Daring had thus far gained naught. The September fiasco at Dornot was followed by an October debacle at Fort Driant, described by one historian as “probably the most formidable and well-prepared fortification that the American Army attempted to reduce in all of World War II.” A three-hundred-acre slab of concrete overlooking the Moselle valley, five miles southwest of Metz, Driant was said by Army intelligence to be “manned by about 100 old men and boys, whose morale is low.” Not true: it was stoutly defended by diehards behind walls seven feet thick, with a pentagonal central fort supplied through arterial tunnels. Neither American bombs, nor napalm, nor point-blank artillery salvos by Third Army’s biggest guns had any discernible effect; nor did day after day of infantry attacks that included pouring hot oil through Driant’s gun embrasures. “We were attempting to assault a medieval fortress in a medieval manner,” wrote a reporter with the 5th Infantry Division. Patton ordered his XX Corps to throw every last man at Driant if necessary because, as his chief of staff noted in the command diary, “he could not allow an attack by this army to fail.”
It failed anyway. After a week’s hard fighting, GIs had reduced only two peripheral barracks outside Driant, while the enemy still held five main casemates. Patton scolded his generals, suggesting that miscreants atone for their failings by personally leading the next attack, “or not come back.” But by mid-October the assault had collapsed—Third Army’s first substantial reverse. (Efforts were made to keep the bad news out of the papers.) In an October 19 letter to Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle, commander of Eighth Air Force, Patton wrote, “Those low bastards, the Germans, gave me my first bloody nose when they compelled us to abandon our attack on Fort Driant in the Metz area.” He requested “a revenge bombardment,” with “large bombs of the nastiest type, and as many as you can spare, to blow up this damn fort so that it becomes nothing but a hole.”
Even the largest, nastiest bombs failed to reduce Driant, and Patton now planned a bigger, broader attack on Metz, the biggest and broadest of his life. After stockpiling ammunition for several weeks, he wrote in his diary on Sunday, November 5:
Had a bad case of short breath this morning—my usual reaction to an impending fight or match. Went to church.… Had Marlene Dietrich and her troupe for lunch. Later they gave us a show. Very low comedy, almost an insult to human intelligence.
A day later he met with the reporters covering Third Army. “I told you we were going to be stopped for a while, and I was correct,” he told them. “Now we are going to start again. You do some lying and say this is simply what we called in the last war ‘correcting a line.’” To Bea he confessed, “I am having indigestion and the heaves as I always do before a match. I suppose I would be no good if I did not; it is not fear as to the result but simply anxiety to get started.”
Rain fell for a third consecutive day, giving Patton what one correspondent described as “a tired, aged appearance.” Two senior commanders arrived at the house on Rue Auxerre at seven o’clock on Tuesday evening, dripping amid the bric-a-brac and the cherubim peering down from the ceiling. The officers pleaded for a postponement of the attack until the skies cleared and the swollen rivers subsided. Patton refused.
* * *
He woke at three A.M. on Wednesday, November 8, to the thrum of rain on the roof. Patton had deliberately chosen this day to commemorate the TORCH landings in Morocco two years before; now, padding around the bedroom, he reminded himself to forgo the counsel of his fears and thumbed through a copy of Rommel’s World War I memoir, Infantry Attacks. He was sufficiently consoled by the account of foul weather on the Western Front in September 1914 to once more fall asleep.
Four hundred guns roused him again at 5:15, a sound he likened to “very many doors all slamming at once.” Third Army would shoot tens of thousands of shells that day; through the front curtains, this first barrage made the northeastern sky gleam as if kindled by heat lightning. The rain had stopped, and stars sprinkled the heavens above Nancy. “I thanked God for His goodness to me,” Patton scribbled in his diary.
