Patton’s Worst Campaign Is Now Taught at West Point as What Not to Do

The verdict came first and it came from inside the army. A study written for the officers who would command America’s next war looked at three and a half months of fighting in one French province and reduced the whole thing to an arithmetic problem. To capture Lraine, a job that involved an advance of only 40 to 60 air miles.

The Third Army required over 3 months and suffered around 50,000 casualties. That is not a YouTube take. That sentence belongs to Dr. Christopher Gable. And the study is called the Lraine Campaign. An overview September to December 1944. It was published in February of 1985 by the Combat Studies Institute at the United States Army Command and General Staff College, Fort Levvenworth, Kansas.

Gable was an associate professor on that faculty. Levvenworth is the school where the Army teaches majors and lieutenant colonels how to run large formations. And the men who read that study were being trained to avoid what was in it. Now, about the claim that travels with this campaign, you have seen it.

The line says, “The Lraine Campaign is taught at West Point as an example of what not to do.” I went looking for that course. I could not verify it. The United States Military Academy does not publish a course by course reading list that I could check, and its history department page lists staff rides and internships without naming a single campaign.

What I can document with a publisher, a date, a place, and an author’s job title is Fort Levvenworth. That is the command and general staff college, not the academy. Different school, different students, different purpose. So Levvenworth is the institution this script will name. If a cadet at West Point is studying Lraine as a cautionary case, the academy has not put that on the public record where anyone can confirm it.

Hold on to that distinction because it is the whole shape of the problem. The Army did the reckoning on this campaign 40 years ago and filed it under professional education. The public never got the memo. And the distinction matters for a second reason. A cadet is being taught that war is possible. A major at Levvenworth is being taught that his own certainty is dangerous.

Those are different lessons and they are aimed at different men. The critique of Lraine was written for the second audience by a historian who worked for the school that trains them and it was written in the flat institutional voice of a document nobody expected a civilian to read. None of this material is buried either.

Hugh Cole wrote the official history for the army’s green book series, the Lraine Campaign, and it runs 14 chapters with appendices and maps. Carlo Deste covered the same ground in Patton, a genius for war. Anthony Kemp wrote a whole book on the fortress fighting called The Unknown Battle Mets, 1944. Steven Zoga counted the tanks in Lraine, 1944.

Rick Atkinson walked the same autumn in the Guns at last light. Six serious works, all of them in print or online. every one of them dealing at length with the three and a half months that the popular version of this man’s war skips over in a sentence. The record is not missing. The record is enormous. What is missing is this campaign’s place in the story America tells about the general who fought it.

And that absence was not an accident of scholarship. It was a choice about which parts of a reputation get carried forward. So let us do this properly. The charges in order with the numbers attached. Then the defense, given its full weight, because the defense has real weight, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling you something.

Then a verdict, and it will be mine, and I will show the work. Start with what the man had already proven, because the charges mean nothing without it. The Third Army became operational on August 1st, 1944. And for the next 30 days, it did something the United States Army had never done at that scale. It attacked west into Britany, south toward the war, east toward the sain, and north into the closing jaw at filez all at once with the same headquarters running all four.

The drive from a ranches to Argenton covered 60 m in two weeks. Armored columns outran their own maps. Liaison aircraft flew ahead of the spearheads because the reconnaissance troops could not keep up with the tanks. The scale of the thing is easy to lose in the legend. So, here it is in figures from Koh’s official history.

At the end of August, the Third Army numbered an estimated 314,814 officers and men. On September 5th, it counted 669 medium tanks between its armored divisions and its separate tank battalions. Behind those tanks stood 51 field artillery battalions, 15 tank destroyer battalions, 23 anti-aircraft battalions, and eight squadrons of mechanized cavalry.

That is not a rating force. That is an industrial enterprise moving at the speed of a raiding force. And no other Allied army headquarters in the West managed the trick that summer. The pursuit also came out of a favorable ledger, and the ledger is worth reading because it makes the autumn harder to explain, not easier.

Cole sets out the balance in the West at the start of September. The Allies had 23 infantry divisions and the equivalent of 15 armored divisions in the line. The Germans had 41 divisions on paper, five of which were already penned inside the coastal fortresses and going nowhere. In combat effectiveness, Cole puts the ratio at roughly 2:1 in favor of the allies.

In guns, at least 2 and a half to one. In tanks, approximately 20 to1. 20 to1 in tanks. Hold that figure because in 11 weeks, it stops mattering. And the reason it stops mattering is the argument of this whole video. The August pursuit was also not free, which the legend tends to forget. Cole records that by August 31st, the 90th Infantry Division had accumulated a casualty list equal to 59% of its authorized strength.

The 35th Infantry Division had already taken some 3,000 casualties at St. Low, at Vyer, and at Mortine before it ever saw the Moselle. The divisions that would have to force a fortified riverline in September arrived at that riverline hollowed out by the summer that made their commander famous. The men running the pieces were good.

Major General Walton Walker had the 20th Corps. Major General Manetti had the 12th Corps. Major General John Wood had the fourth armored division. And Wood’s division would go on to fight the sharpest armored action of the entire campaign. Below them, colonels like Kraton Abrams and Bruce Clark were learning a trade that would carry them to four stars.

