Shortly after midnight on August 7th, 1944, the ground west of the French town of Mortan began to tremble. Columns of German armor, their engines muffled by the darkness, rolled forward through a thick summer fog. Panza after Panza emerged from concealed positions along narrow Norman lanes.
Turrets swiveled toward the west, their commanders standing in open hatches, straining to see through the merc. The smell of diesel exhaust mixed with the damp night air. Tracks clattered over cobblestones and churned through soft earth. Infantry marched alongside, their boots slapping against wet roads, rifles slung over their shoulders, faces grim.
The plan had come directly from Adolf Hitler himself. It was simple. It was bold. And it was designed to do one thing. Cut straight through the narrow corridor at Avanches and sever the supply lines of the most dangerous American general on the Western Front, Lieutenant General George Smith Patton Jr.
What Hitler did not know, what his generals on the ground already feared in their bones, was that attacking toward Patton’s flank was exactly the wrong thing to do. Every formation that tried it would be ground to pieces. Every division thrown against his exposed corridor would be chewed apart by a combination of speed, air power, and a style of warfare the German army had never faced from the Americans before.
By the time the fog lifted that morning, the destruction of the German army in France had begun, and there would be no stopping it. To understand why the mere mention of Patton’s flank sent a chill through German command posts across Normandy, you first have to understand the man himself and the army he had built. George Smith Patton Jr. was born on November 11, 1885 in San Gabriel, California into a family with deep military roots stretching back to the American Revolution.
His grandfather had been a Confederate colonel, mortally wounded at the third battle of Winchester in 1864. Military service was not just a career for the Patton family. It was a calling. He attended the Virginia Military Institute before transferring to the United States Military Academy at West Point, graduating in 1909.
He was a gifted athlete who competed in the modern pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics, finishing fifth overall. He served under General John Persing during the punitive expedition into Mexico in 1916 where he led one of the first motorized combat operations in American military history, taking part in a firefight at the San Miguelito ranch near Rubio in which three of Panchcho Villa’s men were killed, including Villa’s chief bodyguard, Captain Julio Cardinus.
In World War I, he became one of the first American officers to command tanks in combat, leading the United States Tank Corps at the Battle of St. Miel and the Muse Argon offensive in 1918. He was wounded in action, leading his men from the front, hit by a machine gun bullet in the thigh, but continuing to direct operations from a shell hole.
He was awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for extraordinary heroism. Between the wars, while many military officers settled into comfortable peaceime routines, Patton studied armored warfare with an intensity that bordered on obsession. He read Hines Guderion’s groundbreaking work on mechanized operations. He absorbed the campaigns of Napoleon, Frederick the Great, Hannibal, and the Roman legions.
He spent hours on horseback, which he believed developed the instinct for terrain that was essential to a cavalry officer, and he considered the tank to be the modern successor to the cavalry charge. He developed a philosophy of war that was rooted in a single unshakable conviction. Speed kills, not your own men, but the enemy.
A commander who moves fast enough, who strikes deep enough into the enemy’s rear, who refuses to stop and consolidate, who keeps pushing when every textbook says to pause, that commander will destroy armies 10 times his size. By 1944, Patton had already proven this philosophy in North Africa, where his second core helped drive the Africa corpse out of Tunisia after the American humiliation at Casarine Pass, and in Sicily, where his seventh army raced across the island faster than anyone thought possible, reaching Palmo roughly
12 days after the landings, with the final 100-mile dash taking under 72 hours, and then pressing on to Msina in a series of bold flanking maneuvers. including amphibious end runs along the coast that left the Germans scrambling to retreat across the straight of Msina. But Sicily also very nearly ended Patton’s career.
In August 1943, while visiting field hospitals, Patton slapped two American soldiers who were suffering from combat fatigue. He accused them of cowardice. When the incidents became public, the outcry was enormous. Eisenhower privately reprimanded Patton and forced him to apologize publicly to every division in his army.
Patton was stripped of his command. For nearly a year, the most gifted combat general in the American army sat idle, disgraced, watching the war move on without him. But Eisenhower could not afford to waste that talent. In early 1944, Patton was sent to England and given command of the Third Army, which was assembling and training for the invasion of Europe.
