The man would survive to tell the bloody tale of what had happened on that road through the forest.
And there would be hell to pay.
CHAPTER THREE
On the morning of December 19, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, officially the Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater but known to the common soldier and the public simply as Ike, summoned his command staff to Verdun.
His mood and those of his high-ranking officers were just as gloomy as the surroundings. The town was gray and drab, the streets filled with slush, offering little sign that it was the Christmas season. There were a few wreaths and swags of greenery tied with ribbon, but they appeared dried out by the winter wind, the ribbons faded.
He had made his temporary headquarters in that French town, in an old stone barracks that dated to at least the seventeenth century. Ivy clung to the mortar along with an air of history repeating itself.
After all, it was near this spot that one of the bloodiest battles of World War I had taken place against German forces, resulting in more than three hundred thousand men killed on both sides. Some of his generals had been young officers back then. Now, twenty-eight years later, the Germans had once again upset the applecart by refusing to be beaten and launching an offensive through the rugged Ardennes region.
The German offensive had taken everyone by surprise. Since coming ashore on June 6, 1944, Allied forces had been making mostly steady progress against the Germans, pushing them across France and back toward their fatherland. There had even been optimistic predictions that the war would be over by Christmas. However, Hitler’s offensive had blindsided the Allies.
The inability to detect any signs of the German plan was a complete failure of military intelligence and downright embarrassing to Eisenhower. The intelligence failure was partly due to the overall assumption that the Germans were on the ropes and incapable of an offensive operation. The complete secrecy with which Hitler’s generals had carried out their plan put it on par with the secrecy surrounding the D-Day invasion itself.
To make matters worse, there were rumors flying that none other than Otto Skorzeny, the daring SS commando, had hatched a plan to kidnap or kill Eisenhower. Perhaps the rumor was far-fetched, but it wouldn’t have been the first time that the Nazis had attempted something so outlandish. Consequently, Ike had been slinking around Verdun, coming and going through side doors, while a double rode around in his staff car.
To say that Ike wasn’t happy might have been an understatement.
“Do you think we can get some fresh coffee around here?” he grumped.
“Right away, sir,” replied no less than a full-bird colonel, who went hurrying out of the meeting room to fetch a fresh pot of coffee.
Ike had looked like hell since the planning for D-Day began, thanks to the stress that weighed upon his shoulders and a lack of sleep. The bad news of the last few hours hadn’t done much to improve his condition.
It also didn’t help that the fifty-four-year-old survived mainly on a diet of cigarettes, black coffee, hot dogs, and two fingers of bourbon nightly. He preferred not to waste time on food and was well aware that his troops in the field didn’t eat any better.
A haze of stale cigarette smoke already filled the room. A couple of the British officers smoked pipes, which only added to the fug, along with the smell of wool uniforms, damp from the rain and releasing the smell of stale perspiration.
The bare stone walls and small windows set deep within them did little to add any sense of warmth to the room, heated by a rusty potbelly stove that burned damp chunks of scrap lumber and struggled to throw off any real heat. Easels displaying maps had been set up around the perimeter of the room, though that was somewhat unnecessary, considering that most of the men here spent several hours daily studying maps and could have drawn these from memory. The tobacco smoke hugging the ceiling continued to thicken like an approaching storm front.
Outside the room, the guard had been doubled as a precaution, with at least two burly MPs standing beside each doorway. They were doing a thorough job of questioning anyone who wasn’t wearing a general’s stars.
Present for the meeting were all the key players in Allied military operations, including Air Marshal Arthur Tedder, General Omar Bradley, General George Patton, Lieutenant General Jacob Devers, and Field Marshal Montgomery’s deputy, Freddie de Guingand. Conspicuously absent was Montgomery himself, who preferred not to meet personally with those he deemed of lower rank — such as Eisenhower. Nonetheless, it was Eisenhower who was in charge — and who would be blamed if the German offensive proved successful.
Accompanying these men were several staff members. Most prominent among them was the recently promoted Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith, who served as Eisenhower’s chief of staff. He was known to all by his nickname, Beetle, which not only was a play on his actual name, but which also reflected his hard-shelled personality. With so many demands for the general’s time and attention, he guarded access to the busy general like an armor-plated sentry.
On smaller matters that weren’t worthy of Eisenhower’s scrutiny, his decisions carried all the weight of the Supreme Allied Commander. Consequently, he was not a man to be trifled with. This morning he looked even more worried than usual, which for Beetle Smith was definitely saying something.
The room filled with high-ranking officers was unusually quiet. The matter of the German counteroffensive was serious business. They all watched Ike expectantly.
It was clear that the Supreme Allied Commander was disgruntled. To start with, Ike disliked the name that the press had given this defensive fight, having dubbed it the Battle of the Bulge. It was an apt description, considering that on the map, the German offensive had created a deep bubble through the Allied lines.
However, Ike thought that “Battle of the Bulge” sounded like a diet plan or, worse yet, a hernia repair operation.
Ike was determined not to turn this meeting into a blame game. He looked around at the room filled with anxious officers. However it had come about, they now had to deal with the situation.
The colonel returned with the coffee, and Ike nodded his thanks.
“Gentlemen, let’s get started. We have some business to discuss,” he said. He nodded toward a young officer, who hurried to close the double doors to the meeting room. “The Germans are apparently headed for Antwerp. Maybe even back to Paris, if they can. The question is, What are we going to do about it?”
“I say we should open the gate and let them come all the way in,” Patton said, jumping right into the fray. Out of all the officers in the room, he was the most immaculately dressed, from his tailored tunic right down to his gleaming riding boots. He somehow managed to have more stars on his uniform than the rest of the generals combined. “Once the Germans are really spread out, we hit them with a meat grinder. I’ll be happy to work the handle.”
For emphasis, he used his right hand to slowly make a cranking motion, showing how he would turn those panzer divisions into sausage.
“That’s not going to happen, George,” Ike said. He agreed that letting the Germans get strung out and then pulverizing them wasn’t a bad military strategy, but the American public might not see it that way. “We can’t let the Germans get that far. The question is, How do we stop them, right now?”
“If the weather wasn’t so bad, our planes wouldn’t be grounded, and this would be a different story,” an officer pointed out.