NEW ANXIETY beset First Army headquarters, which had again fallen back, to Tongres, near Maastricht, only hours before German bombs demolished the Hôtel des Bains in Chaudfontaine. Ridgway evinced his usual grit, telling his division commanders by phone at six A.M. on December 24,
The situation is normal and entirely satisfactory. The enemy has thrown in all of his mobile reserves, and this is his last major offensive effort in the West in this war. This corps will halt that effort, then attack and smash him.
The Russian High brought clear skies for the first time since the German attack began, and Allied aircraft took wing in great flocks. In a campaign known as “processing the terrain,” twelve thousand offensive sorties were flown in the two days before Christmas, battering highways, airfields, and bridges, as well as rail centers in Koblenz, Trier, and Cologne. Whooping GIs craned their necks as wave upon wave of flying Marauders and Fortresses, Liberators and Lancasters appeared from the west in the heaviest attacks of the war. “The bombers have fine, feathery white streams of vapor streaked across the sky,” a 99th Infantry Division soldier wrote his wife, “and the fighters scrawl wavy designs as they try to murder each other.” Ice and deep snow entombed German convoys west of the Rhine; horse-drawn plows could hardly clear enough routes for three attacking armies. Model’s resupply and reinforcement echelons offered fat targets for Allied fighter-bombers, known as “Jabos” to enemy soldiers. “We prefer to walk instead of using a car on the main highway,” a German lieutenant near St.-Vith wrote in his diary. “The American Jabos keep on attacking everything that moves on the roads.… [They] hang in the air like a swarm of wasps.”
Martin B26 Marauder bombers in formation.