The American Soldiers Who Kept Advancing After German Officers Thought They Had Them Trapped

Fog sat in the fields around Arakort before dawn  on September 19th, 1944, thick enough that a man   standing beside a Sherman could not see the next  tank in line. Crews sat inside with the engines   off listening. Somewhere out past the hedros,  engines were moving, a lot of them, and nobody   could see a single one of them.

What was coming  at them was two fresh German armored brigades and   elements of two more divisions behind them. Close  to 260 tanks and assault guns in total, fielded by   a fifth Panzer Army that outnumbered the American  screen in front of it several times over. Colonel   Bruce C.

Clark’s Combat Command, A part of the  US Fourth Armored Division, held the ground the   attackers needed to cross to reach the rest of  Patton’s third army. Clark did not have 260 tanks. He had a fraction of that spread thin along a  line his own core commander had just ordered   him to hold instead of advance from. The German  commander, General Hasso von Mantifil, liked his   chances.

His brigades were still taking delivery  of new Panther tanks from the factory floor when   the attack order came. A disadvantage on its  face that on the strength report on his desk   wasn’t one. Fresh armor meant a gun that could  kill a Sherman before a Sherman got close enough   to answer. Mantel’s staff looked at the tank  counts, looked at the open ground east of Nancy,   and told him Clark’s division could be cut off,  surrounded, and finished inside a single day.

The first sign of it had come the afternoon  before when German armor hit the fourth armored’s   reconnaissance screen at Lunavville and was beaten  back after losing two dozen tanks in the fighting.   Major General John Wood, commanding the Fourth  Armored Division, and his core commander,   Major General Manton Eddie, read that first clash  as a local counterattack.

Nothing that should stop   the offensive they had already planned for the  following day. Only when reports of heavier German   movement kept arriving through the night did they  call the offensive off and pull Combat Command   A back to consolidate near Arakort instead. By  the time Mantofl’s main attack opened at dawn,   the Americans knew something was coming. They  still did not know how much of it there was.

By   midm morning, it looked like the German staff’s  estimate might be right. Armor broke through   the American outpost line north of Lunville  and pushed toward Clark’s own command post,   close enough that the staff running it could  hear the fighting outside the tent flaps.   Behind that lead edge, the softkinned trucks and  halftracks that keep a combat command fed, fueled,   and in radio contact found themselves boxed in  panzers between them and the rest of the division,   pinned down, cut off. On the map that morning,  the attacking force had done what it set out

to do faster than its own planners had  promised. The fog did not lift for them.   It hung low over the wheat stubble through the  whole morning, and it worked against whichever   side needed to see the farthest to win. A  panther could open fire on a Sherman at a   range where the Sherman’s own gun could do  nothing back, and that gap in reach was the   entire attacking plan compressed into one number  on a specification sheet. Fog erased the number.

Down at 200 yd, about as far as anyone could  see that morning, a Sherman’s 75 mm gun could   put a round through the same Panther’s flank or  rear just as surely as the Panther could kill it   headon at a thousand range had stopped mattering.  What mattered now was which crew saw the other   tank first, and the Americans dug into ground  they had already walked on foot the day before,   mostly did.

Captain Kenneth Lamison’s company met  three Panthers coming out of the mist along the   road toward Bizange that morning, close enough to  engage before either crew had time to think about   range tables, and disabled all three inside a few  minutes. Lamison then pushed a platoon of Shermans   forward to a low ridge.

Let the same column try to  withdraw back through it and took four more tanks   from the flank as they passed underneath. His  crews were back behind the reverse slope before   the survivors could work out where the fire had  come from. A few miles south that same morning,   4 AM18 tank destroyers under Lieutenant Edwin  Liper climbed arise the local maps called Hill   246.

A single enemy tank came out of the  tree line at the base of the hill alone,   feeling its way forward through mist it could see  through no better than the Americans waiting above   it could. Liper’s gunners had the range and the  angle worked out before that crew even knew it   was being watched. and one enemy tank was not  going to be the last one to make that mistake   before the morning was over.

By the time there  was enough light to count wreckage, the brigade   that had done almost all of the day’s fighting  had lost 43 tanks, most of them panthers along   with roughly 200 infantry. Its sister brigade,  delayed disengaging at Lunville the evening before   and slow getting into position afterward, reached  the battle too late to contribute anything at all.   The formation Mantofl had counted on to close his  trap around Clark’s command, had gone into action   essentially alone that morning, and had come  apart doing it.

Digging up this kind of detail,   the machine behind a battle and not just the  battle itself is most of what this channel exists   to do. One campaign at a time and subscribing is  the simplest way to catch the next one when it   goes up. Word came down from the high command that  night to keep attacking regardless of what the   19th had cost.

