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

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THIRD ARMY HEADQUARTERS

LUXEMBOURG CITY, LUXEMBOURG

DECEMBER 26, 1944

2:00 P.M.

George S. Patton is tired of breaking his promises. The air in his palatial headquarters, which serves as an old-folks’ home in peacetime, is thick with the smell of cigarette smoke and the clack of typewriters. Junior officers and enlisted subordinates make sure to keep their distance from the volatile general as they range in and out of the command post, not wanting to incur the wrath of a clearly exhausted Patton. When a message arrives from Dwight Eisenhower, stating that he “is very anxious that I put every effort on securing Bastogne,” Patton nearly explodes.

“What the hell does he think I’ve been doing for the last week?” Patton will write in his diary, careful, after all his trouble, not to criticize his boss in front of the headquarters staff.

But privately Patton seethes at Eisenhower’s poor tactical choices. The Seventeenth Airborne, Eleventh Armored, and Eighty-Seventh Infantry divisions have all been moved one hundred miles back to the French city of Reims as reserves, just in case the German breakthrough goes even deeper into the American lines. “We should attack,” he complains to his staff. Patton could sorely use the additional firepower those units would bring to the relief of Bastogne. Instead, they sit in the patient defensive mode that Patton deplores.

“We should attack.”

The general broods and studies maps of the front lines. Patton’s tank crews are spread out over a thirty-mile-wide front, locked in a stalemate with their German opposites. They are gaining little ground and losing too many men and tanks as they battle for each and every inch of Belgian soil. A German ambush in the hamlet of Chaumont cost Patton eleven Shermans and almost a hundred men. The Fourth Armored also lost scores of tanks in a night attack that advanced their position just a quarter mile.

Even worse is that as soon as the Third Army passes through a town and reclaims it for the Allies, German paratroopers follow right behind. Thanks to intercepted radio messages, they know that the Americans plan to remain constantly on the attack. Thus they move in and take back the towns as soon as the Americans leave.

Dead Americans now lie frozen in the fields outside Bastogne, their faces turned the color of “claret,” in Patton’s own description, from the blood pooling after death. In his journal, Patton keeps a detailed tally of Allied and German casualties, and knows that Germans are dying in far greater numbers.

But casualties tell only part of the story. The German lines are holding fast. Patton and the Third Army are stuck, and Tony McAuliffe and the 101st Airborne are now enduring yet another day in the violent hellhole of Bastogne. The dirty streets are choked with rubble, and small fires caused by artillery shells are left to burn. The only place a man can feel safe from the constant shelling is hunkered underground in a cellar, where he is at least partially protected from falling debris—thus Tony McAuliffe’s decision to relocate his command post to the Belgian barracks. But while there is temporary safety in these bunkers, the tradeoff is the thick, asphyxiating smell of unwashed bodies and clouds of cigarette smoke. And because the soldiers and three thousand civilians that now share Bastogne are reluctant to leave their cellars for any reason, there is also the scent of an aromatic compound known as phenol, or carbolic acid, which is sprinkled on the floors to cover the scent of human excrement and urine.

Elsewhere in Bastogne, American wounded lie atop squalid litters inside an old garage turned into a make-shift field hospital. They cannot help but hear the rasp of the bone saw as army surgeons cut away the destroyed arms and legs of their fellow paratroopers.

The wounded at an aid station on the road leading to the small town of Neufchateau were helpless to defend themselves when German bombers droned overhead early on Christmas morning. Outside, the nighttime sky was shot through with stars. The weather was beautiful, clear and cold. The wounded could not move. Some were in a drug-induced stupor to halt their pain and others were struggling to sleep. They could hear the sound of Junkers JU-88 long before the bombers were over their targets. After long months on the front lines, they knew how to judge whether a falling bomb was far away or close enough to kill them.

These bombs were very close.

The bomb that struck the field hospital was not a direct hit, but the explosion was so severe that the roof collapsed on top of the wounded men. The building soon caught fire, burning many of the bodies beyond recognition. But most of these were already dead by then, buried under the crushing weight of thousands of toppled bricks.

* * *

George S. Patton relishes war. He finds it glorious, and thinks there is no finer test of a man’s courage. He accepts the fact that horrible death can happen to any man, at any time.