And the Germans watched him. That part of the reputation is earned, and it is documented across every serious account, including Dest’s biography, which remains the standard life. The German command spent the late summer of 1944 trying to work out where the Third Army was going and getting it wrong because it moved faster than their reporting cycle.

The method behind that was not mystique. It was a set of habits that other American headquarters adopted later and more slowly. Reconnaissance pushed out beyond the point where a cautious commander would have stopped it. Self-propelled artillery placed with the spearhead instead of behind it, so the guns arrived when the tanks arrived.

Light aircraft flying as the eyes of the column. Engineers traveling with the lead elements rather than being called forward after a bridge was found blown. That is a professional’s toolkit and it is why officers who dislike the man’s personality still teach his summer. By August 28th, the Third Army was operating out of the area near Rams.

And by the first days of September, its leading elements were on the edge of Lraine. In four weeks, it had gone from a beach head in Normandy to the doorstep of Germany’s western industrial approaches. And everyone from Eisenhower down believed the war in the west had weeks left in it. Then the tank stopped. Here’s the part where the story usually goes soft.

So let us keep the numbers hard. The problem was not that the Germans halted the third army at the moose. The problem was fuel and the fuel numbers are unambiguous. Cole records that on August 30th, the third army received 31,975 gallons of gasoline. against its daily consumption. That receipt was approximately 368,025 gallons short.

Gavl adds that on August 31st, the Army received no gasoline at all. For scale, Gabell puts the Third Army’s daily gasoline consumption during the August pursuit at 350,000 gallons. And he puts Lraine some 500 miles from the Normandy beaches, over which that army still drew much of its supply. The Red Ball Express at its peak ran 6,000 trucks day and night to move that supply forward and burned 300,000 gallons a day doing it.

The trucking system that fed the offensive was consuming most of a field army’s daily allowance just to exist. That is the strategic picture on the day the third army arrived at the Moselle. Now the first charge the first charge is not that Patton attacked. It is that he attacked a fortified riverline with an army he could not supply.

and he did it before the supply arithmetic had changed at all. Look at the ground he chose to do it on. Lorraine is not the tank country of the Normandy breakout. Cole describes a plateau of ridges and river cuts with elevations running from 600 to 1,300 ft, sliced north to south by the Moselle and then by the SAR with Nancy sitting 30 m south of Mets and the two cities anchoring two separate core problems.

Every rgeline runs across the axis of an American advance. Every valley floor turns to a bog in the rain. And at the north end of it stands the fortress belt of Mets, a ring of permanent works laid down and rebuilt across roughly 50 years by two armies that each expected to defend the city against the other.

The fifth infantry division was preparing to assault into that belt on September 7th, one week after the day its army received no fuel at all. By September 10th, per Gable, Third Army artillery batteries were receiving only onethird of a unit of fire per day. one-third. In an army whose principal killing instrument was massed artillery, and whose own official historian credits that artillery with deciding fights again and again, the guns that were supposed to break the German crust were rationed before the attack on the crust began. The 12th

Corps went first. Eddie’s first attempt at Nancy opened on September 5th and failed. He came back at it, established a bridge head across the Moselle on September 11th, and took Nancy on September 15th with the 35th Infantry Division. That worked. It worked because Eddie had time to set it up properly and because he shifted his crossing away from the strength.

North of him at Mets, the 20th Corps did not get that luxury. And what happened there is the cleanest possible illustration of the charge. On September 8th, around 0600 hours, the 7th engineer combat battalion reached the bank of the Moselle at Dornote with infantry assault boats. By 1320 hours, companies F and G of the Second Battalion, 11th Infantry, reinforced by a handful of armored infantrymen, were across.

Lieutenant Colonel Kelly Lemon had his men on the far bank and no fire support worth the name behind them. What they dug was a horseshoe of foxholes just inside the edge of a wood, 300 yards deep and 200 yards wide. That was the bridge head. Four infantry companies in a pocket smaller than a golf course under the guns of Fort Gryant on the high ground.

and inside the reach of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, 48 men of the 23rd Armored Infantry Battalion came across to reinforce them. It was not enough and it was never going to be enough because the problem was not courage on the near bank. The problem was that a fortified river crossing is an artillery operation and the artillery had onethird of a unit of fire.

The Dornet bridge head was given up and it did not have to happen at all because two days later the same division showed how the job was actually done. At about 020 hours, the 10th infantry put its first boatloads across the Moselle between Nove and Arnavville, well south of the fortress guns. By 0 720 hours, the leading companies of the first and second battalions were east of the river and on their initial objective.

Cole records the difference plainly. That crossing had the 84th smoke generating company behind it, laying what was the first attempt by the Third Army at large area smoke screening. Not a new weapon, not a new division, a smoke company, a better sight, and a plan that respected the terrain instead of daring it.

I want to be exact about what I am charging here because this is where a lot of commentary goes lazy. I’m not saying the Third Army should have sat on the muse until spring. I am saying that within four days in the same core under the same army commander, one river crossing was run as an improvisation against the strongest point of the German line and one was run as a deliberate operation against a weak point and the second one worked.

