On July 29 Patton drove through Coutances to check on the progress of Major General Robert Gerow's Sixth Division's advance to Avranches. He found it halted at the Sée River by German fire and a wrecked bridge. Patton wrote in his diary, “I asked him [Gerow] whether he had been down to look at the river, and he said ‘No’. So I told him that unless he did do something, he would be out of a job!”33
Patton then went down to the river, was not shot at, and found that the river was not over a foot deep. He then directed the division to cross the river.
On the evening of July 30 the first units of the Fourth Armored Division entered Avranches. They were quickly reinforced the next day. Patton knew the town well. Over thirty years earlier he and his wife, Beatrice, had looked across the bay on a bluff two hundred feet above Avranches to the famous Benedictine Abby, Mont St. Michel, perched on a rock eight miles away. From this strategic location, he ordered the Sixth Armored Division to cross the Sélune River at Pontaubault and with the rest of Middleton's VIII Corps proceed into Brittany.
This advance unlocked the door to the west coast of the Cherbourg Peninsula and outflanked the entire German position in Normandy. Patton's tanks would clear the enemy from Brittany. Then they would begin a grand sweep eastward toward Le Mans and Chartres.
This was a great victory, yet an ironic one for Patton because he was not its bona fide commander. Bradley sent him word that the Third Army would be born officially at high noon on August 1.
Patton's diary contains his poem, “Absolute War,” that beyond doubt asserted what he now intended to do: “Let's take a chance now that we have the ball…. Let's shoot the works and win! Yes win it all.”34
“WE ARE HAVING ONE OF THE LOVELIEST BATTLES YOU EVER SAW”
OVERLORD's moment of greatest opportunity had arrived. The situation kept rapidly changing to the Allies’ advantage. The British and American armies needed a plan to capitalize on the opportunities that the Normandy battlefield now afforded them. Eisenhower, Montgomery, and Bradley were slow to cope with this fast-moving situation and at first fell back on the original OVERLORD assumption that it was necessary to take Brittany's ports to support American logistical needs.
However by August 4, Eisenhower realized that this plan was now outdated. Bradley had planned to send all of Patton's Third Army into Brittany. The original plan was now canceled. Minimum forces could do the job, while the rest of his army advanced southward to the Loire and eastward to envelop the entire German Seventh Army.
Those plans coincided with those of Patton. He was eager to take advantage of the great opportunities offered by the enemy's rapid disintegration. With the activation of Patton's Third Army, the Twelfth US Army Group came into being. Bradley was promoted to assume this enlarged command; the First Army was turned over to General Courtney Hodges.35
With the expansion of the American ground forces, Eisenhower moved to France on August 7 and set up his headquarters near Tournières. (see Map 13). He met with Bradley the next day and urged him to “destroy the enemy now.”36
On July 31, Patton addressed his last staff conference before the Third Army was activated:
I want to thank you all for your long endurance and faithful service while we were waiting for this great opportunity…. Now, gentlemen…. The harder we push, the more Germans we’ll kill…. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you to remember that. [Patton's method was to move constantly and fast so that the Germans had no time to organize a counterattack.]
There's another thing I want you to remember. Forget this Goddamn business of worrying about our flanks. We must guard our flanks, but not to the extent we don’t do anything else…. Flanks are something for the enemy to worry about, not us…. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding anything, except the enemy….
Gentlemen, you’ve done outstanding work. And I want to thank you for it. I am proud of you.37
Patton's genius in aggressive command was based on his ability to see the big battlefield picture. He discerned the primary objective miles ahead of the actual front. Patton's basic plan was to warp drive forward and capitalize on the mobility and punch of his tank divisions while maximizing German disorder. He poured over small-scale Michelin road maps that gave him the details he wanted most: road networks, rivers, railroads, and details about the terrain in general. He memorized an area's geography long before he set foot on the battlefield. Thus while keeping in mind the general objective of a battle, he could best judge how to deal with each specific geographic obstacle.
