"ALL OF US, WITHOUT EXCEPTION, WERE ASTONISHED"

SHORTLY BEFORE three P.M. on Saturday, December 16, a SHAEF colonel tiptoed into Eisenhower’s office in the Trianon Palace Hotel in Versailles, where General Omar Bradley and four others had just settled around a conference table with the supreme commander. The officer carried a sketchy dispatch from the front suggesting “strong and extensive attacks” in the Ardennes; an alarming number of German divisions already had been identified. Scrutinizing a map that showed blows against U.S. V and VIII Corps, Major General Strong, the SHAEF intelligence chief, wondered aloud if the enemy had designs on the Meuse and then Brussels. Beetle Smith indelicately recalled recent warnings to the 12th Army Group of resurgent strength in the German Sixth Panzer Army, but Bradley remained skeptical. This was likely nothing more than a spoiling attack, he said, intended to disrupt the Allied assault toward the Rhine; the rumpus would soon peter out. As the meeting broke up, Strong cautioned that “it would be wrong to underrate the Germans.”

Eisenhower and Bradley dined that night at the supreme commander’s handsome stone villa in St.-Germain-en-Laye. Despite sour tidings from the Ardennes, they were in a celebratory mood: word had just arrived from Washington of the president’s decision to nominate Eisenhower for a fifth star. After spending sixteen years as a major, Eisenhower had ascended from lieutenant colonel to general of the U.S. Army in forty-five months. The two friends shared a bottle of champagne and played five rubbers of bridge.

Eisenhower, in a subsequent cable to Washington-based army chief of staff George Marshall, would confess that “all of us, without exception, were astonished” at the strength of AUTUMN MIST. Nearly a week would elapse until SHAEF intelligence confirmed the Germans’ ambitions of creating a salient: splitting the Allied armies in half by moving forward to capture a long tongue of territory between the Allied troops in the north and south. The supreme commander sensed on the battle’s first day that the trouble in the Ardennes went beyond a spoiling attack. Before repairing to St.-Germain for the evening, he had insisted that Bradley phone his headquarters to shift the 7th Armored Division to St.-Vith from the north, and the 10th Armored Division from the south toward Bastogne. When Bradley replied that Patton would resent the latter order, Eisenhower snapped, “Tell him that Ike is running this damn war.”

A German soldier examines a captured American heavy machine-gun vehicle.

Other moves quickly followed. SHAEF’s only experienced combat reserve consisted of the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions; both had hoped for another month to recuperate from recent battles, but neither would get another day. Army tactical doctrine, learned in World War I, called for combating an enemy salient by first containing the intrusion from both sides. Paratroopers from the two divisions were ordered to the Ardennes immediately. The deployments of one armored division and three infantry divisions from Britain to the Continent would be accelerated, as would troopship sailings to France from the United States. Commanders at the front were told that Meuse bridges were to be held at all costs, or blown into the river if necessary. Patton also was instructed to prepare to swing north and to take Middleton’s beleaguered VIII Corps under his wing. “By rushing out from his fixed defenses,” Eisenhower added in an order to subordinates, “the enemy may give us the chance to turn his great gamble into his worst defeat.” Supply dumps would be defended, evacuated, or burned as required, and defenses around newly liberated Paris strengthened.

In a message to Marshall, Eisenhower assured the chief that “in no quarter is there any tendency to place any blame upon Bradley”—he had “kept his head magnificently.” Yet only grudgingly did Bradley acknowledge his peril. With the fighting front barely a dozen miles away, his room in the Hôtel Alfa was moved to the rear of the building as a precaution against stray artillery, and he now avoided the front door, entering through the kitchen. Aides removed the three-star insignia from his jeep and covered the stars on his helmet. During a brief moment of panic, staff officers buried secret documents in the headquarters courtyard, disguising the cache as a grave and marking it with a wooden cross and dog tags.

Still, Bradley affected nonchalance. Logisticians and engineers were told to continue working on the army group’s plan to cross the Rhine River into Germany. After supper on Monday, December 18, upon studying a map that showed at least four U.S. divisions retreating westward and others threatened with encirclement, he told an aide, “I don’t take too serious a view of it, although the others will not agree with me.”

Among those who no longer agreed was First Army commander Courtney Hodges. At his headquarters at the Hôtel Britannique in the city of Spa, Belgium, he had shared Bradley’s defiant attitude of denial for more than a day after the German attack began. Fourteen of his First Army divisions were holding a 165-mile front from Aachen, Germany, to Luxembourg. But as Sunday wore on, deep unease began spreading through his command post. Church bells pealed to signal a civilian curfew from six P.M. to seven A.M. Mortar crews outside Spa scattered tin pans and crockery around their pits as makeshift alarms against infiltrators. Birds were mistaken for German paratroopers, and improvised patrols scrambled off in pursuit. “Thermite grenades were issued with which we could destroy our papers,” Forrest Pogue informed his diary.

On December 18, Hodges ordered the evacuation of military and civilians. Reports put German panzers first at six miles, then two miles from Spa. Both sightings proved false, but they accelerated the evacuation. “I imagine that the Germans felt like [this] when they had to leave Paris,” Pogue wrote. Belgian schoolchildren assembled to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” while their parents ripped down American flags and photos of President Roosevelt. Twelve hundred patients and medicos emptied the 4th Convalescent Hospital within ninety minutes, bolting for Huy. German V-1s hit two fleeing convoys, killing two dozen GIs and leaving charred truck chassis scattered across the road.

Lieutenant General Courtney Hodges, commander of the U.S. First Army

A German Luftwaffe Heinkel bomber

Monday night at ten P.M., the command group pulled out for Chaudfontaine, near Liège, where a new headquarters opened at midnight in the Hôtel des Bains. Left behind in Spa were secret maps and food simmering on the stove.

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EVACUATION of the vast supply dumps in eastern Belgium seemed far more ambitious than the abandonment of a headquarters hotel, but the task was capably done. Some stockpiles were beyond either removal or destruction—for instance, the eight million rations stored around Liège. Quartermasters in Paris also calculated that even if the biggest depots along the Meuse were captured, enough stocks could be found in the rear to last ten days or more, until emergency shipments arrived from the United States. But smaller supply depots, hospitals, and repair shops were ordered to move west of the river. With help from 1,700 First Army trucks and 2,400 railcars, about 45,000 tons of matériel and 50,000 vehicles were shifted out of harm’s way, along with a quarter million rear-echelon soldiers who were mainly administrators and patients.

Three miles of explosive cord was used to blow up stored grenades, mines, and torpedoes—as well as twenty tons of sugar, rice, and flour—in an exposed supply dump near Malmédy. Most critical were the 3.5 million gallons of gasoline, largely in five-gallon cans grouped in thousand-can stacks, now within ten miles of Lieutenant Colonel Peiper’s SS spearhead. The fuel dump covered several square miles of woodland near Stavelot. In all, 800,000 gallons of gas and 300,000 gallons of vehicle grease and oil were spirited away beginning Sunday night, as Peiper approached the town; another 134,000 gallons were ignited as a flaming roadblock on Highway N-28. More than two million additional gallons were quickly evacuated from Spa using ten-ton tractor-trailers and railcars rushed to a nearby siding. Except for several minor caches captured by the Germans, Rundstedt’s tanks and trucks would be forced to rely on their own dwindling fuel stocks.