The knowledge existed inside the organization. It was applied second. Quick note before we go on. 100 American commanders, admirals, and airmen. Every entry the same shape. Final rank commands, operations, decorations, fate. Then what the record holds against what was claimed. 716 credited photographs and a color volume carrying all of them.

Interpretations, not restorations. High commandw.com. Now back to Aracort. The second charge is dispersal and it is the one Gabble presses hardest. So let us start with the fight that proves the Third Army could still win big when it concentrated. On September 18th, the Germans came at Lunville, opening the fifth Panzer Army counteroffensive under Hasso on Mantofl.

Hitler had scraped together two fresh armored formations, the 111th and 113th Panzer Brigades and pointed them at the flank of Eddie’s 12th Corps. What they ran into on the Lraine Plateau was Combat Command A of the Fourth Armored Division under Colonel Bruce Clark. September 19th was the day Cole records that combat command A reported 43 enemy tanks destroyed, mostly factory new Panthers, against the loss of three American tank destroyers and five M4 tanks.

Personnel losses in combat command A that day were six killed and 13 wounded. Read those two lines together and you have the most lopsided armored exchange, an American division managed in the European theater that autumn. What made it possible was a combination the third army had and then stopped using.

Clark had the 37th tank battalion, the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion, the guns of the 66th and 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalions. Elements of the 35th Tank Battalion, and the 74th Tank Destroyer Battalion, and the 25th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron out front, finding the Germans before the Germans found him.

Overhead, when the weather allowed it, set the 45th fighter group of the 19th tactical air command in P47 Thunderbolts. That is a combined arms team held together under one commander, fighting on ground it had scouted. The Germans, by contrast, arrived peacemeal, which is the same mistake in reverse. Montuffle fed in the 113th Panzer Brigade, then the 111th alongside the 11th Panzer Division, the 21st Panzer Division, the 15th Panzer Grenadier Division, and the 559th Folks Grenadier Division of the German First Army. Two armies spent the last 10 days

of September proving the same doctrinal point to each other, and only one of them was learning it. The price was not nothing on the American side, either. Cole names Major Pitman and Colonel Reed of the cavalry among the casualties, which tells you how far forward the reconnaissance was working.

On September 26th, the 12th Corps was ordered onto the defensive. Zoga’s count in Lraine 1944 widens the frame. Across the whole Aracourt fighting, the Germans committed some 262 tanks and assault guns. 86 were destroyed and 114 were damaged or broken down. Combat Command A lost 25 tanks and seven tank destroyers over the same period.

For September as a month, the Third Army lost 151 medium tanks and 49 light tanks and knocked out 341 German tanks. That is what happened when American armor fought as armor on ground of its own choosing with its own guns behind it and its own reconnaissance in front of it. Wood’s division did not just hold. It gutted two brand new Panzer brigades in a week.

So here’s the charge. Having proved what masked armor could do, the Third Army spent the next three months not doing it. Gable’s language is direct and worth quoting as he wrote it. Patton, he says, can also be faulted for neglecting to practice economy of force and failed to concentrate third army’s resources in reinforcement of the core engaged in decisive operations.

He puts the doctrinal point in one line. One rule of thumb for mechanized forces that emerged from the war was to march dispersed but concentrate to fight. In Lraine, Third Army fought dispersed. And then the sentence that should sting anybody who loves this army. Patton’s reluctance to mass his armor, Gable writes, came as a pleasant surprise to the Germans.

The core commanders broke up the armored divisions and parcled them out by combat command, which diluted the armored punch further. Four armored divisions passed through the Third Army and Lraine, the fourth, the sixth, the seventh, and the 10th. At no point in three and a half months were they used as a mass.

They were fed into core sectors as fire brigades, split into combat commands and spent supporting infantry attacks across mud that could not carry a tank. On September 25th, the Third Army’s operations were halted outright by the logistical crisis, and the October pause began, which brings us to the fort. This is the part the campaign histories move past in a paragraph, and it deserves considerably more than that.

Fort Gryant sits about 5 miles southwest of Mets on high ground, just west of the Moselle. It was built in 1902 and modernized afterward by both the French and the Germans. Cole describes the layout. A central fort shaped like a Pentagon. Four casemates with reinforced concrete walls, some 7 ft thick. Each casemate mounting a three gun battery of either 100 or 150 mm caliber.

Around it, a dry moat 60 ft wide and as much as 30 ft deep. Around that, barbed wire to a depth of 60 ft. Underneath it all, a tunnel system the garrison could move through while American infantry stood on the roof. The assault opened on September 27th at 14:15 hours after an air attack. The second battalion, 11th infantry, went in.

By the end of that day, only 18 men in the two assault infantry companies had gotten inside the fort’s perimeter in any useful way. On September 29th, Eisenhower met with the ranking officers of the theater, and Patton approved continuing the giant operation. That is Cole’s account of the decision point, and it is the moment the campaign stops being about Lraine and starts being about a fort.

The second major assault went in on October 3rd at 12,200 hours, companies from the 11th Infantry, tanks from the 735th Tank Battalion, smoke from the 81st Chemical Mortar Battalion, engineers from the 7th Combat Engineer Battalion. The equipment list tells you what kind of fighting this was. Tank dozers were brought forward to fill the moat under fire.

