Patton’s Top 3 Legendary Tactical Moves
In the winter of 1943, the German High Command looked at the American Army in North Africa and saw amateurs. At Kasserine Pass, an entire American Corps had been broken in a matter of days. And the verdict in Berlin was the same as the verdict in London. The Americans could not fight. But there was one specific man in the American officer corps whom the Germans would come to fear above every other Allied commander, George Smith Patton Jr.
The soldier his own men called Old Blood and Guts. He never commanded an army group. He was censured, relieved, and sidelined more than once. And yet, when the war was over, German generals named him the most dangerous commander the Allies ever put in the field. But what exactly set him apart from all the other generals? Let’s take a closer look at Patton’s three greatest tactical moves of the Second World War.
By the end of February 1943, the American Second Corps had stopped being a fighting formation. Kasserine had cost it more than 5,000 men, nearly half of them taken prisoner. It had lost 183 tanks, 208 artillery pieces, and more than 500 Jeeps in under a week. The Corps still existed on paper. In the field, it was a crowd of shaken men holding a line in southern Tunisia.
On the 6th of March, 1943, Patton arrived to take command. He did not begin with a tactical plan. He began with neckties. Mess halls closed at 7:30 in the morning and stayed closed. Helmets were to be worn strapped. Leggings were to be worn in the desert heat. And every man out of uniform was fined $25, half a month’s pay for a private.
Omar Bradley, then his deputy, understood exactly what the neckties were for. Every time a soldier knotted one, Bradley wrote, he was reminded that the days before Kasserine had ended. The Germans noticed none of this. Rommel had flown out of Africa on the 9th of March, and his successor, von Arnim, inherited his contempt for American troops along with his command.
Field Marshal Kesselring wanted the Americans pushed back out of the Eastern Dorsals, and he expected it to be quick. The 10th Panzer Division drew the job. 6,000 men, roughly 50 serviceable tanks, assault guns, and a screen of tank destroyers aimed straight down the Gafsa road at an infantry division that had never yet held against armor.
Patton read the ground first. The road ran east out of El Guettar into a long open valley walled by ridges. The 1st Infantry Division laid dense minefields across the mouth of it. Behind them, the tank destroyer battalions were dug in on the reverse slope of Kedab Ridge, invisible from the valley floor.
With the artillery registered in advance on the open ground, the Panzers would have to cross. Nothing waited in the open. Everything waited behind the crest. At 6:00 in the morning on the 23rd of March, 1943, the 10th Panzer came down the valley in formation. A second American collapse in 5 weeks would have finished the American army as an independent force in the Mediterranean, and every officer on that ridge knew it.
The Panzers reached the minefield and halted to clear it. That pause was the entire battle. The tank destroyers came up over the crest, fired, and reversed back out of sight, while massed artillery fell on armor that had nowhere left to go. In roughly 1 hour, close to 30 German tanks were burning on the valley floor. One panzer destroyed every 2 minutes.
The Germans came again in the afternoon with infantry leading and the gunners cut them apart with air bursts and with shells skipped off the hard ground. Watching from the high slope, Patton said it seemed a crime to murder good infantry like that. By the next morning, the 10th Panzer reported 26 tanks still running.
Half its armored strength gone in a day. The Americans had paid for it. >> One tank destroyer battalion lost 21 vehicles and 72 men and casualties across the position ran to roughly 500. But for the first time in the war, a veteran German panzer division had attacked American troops in open country and been broken by men who 17 days earlier had not been trusted to hold a road.
The shape of the thing was already visible. Preparation finished before anyone ordered it. Speed that outran what the enemy believed possible. And a blow delivered at the exact point where the enemy had decided no blow could come. Those three habits would define every campaign Patton ever fought. Before we move on to Patton’s second great tactical move, if you are enjoying this kind of detailed tactical breakdown, do consider subscribing.
