In less than 12 hours, on the morning of December 22nd, 1944, General George S. Patton would walk through a snowstorm into a heated Belgian inn, find a colonel of the United States Army eating breakfast beside a fireplace, and ask him one quiet question that would end the man’s career forever. The colonel did not know that yet.
Neither did the 20-year-old private in the foxhole 7 miles north, whose left foot, beneath three layers of frozen leather, had just turned the color of wet ash. His name was Hayes. His boots had stopped feeling like boots three nights ago. He couldn’t remember when it happened. Only that the cold had come first as pain, then as needles, and finally as nothing at all. That was the worst part.
The nothing. Around him, the forest of the Ardennes held its breath. Snow fell in slow, sideways drifts that erased the world 1 meter at a time. Pine branches groaned under the weight of ice. Somewhere in the distance, a tree split open from the cold with a crack so sharp the men in the foxholes flinched, thinking it was rifle fire.
It wasn’t. Nothing was happening tonight, and that, too, was the problem. December 25, 1944, the thermometer hanging from the medic’s tent read 20 below zero Fahrenheit. The American battalion holding this section of the Ardennes had not slept properly in five nights. They had not been dry in eight. The fires they could build were small and weak and starved for wood because the wet pine of these forests refused to burn the way wood was supposed to burn.
It hissed. It smoked. It went out. Hayes pulled a folded sheet of newspaper from inside his jacket and pushed it down between his sock and the lining of his left boot. The Stars and Stripes, yesterday’s date, yesterday’s news, that meant nothing now. The paper was supposed to trap warmth. It didn’t. Five nights earlier, on the morning of December 16th, the Germans had done the unthinkable.
They had attacked through the Ardennes in winter, through forest that every American intelligence officer had spent 6 months calling impassable. By dawn, a salient 70 miles wide had been punched through the Allied line. By December 20th, the town of Bastogne, a small Belgian crossroads of unremarkable buildings and seven converging roads, had been surrounded.
Inside that ring of frozen earth and broken trees, the 101st Airborne Division was dug in, low on ammunition, low on medical supplies, low on everything except the stubborn unwillingness of its acting commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, 46 years old, to consider the possibility of surrender. But Hayes’s battalion was not in Bastogne.
Hayes’s battalion was somewhere outside it, somewhere in the ragged American line that stretched south of the encirclement, holding back German reconnaissance probes that came mostly at night and mostly without warning. Hayes had not fired his rifle in 2 days. He had not been certain he could fire it at all.
The bolt had frozen solid the night before, and the only way he had managed to free it was by holding the breech against his stomach beneath his coat for half an hour until something inside the mechanism cracked loose. He didn’t know if it would do that again. Around 2:00 in the morning, a truck rolled in from the north with three wounded men in its bed.
They weren’t wounded by bullets. The medic, a corporal named Dolan who looked older than his 24 years, climbed up and tried to remove their boots. The leather had fused to the skin. One of the men screamed when Dolan made the first cut. The other two had stopped feeling anything at all. This was the war that no one wrote songs about. This was trench foot.
In the month of November alone, General George S. Patton’s Third Army had recorded somewhere near 12,000 cases. 12,000 men removed from the line not by German bullets, but by their own bodies giving up beneath them. By rotting tissue, by gangrenous toes, by boots that could no longer be taken off without taking the skin with them.
The official medical histories of the United States Army would later record the figure with clinical restraint. The men in the field used another word. They called it a slaughter. And the slaughter had a cause. Three weeks earlier in late November, Patton himself had issued a direct order. Every soldier in his army was to have overshoes.
Dry socks were to be rotated daily. Officers were to inspect the feet of their men personally. The order was written in language so blunt it was almost insulting and it carried Patton’s signature on the bottom. That order had not reached Hayes. Not the overshoes, not the dry socks, not the inspections. Somewhere between the desk where Patton had signed it and the foxhole where Hayes was sitting, the order had passed through hands that had decided it did not apply to them.
This is what no historian would record cleanly because the failure was not a single failure, it was a hundred small ones. A supply officer who didn’t push, a captain who didn’t ask, a colonel who did not see what he did not want to see. The order existed, the boots did not. A man named Patton, 40 miles away in a heated headquarters in Luxembourg City, 59 years old, white-haired, a three-star general with a profanity habit and a Bible on his nightstand, believed his order was being followed.