A snake was used, which is an explosive filled pipe pushed ahead to clear wire and mines. Inside the tunnels, men worked on iron doors with an acetylene torch while Germans held the level below them. Understand what being inside Fort Gryant meant because the phrase is misleading. The Americans took ground on top of the works and in the ditches between them.

The Germans held the interior, the tunnels, and the observation, and they were not a scratch force. Kemp’s account of the garrison names the 1217th Grenadier Regiment, a battalion drawn from an officer training regiment and elements of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division, which is to say instructors and officer candidates fighting and prepared concrete, the hardest defensive combination in the business.

Companies B, E, and G of the 11th infantry went at them with the 10th infantry and later the second infantry drawn in. Tanks from the 735th tank battalion and tank destroyers from the 818th, working the casemate embraasers at point blank range. Company E lost 35 of its 140 men. Companies B and E together took 110 casualties inside two days, about 50%.

Task Force Warick took over the relief effort on October 5th and 6th. A third phase went in on October 7th at 1000 hours. Between October 3rd and October 9th, the operation cost 21 officers and 485 men killed, wounded, and missing. Anthony Kemp’s account of the Mets fighting puts total American losses at Dryant at around 734. On October 9th, the meeting was held that ended it.

General Hobart Gay, the Third Army Chief of Staff, ruled that further attacks within the Ford area would be far too costly and ordered the evacuation while permitting one more attempt to blast through the tunnel. That attempt was never executed. On the night of October 12th into the 13th, the Americans came off Fort Dryant, and the fort was still there.

That is worth sitting with. The garrison of Fort Dryant surrendered on December 8th, 1944, weeks after the city of Mets had already fallen. And it surrendered because it had been cut off and rendered pointless, not because it had been stormed. There is one more detail in Cole’s account of the aftermath that I cannot read without wincing.

In the review of the operation, General Walker sharply insisted that more aggressive personal leadership should have been shown by the assault commanders. The division commander, General Irwin of the fifth infantry division, noted that the difficulties encountered by the attacking force had been greater than anticipated.

And then two weeks later, the same core demonstrated the alternative in a fight almost nobody has heard of. At Messier Lamemetz, between October 28th and 30th, American infantry took the town with a methodical, limited objective attack, prepared, supported, and fought building by building. Cole’s accounting of the final phase.

There is 55 officers and men lost on the American side against an entire German battalion destroyed. 55 two weeks after a battalion’s worth of men had been spent on a fort that was never taken. I am not claiming Msier was Dr’s equal as a military problem. It was not, and any officer would tell you so. I am pointing at what the 20th core could do inside the same month with the same divisions in the same weather when the objective was chosen to fit the method available instead of the method being asked to stretch around the objective. So this is

the pivot not the fall of Mets not the Ardens right here in the middle two weeks of October 1944 on a wooded hill above the Moselle. In my view, the giant operation is where the Lraine campaign stopped being a hard problem handled imperfectly and became a command failure with a specific address.

And the reason is not hindsight. It is that the answer to Fort Dryant was already in the history books and in the map and in the army’s own doctrine before the first man went up that hill. Mets had been taken before. In 1870, the fortress city fell to the Prussians and it fell to encirclement and a starved out garrison, not to infantry going over a moat.

The forts of Mets were designed by professionals to make a direct assault expensive. That is the entire purpose of a fort. Nothing about September of 1944 had changed the physics of 7 ft of reinforced concrete. And nothing about American infantry made it able to cross 60 ft of open moat under interlocking fire from casemates it could not see into. Every subsequent event proved it.

Dryant fell in December to isolation. Fort Jang Dark, the last of them, surrendered on December 13th. also at isolation. The method that finally worked was available in September and it was applied only after the assault method had been tried and paid for. And I want to name the institutional part of this because blaming one man for it lets the system off the hook which is the oldest trick in military history.

The Third Army was not the only headquarters in the European theater that autumn that could not stop. Look at what Gable says about the atmosphere at the top. From September to December, he writes, “Eisenhower, Bradley, and Patton had their sights set firmly beyond the rine, and consequently they underestimated the obstacles and opposition that their soldiers would have to overcome.

” Three levels of command, one shared error, and no mechanism anywhere in that chain for a general to say the thing that needed saying, which was that the attack should stop until the ammunition arrived. An army that promotes for aggression will get aggression when aggression is wrong. That is not a patent problem.

That is a design problem, and the man on the hill above the Moselle paid the invoice for it. The bill came due again in November, and this time the enemy was water. The 12th Corps opened the November offensive on November 8th with a bombardment. That tells you the supply situation had finally improved.

42 battalions of artillery, 540 guns, 22,000 rounds. That is what the Third Army looked like when it was properly resourced, and it is exactly what it did not have in September. By then, the supply position had changed at the bottom. as well as the top. Gabble records that each division was holding two days of rations and 5 days of fuel and lubricants going into the November attack, which is thin by any standard and is still a different world from what the guns had been rationed to in September.

The Third Army had been given six weeks to become an army again. The assault divisions had also been rebuilt. The Fifth Infantry Division had stood in front of Mets from the middle of September to the middle of October, been pulled out of the line, and went back into the attack on November 9th. Shelby Stanton’s order of battle records that rotation in two lines and those two lines cover the replacement of rifle companies that had been fought down to cadre.