Patton threw himself into preparing his new army with the same ferocious energy he brought to everything. He personally inspected every division. He stood on the hoods of jeeps and addressed thousands of soldiers at a time, delivering speeches that were profane, electrifying, and unforgettable. He told his men that Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser.
He told them that the very thought of losing is hateful to Americans. The Third Army that Patton built in England was not just well-trained. It was aggressive, confident, and hungry for a fight. Before the Third Army could enter combat, however, Patton was given one more assignment, and it was perhaps the strangest of his career.
He was placed in nominal command of a fictitious formation called the First United States Army Group. This Phantom Army, complete with inflatable rubber tanks, fake radio traffic, wooden aircraft, and dummy headquarters buildings, was positioned in Southeast England, directly opposite the Pasta Calala.
The entire deception was designed to convince German intelligence that the real invasion of France would come at Calala, not Normandy, and that Patton would lead it. The Germans took the bait completely. Even after the actual D-Day landings on June 6th, 1944, Hitler kept the German 15th Army roughly 19 divisions in reserve near the P de Calala for nearly 7 weeks after D-Day, waiting for the invasion by pattern that never came.
The German high command considered Patton so dangerous, so likely to lead the decisive blow that his mere presence in a theater was enough to pin down an entire army group without firing a shot. It was in France, beginning in the summer of 1944, that Patton would finally unleash the campaign that justified every bit of that German fear.
And it was in France that German commanders, both Vermacht and Vafan SS, would learn through bitter and repeated experience what it meant to engage this man’s flank. Patton’s third army was officially activated at noon on August 1, 1944, and 7 weeks after the D-Day landings on the beaches of Normandy. For those seven weeks, the Allied armies had been locked in a brutal attritional struggle in the hedge country of the Kotentan Peninsula.
The dense Norman Boage, a centuries old patchwork of small fields bordered by thick earn banks topped with tangled hedges and ancient trees, was a defender’s paradise. Every field was a potential ambush site. Every sunken lane could conceal a machine gun nest, a mortar team, or a soldier with a panzer anti-tank weapon.
German defenders could not be seen until they opened fire from 20 or 30 m away. Progress was measured in yards, not miles. American infantry divisions that had landed at full strength on D-Day were reporting casualty rates that rivaled the worst days of the First World War. But by late July, the breakout had begun. Operation Cobra, launched on July 25 by Lieutenant General Omar Bradley’s First Army, shattered the German defensive line west of St.
low with a massive carpet bombing attack. Over 1500 heavy bombers of the Eighth Air Force dropped thousands of tons of high explosive and fragmentation bombs saturating a rectangle roughly 6,000 yd wide and 2200 yd deep along the St. Low to Perier’s road. The Panzer division commanded by General Odon Fritz Boline was positioned directly in the impact zone and was virtually annihilated.
Bioline later reported that at least 70% of his troops were knocked out, dead, wounded, or so dazed they could not fight. Entire companies simply ceased to exist. Tanks were flipped upside down by the blast concussions. The cratered moonscape that remained bore no resemblance to the hedro country that had existed hours before. The German line cracked wide open, and into that gap poured pattern.
Between August 1 and August 4, seven full divisions of the Third Army streamed through the narrow Avanches corridor, sometimes crossing a single bridge at Pontto Bol that became one of the most critical choke points of the entire war. This stone bridge over the Saloon River was barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass.
Traffic control officers worked around the clock directing an endless river of tanks, halftracks, artillery pieces, supply trucks, ambulances, and marching infantry. At one point, vehicles were crossing at the rate of one every 15 seconds, day and night, a pace that Patton’s staff had calculated to the minute. Military police stood at every intersection, waving vehicles through without stopping.
Fuel trucks followed immediately behind the armor. Repair crews trailed the combat formations, recovering broken down vehicles and getting them back into action within hours. It was a logistical miracle and it was also an enormous gamble. If the Germans could cut that corridor, if they could drive a wedge through Avanches and reach the sea just 30 km away, Patton’s entire army would be trapped in Britany with no way to be resupplied or reinforced.
Once through the bottleneck, Patton’s forces erupted in every direction like water bursting through a dam. The fourth armored division under Major General John Wood, one of the most aggressive armored commanders in the American army, swung south and west, driving toward Ren, then Lauron, then the great port of St. Nazair.