He was wrong. Two weeks earlier, on the 8th of December, in a small office in Nancy, France, Patton had picked up the telephone and asked for his chaplain. His name was James Hugh O’Neill. He was 41 years old, a Catholic priest, and he had been the chief chaplain of the Third Army for almost a year. When the call came through, he picked up expecting the usual administrative business of a wartime chaplaincy.
Instead, Patton asked him to write a prayer. A prayer for good weather. O’Neill, who knew his general well enough to know when a request was not actually a request, sat down at a typewriter and produced just over a hundred words. Patton read them, approved them, and ordered them printed onto 250,000 small cards.
The cards were distributed to every soldier in the Third Army. The prayer asked Almighty God to restrain the immoderate rains. It asked for fair weather for battle. It was sincere, and it was strategic, and it was, above all, the act of a man who had begun to understand that the weather itself had become an enemy. Hayes [snorts] had received one of those cards.
It was still folded in his breast pocket beneath three layers of wet wool, becoming soft and unreadable from the moisture of his own body. He had not prayed. He had only kept the card because everyone else had kept theirs, and because in the cold and the dark and the sound of trees splitting open from frost, the small rectangle of dry paper inside his jacket felt somehow like proof of something.
He didn’t know what. Around 3:00 in the morning, a sergeant came down the line, moving from hole to hole in a slow walk that the cold made into a stumble. His name was Kowalski. He was 28 from the iron mill country of western Pennsylvania, and he had been in this army since before North Africa. He stopped at each man, checked each face for the pale gray patches that meant frostbite was advancing toward bone, and moved on without speaking.
When he reached Hayes, he crouched. He looked at the boy’s feet, then at his face. He didn’t ask a question. He just nodded once and stood back up. 20 minutes later, Kowalski was at the command post. The lieutenant on duty was named Bennett. He was 26. He had been a high school physics teacher in Ohio 32 months ago.
Now he ran a platoon, or what was left of one. He had grown a thin beard he was not authorized to grow, and his eyes had the unfocused tightness of a man who had not slept more than two consecutive hours in a week. Kowalski stood in front of him for a long moment before he spoke. “Where is the colonel, sir?” Bennett did not look up from the map.
“South.” Kowalski waited. Bennett finally lifted his eyes. Three nights. The two men looked at each other. Neither said the word, but the word was in the room with them. It had weight. [music] It had temperature. It made the air harder to breathe than the cold had managed on its own. Three nights.
Three nights inside a building with a roof, with a stove, with a bed. Three nights while his men froze inside holes in the frozen ground less than 7 miles away. The colonel had a name. That name will not be repeated here because what he did, he did as a representative of a pattern, not as the only man in this army who chose comfort over the soldiers placed in his care.
The patterns were everywhere that winter. The colonels were many. The record of their removal was, by Patton’s deliberate design, kept quiet. But this one, this particular colonel on this particular night, in this particular sector, was about to make a mistake. Because somewhere south, in the gray early hours of December 22nd, 1944, a jeep was being warmed up in a courtyard.
Inside the headquarters building above the courtyard, an aide was laying out a clean field jacket, a riding crop, a pair of gloves. The man who would wear them was already awake. He had not slept much. He had been reading the morning’s medical reports. The report said the trench foot numbers were not improving.
The report said his order was not being obeyed. The man who had signed that order was about to find out why. His name was Patton, and in approximately 4 hours, he was going to walk into a warm building 7 mi south of a frozen battalion and ask one quiet, terrible question. But that came later. For now, in the dark, in the snow, in the forest where a tree had just split open like a rifle shot, Private Hayes pushed another folded square of newspaper into his boot and did not feel it go in.
The cold kept coming and the war went on. The Jeep came up the road just after 8:00 in the morning. There were three vehicles in the convoy, not the long-armed column that some soldiers had begun to expect when generals visited. Two of them were military police escorts. The third, in the middle, carried a man who needed no escort to be recognized.
The star plates were bolted to the front and rear bumpers, three stars, white on red. There were not many men in the United States Army that winter who carried three stars on the bumper of a Jeep. There were fewer still who would have ridden into this kind of cold with the windshield folded down and his face exposed to the wind.
Patton did. He always had. The men along the road did not cheer. They were too tired to cheer, and they had been told too many things over the past 5 days about commanders who were coming to inspect and commanders who never came at all. Most of them just turned their heads slowly as the Jeep approached and then turned them slowly back again as if even recognition required a quantity of warmth they could no longer spare.