There is a lot more like this on the way because with the 10th Panzer broken behind him, Patton was about to be handed the largest amphibious invasion in history and then ordered to stand aside while somebody else won it. Operation Husky opened on the 10th of July, 1943. >> The plan gave Montgomery’s Eighth Army the direct road to Messina up the east coast.
Patton’s Seventh Army was to land on the southern beaches and guard the British flank. On the 13th of July, Alexander went further and shifted the army boundary west, handing Highway 124 to the British and taking the last good northward road out of American hands. Bradley carried the order to Patton and told him he could not allow it. The thinking behind that order was still the thinking of Kasserine.
The Americans were fit to hold a flank and nothing more. Patton did not argue on paper. On the 17th of July, he flew to Tunis, walked into Alexander’s headquarters and asked permission for what he called a reconnaissance in force toward the west. Alexander took the phrase to mean a patrol. Patton took it to mean an army.
He built a provisional corps around the 2nd Armored Division, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 82nd Airborne and handed it to his deputy, Geoffrey Keyes. It moved on the 19th of July. When Alexander grasped what was happening and signaled Patton to stop, Patton’s chief of staff, Hobart Gay, reported the message garbled and requested a repeat.
He went on requesting repeats until Palermo had fallen. Sicily’s second city was in American hands on the 22nd of July. The provisional corps had covered roughly 100 miles in 72 hours and swept up some 19,000 prisoners. Then Patton turned east and made it a race. The north coast was the worst ground in Sicily.
The Caronie Mountains came down to the sea in ridge after ridge. Each one a natural fortress, each one held by the rear guard of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division, blowing the coast road behind it. Attacking straight into that would have cost a division and taken a month. So, Patton refused to attack it straight. He put infantry battalions onto landing ships and landed them behind the German line instead.
Leapfrogging each ridge by sea while the main body pressed from the front. The first attempt went in near Sant’Agata on the 8th of August and shook a thousand prisoners loose. The second was the one that mattered. Lucian Truscott wanted the Brolo landing postponed. Patton refused and asked him whether he was afraid to fight.
Truscott answered that if Patton doubted him, he could give the division to anyone he pleased. The landing went in on the 11th of August. 650 men under Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Bernard came ashore behind the Nassau Ridge, seized Monte Cipolla, and cut Highway 113, the only road the German rearguard had. Then the 29th Panzergrenadier turned around and came at them.
Bernard’s radio traffic that afternoon is the whole battle in four words. Enemy counterattacking fiercely. Do something. Of 650 men, 177 became casualties inside a single day, more than one in four, and seven of his eight guns were destroyed on the beach. But the road had been cut at the hour it mattered, and the German position on the coast came apart.
An American patrol entered Messina at 4:30 in the morning on the 17th of August, 1943. Patton had won his race by a matter of hours. Then came the sting. In 38 days, Seventh Army had lost close to 9,000 men, roughly 235 every day of the campaign, and across a strait barely 3 km wide at its narrowest point. The Germans had ferried out nearly 40,000 troops, over 9,000 vehicles, 47 tanks, and most of their guns, while the Italians brought back 60,000 more.
Patton had taken Sicily. He had not taken the German army in Sicily. The pattern had held all the same. The plan prepared before permission arrived. Movement faster than the enemy could answer. And the blow landed where the ground itself was supposed to make it impossible. And as the war ground into the frozen December of 1944, that Patton would be asked to do something no staff in Europe believed an army could do at all.
On the 16th of December, 1944, more than 200,000 German troops and close to a thousand tanks came out of the Ardennes Forest into a thinly held American sector. The objective was the River Meuse, and beyond it, Antwerp, splitting the American and British armies in two. Within 3 days, the town of Bastogne, where seven roads met, was surrounded.
And the 101st Airborne was inside it. The whole offensive rested on one assumption: snow and fog would ground Allied aircraft. The roads were sheets of ice, and the German staff had calculated that no Allied army could break off a battle it was already fighting and redeploy in time to change anything. The calculation was sound. It had simply been made about the wrong man.