The sixth armored division under Major General Robert Gro raced 200 m toward Breast, reaching the outskirts of that heavily fortified port city by early August. Patton had wagered Field Marshall Montgomery £5 that he would reach Breast within 5 days. He very nearly won the bet, but Patton’s real interest was not in Britany. While two core chased the German garrisons into their fortress ports, Patton’s 15th core under Major General Wade Heislip was already lunging eastward deep into the German rear.
Helip’s divisions covered 75 mi in just 3 days, capturing the city of Lear on August 8th. By the end of August, the Third Army held a combined frontage of over 450 mi, a distance so vast that it should have been impossible for a single army to control. But Patton did not rely on continuous defensive lines.
He relied on speed, on air cover from Brigadier General Otto Whan’s 19th tactical air command, and on the simple principle that if you keep moving fast enough, the enemy can never concentrate against you. The Germans saw the opportunity presented by Patton’s exposed corridor at a ranchers. Hitler saw it most clearly of all. On August 2, 1944, Hitler issued a direct order to Field Marshal Gwentha von Klug, the commander of Army Group B.
The order was unambiguous. Kluger was to assemble every available Panza division and launch an immediate counterattack westward from the area around Morta, drive 24 km to the coast at Avanches, and slam the door shut on Patton’s third army. The operation was cenamed Luetic, the German name for the Belgian city of Lege, where German forces had won an early victory in August 1914.
Hitler envisioned eight of the nine Panza divisions in Normandy converging for this single decisive blow. He promised a thousand Luftwaffer fighters to provide air cover. He was convinced this counter-stroke would reverse the entire course of the Normandy campaign and perhaps the war itself. But the men who would actually have to carry out this order knew better.
Field Marshall von Klug told Hitler’s headquarters that the operation had no realistic chance of success. The divisions were under strength, exhausted from weeks of continuous combat, and critically short of fuel and ammunition. Kluj sent a message to his chief of staff, expressing his frustration. He said that someone had to tell the Ferrara that if the Americans got through at a ranchers, they would be out of the woods and they would be able to do whatever they wanted. He called the situation crazy.
General Lightnant Gwentha Blumenrit, Kluger’s chief of staff, later testified that all the planning had been done in Berlin with large-scale maps and that the advice of the generals actually fighting in France was neither asked for nor encouraged. The commanders of the Waffan SS divisions, whose elite formations would bear the brunt of the fighting, understood that they were being ordered to drive directly toward the flank of the most aggressive armored commander in the Allied armies.
They had already seen in brutal and costly detail what Patton’s forces could do to SS formations. The 17th SS Panza Grenadier Division gets von Bleikingan had been the first SS formation to feel the full weight of American combat power in Normandy. Formed in late 1943 with a mix of volunteers and conscripts, including many ethnic German recruits from southeastern Europe, the division had been thrown into battle against the 101st Airborne Division at Carantan on June 13, one week after D-Day.
The fighting at what the Americans came to call bloody Gulch was savage. The SS troops launched repeated attacks but were halted and then counteratt attacked by combat command A of the United States Second Armored Division whose Sherman tanks broke the SS assault and drove them back. By early July, the 17th SS had already been reduced to roughly 8,500 men from its full establishment strength.
Then came Operation Cobra and with it catastrophe. Caught in the path of the American breakout, the 17th SS was encircled along with elements of the second SS Panza Division Das Reich in what became known as the Ron Pocket on July 29 and 30. The retreating German columns jammed nose totail on narrow roads were caught in the open by American fighter bombers.
P-47 Thunderbolts of the 405th Fighter Group made pass after pass, firing rockets into the packed vehicles, and dropping 500 lb bombs on columns that had nowhere to go. In a single devastating attack, American pilots claimed dozens of tanks, hundreds of vehicles, and 11 artillery pieces destroyed.
Postwar analysis revised those numbers downward, but the destruction visible on the ground was undeniable. The road was turned into a graveyard of twisted metal and burning wreckage. The 17th SS survived only as four small battle groups, none larger than a reinforced battalion, each named after its commanding officer.
These fragments, battle groups, Brown, Gunter, Fick, and Wall, were all that remained of a division that had been at full strength just 7 weeks earlier. The second SS Panza division, Das Reich, had lost most of its armor in the same Ron disaster. The first SS Panza division lestande Adolf Hitler, the most prestigious formation in the entire Waffan SS, the division that bore Hitler’s own name, was committed peacemeal to the Mortine counterattack.