Bradley phoned at 7:45 to wish him luck, then put Eisenhower on the line. “I expect great things of you,” the supreme commander said. “Carry the ball all the way.” At ten A.M., from a XII Corps observation post overlooking the Moselle south of Metz, Patton watched hundreds of fighter-bombers pirouette in the morning sun before blistering enemy command posts and artillery batteries. “I’m almost sorry for those German bastards,” he muttered. Smoke screens boiled across the river, at its highest flood stage since 1919, and three infantry divisions from XII Corps lunged forward, to be followed by a fourth in the afternoon. Two armored divisions coiled in the brakes and hollows, ready to exploit any fracture in the German line. The rains returned at five P.M., but Patton sensed momentum in his attack. At supper that night, an aide reported, “for the first time in days he was relaxed and talkative.”
Doolittle’s air fleets on Thursday brought more of those big, nasty bombs Patton favored—1,300 heavies dumping 2,600 tons on seven Metz forts in Operation MADISON. Dropped through dense overcast by bombardiers relying on murky radar images, more than 98 percent of the payloads missed their targets, often by miles. The infantry soldiered on, resupplied with rations, plasma, ammunition, and toilet paper tossed from the cockpit doors of single-engine spotter planes flying at ten to twenty feet, too low for German antiaircraft crews to depress their 20mm guns. As part of a XX Corps attack north of the city, gutful troops from the 358th Infantry scampered across the roof of Fort Koenigsmacker, blowing open steel doors with satchel charges and dumping gasoline and thermite grenades down ventilation shafts. Though badly flayed by German machine guns, the men rejected an order to fall back, replying by radio, “This fort is ours.” Soon it was: almost four hundred Germans emerged with their hands raised, the first Metz bastion to fall.
Almost half a mile wide, the Moselle rose farther until water lapped through villages fronting the river. Floodwaters inundated German minefields, which helped eight battalions from the 90th Division get a purchase on the far bank, but building a bridge to carry tanks took days. Engineers blue with cold and wearing flak jackets struggled to hold bridge pontoons in place against the bully current and crashing artillery. “The air seemed filled with white tracers,” a nineteen-year-old soldier in the 5th Division reported. “Men would get up in front of me, head toward the trees and, as a string of tracers would pass through them, [fall] to the ground or into the stream.”
“Groans, suffering, and pain. Men shot to pieces,” a surgical technician entered in his diary. “All wards were completely filled, also the barber shop, supply tent, pharmacy, and laboratory tents. And finally, the mess tent filled up.” A surgeon toiling over the mangled legs of a soldier whose jeep triggered a mine described “bolts, washers, [and] bushings in the muscle, as on a work bench.” Another GI was wounded when a shell detonated in a barnyard, “filling his thigh from knee to buttocks with manure, all tightly packed … as into a sausage.” Wounded men who had narrowly escaped death lay in silence on the ward cots, the surgeon added, “like somebody rescued from the ledge of a skyscraper.” Patton spent his fifty-ninth birthday on November 11 “by getting up where the dead were still warm,” as he wrote Bea. “However the enemy must be suffering more, so it is a question of mutual crucifiction [sic] till he cracks.”
On November 14, nearly a week into the offensive, engineers finished a Bailey bridge north of the city. Early the next morning, the 10th Armored Division rumbled over the Moselle in a spitting sleet storm, threatening a wide envelopment in tandem with the 90th Division, twenty miles above Metz, complemented by a shallower swing in the south by the 6th Armored and 80th Infantry Divisions. As other forces pinched the city’s near flanks, the 95th Division battered German garrison forces west of the river; many of these were the overage or infirm troops known as Halb-soldaten, half soldiers. Eisenhower arrived for a visit on November 15, tromping about in the mud before dining with Patton on the Rue Auxerre. “It was v
ery jolly,” an aide noted, “and the two generals sat up and talked until after two A.M.”
Battlefield advances made them jolly. The next day, Patton more than doubled the daily artillery allocation for XII Corps to twenty thousand rounds, explaining, “If we win now we will not need shells later; if we do not use the shells now, we will not win the war.” Hitler had twice rebuffed Rundstedt’s suggestion to abandon Metz, but Nazi functionaries fled in stolen Renaults and Citroëns. The city water system had been smashed, ammunition was short, and reinforcements were so feeble—including constables armed with ancient French rifles and decrepit supernumeraries wearing brassards in lieu of uniforms—that a Wehrmacht general described them as “drops of water on a hot stone.” The phones failed on November 17 as the last German civilians were evacuated to the east by a police escort from Darmstadt. A new garrison commander summoned from the Eastern Front, General Heinrich Kittel, was made to swear an oath to defend the city “to the last man and cartridge,” the usual immolation blithely demanded of those in harm’s way by those far from it.
