Sweetwilliam’s Reviews > Patton's Prayer: A True Story of Courage, Faith, and Victory in World War II > Status Update

Moving at full speed- around 25 miles per hour on a road or 16 mph across open ground- helped reduce the chances of being hit, especially by a German tank or anti-tank vehicle armed with the formidable 88mm gun, the most feared weapon among US forces in Europe….”

By this stage of the war, one of the greatest menaces was Germans wielding Panzerfausts - single shot equivalents of the bazooka that could destroy a tank at close range. German teenagers, pumped up on amphetamines, could be lurking behind a tree or a hedgerow or in a ditch and suddenly emerge…tankers used their most potent weapon, their .50 cal machine guns, raking roadsides, ripping and shredding trees and fences

My men don’t dig foxholes. I don’t want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don’t give the enemy time to dig one either.

Sure we want to go home. We want the war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to get those bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin I’m going to shoot that paper hanging son of a bitch just like I’d shoot a snake!

In foxholes near Bastogne, Americans also tried their best to find hope, to get through Christmas night, and to avoid freezing to death.
Then one paratrooper finally learned what Patton had known: that Abraham’s forces were approaching from the south.
Relief was at hand.
“Patton didn’t know the words ‘can’t do it,’” he recalled. The news was “like manna from heaven.”

Relief of Bastogne - Blue Skies: News of Payton’s presence “passed up and down our column and one could see clearly in the posture and expression of every soldier that any previous doubt had been summerly erased” recalled Frankel. “We had them licked by God. That pistol-packin’, swaggerin’, Hun-killin’ son of a bitch had just said so in unmistakable terms!”

“God damn! That O’Neill sure did some potent praying. Get him up here. I want to pin a medal on him….Chaplain, you’re the most popular man in headquarters…you stand in good with the Lord and soldiers.” Patron then pinned a Bronze Star Medal on O’Neil’s chest. He was the only man to be awarded a medal in WWII for writing a prayer.