Allied air attacks repeatedly disrupted the division’s movement to its assembly area, causing hours of delay. Going into the attack, Leandate was at barely a third of its authorized armored strength with only a fraction of its tanks and assault guns combat ready. These were the forces battered, under strength, their crews exhausted, their fuel tanks half empty that Hitler ordered to attack toward Patton’s exposed flank.
The total German force assembled for operation luitic drew from five divisions. The second Panza, the 116th Panza, the second SS Panza Das Reich, elements of the first SS Panza Libstand, and the remnants of the 17th SS Panza Grenadier. German records indicate roughly 177 tanks and assault guns actually crossed the start line though plans had called for many more.
The assault was commanded by General Deanza trooper Hans Fryhur Fonfun of the 47th Panza Corps. SS Obsten Fuiraa Paul Houseer commanded the German 7th Army. At 2 in the morning on August 7th, the attack began without artillery preparation to preserve surprise. The thick fog that blanketed the Norman countryside provided concealment from Allied aircraft.
For the first few hours, things went reasonably well for the attackers. The second Panza division advanced rapidly through the darkness, reaching the village of Lameznil Adela by 6:00 in the morning, roughly 15 km toward the sea at Avon. Elements of the second SS Panza briefly seized the town of Morta itself. For a few tense hours at German headquarters, it looked as though Hitler’s gamble might actually work.
The corridor might be cut. Patton might be trapped. But the Americans held a trump card that the Germans did not know about and could not have anticipated. British codereakers at Bletchley Park had intercepted and decrypted Hitler’s counterattack order through the Ultra Intelligence Program three full days before the attack began on August 4.
General Bradley had used that precious warning to quietly redeploy the 30th Infantry Division, known by its nickname Old Hickory, directly into the path of the coming German advance. He prepositioned combat commands of the 9inth and Second Armored Divisions on the flanks, and he alerted every fighter bomber squadron of the 19th Tactical Air Command to stand ready for a maximum effort the moment the weather cleared.
700 men of the second battalion, 120th Infantry Regiment, 30th Division, held a rocky prominence called Hill 314 that overlooked the town of Morta and dominated every road the Germans needed to use. Two artillery forward observers, Lieutenants Charles Barts and Robert Weiss, set up their radios on that hilltop and began calling devastating fire onto the German columns passing below.
They could see everything, every tank column, every truck convoy, every infantry formation moving through the valleys, and they directed American artillery fire onto those targets with lethal precision. For six straight days, those 700 men held that hill against everything the Germans could throw at them, including infantry assaults, mortar barriages, and tank fire.
They were resupplied by parachute drops and by medical supplies fired in special artillery canisters. They refused to be dislodged when the fog began to lift late in the morning of August 7s. The real destruction began. P47 Thunderbolts of the 19th Tactical Air Command and Hawker Typhoons of the Royal Air Force.
Second Tactical Air Force descended on the exposed German armor in waves. Pilots dove through scattered clouds to strafe and bomb columns that were strung out along narrow roads with stone walls and hedgerros on both sides, leaving no room to disperse or take cover. Allied pilots claimed scores of tanks destroyed in a single afternoon, though postwar analysis of German records confirmed a lower but still devastating toll.
Ammunition carriers detonated in spectacular fireballs. Fuel trucks burned with thick black smoke that rose hundreds of meters into the sky. The roads became impossible, choked with wrecked and burning vehicles that blocked any forward movement and made retreat equally difficult. The American second armored division’s combat command struck the southern flank and rear of the SS Panza divisions on August 8th, compounding the disaster.
German units that had been driving westward suddenly found American tanks behind them, cutting their supply lines and threatening encirclement. Confusion spread through the German ranks. Communications broke down as radio equipment was destroyed by air attacks. Unit boundaries dissolved. Commanders lost contact with their subordinates.
And while all of this was happening, while the Germans were throwing themselves westward into the moore of American firepower at Morton, Patton was not defending his flank. He was not pulling back. He was not reinforcing the threatened corridor. He was doing the exact opposite. He was attacking deeper, faster, and farther into the enemy’s rear.
