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That same night, Winters and Nixon were the only two battalion staff officers at HQ. The others had taken off for Paris. Pvt. Joe Lesniewski went to the movies at one of the Mourmelon theaters. He saw a film featuring Marlene Dietrich. Gordon Carson went to bed early, to be ready for football practice in the morning.
Winters and Nixon got word by radio that all passes were canceled. At the theater, the lights went on and an officer strode onto the stage to announce a German breakthrough in the Ardennes. In the barracks, Carson, Gordon, and others were awakened by the charge of quarters, who turned on the lights and reported the breakthrough. "Shut up!" men called back at him. "Get the hell out of here!" That was VIII Corps's problem, First Army's problem. They went back to sleep.
But in the morning, when the company fell in after reveille, Lieutenant Dike told them, "After chow, just stand fast." He was not taking them out on a training exercise, as was customary. "Just stand by" were the orders. Dike told them to kill the time by cleaning the barracks. Evidently what was going on up in the Ardennes was going to be of concern to the 82nd and 101st Airborne after all.
Hitler launched his last offensive on December 16, in the Ardennes, on a scale much greater than his 1940 offensive in the same place against the French Army. He achieved complete surprise. American intelligence in the Ardennes estimated the German forces facing the VIII Corps at four divisions. In fact by December 15 the Wehrmacht had twenty-five divisions in the Eifel, across from the Ardennes. The Germans managed to achieve surprise on a scale comparable with Barbarossa in June 1941 or Pearl Harbor.
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the offensive made no sense. For Hitler to use up his armor in an offensive that had no genuine strategic aim, and one that he could not sustain unless his tankers were lucky enough to capture major American fuel dumps intact, was foolish.
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the defenders were guilty of gross over confidence. Even after the failure of MARKET-GARDEN, the Allies believed the Germans were on their last legs. At Ike's HQ, people thought about what the Allied armies could do to the Germans, not about what the Germans might do to them. The feeling was, if we can just get them from out behind the West Wall, we can finish the job. That attitude went right down to the enlisted-man level. Sgt. George Koskimaki of the 101st wrote in his diary on December 17: "It has been another quiet Sunday. . . . The radio announced a big German attack on the First Army front. This should break the back of the German armies."1
1. Rapport and North wood, Rendezvous with Destiny, 422.
The surprise was achieved, like most surprises in war, because the attackers did a good job of concealment and deception. They gathered two armies in the Eifel without Allied intelligence ever seeing them. By a judicious use of radio traffic, they got Ike's G-2 looking to the north of the Ardennes for any German counterattack (no one in the Allied world thought for one minute that a German counteroffensive was conceivable). Six months earlier, on the eve of D-Day, Ike and his officers had an almost perfect read on the German order of battle in Normandy. In December, on the eve of the German attack, Ike and his officers had a grossly inaccurate read on the German order of battle.