division emerges from the tree line near the Schwalm Creek Valley. The hardened Nazi soldiers sprint toward the American foxholes.

They should know better.

It is impossible to run through fresh snow. The Germans sink up to their knees. They quickly lose their breath. Instead of running, they wade through the snow, making great postholes with each step.

This is when the machine gunners of the Ninety-Ninth take aim. It is now their turn to inflict death.

And they do.

For the first time all morning, the Americans poke their heads up above the rims of their foxholes and fire back. Machine gunners on the front of the slope make use of their unobstructed fields of fire, each man slowly pivoting his gun barrel from left to right, and then back again, fingers firmly squeezing triggers. The hillside is pocked with craters where German shells have fallen short, but otherwise there is no place for the Krauts to hide on this vast expanse of white.

The American-made automatic weapons fire at a slower clip than the German models. But the Browning water-cooled .30-caliber machine gun more than gets the job done, firing off seven two-inch-long bullets every second. It is especially lethal in a setting such as Elsenborn Ridge, which has the wide-open feel of a shooting range. In fact, finding targets to kill is not a problem for the machine gunners of the Ninety-Ninth. The real trick in aiming downhill is not firing too high, lest the bullets whiz above the enemy’s head.

So as the foot soldiers of the Third Panzergrenadier Division lumber up the long and empty half mile between their lines and those of the dug-in Ninety-Ninth, they are, in reality, sealing their own doom.

Some Germans wear winter white. Others are clad in Nazi battle gray. But the color red soon carpets the snow as American bullets mercilessly mow them down.

The soldiers of the Ninety-Ninth cannot remember a moment in their lives when they have felt so wretched. Their units are broken from the relentless bombardment. They are beyond exhausted. Many are battling pneumonia and dysentery. Some are not even riflemen, but rear echelon cooks and clerks who have never learned simple infantry tactics.

But that does not stop them from fighting. And with every German who falls dead in the snow, they feel just that much more hopeful that they will live to see another sunrise.

The clatter of rifle shots and automatic weapons from the Ninety-Ninth continues, and thick swarms of Germans crumple atop one another. Soon the Germans have no choice but to retreat.

Two hours later, they attack again.

Once again, they fail.

Finally, as night falls, the German soldiers of the Third Panzergrenadier attempt one more assault of Elsenborn Ridge.5

But the Ninety-Ninth Division repels them a third time. As the Americans hunker down in their foxholes for their fifth straight subzero and sleepless night, they hear the moans of the dying German troops who now litter the snowy slopes below the ridge fill the air. They are crying out for relief. But none will be forthcoming.

The Ninety-Ninth has held the line for five consecutive days. Even as Americans almost everywhere else are retreating en masse, they are holding. But for how long? They continue to take enormous casualties, and are still outnumbered five to one. A fifteen-mile-long caravan of Panzer tanks and halftracks is backed up in the valley below, waiting with growing impatience for the Ninety-Ninth to be killed to the last man so that they might obtain those vital roads through the Ardennes.

Should the Ninety-Ninth fail to hold their lines, the Germans will be able to quickly redirect their attack toward the Meuse and toward Bastogne. If this should happen, George Patton’s hopes of relieving Bastogne will not come to pass.

So the question remains: How much longer can the Ninety-Ninth hang on?

* * *

“Ike and Bull are getting jittery about my attacking too soon,” Patton writes in his diary, referring to Eisenhower’s G-3, Maj. Gen. Harold Bull. His army is racing to Bastogne, encountering stiff German resistance along the way. “I have all I can get. If I wait, I will lose surprise.

“The First Army could, in my opinion, attack on the 22nd if they wanted (or if they were pushed), but they seem to have no ambition in that line.

“I had all my staffs, except for VIII Corps, in for a conference. As usual on the verge of an attack, they were full of doubt. I seemed always to be the ray of sunshine, and by God, I always am. We can and will win, God helping.”

* * *

The Germans also inch toward the city, unaware that they are racing Patton and the Third Army for control of this vital crossroads. Now, five miles from the center of Bastogne, the Nazis are trying to overrun a town called Noville.

Blocking the way is a tall and determined young major named William Desobry and his ridiculously small band of soldiers and tanks known as Team Desobry.

They make their headquarters in the village schoolhouse. The village church is across the street. When the battle is over, the SS will enter the same church and shoot the village priest for offering comfort to the Americans. For good measure, they will also shoot six other residents of this otherwise sleepy town.

But that is all to come.

