Trump Would Have Loved This Christmas Card Gen. Patton Sent His Troops in 1944 Asking for Their Prayers

December 1944 was not a season of comfort or cheer for Gen. George S. Patton.

Yes, his Third Army was driving relentlessly across Europe. Yes, the Nazi war machine was months from collapse, and Imperial Japan was nearing defeat as well. But as Patton’s armored divisions pushed toward Bastogne — a critical Belgian crossroads held by roughly 15,000 American troops and surrounded by an estimated 50,000 German forces — the general faced a threat that tanks and tactics could not defeat.

Rain. Endless, suffocating rain.

“There is about four inches of liquid mud over everything,” Patton wrote to his wife, “and it rains all the time, not hard but steadily.” The weather grounded Allied aircraft, stripping the besieged Americans of vital air support and threatening to derail one of the most urgent rescue missions of the war.

According to the Friends of the National World War II Memorial, Patton understood that the situation demanded more than logistics or resolve. It demanded divine intervention.

On Dec. 8, 1944, Patton placed a call to the Third Army’s chief chaplain, Father James O’Neill.

“Do you have a good prayer for weather?” Patton asked. “We must do something about those rains if we are to win the war.”

O’Neill searched but found no existing prayer suitable for the moment. Instead, he wrote one himself and presented it to the general.

Patton’s response was immediate and unmistakable: “Have 250,000 copies printed,” he ordered, “and see to it that every man in the Third Army gets one.”

What followed became one of the most remarkable episodes of World War II — and a piece of American military lore that endures to this day.

The prayer read:

“Almighty and most merciful Father, we humbly beseech Thee, of Thy great goodness, to restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend.

“Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.”

On the reverse side of the card, Patton added a personal message to his troops:

“To each officer and soldier in the Third United States Army, I wish a Merry Christmas. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We march in our might to complete victory. May God’s blessings rest upon each of you on this Christmas Day. – G.S. Patton, Jr., Lt. Gen. Commanding, Third United States Army.”

History records what happened next. The following day, the skies cleared. The Third Army surged forward, broke through German lines, and relieved the 101st Airborne at Bastogne. By the end of January, the Battle of the Bulge — Hitler’s final major offensive — had been decisively crushed, sealing the fate of the Third Reich.

Before the prayer was distributed, Patton made his conviction clear to the chaplain.

“Chaplain, I am a strong believer in prayer,” he said. “A good soldier is not made merely by making him think and work. There is something in every soldier that goes deeper than thinking or working — it’s his ‘guts.’ It is something that he has built in there: It is a world of truth and power that is higher than himself.”

Even Patton — a famously hard-edged commander with philosophical leanings far from Sunday school — understood the irreplaceable role of Christian faith. So did the men who fought America’s wars before the cultural revolution of the 1960s hollowed out the nation’s moral confidence.

Today, America is no longer fighting to liberate occupied Europe. But the lesson remains. After years in which figures like Lloyd Austin presided over a Pentagon shaped by the Biden administration’s secular and ideological priorities, the country has begun a slow course correction under President Donald J. Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Still, restoring a truly God-fearing national culture will not happen overnight.

The reason for the season has never changed. It is Christ — and the humility to pray.

If Gen. Patton could remember that truth while facing one of the most consequential military decisions in American history, then surely we can remember it this Christmas as well — including the president of the United States.