On August 8th, the same day the Mortine counterattack was being torn apart, Patton’s 15th Corps captured Lemon, 75 mi behind the German front lines. Highlip’s divisions had covered that distance in 3 days. On Patton’s orders, the 15th Corps then swung north toward Argentin, aiming to get behind the entire German army in Normandy. Patton once told his officers that flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not him, and that before the enemy finds out where his flanks are, he would be cutting the enemy’s throat. At Morta, that philosophy was
being demonstrated on an operational scale that would reshape the entire Western Front. By August 13, Operation Luic was finished. The Germans had lost approximately 120 tanks and assault guns, more than 2/3 of the armor committed. American casualties were roughly 2,000 to 3,000, with the 30th division taking the heaviest losses, suffering nearly a thousand casualties on August 7 alone.
But the strategic consequences for Germany dwarfed anything that happened at Morta itself. Hitler’s order to attack westward had accomplished something no Allied general could have planned. It had shoved every available German Panza division as far west as possible at the precise moment when Patton’s forces were sweeping east and the Canadian first army was driving south from Karn toward FileZ.
The trap was forming. The pocket was closing. What followed was one of the most complete destructions of a field army in the history of modern warfare. Patton’s 15th core swung north after taking Lemore, covering the distance to Arjuna with a speed that left German commanders unable to react or reposition.
By August 12 and 13, American forces had reached Argentin, forming the southern jaw of an enormous pocket. The Canadian First Army and the Polish First Armored Division under Major General Stannis Law Machek were pushing south from Khn to form the Northern Jaw. Inside that pocket were the shattered remnants of the German 7th Army and the fifth Panza Army.
The SS divisions that had been hurled into the Mortine attack were now trapped. The first SS Panza, the second SS Panza, the 12th SS Panza Hitler Yugand, and the remnants of the 17th SS were all caught inside the closing ring along with dozens of vermarked infantry and Panza divisions. Bradley halted Patton at Argentinon on August 13, fearing a collision with Canadian forces approaching from the north.
A gap of roughly 20 km remained open for several critical days, allowing some German units to escape eastward. The gap was finally sealed between August 19 and 21 when the Polish first armored division fought a desperate 2-day battle on hill 262 at Monttomel, a feature the Poles called the mace. Mach’s men lost 325 killed, over a thousand wounded and 114 missing while holding off German formations trying to break out.
The United States 90th Infantry Division linked up with the Poles at Shamba, finally closing the ring. The carnage inside the file’s pocket defied comprehension. Supreme Allied Commander General Dwight Eisenhower visited the battlefield and wrote that it was possible to walk for hundreds of yards, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.
The stench of decomposing bodies, of burning oil and rubber, of rotting horse flesh from the thousands of draft animals that had been killed alongside their handlers hung over the countryside for weeks. Bulldozers had to be brought in to clear the roads. Entire villages were buried under wreckage. Allied investigators counted approximately 500 destroyed tanks and assault guns.
Over a thousand artillery pieces and 5,000 wrecked vehicles scattered across the Norman countryside. Between 10,000 and 15,000 German soldiers lay dead in the fields and ditches and roads. Another 40,000 to 50,000 had been captured. Those who escaped did so on foot, abandoning virtually all their heavy equipment. Army Group B, the main German field force in France, had been shattered.
The SS divisions emerged as hollowedout shells. The first SS Panza Libstande broke out of the pocket on August 22 with zero combat ready tanks and no functioning artillery. The 12th SS Panza Hitler Yugand, which had entered the Normandy campaign with over 20,000 men, had lost roughly 8,000. The second SS Panza Dasich had been sent back into the pocket to help extricate other units and emerged a shadow of its former self.
But the destruction of German formations on Patton’s flank did not end in Normandy. It continued into the autumn. In September 1944, Patton’s third army drove eastward into the Lraine region, crossing the Moselle River and threatening the Sar industrial heartland. Hitler responded by committing two brand new Panza brigades, the 111th and the 113th to counterattack Patton’s spearhead near the town of Aracort.
These brigades were equipped with factory fresh Panther and Panza 4 tanks, but their crews had received only about two weeks of unit training. Many of the tank commanders had never fought in the West. They were thrown against combat command A of the fourth armored division beginning on September 18. The American defenders were led by Colonel Bruce Clark with Lieutenant Colonel Kraton Abrams commanding the 37th tank battalion.