Lieutenant Bennett was at the side of the road when the Jeep stopped. He had been awake for 19 hours. His eyes felt as though somebody had filled them with sand. He saluted because he had been saluting officers for 32 months, and the motion was not a thought anymore, only a reflex of the arm. His glove was stiff, the salute looked broken. Patton returned it.
He stepped out of the Jeep into the snow. He wore the polished helmet with the three stars on its front, the riding boots, the breeches, the pistol on the hip. Not the ivory-handled one. That was the one for the photographers, and Patton resented the press for calling it pearl. This was the working one, plain, worn, and ready.
His face in person was older than the photographs suggested, 59 years. In good light, you could see all of them. Lieutenant Bennett swallowed. General. Patton looked past him toward the trees. The foxholes were scattered through the pines like the holes left by something that had been ripped out of the ground. Smoke rose in thin gray columns from a dozen weak fires.
Men moved between them slowly, the way men move when they have made a decision not to fall down. How many cases in the last 48 hours, Lieutenant? Bennett knew exactly what he meant. He did not have to ask. 14, sir. Of those, how many cannot return to duty? Three confirmed, sir, possibly five. Patton nodded once. He did not write anything down.
He did not need to. He began walking. This was the part that the men in the rear would not understand when the story was told later in mess halls and reunion halls and across the kitchen tables of small towns from Wisconsin to Georgia. They expected the rage. The rage came later. Sometimes what came first on that morning was something colder.
Patton walked the line. Not down the road, the line. Hole to hole in the snow in the cold that was making his own face raw inside of 3 minutes. He stopped at the first foxhole. He looked down at the man in it. The man was a private from somewhere in eastern Tennessee, and he had been asleep sitting upright with his back against the frozen earth.
He woke up when the shadow passed over him. He saw the three stars. He tried to stand. Stay seated, son. Patton crouched at the edge of the hole. The ground crackled under his boots. He looked at the private’s feet. Boots off. The boy’s hands trembled. He worked at the laces. The leather did not want to give. He looked up ashamed.
Sir, I Take your time. It took almost a minute. When the left boot finally slid free, the smell came up. Sweet and wrong. The smell of skin that had been wet for too long. The sock came off with the boot. The skin underneath was the color of an old bruise. Patton looked at it. He did not flinch.
He had seen worse in field hospitals and he would see worse before this winter ended. But he looked at it for a long moment and then he looked at the private’s face. You’ve been here how long, son? Four days, sir. When was the last time anyone told you to take your boots off? The boy could not answer. Patton nodded again. He stood.
He moved to the next hole. He did this 14 times. Lieutenant Bennett walked behind him in silence. He had never been so quiet for so long while the general was looking at his men. He had imagined this moment in the abstract during the long hours of the night. He had imagined being chewed out. He had imagined being demoted on the spot.
He had imagined a tirade that would end his career. He had not imagined this. The systematic methodical quiet of a man who was counting. That was the word Bennett would use later after the war when his grandson asked him what Patton had really been like. He would say he counted. He counted fires. He counted boots. He counted men.
And as he counted, his jaw got harder, but he never said anything that mattered out loud. That was when you knew. That was when if you were a smart officer, you began to be afraid. At the 14th hole, Patton stopped. He had not asked about the colonel yet. He had not mentioned him. He had walked past the command tent twice without looking inside it.
Now he straightened slowly and turned to face Bennett. Lieutenant? Yes, sir. Your commanding officer. Bennett’s mouth went dry. The cold helped him hide it. He is not at the command post, sir. I can see that. Silence. The wind moved between the trees. A pine creaked somewhere above them. Where is he, Lieutenant? There was no way out of the question.
Bennett had known there would not be. He had known it from the moment Sergeant Kowalski had walked into the tent at 3:00 in the morning. He had known it through every minute since. South, sir. 7 miles. Doing what? Bennett’s voice was quieter than he wanted it to be. Coordinating supply, sir, according to the duty log.
For how long? Three nights. The wind kept moving. Patton’s expression did not change. Bennett would remember for the rest of his life that the general did not curse. He did not raise his voice. He did not say a single one of the words that the United States Third Army had told stories about for 2 years. He simply said, “Get in the jeep, Lieutenant.” They went south.
The road was bad. The road had been bad for a week. There were stretches where the snow had drifted deep enough to bury a man to the waist, and the military police escort had to push twice with bare hands to free the lead vehicle from a hidden ditch. The convoy moved at the speed of a man walking.
