“Patton’s relief of Batstone was the finest moment of his career”
The inside baseball on that is that Patton had a contact at Bletchley Park and the Ultra intercept data and did not dismiss the possibility, as others had, that something was brewing and so prepared to turn his whole army around and send them north, just in case.
Interesting. I had never heard that before. It was brilliant Generalship on Patton’s part.
Patton actually listened to the intel reports, and wasn’t worried about pussyfooting around British fee-wings or intimidated by their claims of strategic genius. He had to. He let the Bastogne garrison know the 3rd would be there for drinks on Christmas Day, turned out it was early in the morning on the 26th. :^)
The Germans had to use crossroads of the better roads to move effectively, so knotting up and holding crossroads at great cost stymied the German offensive. Somewhere around here there’s a book about a group of US military engineers who were in the right place at the wrong time, were told to trench and sandbag, resist at all costs, and stoppered ‘em up in that area.
The Germans had conjured 26 divisions seemingly out of thin air, but had to prevail in a pretty short time frame because such a large op couldn’t be sustained.