Abrams, who would later become one of the most famous armored commanders in American history and the namesake of the M1 Abrams main battle tank, fought his Shermans with a tactical cunning and aggressiveness that matched Patton’s own philosophy. His tankers used the rolling Lorraine terrain to set ambushes, maneuvering into hull down positions behind ridgeel lines and engaging the German Panthers at ranges where the Sherman’s shorter range gun could penetrate their side armor.
The tank destroyers of Ca Company, 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion, equipped with the fast, lightly armored M18 Hellcat, added their firepower. The Hellcat could reach speeds of 55 mph on roads, making it the fastest tracked armored vehicle in the war. Its 76 mm gun could knock out a Panther from the flank.
The American crews used their speed to set up rapid ambushes, fire, and displace before the Germans could react. When the weather cleared, the P47 Thunderbolts arrived and added air delivered destruction to the ground battle. The results over 11 days of fighting were devastating. Of 262 German armored fighting vehicles committed to the Aracort counterattack, only 62 remained operational at the end of September, 86 were confirmed, destroyed outright.
The American Fourth Armored Division lost 41 Shermans and seven Stewart light tanks in the same period along with 225 killed and 648 wounded. The two German Panza brigades effectively ceased to exist as cohesive combat formations. General Major Friedrich vonmelanthin, the chief of staff of the German Fifth Panza Army that had ordered the attack, later acknowledged the grim operational reality.
He wrote that the West Wall was still unmanned at that time and that no effective defense could have been made there. The counterattack had been an attempt to discourage the Americans from advancing farther. It failed completely, and it cost the Germans armored reserves they could never replace. The Lraine campaign ground on through October and November of 1944, becoming one of the most grueling chapters in the Third Army’s history.
Patton’s forces fought through constant rain, mud, and flooding. The Miselle and Sai rivers overflowed their banks, turning the countryside into a swamp. Supply lines stretched thin as the Allied logistical system strained to keep up with armies advancing across the breadth of France. Patton’s forces were allocated less fuel and ammunition than the northern armies under Montgomery, a decision that infuriated him.
Despite these obstacles, the Third Army pressed forward. The ancient fortress city of Mets, which had not fallen by direct assault in living memory, and whose fortifications had resisted attackers for centuries, fell to the Fifth Infantry Division and the 95th Infantry Division on November 22, 1944.
The German garrison fought from a ring of armored forts that had been constructed by the Prussians after 1870 and reinforced by the French after 1918. The Americans had to take these forts one by one using flamethrowers, demolition charges, and close quarters infantry combat. The capture of Mets was a testament to the tenacity of Patton’s infantry, and it was a blow to German morale.
A fortress that had stood for centuries had fallen in weeks. By mid December, the Third Army had advanced through Lraine and was pushing into the Sar region of Germany itself. The front was active, the pressure constant, and every unit was fully engaged. It was at precisely this moment, with his army stretched across a broad front and locked in combat, that the crisis came from an entirely unexpected direction.
On December 16, 1944, three German armies launched a surprise offensive through the Arden’s forest of Belgium and Luxembourg. The Battle of the Bulge was Hitler’s final gamble in the west. 25 divisions, including the strongest remaining Panza forces in the German army, struck the thinly held American line and created a bulge 60 mi deep and 40 mi wide in the Allied front.
Two entire American infantry divisions, the 106th and the 28th, were overrun in the opening hours. Thousands of American soldiers were killed or captured. Panic spread through rear area headquarters. The town of Baston, a vital road junction where seven main roads converged, was surrounded by German forces with the 101st Airborne Division and elements of the 10th Armored Division’s Combat Command B trapped inside, low on ammunition, food, and medical supplies.
When the German commander sent a surrender demand, the American acting commander, Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, famously replied with a single word, nuts. The Allied high command met at Verdan on December 19. Eisenhower asked his generals who could relieve Baston and when. Patton spoke up immediately. He told Eisenhower he could attack with three divisions within 48 hours.