The wind came in across the open fields where the trees thinned out, and inside the open jeep, three stars and all, Patton sat exposed and did not speak. Bennett rode in the second vehicle. He was not sure why he had been ordered to come. He had not been told what was about to happen. He had only been told to get in, and he had gotten in because in the Third Army you did not ask a man with three stars to explain himself.
But he could guess. He had been guessing since the moment the colonel’s name had been spoken. The further south they drove, the stranger the world became. The roads got better. The snow along the verges looked older. The trees pulled back. They passed a farmhouse that had its chimney still working, white smoke climbing straight up into the gray morning.
They passed an aid station that was orderly with stretchers lined up under a canvas roof and a coffee urn steaming on a table outside. The further from the line, the more the war began to look like a war that other people fought. After about 40 minutes, the road bent slightly and through the falling snow Bennett saw the building.
It was not a hotel in the way American soldiers in 1944 used the word. It was a small stone country inn, two stories, the kind of place that had served traveling salesman and the occasional Belgian wedding party for 200 years before any American had ever heard of it. The shutters were closed. The roof was steep. Smoke came out of two chimneys.
Three jeeps and a staff car were parked outside in fresh snow that had not been cleared. The lights were on behind the shutters. Bennett, watching it through the cracked windshield of the second vehicle, felt something he had not expected to feel. He felt embarrassed, not for the colonel, for himself, because for one bad second, looking at those warm windows through the storm, he had wanted, more than he had wanted anything in five days, to go inside.
Then he remembered the boy in the foxhole whose left foot looked like an old bruise. The shame went away. It was replaced by something harder. The convoy stopped. Patton stepped out of the lead jeep before the engine was even off. The snow began to cover his shoulders immediately. He looked at the inn for a long moment, then he walked toward the door.
The door opened into warmth. That was the first thing. The warmth hit you in the face like a slap. After 2 days on the line, after the long cold drive, after the snow on the shoulders and the wind in the open Jeep, the inside of that small Belgian inn was so warm it almost hurt. Bennett, stepping through the door three paces behind the general, felt his face begin to burn in the way that frozen skin burns when blood comes back to it.
The lobby was small. A staircase climbed the right wall to the second floor. A fireplace took most of the left wall, and there was fire in it. Real fire, real seasoned hardwood, the kind of fire that the men on the line had not seen in 2 weeks. There were three officers in the room. One was a major.
He was seated in a leather chair near the fire with a coffee cup in his hand and a folded newspaper across his knee. The newspaper was the European edition of Stars and Stripes, the same paper that Private Hayes had been stuffing into his boot at 3:00 that morning. The other two were captains. They had been speaking when the door opened.
They were not speaking anymore. The major saw the three stars first. He stood up so quickly his coffee spilled across the newspaper. Nobody saluted. Nobody moved. The room held its breath like a man waiting for the second sound of a rifle bolt. Patton said nothing. He looked at the fireplace.
He looked at the coffee cup on the leather chair. He looked at a small table beside it where a half-finished plate of bread and cheese was still warm enough to give off the faintest trace of steam. He looked at the staircase. Then finally, he spoke. His voice was so quiet that Bennett, who was standing 4 ft behind him, had to lean forward to hear it.
“Bring him down.” The major’s mouth opened, closed, opened again. “Sir, the colonel is” I said, bring him down. The major moved. He climbed the stairs at the speed of a man who already knew he had lost something he would not get back. The room waited. Bennett looked at the fireplace and the longer he looked at it, the more it began to feel less like a fire and more like a piece of evidence.
A minute passed, two. The footsteps came back down, heavier this time, two sets. The colonel was about 45 years old and he had hastily pulled a wool robe over a clean uniform shirt. His hair was combed. He had not been roused from sleep, he had been roused from breakfast. Halfway down the stairs, he saw the general waiting by the fire.
The blood went out of his face. It was the most physical thing Bennett had ever seen happen to a grown man without anyone touching him. The colonel completed the stairs. He stopped at the bottom. He raised his hand to salute. General, how many of your men are unfit for duty this morning? The colonel hesitated.
I I would have to check the morning report, sir. Check it. It’s at the at the command post, sir. I haven’t. You haven’t been there. Sir, I came back here to coordinate. How many fires were burning on your line at 4:00 this morning? Silence. How many of your men have you personally inspected for trench foot in the last 72 hours? Silence.