Desobry is twenty-six and has been in the army just four years. Though he chose to attend Georgetown University instead of West Point, his quick thinking and sound judgment have already seen him promoted over men a dozen years his senior. With that kind of talent come great expectations. The scarecrow-thin Desobry has been ordered to place his small team of defenders between the German advance and the heart of Bastogne. For while a quick map study shows Desobry that Noville is utterly indefensible, the town is also tactically vital—of the three roads leading out of Noville, one aims straight into downtown Bastogne. The road is paved and wide, the closest thing the Ardennes has to a superhighway leading directly to Bastogne.

“If this situation gets to the point where I think it necessary to withdraw,” Desobry nervously asked his commanding officer when first given the order to defend Noville, “can I do that on my own, or do I need permission from you, sir?”

Desobry’s superior, and commander of CCB of the Tenth Armored Division, is Col. William Roberts. The two are so close that Desobry considers Roberts to be his second father. He listens intently to the colonel’s response, determined to follow it to the letter, for fear of letting the older man down.

Roberts is kind—yet direct. “You will probably get nervous tomorrow morning and want to withdraw, so you had better wait for any withdrawal order from me.”

That order has not yet arrived.

Armed with just fifteen Sherman tanks and four M-18 Hellcat tank destroyers, Desobry holds Noville long enough for an element of the 101st Airborne to reinforce his small command. The battalion of paratroopers works with Team Desobry to thwart several German attempts to capture Noville. Panzers and Sherman tanks soon burn alongside the road. Wounded soldiers are trapped inside many of these. The heat from the flames is too intense for rescue, and so they roast to death in their steel coffins.

The town is burning as well. At times the smoke from burning buildings mixes with the thick fog to give Noville an otherworldly appearance. Men fire their guns into the morass, unsure of where they’re aiming or what they’ve hit. German shells from the ridgelines outside town fall on the Americans at the rate of two dozen every ten minutes. The schoolhouse is destroyed, and Major Desobry is forced to find a new command post. Not even night stops the German shelling.

As the evening descends, Desobry hunkers down with his airborne counterpart to discuss strategy. He has no problem ceding command of the situation to Lt. Col. James LaPrade, a Texan who graduated from West Point in 1939. LaPrade is the rare man who not only is Desobry’s superior officer and near equal in height, at just under six-four, but who has a career arc even more accelerated than Desobry’s. At the young age of thirty, LaPrade is just two promotions away from making general.

But unbeknownst to the two officers, one of Desobry’s men has just made a fatal mistake. With dusk not yet complete, an American maintenance officer parked his vehicle directly in front of the command post, rather than a few hundred yards down the road. A German tank crew on a distant ridgeline spotted the vehicle through binoculars. Now they waste no time zeroing in on this choice target. Within seconds of estimating distance and trajectory, their big 88 mm gun belches its trademark green fire, and a shell races toward Desobry and LaPrade.

The two men sit in the quiet of the command post. A clerk writes in his journal. The careless maintenance officer enters the cramped room, with its wall-to-wall collection of maps, chairs, and telephones, to report that he is back from towing broken tanks into Bastogne. An armoire has been pulled across one window as protection from snipers.

The 88 mm lets out its trademark scream before impact—an impact that absolutely no one in the command post is expecting.

The armoire explodes into a thousand splinters. The roof collapses, as do the stone walls. Desobry is buried under a pile of rubble, his body shot through with pine wood. His left eye is nearly ripped from its socket, and his head is slashed and punctured by metal, wood, stone, and glass.

But he is alive.

Lt. Col. James LaPrade lies beside Desobry, all but unrecognizable. Tony McAuliffe thinks he’s the best battalion commander in the 101st. His wife’s name is Marcy. His brother, Robert, a marine, won the Navy Cross and had a ship named after him for his heroism on Guadalcanal, where he was killed in action.

“LaPrade,” reads the name on the dead commander’s dog tags.

If not for that, his shattered body could belong to anyone, on either side of the war. Not even his wife would be able to recognize the man she loves.

A medic quickly attends to Desobry, and helps lift his stretcher into an ambulance. The driver guns the engine and races for the tents of the field hospital, on the outskirts of Bastogne. But a German patrol intercepts the ambulance. For some reason, they take pity on Desobry, perhaps thinking he will die soon anyway, and do not shoot him.

For Major Desobry, the war is over. He is taken to a German prisoner camp in the Fatherland.

But he has done his job in Noville. By delaying the Germans’ advance and resisting the urge to withdraw, he has given the 101st Airborne the precious time they need to form a tight perimeter around Bastogne.