Every division at Mets in November was carrying men who had joined it within the previous month which is its own kind of tax on an assault plan. The preparation on the Met side shows what the pause bought. The 10th Armored Division, which had debarked on the continent on September 23rd, put its armored infantry into the line on November 2nd at Fort Dryant, which is a sentence worth reading twice.

A Fresh American Armored Division’s first employment in Europe was standing guard on the fort the Third Army had walked away from three weeks earlier. On November 3rd, Walker issued field order number 12 for the reduction of Mets. On November 8th, the 83rd Infantry Division under Major General Robert Makin was transferred to his core to hold frontage while the assault divisions concentrated.

The Third Cavalry Group under Lieutenant Colonel James Pulk screened the North. Walker’s 20th Corps went in against the Met sector on November 9th with 30 battalions of infantry, nearly 500 tanks, and over 700 guns. And the Moselle rose to meet them. Cole’s chapter on the November battle for Mets reads like a river survey. Rain and snow flurries persisted day after day, grounding the American plains.

At Catnome, the river was nearly 1,000 yards wide. The inundated area measured a mile and a half in breadth. The flood waters receded at the rate of about 3/4 of an inch per hour. In the sector of the 358th Infantry, 80 assault boats rapidly dwindled to 20. Three bridge sections were destroyed and 24 men became casualties in a single bridging attempt.

Supplies were flown across the river by small liaison planes because nothing else could get there. The 90th Infantry Division under General James Van Fleet took only about 200 prisoners on its first day, which in that division’s language meant the Germans were not running. The German side was thinner than the map suggested and harder than the map suggested.

General Walter Hearnline’s 82nd Corps held the sector. The 416th Division, known to the Germans themselves as the Whipped Cream Division for the state of its manpower, counted about 8,500 officers and men. The 19th Folks Grenadier Division was about the same size, and that division alone planted some 40,000 mines along its front.

Inside, Mets sat the 462nd Vulks Grenadier Division. General Utignant Hinrich KD was appointed to command the fortress on November 14th and he was wounded and captured on November 21st. The core also ran a deception and it cost real men. The 95th Infantry Division’s part in the opening was an operation called Kasanova, a limited objective demonstration at the Yukang crossing designed to hold German attention north of the city while the main effort developed elsewhere.

Cole’s line about it is short and awful. The three assault companies ran into trouble immediately. Fine attacks are made by companies who are not told they are a faint. And the casualties from a demonstration are indistinguishable from the casualties of an attack meant to succeed. Around them, the engineers of the 315th and 320th Engineer Combat Battalions worked the flood.

The 90th Infantry Division’s regiments went in under Colonel Guyard with the 377th, Colonel Clark with the 358th, Colonel Bell with the 359th, and Colonel George with a 357th. and the division’s drive ran 16 miles in ground that gave up a few hundred yards at a time. At curling, the fighting ended with over half of the German defenders killed rather than captured, which is the statistical signature of men who have been told not to come back.

On the 11th and 12th of November, a battle group of the 25th Panzer Grenadier Division counterattacked into the bridge head with some 10 tanks and assault guns, and 10 was what the German army and Lraine could scrape together for a counterstroke by that point in the campaign. Mines are the detail that gets left out of the tidy accounts.

And a minefield does not care how good the plan above it is. At Fort Koigmacker, the 90th division did the job the way it had to be done at close quarters on top of the works and took at least 30 to1 Germans killed or captured. The attacking battalion lost 111 men killed, wounded, and missing to get there. The 95th Infantry Division under Major General Harry Twaddle came up on the other side of the Fortress Ring and earned the name it still carries, the Iron Men of Mets.

Task Force Bacon pushed into the city from the north on November 17th. On November 19th, the 90th, and the fifth infantry divisions linked up east of Mets and closed the ring. The garrison surrendered on November 21st and 22nd. Fort Verdun gave up on November 26th. The Outer Works went one at a time after that, each one waiting until hunger and isolation did the arithmetic for it.

Mets was American. It had taken from September 8th to December 13th to make it so. And here’s the comparison that hurts because it happened in the same week, 60 mi to the south with an army nobody makes films about. On November 23rd at 10:30 hours, Task Force Ruawa of the French Second Armored Division under General Jacqu Lllair drove into Straborg and reached the Rine.

The clerk’s division was fighting under General Wade Hayeslip’s 15th Corps and Alexander Patch’s seventh army in Jacob Devers’s sixth army group. Clark and Smith document the operation in the Greenbook Riviera to the Rine. The 44th Division had covered nine miles along the axis of one road by November 19th. The armored columns went 10 twisting road miles beyond civil around Strawburg.

They took 6,000 German prisoners. The cleric’s division lost approximately 55 men killed, 165 wounded, and five missing between November 19th and 24th. The Germans in front of them were not phantoms either. The 553rd and 78th Volk grenadier divisions held that sector, and when the city fell, the Americans and French found themselves interning 15,000 German civilians alongside the prisoners.

The 315th Infantry closed up on Sever around noon on November 24th and the gap was shut behind the armor. That is a mountain barrier forced in late autumn in the same weather by a core that had been fighting its way north since the landings on the Riviera coast. Devers’s army group forced the vage in winter and put troops on the rine.