How many pairs of dry socks were distributed yesterday? Silence. How many overshoes? The colonel’s voice, when it finally came, was very small. Sir, the supply situation has been I issued an order in November. Sir, that order had my signature on it. Yes, sir. And you did not follow it. It was not a question.
The colonel did not try to answer it as if it were. The fire snapped behind them. Outside the shutters, the wind rose in a long dragging note and then fell away again. Bennett watched the general’s hands. They were not clenched, They were not shaking. They were perfectly still. That was what was terrifying. The stillness. Patton walked over to the leather chair near the fire.
He looked down at the spilled coffee and at the newspaper that was beginning to brown where the coffee had soaked into it. He looked back at the colonel. Get your coat. The colonel blinked. Sir? You are going to spend the day with your battalion. Yes, sir. You will walk the line with me. You will look at every man. You will count the boots that work and the boots that do not.
You will personally see the cases that have been taken to the aid station. Yes, sir. You will not return to this building. A long pause. You will not return to any building until your men have. The colonel closed his eyes for one full second. When he opened them, something had gone out of his face.
It would not come back during this war. Yes, sir, he said. He climbed the stairs to get his coat. They put him in the back of the second truck. There was no ceremony to it. No announcement. The general did not say to anyone, in front of anyone, that this man was being punished. He simply gestured toward the truck, and the colonel climbed up into the open bed, and a military policeman closed the tailgate behind him.
There were five enlisted men already inside. Three of them were wounded. Not the killing kind of wounded, the slow kind. Trench foot, frostbite, the kind of injury that did not make a sound. They were being transported back to the battalion aid station since the supply truck was returning empty, and there was no sense in wasting the trip.
The fourth man was Corporal Dolan, the medic. The fifth was Private First Class Hayes. Hayes had been pulled out of the line shortly before 10:00 that morning. His left foot had begun to show what Dolan called the bad signs, the ones that meant tissue was already gone and probably more was going. Dolan had walked him down to the road.
The truck had picked him up. He had been riding south for 30 minutes on his way to the aid station when the convoy had stopped at the inn. Now he was riding north again, back the way he had come with a colonel sitting 2 ft across from him. The colonel did not look at any of them. He sat with his back against the cab, his hands in his lap, his eyes on the floor of the truck bed.
His coat was clean, his boots were dry, his face had the closed look of a man who had decided that if he did not look at his surroundings, his surroundings would stop existing. Hayes looked at him. Hayes was 20 years old, and he was running a fever, and he was missing the top knuckle of feeling in three of his toes.
He looked at the colonel for a long time. He did not say anything. He did not need to. After about 10 minutes, Hayes reached down slowly to his left boot. Dolan saw him doing it. Dolan opened his mouth to stop him. He did not. Hayes worked at the lace. His fingers were not very good anymore, but he got it loose.
He pulled the boot off. The sock came with it. The smell rose immediately in the closed air of the truck bed, sour and unmistakable. The colonel did not look up. Hayes [snorts] set the boot down on the wood beside him. The foot underneath was the color of a black plum where it should have been the color of a foot. Hayes left it there.
He did not put the boot back on. He did not say a word. The colonel kept his eyes on the floor. He did not have anywhere else to put them. Dolan looked at Hayes. Hayes looked at the colonel. The wounded men looked at nothing at all. The truck went north through the snow. Nobody spoke for the rest of the ride. When the convoy reached the line, Patton did not return to the rear.
He stayed. He spent the rest of December 22nd, 1944 on his feet in the cold with a battalion that had not seen its commanding officer for three nights. He did not give a speech. He did not call the men together. He gave orders one at a time to one officer at a time and each order was specific and small and could not be misunderstood.
Tear down the abandoned farm shed at the edge of the tree line. Use the wood. Move two of the medics forward by a hundred yards. Distribute every dry sock you have. Everyone. Now. Take the canvas off the supply tarpaulin. Cut it into squares. Wrap the men’s feet. Find me the trench foot count by 1600 hours.
He moved through the line the way he had moved through it that morning. But now there was a rhythm to it and the men felt the rhythm. They did not cheer. The Third Army did not cheer when Patton came around. But they straightened slightly the way a man straightens when he hears his name called by someone he respects.
Late in the afternoon he stopped in front of a sergeant who was bent over a small fire feeding it pieces of broken pallet wood one piece at a time the way you would feed a sick child. The sergeant looked up. It was Kowalski. Patton looked at him for a moment. Sergeant, General, you still able to fight? Kowalski did not hesitate. Yes, sir.