The room fell silent. Several generals exchanged skeptical glances. What Patton was proposing seemed operationally impossible. His third army was engaged in heavy fighting in the SAR facing east. To relieve Baston, he would need to disengage from the enemy across a broad front, wheel his entire force 90° to the north, move over a 100 miles on icy roads through freezing weather, and attack into the southern flank of the German penetration, all within 2 days.
No army in modern military history had ever attempted such a maneuver at that scale and speed. But Patton had already anticipated the crisis. His intelligence chief, Colonel Oscar Kau, had briefed him on December 9th, a full week before the German offensive began, that enemy Panza divisions were disappearing from the front line and concentrating for something significant.
Patton had immediately ordered his staff to prepare three separate contingency plans for a northward pivot, each with a different axis of advance. When Eisenhower asked the question at Verdun, the plans were already in Patton’s pocket, staffed out down to the roots, fuel requirements, and ammunition allocations for each division.
He telephoned his headquarters and gave the code word to activate the plan. The Third Army began its turn. Tens of thousands of vehicles, tanks, trucks, artillery pieces, ambulances, fuel tankers, and supply wagons swung north through freezing rain, sleet, and snow. The fourth armored division, the 26th Infantry Division, and the 80th Infantry Division formed the spearhead of the Third Corps under Major General John Milikin.
Roads were clogged with retreating stragglers from the shattered American units in the Bulge. Traffic jams stretched for miles on roads that were coated with black ice. Fuel was desperately short. Temperatures plunged well below freezing, and soldiers in open topped vehicles suffered from frostbite and exposure. None of it mattered.
Patton drove his army forward with a relentless intensity that stunned even his own staff. The 80th Infantry Division took the town of Edelbrook. The 26th Infantry attacked west of the main relief axis to protect the flank. And at the tip of the spear, Lieutenant Colonel Kraton Abrams and his 37th tank battalion, the same unit that had shattered the German Panza brigades at Aracort 3 months earlier, fought their way north through one German blocking position after another.
On December 26th at 4:50 in the afternoon, Abrams’ tanks smashed through the last German defensive line near the village of Aseninoa, just south of Baston. The lead Sherman, known by its crew as Cobra King, rolled into the perimeter and made contact with engineers of the 326th Airborne Engineer Battalion. The siege of Baston was broken.
Patton had moved three divisions over a 100 miles in 5 days, turned his entire army 90°, and attacked into the German flank in the dead of winter. German commanders, many of whom had spent their entire careers studying the campaigns of Napoleon and Frederick the Great, recognized this maneuver for what it was.
It was one of the most extraordinary feats of operational planning and execution in the history of warfare. No other Allied commander could have done it. Most German commanders privately admitted that no German commander could have done it either. Not at that speed, not in those conditions. In the final months of the war, Patton delivered one last demonstration.
On the night of March 22, 1945, he ordered Major General S. Leroy Irwin’s fifth infantry division to cross the Rin River at Nearstein and Oppenheim, south of the city of Mines. There was no massive preparatory bombardment, no weeks of elaborate planning, no thousand plane air support package. Patton wanted speed and surprise, and he got both.
The 249th Engineer Combat Battalion constructed a 366 m floating bridge in just 18 hours. American troops poured across into the heart of Germany. On the Eastern Bank, resistance crumbled. Roughly 19,000 German soldiers surrendered, many too demoralized and exhausted to fight. Patton had crossed the Rine a full day before Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s carefully orchestrated Operation Plunder farther to the north.
He sent a message to Supreme Headquarters that has become one of the most quoted communications of the war. He told them he had crossed the Rine and asked them for God’s sake to send some gasoline. By the time Germany surrendered in May 1945, the Third Army had compiled a combat record unmatched in American military history.
In 281 days of continuous operations, it had liberated or conquered 81,761 square miles of territory. It had captured over a million prisoners of war. It had crossed 24 major rivers and streams. It had advanced farther, faster, and more relentlessly than any Allied army in the European theater. The German officers who survived the war left behind a collection of professional assessments that tell you everything you need to know about how the enemy viewed George Patton.
General Lightnant Gwentha Blumenrit who had served as chief of staff to Field Marshall von Kluga and had watched the Morta disaster unfold from the German side said the German command regarded Patton extremely highly as the most aggressive Panza general of the allies. A man of incredible initiative and lightning action. Blumenrit said Patton’s operations impressed them enormously because he came closest to the German concept of the classical military commander.
