From Atkinson’s The Guns at Last Light:
“Glory Has Its Price”
Time in the last week of December chose Eisenhower as its “Man of the Year.” A flattering cover portrait depicted the supreme commander flanked by American and British flags, with legions of soldiers stretching behind him into the middle distance. The honor rang a bit tinny given the current German salient in Allied territory, which now measured forty miles wide by sixty miles deep. U.S. losses in the last fortnight of December included almost 600 tanks, 1,400 jeeps, 700 trucks, 2,400 machine guns, 1,700 bazookas, 5,000 rifles, and 65,000 overcoats. The enemy had accumulated such a large American motor pool that pilots were ordered to bomb any column that included both Allied and German vehicles.
Of greater concern was a German armored spearhead ripping a seam between the U.S. VII Corps in the south and XVIII Airborne Corps in the north. Fatigue, dispersion, empty fuel tanks, and ammunition shortages impaired the enemy drive. In some instances. half a German brigade towed the other half, and ordnance trucks often had to make a four-night round trip drive to Bonn for Artillery shells. But on Christmas Day the 2nd Panzer Division was only five miles from Dinant, soon drawing near enough to the Meuse to draw fire from British tanks. Four divisions in Joe Collins’s VII Corps, now nearly 100,000 strong, were ordered to counterpunch on a fifty-mile front, with Major General Ernie Harmon’s 2nd Armored Division smashing into the enemy vanguard after a seventy-mile road march from the Roer River that took less than a day.
Savage fighting raged from the Salm to the Meuse for three days. As Typhoons and Lightnings screamed over the treetops at Foy-Notre Dame, just east of Dinant, Harmon’s tanks rumbled through a wood in nearby Celles, destroying or capturing 142 vehicles and taking nearly five hundred prisoners. On December 26, Manteuffel authorized survivors from 2nd Panzer to flee on foot, abandoning equipment from six battalions. Farther east, a British flame-throwing tank persuaded two hundred Germans to emerge with raised hands from a last stand chateau in Humain, while thirteen artillery battalions drove the 2nd SS Panzer out of Manhay. In confused fighting at Sadzot-known to GIs as Sad Sack-enemy crews mortared their own platoons; the engagement turned out to be Sixth Panzer Army’s last sally before Model ordered Dietrich onto the defensive.
Eisenhower for the past week had been looking for counteroffensive opportunities that would trap the overextended Germans and fulfill his ambition of annihilating enemy forces west of the Rhine. An Ultra intercept decoded just after Christmas revealed that Model’s army group was fast running short of serviceable tanks and assault guns; despite recent losses, the U.S. First, Third, and Ninth Armies alone had almost four thousand tanks. But disagreements over when and where to strike back divided Allied commanders.
Patton favored driving from the south through to base of the German salient, toward Bitburg and then east, in hopes of bagging the entire enemy pocket. Collins, in a memorandum on Wednesday, December 27, laid out three options and endorsed “Plan No. 2,” a strong attack from the north toward St.-Vith, complemented by Third Army’s lunge from the south. Montgomery hesitated, suspecting the Rundstedt had enough combat strength for another attack that could punch through the Americans to Liege. Collins thought not. “Nobody is going to break through these troops,” he told Montgomery. :This isn’t going to happen.” If the Allies failed to attack closer to the base of the salient, they risk leaving a corridor through which retreating Germans could escape, he told the field marshal. “You’re going to push the Germans out of the bag,” Collins added, “just like you did at Falaise.”
Falaise could hardly be blamed solely on Montgomery, who through much of the European campaign had evinced a bold streak-in Market-Garden, for instance, and in encouraging the Americans to blow past the Brittany cul-de-sac. But now he turned cautious, perhaps discouraged by First Army’s early drubbing. He had doubted Patton’s ability to reach Bastogne or impede Manteuffel, and he doubted that the poor roads leading south towards St.-Vith would support Collin’s scheme. Rather than gamble on an attempt by First and Third Armies to sever the forty-mile base of the salient, he thought a more prudent counterstrike would aim the two armies’ main blows across the waist of the bulge at Houffalize, north of Bastogne, shooing away the enemy rather than trapping him, and only after the German offensive had, as he put it, “definitely expended itself.”
Eisenhower chafed at Montgomery’s caution. When he learned on Wednesday that the filed marshal was at last ready to consider counterattacking, the supreme commander exclaimed sarcastically, “Praise God from whom all blessings flow!”
“Monty is a tired little fart,” Patton informed his diary the same day. “War requires the taking of risks and he won’t take them.” Yet others were just as circumspect as Montgomery. Beetle Smith in a staff meeting on Wednesday suggested telling “our masters in Washington that if they wanted us to win the war over here they must find us another ten divisions.” Bradley also favored pinching the enemy at Houffalize, not least because Eisenhower had promised to return First Army to his command when the town fell. First Army planners agreed that poor roads precluded hitting at the base of the Ardennes salient, and Monk Dickson, the intelligence chief, endorsed Montgomery’s view the Rundstedt could strike again; he counted seventeen uncommitted German divisions. Deteriorating weather further encouraged prudence: a five-day spell of clear skies ended on Thursday, December 28, and with it the comfort provided by Allied air fleets.
Joe Collins should have commanded 1st Army instead of Hodges.
I don't know who Atkinson is, but I sure don't agree with his assessment of Eisenhower and how his being honored "rang a bit tinny." The guy was a hero of the first order IMO. His instincts were good, except when he would let Monty influence him against his own best judgment as in Market-Garden.
Eisenhower's response to response to the German Ardenne offensive was exactly what was needed IMO. Immediately upon realizing the German counter-offense he mobilized troops from France and sent them speeding toward the fray overnight in anything that had four wheels. He immediately called a meeting of top generals that resulted in Patton's unprecedented ninety-degree turn and heroic rescue of Bastogne.
Atkinson also seems to slide over Monty's reluctance to act as though it were an anomaly which it was not - it was his MO.
From all of that, I would guess Atkinson was a British reporter/author.