What Patton Did When Eisenhower Asked the Impossible at Bastogne

On 19 December 1944, with the German offensive in the Ardennes three days old and widening, Eisenhower called his senior commanders to a cold barracks room in Verdun. The question he put to Patton was simple and, to most of the men in that room, unanswerable: how long to break off the Third Army's attack into the Saar, turn it ninety degrees to the north, and drive into the German flank.