The Second Objective

12

Versailles, France

DECEMBER 16, 3:00 P.M.

Dwight Eisenhower was nursing a same-day champagne hangover. His valet, an ex-bellhop named Mickey McKeough, had married his Women’s Army Corps sergeant girlfriend that morning in the gilded Louis XIV chapel of the Trianon Palace Hotel on the grounds of the Versailles compound. Eisenhower told a friend that the diminutive bride and groom looked cute enough to decorate the top of their own cake. The reception went into the early afternoon, and when the bubbly ran out they dipped into the general’s private wine cellar. With only nine days left until Christmas and the front firmly in Allied control, few of the overworked staff at Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Forces needed an excuse to let off steam, but wishing Mickey and his wife well was better than most.

General Eisenhower had a more personal reason for indulging himself. A cable had arrived that morning informing him that President Roosevelt had placed his name in nomination before Congress for the post of General of the Army. This new rank would bring with it a fifth star and sole authority over the Allies’ entire armed forces in Europe. That much power had not been conferred on one soldier since the First World War. After sixteen years as a desk-bound major, Eisenhower had risen from lieutenant colonel to the army’s highest rank in a little over three years. The affable fifty-four-year-old Kansan had planned a private dinner that night to celebrate with some drinking buddies, among them one of his best friends and colleagues, General Omar Bradley. Bradley had arranged for a bushel of Ike’s favorite oysters to be flown in from the Normandy coast. Given their recent successes in the field, for the first time in two years, Eisenhower felt he could allow the weight of the war to slip slightly off his shoulders.

Eisenhower, Bradley, and four staff officers were in the Clemenceau Ballroom of the Trianon Palace at Versailles, which they used as their tactical map room. They were halfway through a relaxed meeting about how to speed up training and delivery of replacement soldiers from the States. Eisenhower drank coffee, chain-smoked, popped a handful of aspirin, and ate a big lunch, trying to negotiate away his headache from the morning’s champagne before the evening’s Scotch. He was already on medication for high blood pressure and stress. His left knee, sprained two months earlier and slow to recover, ached with the arrival of an early winter cold front. Outside, heading into the shortest days of the year, the sky was already beginning to darken.

The meeting was interrupted by the arrival of a brigadier general, deputy to Eisenhower’s chief intelligence officer, British Brigadier General Kenneth Strong. The man appeared grim and called Strong out of the room. Eisenhower saw the same look on Strong’s face when he returned, and asked him to share what he’d learned. Strong moved to one of the large maps that adorned the walls.

“We’re getting fragmented reports that the enemy counter attacked this morning across a broad front,” said Strong. “Here, in the Ardennes, First Army sector, all the way down into Luxembourg.”

Eisenhower looked to Bradley, whose headquarters were in Luxembourg City. “What do you know about this?”

“I was in Spa with General Hodges yesterday, but I didn’t see any of this myself,” said Bradley.

“Didn’t you hear anything, Brad?”

“Some early reports came in as we were leaving. My first thought was it’s just a spoiling attack. That’s what I still think. They’re trying to disrupt our move across the Rhine.”

Eisenhower stood up to join them at the map and pointed at the Losheim Gap. They called this sector the “Ghost Front,” for it had seen no heavy action since Hitler’s panzer blitz to Paris four years earlier. Eisenhower also knew that this same sleepy seven-mile corridor had served as the fast lane for Germany’s first-strike invasions of France in 1914 and 1870. Concentrating their effective forces to the north and south after pushing the Germans out of France, the Allies had rolled the dice that in winter the harsh terrain and broken roads of the thinly held Ardennes offered no strategic advantage or tactical temptation to the reeling Nazi army.

“We’re spread pretty thin in here, aren’t we, Brad?”

“Four divisions.”

“Fairly green, aren’t they?”

“Two of them are replacements. The others we’ve pulled off the line after heavy action.”

“So it’s half nursery, half old folks’ home.”

“That’s the risk we’ve taken.”

“How many divisions have they committed; do we have a count?”

“Not yet,” said Strong. “But Jerry’s put together a steady buildup on the other side of the Siegfried, as many as ten divisions already-”

“And intelligence always indicated that was purely defensive, in anticipation of our moving against them,” said Bradley, slightly irritated.

“Well, it isn’t defensive now.”

“This has to be a local attack, to distract us from Patton’s move into the Rhine.”

They had all been stunned by the news, but Eisenhower was the first to recover. His headache was gone, swept away by alarm and clarity. “This is our weakest point. Why would they hit our weakest point in force?”

“I don’t know the answer,” admitted Bradley. “He’s not after a terrain objective. That ground doesn’t mean anything.”

“This is no spoiling attack. Not with those kind of numbers.”

“Then what kind of attack is it?” asked Bradley.

“I don’t know yet, Brad, but we’re not going to wait to find out. First Army doesn’t have any reserve; they’ve caught us with our pants down.”

“I’m sure Hodges would’ve let us know by now-”

“Maybe he can’t. Mobilize 7th Armored out of Holland, get them moving toward Spa by morning. And I want three more divisions on stand-by to support this sector until we get it sorted out,” said Eisenhower. “What’s available to us?”

“We’ve got the 82nd and 101st bivouacked near Reims,” said Strong.

“They’re still being refitted,” said Bradley.

“Cancel all leaves, get ’em back in camp and ready to move in twenty-four hours,” said Eisenhower. “Patton’ll have to give us one of his for the third.”

“That’s going to hurt his move across the Saar,” said Bradley. “George isn’t going to like it.”

“George isn’t running this damn war,” said Eisenhower.

They wouldn’t learn until the following day that General Courtney Hodges, commander of First Army, headquartered in Spa, had been trying since early morning to alert Allied headquarters in Versailles that German forces were rolling over his forward positions.

His phone lines had all been cut.

The foul weather hovering over the Ardennes worsened during the night. Cold winds pushed through a front with heavy cloud cover that discharged sleet storms and sporadic snow. Across the Channel, all of England remained socked in as well, grounding Allied fighters and bombers that might have blunted the initial German advance. C-47 transports were unable to take off from British bases, denying reinforcements and fresh supplies to the troops under siege throughout the expanding front.

By dawn the disjointed communications received by Supreme Allied Command had coalesced into an alarming realization that the weakest sector in their front line was under assault from thirty-six divisions, over half a million men, the largest German offensive of the entire war.