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On the Champs-Elysées that morning, the French crowds could not believe that a single infantry division could have so many vehicles: countless Jeeps, some with .50 machine guns mounted behind; scout-cars; the artillery, with their 155mm ‘Long Tom’ howitzers towed by tracked prime-movers; engineers; service units with small trucks and ten-tonners; M-4 Sherman tanks, and tank destroyers.
Four men were mounted in each Jeep, which was a mistake since the Americans themselves seldom packed as many on board,
Patton read and firmly approved. ‘Have 250,000 copies printed and see to it that every man in the Third Army gets one.’ He then told O’Neill that they must get everyone praying. ‘We must ask God to stop these rains.
The understandably tired 4th and 28th Infantry Divisions were licking their wounds after the horrors of the Hürtgen Forest.
But that afternoon Lüttwitz suddenly became aware of Bastogne’s importance to the Americans. His headquarters intercepted a radio message saying that an airborne division would be coming to Bastogne in convoys of trucks.
So Brigadier General Anthony C. McAuliffe, the 101st Division’s artillery commander, had to take their men into battle.
Patton answered that he would halt the 4th Armored Division and concentrate it near Longwy, prior to moving north. He could have the 80th Infantry Division on the road to Luxembourg by the next morning, with the 26th Infantry Division following within twenty-four hours.
‘Hell, let’s have the guts to let the sons of bitches go all the way to Paris,’ Patton called down the table. ‘Then we’ll really cut ’em off and chew ’em up.’ This prompted nervous laughs. Patton’s instinct to attack the enemy salient at the base found few supporters.
Patton did not say that a combat command of the 4th Armored and a corps headquarters were already on the move, and the rest were starting to leave that morning. The idea that the bulk of an army could be turned around through ninety degrees to attack in a different direction within three days produced stunned disbelief around the table.
The forward air controller with the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment called in a ‘cab-rank’ of rocket-firing Typhoons. The target was indicated with red smoke canisters, but the Germans rapidly fired similar-coloured smoke canisters into American positions east of Celles.
The next morning, however, a German radio station put out a fake broadcast on a BBC wavelength, with a commentary which deliberately set out to stir American anger, implying that Montgomery had sorted out a First US Army disaster. ‘The Battle of the Ardennes’, it concluded, ‘can now be written off thanks to Field Marshal Montgomery.’
Between 17 and 26 December, 50,000 trucks and 248,000 men from quartermaster units shifted 2.8 million gallons of gasoline so that panzer spearheads could not refuel from captured dumps.