In the same weeks, the most famous field army in the United States Army was reducing masonry outside Mets. David Collie wrote a whole book decision at Strasburg about what the high command then did with that Ryan opportunity and the answer was not much which is its own story and its own indictment. That is the case for the prosecution.

Now the defense and I am going to give it every inch it is earned because the version of this campaign where Patton is simply a butcher is as false as the version where he is simply a genius. Start with the fact that the logistics famine was not his to fix. The Third Army did not decide the Allied theat’s priorities in September of 1944.

It did not decide that the Northern Thrust and the airborne operation in Holland would be resourced first. It did not build the port capacity or fail to open Antworp. Gabble, who wrote the harshest professional critique of this campaign, is explicit about where that responsibility sits, and he draws the general lesson from it.

The Lraine campaign, he writes, demonstrated that logistics often drive operations, no matter how forceful and aggressive the commanding general may be. That is, a sentence about a system, not about a man. Second, the weather was real and it was not a footnote. Gable records that non-combat casualties, most of them trench foot, roughly equal combat casualties for the month of November.

Theater-wide 46,000 troops were hospitalized for weather related injuries, which he measures as the equivalent of three infantry divisions taken out of the line by cold and wet. 95% of the trench foot cases would be out of action, at least until spring. You cannot run a war of maneuver in a season that is removing your infantry faster than the enemy is.

Third, the enemy was not the enemy of August. The German first army under Ottoonorf was reinforced steadily through September. General Feld Marshall Johannes Blascoitz was replaced at Army Group G by General Herman Balk. The Mets fortress zone was held by the equivalent of four and a half divisions.

Fresh armored formations were thrown in at Arakort. The Germans reinforced Lraine because they understood correctly that a breakthrough there opened the Sar industrial region and they fought accordingly. Fourth, and this one deserves more air than it usually gets, the Third Army inflicted far more than it lost. Third Army claimed over 180,000 German casualties between September and November.

Cole records that at least 75,000 prisoners passed through the Third Army cages during the Lraine operation. By early December, the three Panzer divisions facing the Third Army were down to 13, seven, and four running tanks, respectively. Those are the divisions that were not available to MO when he needed them in the Arden 3 weeks later.

And no honest account of the winter of 1944 can ignore that. Fifth, the American soldier and the American gun performed. Gabel says so directly. The American soldier proved himself capable of carrying the fight to a determined enemy under adverse conditions, and the artillery’s ability to mass its fire at critical points was tactically decisive time after time.

And Cole is careful about the tank exchange in both directions. German tank losses in the September battles, he writes, were much higher than those inflicted on the American armored formations. But in November and December, American tank losses in the slow advance through the Lorraine mud probably were considerably higher than the enemies.

That is what an honest historian looks like, and it is why the green books have outlasted every popular account written since. There is an equipment point running underneath all of this as well. Gable is blunt that the M4 Sherman was badly outgunned by German panzers, mounting superb anti-tank pieces.

That gap did not close at any point in the campaign. In the pursuit, it did not matter much because a Sherman that arrives at a crossroads first does not need to win a duel. In Lraine, it mattered constantly because a Sherman crawling across a saturated field toward a prepared anti-tank position is in the one situation the design cannot survive.

Some part of what looks like timidity in the November fighting is a tank crew making a correct assessment of their own vehicle. Sixth, the comparison test. If Lraine was the worst command performance of the autumn of 1944, then what was happening in the Herkin forest? General Courtney Haj’s first army fought in that forest from September 19th to December 16th, 88 days, over an area of roughly 54 square miles.

And the accounting most often cited puts the cost at at least 33,000 American killed and wounded with upper estimates near 55,000 against German losses of about 28,000. The green book covering that sector is Charles McDonald’s the Sig Freed line campaign and Macdonald also wrote the army’s tactical study of the Moselle crossing in three battles Arnavville Altuso and Schmidt 54 square miles for 33,000 men and widen it one more step across the whole Zigg freed line effort that autumn the first and 9inth armies together recorded 57,39 battle casualties and 71,654

non-battle casualties. Read that second figure again because it is larger than the first. The autumn of 1944 on the German border was a season in which the weather beat more American soldiers out of the line than the Germans did across every army in the theater under every commander aggressive or cautious. Whatever Lraine was, it was not the worst bargain struck in the European theater that season.

And any critique that pretends otherwise is comparing a general to an ideal instead of to his peers. So the defense is not a technicality. It is substantial. It is sourced and it means the answer here cannot be a simple one. Before the verdict, the part of this campaign that almost never gets told and the reason I wanted to do this script at all if you take nothing else from the next few minutes, take this section because this is the third army at ground level in Lraine and it looks nothing like the news reels. Start with the ammunition.

In the last week of October, 80% of the artillery ammunition expended by the 20th Corps was of German origin. 80%. American gunners in an American corps shooting captured enemy stocks because their own resupply could not keep the tubes fed. That figure is in Gable’s overview, and I have never once heard it said out loud in a documentary.

Think about what that means in practice. Somebody had to inventory, capture dumps, sort fuses, workout charges, and safety data for foreign propellant, and then fire it in support of American infantry. And the fire had to land where it was called. That is a quartermaster, an ordinance achievement that nobody got a ribbon for.