Patton’s Third Army was attacking east into the Saar when the Ardennes broke open. On the 18th of December, before anyone asked him for it, Patton ordered his chief of staff, Hobart Gay, and his operations officer, Hal Maddox, to stop what they were doing and plan the opposite war. Disengage Third Army from its eastward attack. Turn it 90 degrees.
Drive north into Luxembourg. They did not draft one plan. They drafted three. One for each possible axis of advance. Each complete down to march tables and road priorities. And each given a code name. On the 19th of December, Eisenhower called his commanders to Verdun. Bradley had heard it the night before, so Bradley was not surprised.
The rest of the room was. Patton said he could attack with three divisions in 48 hours. Senior officers around that table did not believe it was physically possible. And Eisenhower told him to take three days rather than go in piecemeal. Then Patton walked to a telephone, spoke one prearranged phrase to his headquarters, and an army began to move.
No new orders were written. No conference was held. The staff work had been done 36 hours earlier. And a single sentence released it. What followed was the largest and fastest redeployment of the war in Europe. More than 133,000 vehicles were rerouted. 63,000 tons of supplies were shifted in five days.
57 tons of maps went out to units that had been fighting on entirely different sheets that morning. And roughly 20,000 miles of signal wire were laid to keep the thing talking to itself. When the attack opened, 108 battalions of artillery, 1,296 guns were behind it. Patton spent those days in an open jeep in freezing weather, working traffic at icy crossroads himself and pushing stuck trucks out of the ruts alongside the men who drove them.
He had also, back on the 8th of December, asked his chaplain, James O’Neill, for a prayer for good weather and had a quarter of a million copies printed and issued. On the 23rd of December, the skies over the Ardennes cleared and the fighter-bombers came out. Patton said the chaplain had done some potent praying and pinned a bronze star on him.
Inside Bastogne, on the 22nd of December, a German party came forward under a white flag and demanded surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe answered with a single word, “Nuts.” His own officers had to explain to the Germans that it meant, “Go to hell.” The attack jumped off at 6:00 that same morning.
The 4th Armored Division led over frozen roads into infantry dug in on every rise and the ground it had to cover was roughly 100 miles from where it had started the week. On the afternoon of the 26th of December, the Reserve Combat Command, under Creighton Abrams, went at the village of Assenois head-on.
2,340 artillery rounds went into it in a few minutes and the tanks drove through their own barrage. At about 4:50 in the afternoon, the lead Sherman, a heavily armored tank named Cobra King, cleared the last of the German positions south of the town. Its commander, Lieutenant Charles Boggs, was met on the road by Lieutenant Dwayne Webster of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion.
The corridor into Bastogne was open. It had not been cheap. The 4th Armored Division lost about a thousand men getting there. Abrams’ tank battalion was down to roughly 20 tanks and his lead company to four. And across the Ardennes as a whole, American losses in the first 18 days ran to 41,315 men, 96 casualties every hour around the clock for two and a half weeks.
Patton himself called the relief of Bastogne the outstanding achievement of the war. The men who had planned the offensive agreed in their own way. >> After the war, General Blumentritt wrote that they had regarded Patton as the most aggressive Panzer general the Allies possessed. A man of lightning action whose operations came closest to their own idea of a commander.
Alfred Jodl was blunter still. He called Patton the American Guderian. A general who preferred large movements, took enormous risks, and won enormous successes. Rommel, who had left Africa convinced the Americans were beatable, later wrote that it was Patton’s army in France that produced the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare he had seen.
The German army had spent two and a half years being told that the Americans could not fight. It had spent those same years learning the name of the one American who could not be stopped from moving. Thank you for watching. What is your favorite tactical move by Patton? And which commander should I cover next? Let me know in the comments.
And if you enjoy the content, why not subscribe? See you again soon.
