The wounded at an aid station on the road leading to the small town of Neufchâteau 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.