Few people realized that while Patton was in the doghouse, he spent part of his time in England studying the actual routes used nine centuries earlier by William the Conqueror for his campaigns in Normandy and Brittany. He reasoned correctly that the same routes, now modern roads, had to be useable terrain for his army. Patton also invested a great deal of his time studying the road maps of Western Europe, particularly in the places where he expected to fight.
When Patton was in the field during Third Army campaign operations, he carried a special operations map, ten by twenty inches in size, that was covered and waterproofed. Significant towns, crossroads, rivers, etc. were all marked with secret code identification numbers. When he radioed his headquarters, he referred to the code number of the location where he wanted something done. His chief of staff, the signal officer, and Colonel Oscar W. Koch, head of Third Army intelligence, had identical copies. Koch was the most brilliant and original member of Patton's command team. Some believed that Koch had the most penetrating brain in the field of intelligence in the US Army.
Patton at heart was a cavalryman. His plans emphasized fast decisions, rapid execution, and balanced risk. Patton's general plan for the coming Third Army campaign was to employ a leapfrog tactic: when the advance guard of a column encountered resistance, the enemy was to be surrounded and contained on the spot. Immediately another advanced guard unit would continue onward until it struck opposition. This leapfrog tactic would be repeated over and over again. In this way, the enemy was kept in a perpetual state of shock and confusion, and given no time to organize or deliver a counterattack.
Patton employed that same type of tactics that had brought the Wehrmacht its greatest victories in Poland, France, and North Africa. But now Patton was applying his own “blitzkrieg in reverse” on the Germans.
Patton's additional intelligence source was popularly called “Patton's Household Cavalry.” Under Patton's personal direction, Colonel M. Fitchett's Sixth Cavalry Group, equipped with radio sets, conducted continuous patrols that ranged far and wide across the entire front and the Third Army's flank. The group was composed of squadrons, and they were divided into troops. Each was made up of about twenty soldiers equipped with jeeps, tanks, armored cars, half-tracks, and guns. Their mission was to move fast, surprise the enemy, outflank, confuse, ambush the Germans, and withdraw. They sent a steady stream of reports directly to Patton's command post.38 Thus, Patton often knew more about specific unit actions along the front than did the corps or division on the spot. The knowledge that Patton knew what was happening provided the motivation for improved frontline unit performance.39
Patton's advanced organizational methods and command skills won the respect of the Third Army's staff and fired their imaginations. After attending a staff briefing by Patton, a young officer wrote to his father, “I will go with him to the ends of the earth.”40
When Patton and his Third Army strode upon the Normandy stage on August 1, they were fully prepared for the battle ahead. After almost two months of attritional warfare, the Allies had reduced the German army to tatters. Allied air power controlled the skies. It had broken the German logistics chain, made daylight troop movement virtually impossible, and denied aerial reconnaissance intelligence to the German commanders. Patton gloried at how quickly his forces were advancing. As he wrote to a cavalry officer under whom he had served, “We are having one of the loveliest battles you ever saw. It is a typical cavalry action.”41<
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Perhaps of greatest importance, since the July 20 assassination attempt, the führer had been micromanaging all the fronts. Now by launching an abortive counterattack on Patton's advance into Brittany he would make a blunder that almost ended the war in Europe.42
August 1944 was one of the most remarkable months of World War II. Though the war in Western Europe continued for nine more months, the Third Reich's doom was sealed in August. The variety and complexity of operations during these thirty-one days makes this phase of the OVERLORD campaign one of the most monumental events in the history of modern warfare. Historian Nigel Hamilton contends that “Patton was to give perhaps the finest performance of ‘headlong’ mobile operations ever seen in military history.”43
THE BRITTANY SWEEPSTAKES
It was high noon on August 1 in Brittany when the Third Army became fully operational. Patton's Fourth and Sixth Armored Divisions thrust to the west. The main prizes for the “Brittany Sweepstakes” were the seaports of Saint-Malo, Brest, Lorient, and Saint Nazaire. (See Map 18.) In OVERLORD's original plan these ports would support the growing logistical demands of the invasion. It was a race to see if the Americans could secure these ports before the Germans destroyed them. The crossroad city of Rennes was also noted as an important jumping-off place for Patton's eastward thrust. (See Map 18.)