On the 20th, Mantel sent his second  brigade forward alone against a defense that had   grown overnight to include a second American tank  battalion and additional tank destroyers alongside   Clark’s original command, outnumbered on paper  by roughly three tanks to one in the American   accounting of that day’s fighting. The order held  anyway. Whatever Manyl privately thought about   throwing one brigade at a reinforced line a day  after watching its sister formation get gutted.

the same way. Nothing in the surviving paperwork  records him saying it out loud. What broke the   second attack wasn’t ground fog alone this time.  It was what came after the fog burned off around   midday. P47 Thunderbolts of the Ziknank Tactical  Air Command had been grounded through the worst   of the mist that morning, unable to find targets  from the air any better than the tank crews below   them could find them from the ground.

Once the  ceiling lifted, the fighter bombers caught the   German columns strung out in the open on  the same roads they had used to advance a   few hours earlier and went to work on them from  above. While Clark’s tanks kept working on them   from ground level below, a capability that had  been useless in the dark became inside the same   afternoon the exact thing the plan had no answer  for a second time running.

The fighting did not   end on the 20th. It ran on for 11 days in total  through the farm village of Reicort and a string   of crossroads nobody outside Lraine had ever had  reason to learn the names of the 10th Armored   Infantry Battalion held ground there through some  of the ugliest close quarters fighting of the   whole autumn campaign.

House by house and hedro by  hedro, artillery falling on positions too close to   their own lines for comfort. No single afternoon  after the 20th decided the outcome by itself. Mantofl kept feeding fresh units into the salient  as they became available, sometimes a company at   a time rather than a brigade, which tells its  own story about what he had left to feed in.   Clark’s division, reinforced peace meal by  battalions borrowed from elsewhere in the core,   kept holding the ground it had been expected to  lose in a single foggy morning 11 days earlier,   and in several places kept pushing forward from it  instead. No surviving German account settles how

many tanks fifth Panzer army had left in running  order by the time the attacks were called off at   the end of September. The brigade war diaries were  incomplete before the fighting scattered their   keepers and the handful of postwar interviews with  surviving officers give figures that do not agree   with each other or with the American tallies taken  off the battlefield afterward.

What both sets of   records do agree on, whatever the exact count is,  which direction the numbers ran, and which army   was doing the counting from a position of strength  by the time it was over. When the accounting was   as complete as it was ever going to get, the  Germans had put somewhere close to 200 tanks   and assault guns into the 11 days of fighting  around Aracort and lost most of that force in the   process. A large share destroyed outright where  they sat and the rest damaged too badly to matter.

Combat Command A’s own losses across the same  11 days came to a small fraction of that figure.   The division that had been expected to break apart  inside a single foggy morning was still sitting on   the same ground it had started on and had spent  most of the intervening week and a half moving   forward from it rather than back. Mantel was not a  poor commander before Arakort or after it.

He had   built a genuine reputation in Russia and at Araort  he read the numbers in front of him correctly for   exactly what they told him. more tanks, a better  gun, a smaller American division holding ground   it had no business holding against those numbers.

What the paperwork did not tell him was that half   his crews had never trained together before that  week, that his reconnaissance had missed how thin   the American line ran in the places that mattered  most, and that the one advantage his tanks held   on paper was a gun range advantage that a week  of ordinary French autumn weather could cancel   outright. A commander can only plan around what  shows up in front of him.

What showed up in   front of Mantel was accurate. It just wasn’t the  weather. One German officer, captured briefly by   an American patrol partway through the fighting,  was asked how a force with that much armor and   that much surprise had failed to close a trap it  had clearly set out to close. He gave no answer   that satisfied the men questioning him, and  the summary of that interrogation, filed and   forgotten in a core intelligence log, does not  record him trying especially hard to invent a   better one on the spot. Whatever he believed  about the plan he had been sent to execute

went into the ground with the rest of what nobody  wrote down that week. Clark carried Araort into a   long career built partly on what that week had  taught him. The tactics his command used there,   concealment over range, letting the enemy close  the distance instead of trying to match his gun   at a distance that favored the enemy’s gun, got  taught for years afterward at American armor   schools as a case study in how a technically  outgunned force beats one that isn’t.

One of   the battalion commanders who fought under him that  week commanded a battalion of Shermans that killed   more armor in less time than almost any American  unit had managed up to that point in the war. His   name was Kraton Abrams and he went on to lead the  entire United States Army by the end of his own   career, carrying the lessons Araort taught about  gun range, armor, and the cost of finding out   the hard way which side holds the advantage long  after the last wrecked Panther had been cleared

from the fields around Lraine. Decades later, the  army named its next main battle tank after him.   It was built from the hull up so that no American  crew would ever again need fog, a ridge and a   reverse slope just to get an even fight out  of the gun they had been issued to carry.

