At the beginning of Chapter 7, what did the authors believe that the Germans were thinking before their attack?

The Germans were probably thinking about how they would be the lucky gunners who fired the first rounds into the American lines and turned the war in favor of Germany. They would have been thinking about how they would tell their descendants that a quarter million men, more than 700 tanks, and thousands of artillery pieces had been camouflaged in the Ardennes Forest for weeks. They were thinking how after their successful operation they would attack Stalin and Russia and defeat the Communists.