Yet he is not immune to human suffering, and the Battle of the Bulge is taking a hard toll on him. It is within his power to ease the pain and hardship of those embattled men of the 101st Airborne. His failure to do so haunts him.

It has been a week since the meeting with Eisenhower in Verdun. Patton is too keyed up to sleep more than a few hours every night. He is drained and dog-tired. His face is burned bright red from the windblast of too many hours in his open-air jeep. The lines around his blue eyes have become deep fissures. “I saw a tired, aging man,” notes a Red Cross volunteer who caught a glimpse of Patton at a Christmas Eve church service. “A sorrowful, solitary man, a lonely man, with veiled eyes behind which there was going on a torment of brooding and depression.”

Patton cannot rest. He is failing. “A clear cold Christmas,” he wrote in his journal yesterday. “Lovely weather for killing Germans—which seems a bit queer, seeing whose birthday it is … I left early this morning to try to visit all the divisions in contact with the enemy. All were very cheerful. I am not, because we are not going fast enough.”

There was no Christmas truce, as sometimes occurred during the First World War. So after arranging for every man in his army to have a turkey dinner—cold sandwiches for the soldiers at the front, a hot meal for those behind the lines—he left early in the morning to visit every one of his combat divisions.

It was a long day, and Patton was not uplifted by what he saw. The only good news came the next morning, when reports that a new sort of artillery fuse was being used effectively against the German strongpoint in the town of Echternach. We “actually killed seven hundred of them,” he wrote offhandedly in his journal.

Now he spends the twenty-sixth, Boxing Day,1 having heard that some of his tanks are within a half dozen miles of Bastogne. But today, as with yesterday and the day before, victory hardly seems likely. Reports filtering back to his headquarters state that his tank divisions continue to take heavy casualties.

Making matters worse—far worse—is that rather than helping Patton by pushing his own army south toward Bastogne, British field marshal Bernard Law Montgomery refuses to attack. He says his army is not ready. And instead of encouraging Patton’s audacious plan to relieve the 101st, Montgomery is deepening their professional rivalry by predicting that Patton and the Third Army will fail.

When Montgomery goes so far as actually to insist to Eisenhower that Patton return to Metz, claiming that Patton’s army is too small to take Bastogne, Patton severs all pretense of friendship with his British counterpart. He calls the idea of a retreat to Metz “disgusting.”

But Montgomery’s behavior only adds to the pressure on Patton, because a simple look at the current battlefield situation map shows that one thing is becoming ever clearer: no one can save the Battered Bastards of Bastogne except for Patton and his Third Army. In fact, no one else is even making the effort.

No one.

* * *

That same day, the phone in Patton’s headquarters rings. Maj. Hugh Gaffey, commanding the Fourth Armored, is on the other end, requesting permission to launch a high-risk attack into Bastogne immediately.

Patton does not hesitate. “I told him to try it,” he will write in his journal tonight. With that order, the Fourth Armored Division begins fighting their way toward Tony McAuliffe and the trapped men of the 101st Airborne.

* * *

Lt. Col. Creighton “Abe” Abrams commands the spearhead Thirty-Seventh Tank Battalion of the Fourth Armored Division. He chews on a long unlit cigar so enormous that his men compare it to the barrel of a gun. Abrams is thirty years old, a lantern-jawed Massachusetts native who graduated from West Point just eight years ago. Some day he will be chief of staff of the army, a four-star general so famous they will name a type of tank after him.

But right now, Abrams is just a bold young tank commander who is making plans to disobey a direct order.

Perched atop a hill just a few miles away from Bastogne, Abrams sits tall in the turret hatch of his Sherman tank, nicknamed Thunderbolt VII. He has already had six Shermans shot out from under him—all named Thunderbolt. In September he was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for courage under fire. Abrams’s men love him, because he is a lax disciplinarian away from the battlefield and knows there is a time and place for fun. But when it comes time to fight, they also know they are expected to do precisely as their commanding officer orders.

A long line of Shermans snakes down the narrow and rutted country road behind Abrams. These tanks also have names: Cobra King, Deuces Wild, Betty, Destruction, and so on.

Abrams has been tasked with capturing the heavily fortified town of Sibret, which lies three miles to the northwest. But his unit is down to just twenty Sherman tanks, and his infantry is short 230 men. Abrams does not like the Sibret scenario, even though that is the plan that his commanding general, George Patton, has just approved.



Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams at his desk in Germany

Scanning the horizon with his high-powered binoculars, Abrams watches hundreds of C-47 cargo planes dropping supplies to the besieged men of Bastogne. Parachutes laden with ammo and food blossom against the leaden sky, but at the same time German antiaircraft fire is shooting down many of the slow-moving, twin-engine supply planes. They spiral to the earth, soon to explode, the pilots consigned to a fiery and instant death.

The sight of this humanitarian airdrop, paired with the knowledge that American soldiers have been suffering and dying inside Bastogne for more than a week, fills Abrams with a sense of urgency. Why attack Sibret? The town is heavily defended, and capturing it will not bring Patton’s army closer to Bastogne. Why not bypass Sibret and go directly to McAuliffe’s aid?

Abrams ponders that question as he continues to survey the battlefield.

He sees the men of the 101st crouched in their snowy foxholes. He also knows that hundreds of hidden Germans are waiting to destroy any rescuing force.

But Lieutenant Colonel Abrams is convinced he and his men can get through.

So Abrams radios a request for permission to launch an all-out blitz on the tiny hamlets of Clochimont and Assenois. This is the most direct route into Bastogne. If he takes those towns, Abrams can be in Bastogne within hours. But if the impromptu plan fails, his small force will surely be wiped out. The narrow road he plans to use could become a death trap.

The request goes to Major General Gaffey, who passes it along to George Patton.

Patton orders the attack.

* * *

Abrams soon orders all available American artillery in the area to launch an immediate barrage to soften the German defenses. The thunder of 155 mm guns soon booms across the Belgian countryside, as shell after shell is lobbed on the German positions hidden within Assenois and its forests. In all, more than two thousand rounds will fall on the Wehrmacht fighters today.

“Get those men in Bastogne,” Abrams commands his tankers. He waves his arms high in the air, and his tanks churn forward.

There is nothing quick about their movement. The Sherman’s top speed is just thirty miles per hour. Nor is there any way to conceal their advance. Thanks to the artillery barrage, the Germans know the Americans are coming. They can now clearly see Abrams and his line of Shermans and halftrack armor steering down the hill into Clochimont.

Abrams closes the hatch and conceals himself inside the three-inch-thick steel of the turret as his and the other Shermans burst through Assenois’s ancient town square. German artillery explodes all around. One shell knocks down a telephone pole, blocking the road and bringing the column of five Shermans and a halftrack to a lurching halt.

The pole has to be moved.

Abrams and several other men immediately climb out of their tanks. With sniper fire pinging off steel and glancing off the rutted road, they work as a team to swing the heavy pole out of the way.

Then it’s back into their Shermans. Behind them, a column of infantry secures Assenois, and will stay there until the mopping-up action is complete. A second column of foot soldiers travels with Abrams’s tanks as they move toward the concealed German positions in the forest alongside the road through Assenois.





American tank destroyers prepare to advance on Bastogne in January 1945

Rather than simply race through the town, Abrams chooses to level it. Every building that might conceal a German becomes a target. The Shermans load and shoot their big 76 mm guns as many as seven times per minute. Meanwhile, the infantry ruthlessly hunts down Germans, screaming, “Come out,” to induce them to surrender.

“But they wouldn’t,” one American soldier later remembers. “One poked his head out of a foxhole and I shot him in the neck.”

Trouble soon strikes. The jeep carrying the artillery observer is hit before he can give the signal to halt the barrage. The American artillery continues to rain down shells on Assenois, unaware that Abrams and his men are now inside the town. Three hundred and sixty rounds of artillery shells are fired by the American big guns. Geysers of earth erupt throughout the town as each shell forms its own deep crater. Frantic radio calls from Lt. Charles Boggess, who now leads Abrams’s spearhead in his tank, Cobra King, go unheard. Americans and Germans both are killed. The American shelling and the nonstop tank barrage are completely decimating Assenois, wiping it off the map as if it never existed. Plumes of fiery smoke and dust turn the daytime sky black. Finally, a spotter plane pilot sees the trouble and orders the artillery to stop.