The American Soldiers Who Kept Advancing After German Officers Thought They Had Them Trapped

Fog sat in the fields around Arakort before dawn  on September 19th, 1944, thick enough that a man   standing beside a Sherman could not see the next  tank in line. Crews sat inside with the engines   off listening. Somewhere out past the hedros,  engines were moving, a lot of them, and nobody   could see a single one of them.

What was coming  at them was two fresh German armored brigades and   elements of two more divisions behind them. Close  to 260 tanks and assault guns in total, fielded by   a fifth Panzer Army that outnumbered the American  screen in front of it several times over. Colonel   Bruce C.

Clark’s Combat Command, A part of the  US Fourth Armored Division, held the ground the   attackers needed to cross to reach the rest of  Patton’s third army. Clark did not have 260 tanks. He had a fraction of that spread thin along a  line his own core commander had just ordered   him to hold instead of advance from. The German  commander, General Hasso von Mantifil, liked his   chances.

His brigades were still taking delivery  of new Panther tanks from the factory floor when   the attack order came. A disadvantage on its  face that on the strength report on his desk   wasn’t one. Fresh armor meant a gun that could  kill a Sherman before a Sherman got close enough   to answer. Mantel’s staff looked at the tank  counts, looked at the open ground east of Nancy,   and told him Clark’s division could be cut off,  surrounded, and finished inside a single day.

The first sign of it had come the afternoon  before when German armor hit the fourth armored’s   reconnaissance screen at Lunavville and was beaten  back after losing two dozen tanks in the fighting.   Major General John Wood, commanding the Fourth  Armored Division, and his core commander,   Major General Manton Eddie, read that first clash  as a local counterattack.

Nothing that should stop   the offensive they had already planned for the  following day. Only when reports of heavier German   movement kept arriving through the night did they  call the offensive off and pull Combat Command   A back to consolidate near Arakort instead. By  the time Mantofl’s main attack opened at dawn,   the Americans knew something was coming. They  still did not know how much of it there was.

By   midm morning, it looked like the German staff’s  estimate might be right. Armor broke through   the American outpost line north of Lunville  and pushed toward Clark’s own command post,   close enough that the staff running it could  hear the fighting outside the tent flaps.   Behind that lead edge, the softkinned trucks and  halftracks that keep a combat command fed, fueled,   and in radio contact found themselves boxed in  panzers between them and the rest of the division,   pinned down, cut off. On the map that morning,  the attacking force had done what it set out

to do faster than its own planners had  promised. The fog did not lift for them.   It hung low over the wheat stubble through the  whole morning, and it worked against whichever   side needed to see the farthest to win. A  panther could open fire on a Sherman at a   range where the Sherman’s own gun could do  nothing back, and that gap in reach was the   entire attacking plan compressed into one number  on a specification sheet. Fog erased the number.

Down at 200 yd, about as far as anyone could  see that morning, a Sherman’s 75 mm gun could   put a round through the same Panther’s flank or  rear just as surely as the Panther could kill it   headon at a thousand range had stopped mattering.  What mattered now was which crew saw the other   tank first, and the Americans dug into ground  they had already walked on foot the day before,   mostly did.

Captain Kenneth Lamison’s company met  three Panthers coming out of the mist along the   road toward Bizange that morning, close enough to  engage before either crew had time to think about   range tables, and disabled all three inside a few  minutes. Lamison then pushed a platoon of Shermans   forward to a low ridge.

Let the same column try to  withdraw back through it and took four more tanks   from the flank as they passed underneath. His  crews were back behind the reverse slope before   the survivors could work out where the fire had  come from. A few miles south that same morning,   4 AM18 tank destroyers under Lieutenant Edwin  Liper climbed arise the local maps called Hill   246.

A single enemy tank came out of the  tree line at the base of the hill alone,   feeling its way forward through mist it could see  through no better than the Americans waiting above   it could. Liper’s gunners had the range and the  angle worked out before that crew even knew it   was being watched. and one enemy tank was not  going to be the last one to make that mistake   before the morning was over.

By the time there  was enough light to count wreckage, the brigade   that had done almost all of the day’s fighting  had lost 43 tanks, most of them panthers along   with roughly 200 infantry. Its sister brigade,  delayed disengaging at Lunville the evening before   and slow getting into position afterward, reached  the battle too late to contribute anything at all.   The formation Mantofl had counted on to close his  trap around Clark’s command, had gone into action   essentially alone that morning, and had come  apart doing it.

Digging up this kind of detail,   the machine behind a battle and not just the  battle itself is most of what this channel exists   to do. One campaign at a time and subscribing is  the simplest way to catch the next one when it   goes up. Word came down from the high command that  night to keep attacking regardless of what the   19th had cost.