Patton nodded once. He moved on. That was the entire exchange. It would not appear in any history book. It would not be mentioned in any after-action report. There would be no medal pinned, no commendation written, no photograph taken. But Kowalski, who would live to be 81 years old, would remember those five words for the rest of his life.
He would remember them in 1953 when his oldest boy went to Korea. He would remember them in 1968 when his youngest came home from Vietnam without the use of his right hand. He would remember them in 1997 when his wife asked him in the kitchen of their small house in western Pennsylvania, why he never seemed to feel sorry for himself.
He would remember them because on a freezing afternoon in the Ardennes, in a war that was killing better men than him by the thousands, and a three-star general had stopped in front of him and asked a question that was also somehow an answer. The colonel walked the line behind Patton for the rest of the day.
Nobody saluted him. Nobody spoke to him. He had become, in the space of a single morning, the most invisible man in the United States Third Army. The weather broke on the morning of December 23. It broke the way some prayers are answered, which is to say, not all at once, but slowly and with a quality of indifference that suggested the sky had been going to do this anyway.
The cloud cover thinned by degrees. The snow stopped falling. The wind, which had been the most physical enemy of the past five days, dropped to the kind of low murmur that allowed men to hear, for the first time in a week, the sound of their own breathing. Then the planes came. They came from the west, from the airfields of liberated France, and they came in numbers that the men in the foxholes had almost stopped believing in.
C-47 transports, P-47 Thunderbolts, the drone of engines that meant supply drops, that meant air cover, that meant the men inside Bastogne would not have to choose by Christmas Day between rationing morphine and rationing bullets. Patton was in his command vehicle when the first reports came in.
According to the diary he kept, and that Martin Blumenson would later edit into two thick volumes, the second of which appeared in 1974, he wrote four words about the change in the sky. “God damned good weather.” That was all. Chaplain James Hugh O’Neill, the 41-year-old Catholic priest who had written the weather prayer 15 days earlier, would say later that he did not think God needed any particular credit for the break in the clouds.
He would say only that men in war prayed for what they could not control, and that the sky had cleared, and that the two facts did not necessarily have anything to do with each other. Patton, who attended chapel every Sunday and slept with a Bible on the nightstand and swore like a teamster in the daylight, pinned a bronze star on O’Neal anyway.
He understood, in his own complicated way, what the men needed. The colonel spent Christmas Eve in the line. He had a foxhole. He had a blanket. He had the standard ration that every man in the battalion had, which on the night of December 24th included a small tin of canned fruit that the supply officer had managed to scrounge from somewhere.
He did not eat his. He passed it without speaking to the wounded man in the next hole over. The wounded man took it. He did not thank him. That was how it went for the rest of the colonel’s time with the battalion. He was there, and he was visible, and he did the work, and he gave the orders, and the orders were obeyed because they were lawful orders given by a man wearing the eagles of his rank.
But nobody looked at him, not directly, not for any longer than the function of duty required. If he gave a command, the sergeant repeated it to the men, and the men carried it out, and the men spoke to the sergeant. They did not speak to him. If he walked along the line, men found something to do that required them to be facing the other way.
They did not insult him. The Third Army did not produce insubordination in its enlisted men, it produced something quieter and harder and worse. It produced absence. He was a man who had been removed from the human company of his own battalion without ever being relieved of his command. He carried out the function of an officer for 3 more weeks until the army quietly transferred him in the second week of January to a desk position in a rear area headquarters, where he would spend the rest of the war and the rest
of his career. His name does not appear in any public role of officers relieved by General Patton during the winter of 1944. That is not an oversight. That is the point. Martin Blumenson, in his edited collection of Patton’s papers, would note that the general was unusually careful that winter about the formal record of reliefs.
There were dozens of them in the Third Army between November and February. Most were never made public. Patton understood something about armies that not every commander understood. He understood that a publicly disgraced officer is a story, and a story is a distraction, and a distraction is the last thing an army needs in the middle of the largest battle the United States Army had ever fought in Europe.
The point was not to punish the colonel. The point was to fix the line. The line was fixed. Trench foot cases in the battalion dropped by more than two-thirds in the 72 hours after Patton’s visit. The drop was not because of inspirational speeches, of which there were none. The drop was because, for the first time in 2 weeks, every man in the battalion had dry socks twice a day, working fires, blankets in rotation, and an officer who walked the line and looked at their feet.