And the phrase one-third of a unit of fire deserves unpacking because it sounds like bookkeeping and it is not. A unit of fire is the planning allowance of ammunition for a weapon for a day of combat. The figure a staff uses to answer the only question that matters before an attack, which is whether the guns can shoot for as long as the infantry will be exposed.

Cutting that allowance to a third does not make an attack a third harder. It changes what kind of attack is possible at all. It ends the rolling barrage. It ends counterb work against German guns that are firing freely. It means the preparation stops before the infantry reaches the wire. Then the smoke and what a smoke company actually did because the phrase large area screen hides all the labor in it.

Generators cighted by wind and terrain tended and refilled by hand, burning oil for hour after hour to keep a river valley invisible to observers sitting in concrete 2 miles away and adjusted every time the wind shifted. Because a screen that drifts leaves the crossing site naked at the worst possible moment. Chemical troops do that work.

A smoke company does not appear in a single patent film I have ever seen. And it decided which of two river crossings the Third Army got to keep. And the reason smoke was the decisive item comes down to geometry that nobody puts in a documentary. Fort Gryant sits 5 miles from where the 11th infantry crossed at Dornot. 5 miles.

And it still interfered with that crossing because a fortress gun firing at a surveyed map reference does not need to see the boats. The army thought this fighting was important enough to study at battalion level. And Charles McDonald wrote it up for the center of military history in three battles. Arnavville, Altudso, and Schmidt.

A volume produced so that officers could read one river crossing in the kind of detail that a campaign history has no room for. The lesson of Arnavville is not that Americans were brave at Arnavville. It is that you defeat a fort by removing its observation or by going where it cannot reach and not by walking toward it. That fortress belt is worth one more minute because the Americans were not fighting one generation of concrete.

They were fighting three stacked on the same ground. The oldest works around Mets date from the 1870s. The Germans extended them before the first war. The French modernized them after it. The Germans came back and improved them again. Fort Metric north of the city was imagin line work meaning the 20th corps in November was assaulting French inter war engineering held by Germans 5 miles from Prussian era masonry held by the same army.

The forts were cited to support each other by fire which is the entire point of a belt and it is why the reduction of Mets could not be done fort by fort in sequence. Every position you attacked was covered by two you had not attacked yet. Then the engineers who fought a separate war in November. Over 130 bridges built in a single month in a valley where the water level was dropping by fractions of an inch an hour, which only matters if your job is to guess the exact moment a saturated bank will hold a treadway and a loaded truck. Get that guess wrong and the

bridge and the men on it go into the river. Get it right and an infantry division eats that night. And there is a supply mechanism underneath all of this that Gabel names in one devastating line. The Third Army’s logistical shortcuts, he writes, included burning up gasoline reserves to keep an advance going and then neglecting ammunition supply to bring up gasoline.

Read that as a sequence rather than a criticism and you have the entire campaign. Spend the reserve to keep moving. Then use the remaining transport to replace the fuel instead of the shells. Then attack a fortress line with the shells you did not bring. Every step follows logically from the step before it.

And the first step was taken in August by men who believed the war was almost over. Then the mud, which is not a mood in this campaign, but a mechanical fact. Saturated Lraine clay does two things to an army. It takes the roads away from wheeled traffic. So ammunition and rations move by a tracked vehicle or not at all, which means the tanks that should be fighting are hauling.

And it changes the arithmetic of an artillery shell because a round that buries itself in soft ground before detonating loses most of the fragmentation effect it was fired for. The third army’s greatest strength was mass high explosive. Lorraine mud partially disarmed it. The fire plans built on paper in September were being fired into ground that ate them by November.

Then the mines, one German division, the 19th Vulks grenadier laid about 40,000 of them across its frontage. That is the arithmetic of a campaign where the infantry advance rate was measured in yards and the engineer casualty rate was not. And then the cold, which is the item I would put at the top of the list if I were teaching this campaign.

Trench foot is not frostbite. It is what wet and cold and immobility do to a foot over days. And the preventive is dry socks rotated plus over shoes big enough to wear over a boot, plus the chance to take the boots off at all, which is exactly what a man in a flooded foxhole under observed fire does not have.

Every one of those preventives is a supply item, which means every trenchoot casualty in Lraine traces back to a loading priority set hundreds of miles behind the front by people who were thinking about gasoline. Now, the verdict, and I have been circling it for a while, Patton was not responsible for the fuel famine, and I do not believe any American commander in the West could have taken Lraine quickly in the autumn of 1944.

That is my honest reading of the logistics. But the fuel does not explain what I actually hold against this campaign, which is the shape of it. Gabble’s charge is the correct one. The Third Army fought dispersed for three and a half months in a season when the ground would not carry armor and the ammunition would not support broad attacks, and the one time it concentrated an armored division under a commander who was allowed to fight it as a division.

At Airort, it destroyed two German panzer brigades for the loss of a handful of tanks. The organization had the answer in September in its own afteraction reporting and did not build the rest of the campaign around it. And Fort Gryant remains, in my view, the least defensible thing on the whole record. Not because the attack failed. Attacks fail, because it was continued after the first assault put almost nobody inside the works.