At the opening gun the Sixth Armored and Seventy-Ninth Infantry Divisions raced first to Saint-Malo and then onward to Brest. The Fourth Armored and Eighth Infantry Divisions moved rapidly on Rennes. The XV Corps with the Fifth Armored, Eighty-Third, and Ninetieth Infantry Divisions were deployed between the Sée and Sélune Rivers. (See Maps 17 and 18.)
Very few German troops were left to oppose the American Third Army in Brittany. The Wehrmacht could only muster ten understrength battalions of infantry and four Ost (east) battalions of anti-Bolshevik Russians. These units and an additional fifty thousand naval, air, and support troops were clustered in or around the seaports.44
From all over the jam-packed OVERLORD beachhead, soldiers and equipment converged on a narrow corridor between Avranches and Saint Hilaire, through which the entire Third Army had to pass. This created one of the worst traffic jams ever, about ten miles south of Pontaubault. In one of the OVERLORD campaign's best instances of staff work, the Third Army sent clusters of senior officers out onto the roads feeding into the key intact bridge at Pontaubault. Their orders were to keep all the vehicles moving, disregarding any strict sequence of units. One divisional commander said he had spent most of his time that day acting as a traffic cop.
When Patton was personally held up in Avranches by a hopeless tangle of trucks, he jumped from his jeep into an umbrella-type police box at the center of a square, and for an hour and a half he directed traffic, exhibiting his characteristic mixture of profanity and élan. The effect on the drivers was said to have been electric.
Fig. 9.1. General George S. Patton in France. (US Army)
In an attempt to stop this flood of American forces, the Germans sent in the entire bomber force of Luftfotte 3 (i.e., air fleet) to take out the key Pontaubault bridge. They were unsuccessful due to the accuracy of American antiaircraft gunners and numerous Allied fighters.
After crossing the bridge, the bunched-up columns were unscrambled by having each road clearly marked with the destination point of each division. Due to this deployment innovation, all of the Third Army's seven divisions raced into the new theater of operations in just seventy-two hours. As the rear guard crossed this bridge, Patton's forward columns had driven eighty miles farther. Within three days a hundred thousand men and their equipment had fanned out to participate in the Brittany Sweepstakes.45
Now Hitler attempted to make this race harder for the Third Army to win. The führer ordered all the Brittany ports to be held as fortresses. There was some justification for this move as these coastal troops lacked mobility and had been depleted in strength. Many of the original Wehrmacht divisions defending Brittany already had been pulled into the Normandy battle. Herbert Essame estimated that approximately 200,000 German soldiers, sailors, and airmen were isolated in these fortresses. Some did not surrender until the end of the war.46
By the early evening on August 1, Wood's Fourth Armored Division was approaching Rennes. This provincial capital was sixty miles south of Avranches. Rennes was a hub from which ten main roads radiated and was vital for Patton's eastward thrust. Here Wood struck strong German resistance. During the night the Ninety-First Infantry began arriving and was teamed up with the Thirteenth Infantry to take Rennes. Meanwhile the Fourth flanked the city and cut seven of the ten highways converging on Rennes, virtually isolating it. (See Map 18.)
A contest of wills and an extremely daring offensive also began on August 1. Middleton ordered Gerow, the commander of the Sixth Armored Division, to take Dinan. Soon afterward Patton arrived and told Gerow to instead head for Brest and bypass all resistance. Patton had bet Montgomery that Gerow could take Brest by Saturday night. To accomplish this feat, the Sixth would have to travel two hundred miles in five days and then take the town. On August 2, they arrived on the outskirts of Dinan, which they found to be a German stronghold that they accordingly bypassed. By the evening of August 3, Gerow's leading units were at Loudéac, one hundred miles from Brest. (See Map 18.) Then Middleton intervened and ordered Gerow to backtrack and first take Dinan as a first step for seizing the port of Saint-Malo. The next morning Patton arrived as Gerow was planning the Dinan attack. Patton asked Gerow, “What the hell are you doing here?” Gerow handed Patton Middleton's order. “I’ll see Middleton. You go ahead where I told you to go.”47 Middleton had caused a day to be wasted. The Sixth Armored lightning advance continued, reaching Brest on the evening of August 6. However by then the city had been strongly reinforced by the Germans. Remarkably Gerow had advanced over two hundred miles in less than seven days with casualties of only 120 killed and four hundred wounded. It was an astounding military feat. If it had arrived a day earlier, the Fourth might have been able to take Brest.