That officer was no longer the colonel. That officer was Lieutenant Bennett, the platoon commander who had walked the line beside Patton. On the recommendation of the officers above him, who had seen what he had done during the third week of December, he would be promoted to captain before the end of January.
On December 26, 3 days after the weather broke, a column of Sherman tanks belonging to the 37th Tank Battalion of the Fourth Armored Division pushed through the southern perimeter of the German encirclement around Bastogne. The battalion was commanded by a lieutenant colonel named Creighton Abrams. He was 30 years old.
He would, in another generation, command American armies in another war on another continent, and his name would eventually be placed on the main battle tank of the United States Army. But on the afternoon of December 26th, 1944, he was simply a young tank officer who had been pushing his men through frozen Belgian forest for 5 days without sleep.
The first American to physically reach the men inside Bastogne was a first lieutenant named Charles Boggs. His tank crossed the perimeter at 4:50 in the afternoon. He climbed down. An engineer officer of the 101st Airborne walked out of a tree line to meet him. They shook hands. Neither of them said anything for the historians.
The siege of Bastogne was over. The battle was not. The fighting in the Ardennes would continue for another month. The cold would not break properly until February. Thousands more Americans would die before the salient was pushed back to where the German line had stood on the night of December 15th. Some of them would die from bullets, some from artillery, and some still from the cold.
Patton, the man who had moved his army 100 miles north in 48 hours, the man who had walked the line on December 22nd, the man who had quietly destroyed the careers of dozens of officers without ever putting their names in the newspaper, was not finished with his contradictions. The same general who had insisted in writing that every soldier in his army receive overshoes had also, 3 months earlier, ordered the assault on the fortified city of Metz.
The Lorraine campaign that surrounded that assault was, by the calculations of historians like Carlo D’Este and John Nelson Rickard, one of the bloodiest and least strategically defensible operations of the Third Army’s war. American casualties in the Lorraine campaign ran into the tens of thousands. Many of them died in conditions that were nearly as cold as the Ardennes, and many of them died for the personal pride of a man who could not stand to leave a German fortress unbroken behind him.
The diaries that Blumenson would later publish contain other things that do not appear on the monuments. They contain remarks about Russians, about Jews, about black American soldiers that no reasonable reader can square with the language of the man who wept in field hospitals over the lost feet of his infantry.
Patton was not a simple man. He was not a hero in the way that the films would later try to make him a hero. He was a deeply, almost violently capable soldier, and he was a man whose private mind contained things that his public memory would never quite reconcile. He saved the boy in the foxhole. He also said and believed things in private that the boy in the foxhole, had he heard them, might not have wanted to be saved by him.
Both of those things are true. A year later, almost to the day, on a country road near Mannheim in occupied Germany, Patton’s staff car was struck by a slow-moving army truck at a rail crossing. The crash was not violent. Patton was the only person seriously injured. His neck was broken.
He was paralyzed from the chest down. He was taken to a military hospital in Heidelberg. He lingered for 12 days. He died on December 21st, 1945. He was 60 years old. That date, for anyone who counted, was almost exactly 1 year after the morning he had walked the frozen line outside Bastogne and counted the boots of a battalion that had been failed by its colonel.
There is no record of what he thought about in those 12 days in the hospital bed in Heidelberg. There is no record of whether the men in the foxholes crossed his mind. There is only the record of his death in a clean military hospital under blankets in warmth in a way that nine out of 10 of the boys he had commanded would have considered an unimaginable luxury.
Private First Class Hayes lost the toes on his left foot. He did not lose the foot. He came home in the summer of 1945. He took a job at a paper mill in his hometown. He married a girl he had known in high school. He had [snorts] three children. He walked with a faint limp for the rest of his life, which his children noticed and which his grandchildren eventually stopped noticing, the way children stop noticing the small permanent injuries of the men around them.
He never spoke about the colonel, not to his wife, not to his children, not to the local Veterans of Foreign Wars chapter where he drank a beer every Friday night for 41 years. He spoke sometimes about Patton. He spoke about the weather. He spoke about the medic, Dolan, who had cut his boot off without taking the skin with it.
He spoke about a sergeant named Kowalski who had checked his face for frostbite in the dark, but he did not ever in 83 years on this earth speak the colonel’s name out loud. That too was a kind of judgment. It was perhaps the longest one.