And it was continued again after that. And the officer who finally stopped it on October 9th was the chief of staff, not the army commander. When the review came, the core commander’s first instinct was that the assault commanders should have shown more aggressive personal leadership. 21 officers and 485 men had become casualties in 6 days on a hill that a siege took in December without a fight.

I think the officers on that hill were being asked to solve a problem with courage that could only be solved with a different plan. And I think that is the specific failure of imagination this campaign should be remembered for. And if that pattern sounds familiar, if you have watched an organization double down on a plan because stopping would look like weakness and then look for someone at the bottom to blame when the plan does not work, you are not imagining the resemblance.

The mechanism is older than any of us and it is not confined to armies. Now the systemic point because that is where this channel always ends up. The American army of 1944 selected for forward motion. It promoted men who attacked. It relieved men who paused. and it gave a field army commander no institutional way to report that his ammunition allowance had made his mission impossible without sounding like a man asking to be replaced.

Gavl names Eisenhower and Bradley alongside Patton in the same sentence about eyes fixed beyond the rine and he is right to three headquarters, one culture and the culture was the problem. Which is exactly why the army and not the public is the institution that dealt honestly with this campaign. Levvenworth published the critique in 1985 and taught it to majors.

The popular story kept the summer of 1944 and dropped the autumn. That is not a failure of the audience. It is a curation decision made by publishers and filmmakers and broadcasters repeated for 80 years. And the consequence is that the army’s own verdict on its most famous field commander sits in a government pamphlet while the legend sits on every shelf in every airport bookshop in America.

Now the numbers side by side because the contrast is the argument. The Third Army in August of 1944, one month, four simultaneous axes of advance, 60 mi from Avanches to Argentine in 2 weeks. 314,814 officers and men on the rolls at months end. 669 medium tanks. 350,000 gallons of gasoline burned every day to keep it moving.

The Third Army from September 1st to December 18th, three and a half months for a province a car crosses in an afternoon. 50,000 casualties in Gabbell’s overview. In the tabulation carried in Cole’s official history, the battle casualty total is 55,182 broken into 6,657 killed, 36,46 wounded, and 12,119 missing.

The gap between the two figures is rounding in category, not dispute. And I will take Cole’s number as the working one. Gabble’s framing is the one that lands. Lraine accounted for roughly onethird of the Third Army’s total casualties for the entire European War. Same army, same commander, same soldiers, four months apart. And then there is what it cost.

And the only currency that matters. Start with the four rifle companies who crossed at Dornut and held a wood for two days, waiting for a fire plan that could not be delivered, and then came back over the same river they had crossed, having accomplished the removal of their own bridge head. Nobody was decorated for that afternoon.

It appears in the official history as a paragraph. Then the platoon of the 377th Infantry that walked into a minefield in November and walked out with one officer and five men still on their feet, not shot at by anybody, not counterattacked. A platoon reduced to a squad by ordinance, buried in the dirt weeks earlier by men who had already retreated.

The 95th Infantry Division closed out its war with 6,591 battle casualties. 1,25 of them killed in action, 4,945 wounded and 61 missing. According to the agitant general’s final report on Army battle casualties, that same division took 31,988 German prisoners across its service. Both of those numbers belong on the same page.

A division is not either a tragedy or a triumph. And the men in it were never given the option of being only one of those things. And sit with the word missing for a second because it is the coldest column in any casualty table. 12,119 of them in this campaign. Some of those men were prisoners and 380 of the 95th divisions total were taken alive into German hands.

Some were killed and ground. The Americans did not hold long enough to search, and some went into a river that was a thousand yards wide at Catnam in November, out of an assault boat in the dark, wearing wool and web gear, and were carried away from the crossing site by a current nobody had measured.

The men in that column have no grave with a date on it, and no action attached to their name in any regimental history, and the ones nobody ever shot at. A man carried out of the line in November with his feet gone gets no citation, no battle honor, and no mention in his regiment’s history. And in most cases, he did not come back to that regiment at all.

He was a rifleman one week and a hospital admission the next. And the thing that took him out of the war was rain and a loading priority. There is no monument anywhere in Lraine to that, and there are a great many of those men. If your father or your grandfather crossed the Moselle in September or went up that hill in October or came off it, he was part of the single most expensive stretch of the Third Army’s war.

And the reason you may never have heard it described that way has nothing to do with him. One last figure, and it is the one Gable closes on. The Third Army never used Lraine as a springboard for an advance into Germany after all. On December 20th, the 12th Corps and the Third Corps turned north. On December 22nd, the Third Army entered the Battle of the Bulge, and the pivot that made Patton immortal was launched out of a province he had spent an entire autumn acquiring for a completely different purpose.

Gable’s own last word is that the Lraine campaign will always remain a controversial episode in American military history. I think that is too gentle. I think it is the campaign that shows us what the American army of 1944 actually was underneath the legend which is an organization of extraordinary firepower and improvisational skill run by a culture that could start an attack far more easily than it could stop one.

Patton was the best pursuit commander the United States produced in that war. Lorraine is the proof that a pursuit commander in a siege is still a man in a siege. That’s the story. The sources are in the description. I’ll see you in the next one.