On the 20th, Mantel sent his second  brigade forward alone against a defense that had   grown overnight to include a second American tank  battalion and additional tank destroyers alongside   Clark’s original command, outnumbered on paper  by roughly three tanks to one in the American   accounting of that day’s fighting. The order held  anyway. Whatever Manyl privately thought about   throwing one brigade at a reinforced line a day  after watching its sister formation get gutted.

the same way. Nothing in the surviving paperwork  records him saying it out loud. What broke the   second attack wasn’t ground fog alone this time.  It was what came after the fog burned off around   midday. P47 Thunderbolts of the Ziknank Tactical  Air Command had been grounded through the worst   of the mist that morning, unable to find targets  from the air any better than the tank crews below   them could find them from the ground.

Once the  ceiling lifted, the fighter bombers caught the   German columns strung out in the open on  the same roads they had used to advance a   few hours earlier and went to work on them from  above. While Clark’s tanks kept working on them   from ground level below, a capability that had  been useless in the dark became inside the same   afternoon the exact thing the plan had no answer  for a second time running.

The fighting did not   end on the 20th. It ran on for 11 days in total  through the farm village of Reicort and a string   of crossroads nobody outside Lraine had ever had  reason to learn the names of the 10th Armored   Infantry Battalion held ground there through some  of the ugliest close quarters fighting of the   whole autumn campaign.

House by house and hedro by  hedro, artillery falling on positions too close to   their own lines for comfort. No single afternoon  after the 20th decided the outcome by itself. Mantofl kept feeding fresh units into the salient  as they became available, sometimes a company at   a time rather than a brigade, which tells its  own story about what he had left to feed in.   Clark’s division, reinforced peace meal by  battalions borrowed from elsewhere in the core,   kept holding the ground it had been expected to  lose in a single foggy morning 11 days earlier,   and in several places kept pushing forward from it  instead. No surviving German account settles how

many tanks fifth Panzer army had left in running  order by the time the attacks were called off at   the end of September. The brigade war diaries were  incomplete before the fighting scattered their   keepers and the handful of postwar interviews with  surviving officers give figures that do not agree   with each other or with the American tallies taken  off the battlefield afterward.

What both sets of   records do agree on, whatever the exact count is,  which direction the numbers ran, and which army   was doing the counting from a position of strength  by the time it was over. When the accounting was   as complete as it was ever going to get, the  Germans had put somewhere close to 200 tanks   and assault guns into the 11 days of fighting  around Aracort and lost most of that force in the   process. A large share destroyed outright where  they sat and the rest damaged too badly to matter.

Combat Command A’s own losses across the same  11 days came to a small fraction of that figure.   The division that had been expected to break apart  inside a single foggy morning was still sitting on   the same ground it had started on and had spent  most of the intervening week and a half moving   forward from it rather than back. Mantel was not a  poor commander before Arakort or after it.

He had   built a genuine reputation in Russia and at Araort  he read the numbers in front of him correctly for   exactly what they told him. more tanks, a better  gun, a smaller American division holding ground   it had no business holding against those numbers.

What the paperwork did not tell him was that half   his crews had never trained together before that  week, that his reconnaissance had missed how thin   the American line ran in the places that mattered  most, and that the one advantage his tanks held   on paper was a gun range advantage that a week  of ordinary French autumn weather could cancel   outright. A commander can only plan around what  shows up in front of him.

What showed up in   front of Mantel was accurate. It just wasn’t the  weather. One German officer, captured briefly by   an American patrol partway through the fighting,  was asked how a force with that much armor and   that much surprise had failed to close a trap it  had clearly set out to close. He gave no answer   that satisfied the men questioning him, and  the summary of that interrogation, filed and   forgotten in a core intelligence log, does not  record him trying especially hard to invent a   better one on the spot. Whatever he believed  about the plan he had been sent to execute

went into the ground with the rest of what nobody  wrote down that week. Clark carried Araort into a   long career built partly on what that week had  taught him. The tactics his command used there,   concealment over range, letting the enemy close  the distance instead of trying to match his gun   at a distance that favored the enemy’s gun, got  taught for years afterward at American armor   schools as a case study in how a technically  outgunned force beats one that isn’t.

One of   the battalion commanders who fought under him that  week commanded a battalion of Shermans that killed   more armor in less time than almost any American  unit had managed up to that point in the war. His   name was Kraton Abrams and he went on to lead the  entire United States Army by the end of his own   career, carrying the lessons Araort taught about  gun range, armor, and the cost of finding out   the hard way which side holds the advantage long  after the last wrecked Panther had been cleared

from the fields around Lraine. Decades later, the  army named its next main battle tank after him.   It was built from the hull up so that no American  crew would ever again need fog, a ridge and a   reverse slope just to get an even fight out  of the gun they had been issued to carry.