He added that Patton had even improved on Napoleon’s basic principle of speed. General lost Alfred Jodel, the chief of operations at the German armed forces high command, told his interrogators that Patton was the American Gdderian. Jodel said Patton was very bold, preferred large movements, took big risks, and won big successes.
General Ostines Gudderion himself, the architect of German armored warfare and the man whose theories Patton had studied so carefully between the wars, paid what may have been the highest professional compliment possible. He said that from the standpoint of a tank specialist, he must congratulate Patton because Patton had acted as Gudderion himself would have done in the same situation.
General Feld Marshall Albert Kessler compared pattern to Irvin RML, saying both men had developed tank warfare into an art and possessed a kind of instinctive feel for armored operations. General Lightnant Fritz Boline who had commanded the Panza lair division and faced Patton at Morta in the Lorraine and at the bulge offered a telling comparison.
Reflecting on the Africa corpse escape after the battle of Elamagne in 1942, Boline said he did not think that Patton would have let them get away so easily. And General Feld Marshall Gered von Runet, who had twice served as supreme commander of all German forces on the Western Front, gave the most concise judgment of all.
When asked by the American military newspaper Stars and Stripes, which Allied commander the Germans respected most, Runstead answered simply, “He is your best.” The evidence for that verdict was written in the wreckage of armored columns across France, Belgium, and Germany. From the burning hulks in the Ron pocket to the killing ground at FileZ.
From the shattered Panza brigades at Aracort to the frozen roads south of Baston. From the Rine crossing at Oppenheim to the final drive into the heart of the Reich. Patton did not live to grow old with his legend. On December 9th, 1945, just 7 months after the war in Europe ended, he was riding in the backseat of his staff car near Mannheim, Germany, when a 2 and a half ton army truck turned into his path.
The collision threw pattern forward. His head struck the partition between the front and rear seats. He suffered a broken neck and was paralyzed from the neck down. He was taken to the United States Army Hospital in H Highleberg, where doctors fought to save him. He lingered for 12 days. On December 21, 1945, George Smith Patton Jr.
died in his sleep. He was 60 years old. He had once said he wanted to be killed by the last bullet fired in the last battle of the war. Instead, he died in a hospital bed from injuries sustained in a minor traffic accident. It was a fate that would have struck him as bitterly ironic. the most aggressive combat general of his generation.
The man who had survived machine gun fire in the Argon, who had led armies across North Africa and Europe, who had outrun, outfought, and outmaneuvered some of the finest military formations in the world, was killed by a peaceime truck on a German road. Patton was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial in Ham, Luxembourg, among the men of his Third Army.
His grave is marked by a simple white cross identical to those of the 5 76 soldiers buried around him. He had told his wife that he wanted to lie with his men. He got his wish. Today, more than eight decades after the war, Patton’s grave remains the most visited site in the cemetery. Veterans, historians, and tourists come from around the world to stand before that white cross.
Many leave coins on the headstone, an old military tradition of respect. The lessons he taught on the battlefields of France are still studied at militarymies from West Point to Sandhurst. His campaigns are analyzed in staff colleges in dozens of countries. His principle that speed and audacity can overcome numerical disadvantage.
That the bold attacker who refuses to stop moving will always defeat the cautious defender who pauses to protect his flanks remains one of the foundational concepts of modern armored warfare. The German commanders who faced him understood this better than anyone. They had built their own military doctrine around the same principles of speed, surprise, and deep penetration.
They had conquered Poland in 5 weeks, France in six, and driven to the gates of Moscow in 5 months using exactly the kind of warfare Patton practiced. But when they encountered a general who applied their own methods against them with equal skill and greater resources, they discovered something that no amount of tactical brilliance could overcome.
They discovered that attacking into the flank of a man who refused to defend his flanks, who used his exposed positions as lures to draw the enemy forward into destruction, was not a battle. It was a death sentence. That knowledge earned in blood at Morta, confirmed at FileZ, reinforced at Aracort, and proven beyond all doubt at Baston, spread through the German officer corps like a warning passed between survivors of a natural disaster. Avoid the flank.
Stay away from the corridor. Do not be drawn in. Because Patton’s flank was never what it appeared to be. It was never a weakness waiting to be exploited. It was a door that opened only one way, inward toward annihilation.