Patton’s Top 3 Legendary Tactical Moves
In the winter of 1943, the German High Command looked at the American Army in North Africa and saw amateurs. At Kasserine Pass, an entire American Corps had been broken in a matter of days. And the verdict in Berlin was the same as the verdict in London. The Americans could not fight. But there was one specific man in the American officer corps whom the Germans would come to fear above every other Allied commander, George Smith Patton Jr.
The soldier his own men called Old Blood and Guts. He never commanded an army group. He was censured, relieved, and sidelined more than once. And yet, when the war was over, German generals named him the most dangerous commander the Allies ever put in the field. But what exactly set him apart from all the other generals? Let’s take a closer look at Patton’s three greatest tactical moves of the Second World War.
By the end of February 1943, the American Second Corps had stopped being a fighting formation. Kasserine had cost it more than 5,000 men, nearly half of them taken prisoner. It had lost 183 tanks, 208 artillery pieces, and more than 500 Jeeps in under a week. The Corps still existed on paper. In the field, it was a crowd of shaken men holding a line in southern Tunisia.
On the 6th of March, 1943, Patton arrived to take command. He did not begin with a tactical plan. He began with neckties. Mess halls closed at 7:30 in the morning and stayed closed. Helmets were to be worn strapped. Leggings were to be worn in the desert heat. And every man out of uniform was fined $25, half a month’s pay for a private.
Omar Bradley, then his deputy, understood exactly what the neckties were for. Every time a soldier knotted one, Bradley wrote, he was reminded that the days before Kasserine had ended. The Germans noticed none of this. Rommel had flown out of Africa on the 9th of March, and his successor, von Arnim, inherited his contempt for American troops along with his command.
Field Marshal Kesselring wanted the Americans pushed back out of the Eastern Dorsals, and he expected it to be quick. The 10th Panzer Division drew the job. 6,000 men, roughly 50 serviceable tanks, assault guns, and a screen of tank destroyers aimed straight down the Gafsa road at an infantry division that had never yet held against armor.
Patton read the ground first. The road ran east out of El Guettar into a long open valley walled by ridges. The 1st Infantry Division laid dense minefields across the mouth of it. Behind them, the tank destroyer battalions were dug in on the reverse slope of Kedab Ridge, invisible from the valley floor.
With the artillery registered in advance on the open ground, the Panzers would have to cross. Nothing waited in the open. Everything waited behind the crest. At 6:00 in the morning on the 23rd of March, 1943, the 10th Panzer came down the valley in formation. A second American collapse in 5 weeks would have finished the American army as an independent force in the Mediterranean, and every officer on that ridge knew it.
The Panzers reached the minefield and halted to clear it. That pause was the entire battle. The tank destroyers came up over the crest, fired, and reversed back out of sight, while massed artillery fell on armor that had nowhere left to go. In roughly 1 hour, close to 30 German tanks were burning on the valley floor. One panzer destroyed every 2 minutes.
The Germans came again in the afternoon with infantry leading and the gunners cut them apart with air bursts and with shells skipped off the hard ground. Watching from the high slope, Patton said it seemed a crime to murder good infantry like that. By the next morning, the 10th Panzer reported 26 tanks still running.
Half its armored strength gone in a day. The Americans had paid for it. >> One tank destroyer battalion lost 21 vehicles and 72 men and casualties across the position ran to roughly 500. But for the first time in the war, a veteran German panzer division had attacked American troops in open country and been broken by men who 17 days earlier had not been trusted to hold a road.
The shape of the thing was already visible. Preparation finished before anyone ordered it. Speed that outran what the enemy believed possible. And a blow delivered at the exact point where the enemy had decided no blow could come. Those three habits would define every campaign Patton ever fought. Before we move on to Patton’s second great tactical move, if you are enjoying this kind of detailed tactical breakdown, do consider subscribing.