The Germans lay Teller antitank mines on the road in a last-ditch effort to stop the American breakthrough. None of the Shermans is hit, but an American halftrack explodes when it hits a mine, killing the driver and again bringing the American column to a complete halt. Thinking quickly, Capt. William Dwight, Abrams’s operations officer, risks his life by climbing out of his tank and exposing himself to fire as he clears the mines out of the road by hand.

Through the dust and smoke, Pvt. James R. Hendrix, the son of an Arkansas sharecropper, spots two concealed German 88 mm guns. Next to them, hiding in a foxhole, are two Wehrmacht soldiers. Hendrix crouches low and moves toward them through a hedgerow, then presses his body flat in a shell crater as he creeps up on the enemy. Hendrix is just five foot six, and weighs only 125 pounds, but he shows no fear as he prepares to attack the German foxhole alone.

“A feller just figures if it’s his time, it’s his time, and that’s all there is to it,” is how he later explains his courage.

Screaming, “Kommen heraus!”—“Come out!” in German—Hendrix runs up to the foxhole with his M-1 aimed squarely at the enemy soldiers.

They don’t surrender. Hendrix is forced to shoot one soldier in the head and then smash in the skull of the other with his rifle butt.

“I got their guns and got back in my shell hole and started hollering, ‘Kommen heraus,’ again, and sure enough, them Germans began coming out from around the different foxholes, and 13 gave up,” he will later recall, describing the action that will earn him the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Later that night, in fierce, pitch-black fighting that will see few prisoners taken on either side, Hendrix will add to his legacy by personally knocking out two German machine-gun nests and also braving sniper fire to pull a wounded American from a burning halftrack.2

The battle in the forests surrounding Assenois will continue long into the night, but by afternoon the Americans have carved a small channel through the German lines. The path is less than four hundred yards wide, and Germans are poised on both sides, prepared to counterattack and once again close the road. But for now, American tanks are advancing toward Bastogne.

Boggess fires on a German pillbox on the outskirts of Bastogne. The smoke clears. First Lieutenant Charles Boggess opens the turret of Cobra King and lifts his torso up through the opening. Soldiers in uniform crouch in foxholes across the road to his right, their guns aimed his way. “Come here! Come on out! This is the Fourth Armored,” he shouts. He does not yell in German, hoping to find an American reply.

There is no answer. A tense moment passes. With his head and chest completely exposed to rifle fire, Lieutenant Boggess considers his options.

The Sherman 76 mm barrel pivots until it is aimed directly at the foxholes. Pvt. James G. Murphy has already loaded a round, and the gunner, Cpl. Milton Dickerman, awaits the order to fire.

“Come on out!” Boggess nervously shouts again.

A lone soldier walks forward.

“I’m Lieutenant Webster, of the 326th Engineers, 101st Airborne Division,” he said. “Glad to see you.”

Bastogne has officially been relieved.

Cobra King rolls into the heart of the town, followed by a convoy of Sherman tanks.

Soon, “Abe” Abrams appears.

“Gee, am I mighty glad to see you,” says Tony McAuliffe.

Patton’s audacious gamble has succeeded. He awards Abrams with the equivalent of a second Distinguished Service Cross and praises him as America’s top tank commander—even saying that Abrams is a better tank commander than he.

* * *

The next morning, December 27, 1944, George Patton once again walks to the front of a small Catholic chapel and drops to his knees in prayer.

“Sir, this is Patton again,” he begins with an air of contrition. “And I beg to report complete progress. Sir, it seems to me that You have been much better informed about the situation than I was, because it was that awful weather which I cursed You so much which made it possible for the German army to commit suicide. That, Sir, was a brilliant military move,3 and I bow humbly to Your supreme genius.”4

* * *

The German advance stalled on Christmas Eve 1944. Basically, the Germans overran their supply lines. And without ammunition and gasoline, they were unable to wage an offensive campaign. The continued progress of Patton and his Third Army eventually spelled doom for Operation Watch on the Rhine. By January 25, 1945, the Germans had retreated back to the same positions they had held at the start of the offensive six weeks earlier. Thus ended the last great German attack on the Western Front. “The relief of Bastogne is the most brilliant operation we have thus far performed, and is in my opinion the outstanding achievement of this war,” Patton writes home to his wife, Beatrice.

“Now the enemy must dance to our tune, not we to his.”