At 10:30 A.M. on November 19, the two wings of Third Army completed the encirclement of Metz when soldiers from the 5th Division met cavalry troopers from the 90th seven miles east of the city, in Retonfey. Patton’s two corps now held a line ten to twenty miles east of where they had begun eleven days earlier. In Metz, the end came quickly, with mercifully few room-to-room brawls. Six thousand prisoners were captured; General Kittel was discovered on November 21 in an underground field hospital, suffused with morphine after being badly wounded while fighting in the line. The city formally surrendered at 2:35 P.M. the next day.
* * *
Patton drove into Metz as the conquering hero, sirens wailing to herald his arrival, punctuated by the “steamboat trombone” on his personal jeep. “It was very pleasant to drive into a town which has not been captured for more than 1,300 years,” he wrote, still insisting on his fictitious version of history. To Bea he added, “I will be hard to live with. I have been a sort of demi-god too long.” He personally interrogated General Anton Dunckern, the bug-eyed security commander for Lorraine, who had been apprehended by a 5th Division patrol while trying to slink out of Metz with an aide. After threatening to turn him over to the French, who “know how to make people talk,” Patton told an interpreter, “If he wanted to be a good Nazi, he could have died then and there. It would have been a pleasanter death than what he will get now.” When Dunckern protested that he had been captured by Americans and should therefore remain in U.S. custody, Patton snapped, “When I am dealing with vipers, I do not have to be bothered by any foolish ideas.… I understand German very well, but I will not demean myself by speaking such a language.”
An honor guard played ruffles and flourishes for the victors. Patton sprinkled medals among his legions, acclaiming what he deemed “one of the epic river crossings of history,” and Metz formally returned to French custody. GIs in muddy boots and frayed uniforms stood at attention in a central square, as a military band with colors flying preceded French soldiers in black berets, white leggings, and Sam Browne belts, each with two submachine guns slung over his shoulders.
Little mention was made of the outlying forts, several of which remained defiantly unconquered. Sherman tanks blackened those works with thousands of rounds of French white-phosphorus ammunition, using special firing pins improvised by Third Army armorers. Fort St.-Privat surrendered on November 29, yielding more than five hundred prisoners, scores of whom had phosphorus burns. Fort Driant, that hard nut, would hold out until December 8, and Fort Jeanne d’Arc was the last to fold, on December 13.
By that time Third Army’s left wing had finally closed on the Saar River and the Siegfried Line, although Patton’s right remained short of the German frontier. The sixty-mile advance in the Lorraine campaign had liberated another five thousand square miles of France, but at a cost in three months of nearly a hundred thousand U.S. battle and nonbattle casualties. Third Army had yet to breach the Westwall, much less reach the Rhine, and the long autumn amounted to what one historian would call “Patton’s bloodiest and least successful campaign,” a season of unimaginative and dispersed frontal attacks of the sort he ridiculed when lesser generals launched them. Unable to resist the prestige of bagging Metz, he had forfeited the single greatest advantage the Americans now held over their adversaries—mobility—by permitting much of his army to be drawn into a sanguinary siege.
In a note to Henry L. Stimson, the secretary of war, Patton proposed that as part of any surrender terms the Germans be required to keep Lorraine, “this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consists in assorted manure piles.” He also summoned the Third Army chaplain, Colonel James H. O’Neill, to his office in an old French barracks in Nancy. “Chaplain, how much praying is being done in the Third Army?” Patton asked.
“I’m afraid to admit it,” O’Neill said, “but I do not believe that much praying is going on.”
“We must ask God to stop these rains,” Patton said, staring through his high windows at the sopping landscape outside. “These rains are the margin that holds defeat or victory.” O’Neill typed out an improvised appeal on a three-by-five card, and engineers reproduced a quarter-million copies to be distributed throughout Third Army. “Restrain these immoderate rains with which we have had to contend,” the text asked.