There is a lot more like this on the way because with the 10th Panzer broken behind him, Patton was about to be handed the largest amphibious invasion in history and then ordered to stand aside while somebody else won it. Operation Husky opened on the 10th of July, 1943. >> The plan gave Montgomery’s Eighth Army the direct road to Messina up the east coast.
Patton’s Seventh Army was to land on the southern beaches and guard the British flank. On the 13th of July, Alexander went further and shifted the army boundary west, handing Highway 124 to the British and taking the last good northward road out of American hands. Bradley carried the order to Patton and told him he could not allow it. The thinking behind that order was still the thinking of Kasserine.
The Americans were fit to hold a flank and nothing more. Patton did not argue on paper. On the 17th of July, he flew to Tunis, walked into Alexander’s headquarters and asked permission for what he called a reconnaissance in force toward the west. Alexander took the phrase to mean a patrol. Patton took it to mean an army.
He built a provisional corps around the 2nd Armored Division, the 3rd Infantry Division, and the 82nd Airborne and handed it to his deputy, Geoffrey Keyes. It moved on the 19th of July. When Alexander grasped what was happening and signaled Patton to stop, Patton’s chief of staff, Hobart Gay, reported the message garbled and requested a repeat.
He went on requesting repeats until Palermo had fallen. Sicily’s second city was in American hands on the 22nd of July. The provisional corps had covered roughly 100 miles in 72 hours and swept up some 19,000 prisoners. Then Patton turned east and made it a race. The north coast was the worst ground in Sicily.
The Caronie Mountains came down to the sea in ridge after ridge. Each one a natural fortress, each one held by the rear guard of the 29th Panzer Grenadier Division, blowing the coast road behind it. Attacking straight into that would have cost a division and taken a month. So, Patton refused to attack it straight. He put infantry battalions onto landing ships and landed them behind the German line instead.
Leapfrogging each ridge by sea while the main body pressed from the front. The first attempt went in near Sant’Agata on the 8th of August and shook a thousand prisoners loose. The second was the one that mattered. Lucian Truscott wanted the Brolo landing postponed. Patton refused and asked him whether he was afraid to fight.
Truscott answered that if Patton doubted him, he could give the division to anyone he pleased. The landing went in on the 11th of August. 650 men under Lieutenant Colonel Lyle Bernard came ashore behind the Nassau Ridge, seized Monte Cipolla, and cut Highway 113, the only road the German rearguard had. Then the 29th Panzergrenadier turned around and came at them.
Bernard’s radio traffic that afternoon is the whole battle in four words. Enemy counterattacking fiercely. Do something. Of 650 men, 177 became casualties inside a single day, more than one in four, and seven of his eight guns were destroyed on the beach. But the road had been cut at the hour it mattered, and the German position on the coast came apart.
An American patrol entered Messina at 4:30 in the morning on the 17th of August, 1943. Patton had won his race by a matter of hours. Then came the sting. In 38 days, Seventh Army had lost close to 9,000 men, roughly 235 every day of the campaign, and across a strait barely 3 km wide at its narrowest point. The Germans had ferried out nearly 40,000 troops, over 9,000 vehicles, 47 tanks, and most of their guns, while the Italians brought back 60,000 more.
Patton had taken Sicily. He had not taken the German army in Sicily. The pattern had held all the same. The plan prepared before permission arrived. Movement faster than the enemy could answer. And the blow landed where the ground itself was supposed to make it impossible. And as the war ground into the frozen December of 1944, that Patton would be asked to do something no staff in Europe believed an army could do at all.
On the 16th of December, 1944, more than 200,000 German troops and close to a thousand tanks came out of the Ardennes Forest into a thinly held American sector. The objective was the River Meuse, and beyond it, Antwerp, splitting the American and British armies in two. Within 3 days, the town of Bastogne, where seven roads met, was surrounded.
And the 101st Airborne was inside it. The whole offensive rested on one assumption: snow and fog would ground Allied aircraft. The roads were sheets of ice, and the German staff had calculated that no Allied army could break off a battle it was already fighting and redeploy in time to change anything. The calculation was sound. It had simply been made about the wrong man.