Although the bulk of the American forces were shifted eastward in early August, a long and basically useless campaign to capture Brittany's ports continued. Saint-Malo fell after two more weeks of siege warfare by twenty thousand US infantry troops, but the port was wrecked. After being reduced to rubble, Brest was captured on September 18 at a cost of ten thousand US casualties. Lorient and Saint-Nazaire remained under siege by American troops to the end of the war in 1945. These ports were never rehabilitated.48
As August began, Eisenhower and other members of the Allied high command recognized that the original OVERLORD plan to capture the Brittany ports was outdated, as they were too far from the emerging theater of operations to be of logistical value. In a diary entry on August 4, Patton recorded that he was directed to swing most of the Third Army eastward toward the Seine River.
The XV Corps was to attack in the direction of Le Mans across the Mayenne River between Mayenne and Laval. (See Map 19.) They plunged into an eighty-mile-wide gap devoid of German troops. By midnight on August 6, Major General Ira T. Wyche's Seventy-Ninth Division was almost in Laval. Major General Wade Haislip's XV Corps had raced forty-five miles eastward close to Le Mans. The stage was set for the potential envelopment of the German Seventh Army west of the Loire. This was a rare opportunity for the total destruction of the enemy.49
The German generals saw this catastrophic situation. When American tanks had reached Rennes, General Bayerlein wrote that it “had shattering effect, like a bomb-burst upon us.”50
HITLER'S FOLLY
As Patton's Third Army began its drive eastward, Major General Courtney Hodges of the First Army pushed the Germans out of Vire. (See Map 19.) The First Infantry Division meanwhile took Mortain on August 4 and the important Hill 314 that dominated the area. The town thus far had been undamaged by the fighting. Its occupation helped to forge a link with Patton's units to the south.
At 2:00 a.m. on August 7, intelligence alerted Patton of an
imminent, large-scale German attack against the First Army. There was a twelve-mile gap between the First and Third armies south of Avranches, with the Third's supply line running through it. (See Map 20.) At that moment, Patton had his Thirty-Fifth Infantry Division moving through this gap. He ordered it to be committed in support of the First Army. Few American commanders believed that the Germans would attack. Instead they anticipated a German withdrawal across the Seine to regroup and hold a new defensive position. Hitler had other ideas.51
The führer thought he could take advantage of the exposed Allied position at Avranches. He watched Patton's bold attack with amazement. “Just look at that crazy cowboy general driving down to the south and into Brittany along a single road and over a single bridge with an entire army!”52 Surely Hitler exclaimed some strong panzer division could cut off this bottleneck with a thrust of only sixteen to nineteen miles? They then could cut off the Third Army before turning north to also crush the Normandy beachhead. (See Map 20.)
Hitler believed that Operation Lüttich or, as the Allies named it, the Mortain counterattack was “a unique, never recurring opportunity for a complete reversal of the situation!”53 It was code-named Lüttich (German for “Liège”) after the city in Belgium, the site of a key battle at the beginning of World War I exactly thirty years earlier that opened the way for the German attack on France.54
Early on August 3 Kluge received Hitler's orders to close up the gap at Avranches by withdrawing panzers from other parts of the Normandy front. Kluge had already considered such an operation but rejected it as impossible to accomplish without major reinforcements. According to OB West operations officer General Bodo Zimmerman, Kluge cabled this warning to Hitler: “Tanks are the backbone of our defense, where they are withdrawn, our front will give way…. If, as I foresee, this plan does not succeed, catastrophe is inevitable.”55 This counterattack was mounted with four understrength panzer divisions—just 145 panzers in all (the average strength of one Allied armored division).
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