Grant us fair weather for Battle. Graciously hearken to us as soldiers who call upon Thee that, armed with Thy power, we may advance from victory to victory, and crush the oppression and wickedness of our enemies, and establish Thy justice among men and nations. Amen.
To his diary a week later Patton confided, “It has certainly rained less since my prayer.”
To the Land of Doom
FAR above the killing fields, the struggle for command of the skies had long tilted in the Allies’ favor, allowing some four thousand Anglo-American heavy bombers flying from England and Italy to get on with what an airman called “the murder business”: the gutting of the German homeland with well over one million tons of high explosives, incendiaries, and fragmentation bombs.
Allied hopes for strategic bombing early in the war had proved too optimistic, especially the belief that precision strikes would quickly eviscerate the enemy war economy, and so spare ground forces the blood-letting that had characterized World War I. Imprecise targeting, bad weather, and savage German defenses had forced Allied strategists to use the bomber fleet as a blunt instrument, a bludgeon rather than a scalpel. Terrible aircraft losses in the first three months of 1944, including almost 800 U.S. heavies shot down, had been stanched in the spring by the belated arrival of the P-51 Mustang, a fighter with sufficient range to escort bombers to any target on the Continent. An unexpected surge in German aircraft production, with 10,000 single-engine fighters built from May through September, had again challenged Allied hegemony; during the summer, another 900 bombers went down from Eighth Air Force alone. But the Luftwaffe now was in a death spiral, having lost 31,000 planes before D-Day and another 13,000 from June through October. By July, novice German fighter pilots typically received less than thirty flying hours in training before being hurled into combat, less than one-tenth the Anglo-American average; the life expectancy of a Luftwaffe pilot could be measured in weeks if not hours. “Each time I close the canopy before take-off,” wrote one airman, “I feel that I am closing the lid of my own coffin.”
Of necessity, antiaircraft flak had become the primary German defense. Flak was credited with destroying 6,400 Anglo-American planes in 1944 and damaging 27,000 others. A standard 88mm flak gun fired a 17-pound shrapnel grenade that climbed thirteen thousand feet in six seconds before bursting into fifteen hundred shards that could perforate any plane within two hundred yards. Fortunately for Allied crews, sixteen thousand 88mm shells were required on average to bring down a single heavy bomber. Flak nevertheless “held an evil, hypnotic fascination,” an American pilot acknowledged. Heavier German guns
were deployed to reach high-flying B-17s, and by war’s end 1.2 million Germans would man the Reich’s ground-based air defenses.
British bombers, flying mostly at night, tried to avoid what a BBC reporter over Berlin described as “a wall of light.” A blue-tinted searchlight beam, guided by radar, would fix on an approaching plane, drawing other searchlights into a brilliant cone so that “the bomber appeared to ride at its moving vertex” while gunfire converged on the target. “The only hope,” an RAF crewman said, “was to get clear before the searchlights could form a cone.” American bombers, flying by day, sought to counter German search and fire-control radars with an expanding array of electronic jammers; one study estimated that effective jamming meant that 25 percent fewer planes were destroyed and 50 percent fewer were spared serious flak damage compared to those flying without countermeasures. Still, as the poet-airman Randall Jarrell wrote:
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
Air supremacy provided an invaluable advantage to Allied ground forces and spared the lives of many Anglo-American fliers, even if that meant little to those washed out with a hose. The Allied strategic air effort in Europe cost some eighty thousand lives and ten thousand aircraft, and the vast tactical air war in direct support of ground forces added more losses. In the first half of 1944, battle casualty rates for every 1,000 bomber crewmen serving six months in combat included 712 killed or missing and 175 wounded: 89 percent. By one calculation, barely one in four U.S. airmen completed twenty-five missions over Germany, a minimum quota that was soon raised to thirty and then thirty-five on the assumption that the liberation of France and Belgium and the attenuation of German airpower made flying less lethal.
The Liberation Trilogy Box Set Page 262