Patton’s Third Army was attacking east into the Saar when the Ardennes broke open. On the 18th of December, before anyone asked him for it, Patton ordered his chief of staff, Hobart Gay, and his operations officer, Hal Maddox, to stop what they were doing and plan the opposite war. Disengage Third Army from its eastward attack. Turn it 90 degrees.
Drive north into Luxembourg. They did not draft one plan. They drafted three. One for each possible axis of advance. Each complete down to march tables and road priorities. And each given a code name. On the 19th of December, Eisenhower called his commanders to Verdun. Bradley had heard it the night before, so Bradley was not surprised.
The rest of the room was. Patton said he could attack with three divisions in 48 hours. Senior officers around that table did not believe it was physically possible. And Eisenhower told him to take three days rather than go in piecemeal. Then Patton walked to a telephone, spoke one prearranged phrase to his headquarters, and an army began to move.
No new orders were written. No conference was held. The staff work had been done 36 hours earlier. And a single sentence released it. What followed was the largest and fastest redeployment of the war in Europe. More than 133,000 vehicles were rerouted. 63,000 tons of supplies were shifted in five days.
57 tons of maps went out to units that had been fighting on entirely different sheets that morning. And roughly 20,000 miles of signal wire were laid to keep the thing talking to itself. When the attack opened, 108 battalions of artillery, 1,296 guns were behind it. Patton spent those days in an open jeep in freezing weather, working traffic at icy crossroads himself and pushing stuck trucks out of the ruts alongside the men who drove them.
He had also, back on the 8th of December, asked his chaplain, James O’Neill, for a prayer for good weather and had a quarter of a million copies printed and issued. On the 23rd of December, the skies over the Ardennes cleared and the fighter-bombers came out. Patton said the chaplain had done some potent praying and pinned a bronze star on him.
Inside Bastogne, on the 22nd of December, a German party came forward under a white flag and demanded surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe answered with a single word, “Nuts.” His own officers had to explain to the Germans that it meant, “Go to hell.” The attack jumped off at 6:00 that same morning.
The 4th Armored Division led over frozen roads into infantry dug in on every rise and the ground it had to cover was roughly 100 miles from where it had started the week. On the afternoon of the 26th of December, the Reserve Combat Command, under Creighton Abrams, went at the village of Assenois head-on.
2,340 artillery rounds went into it in a few minutes and the tanks drove through their own barrage. At about 4:50 in the afternoon, the lead Sherman, a heavily armored tank named Cobra King, cleared the last of the German positions south of the town. Its commander, Lieutenant Charles Boggs, was met on the road by Lieutenant Dwayne Webster of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion.
The corridor into Bastogne was open. It had not been cheap. The 4th Armored Division lost about a thousand men getting there. Abrams’ tank battalion was down to roughly 20 tanks and his lead company to four. And across the Ardennes as a whole, American losses in the first 18 days ran to 41,315 men, 96 casualties every hour around the clock for two and a half weeks.
Patton himself called the relief of Bastogne the outstanding achievement of the war. The men who had planned the offensive agreed in their own way. >> After the war, General Blumentritt wrote that they had regarded Patton as the most aggressive Panzer general the Allies possessed. A man of lightning action whose operations came closest to their own idea of a commander.
Alfred Jodl was blunter still. He called Patton the American Guderian. A general who preferred large movements, took enormous risks, and won enormous successes. Rommel, who had left Africa convinced the Americans were beatable, later wrote that it was Patton’s army in France that produced the most astonishing achievements in mobile warfare he had seen.
The German army had spent two and a half years being told that the Americans could not fight. It had spent those same years learning the name of the one American who could not be stopped from moving. Thank you for watching. What is your favorite tactical move by Patton? And which commander should I cover next? Let me know in the comments.
And if you enjoy the content, why not subscribe? See you again soon.
