People who rarely use profanity means they do use it, and when they do, they do it for effect. Certainly, a demand that he surrender Bastogne would justify profanity in a forceful response.
> including by the US Army official historian
An official US Army historian's job is to make the US Army look good.
As we are all painfully aware these days, the accounts of newspapers are rarely accurate, and often outright fabrications. Why would WW2 accounts be any different?
I doubt McAuliffe would want to besmirch his record after the war, had nothing to gain by contraindicating it, and would be content to let it stand.
My father was a carefully honest man, and was never known by me to lie. He held his tongue until after McAuliffe passed away. He also told me some family secrets after all involved had passed, and asked me to keep them to myself until after he died, which I did.
It never occurred to me to ask him to write down that story, and now it's too late.
I know my evidence is hearsay and inadmissible in court. You're free to draw your own conclusions.
P.S. I was once personally involved in an incident that made the local TV news. There was nothing political about it, but each of the three local news channels got essentially all the basic facts about it wrong. But that is the "record" of the event. It pretty much soured me on the veracity of news reports.