General Patton was one the great combat generals of the Second World War at the corps and army levels of command. He was unquestionably considered by the Germans to be the most capable Allied senior general in the ETO. His accomplishments in North Africa, Sicily, Normandy, and across France are impressive. However, it’s also undeniable that Patton struggled in Lorraine in late 1944, most noticeably in failing to adjust his plans and the conduct of operations to meet a battlefield situation that was very different than any he had so far encountered. The previously cited books and studies on the Lorraine campaign reveal many examples when Patton made decisions or acted in a manner uncharacteristic of him. The significance of Patton’s underestimation of his enemy’s capabilities, including the advantages provided by his fortifications, also are well known.
Remaining unanswered is why Patton acted in such an atypical manner. His war memoirs provide no insight into this and few have postulated on possible causes. Possible influences include his length of operational service under trying conditions for over two years, particularly hard for man aged 59; increasing concern and anger that he might not be able to achieve his intended destiny as a highly successful army commander; and perhaps a growing sense of isolation and loneliness as his inter-war friendships with both Eisenhower and Bradley had long been strained (largely due to the darker side of Patton’s personality).
Perhaps it was the burden of facing a long list of battlefield challenges over which he had limited control including logistics, quality of his infantry, poor weather and terrain that limited maneuver and fire, and provided great advantages for the defender. Had Third Army been considerably larger and consistently sustained, Patton still would have faced a difficult campaign.
Destiny again would soon favor Patton in the form of the surprise strategic offensive the Germans launched in the Ardennes beginning on 16 December 1944. Patton had anticipated that the Germans might undertake a desperate go-for-broke winter offensive and had directed his staff to plan for such an event. When the Germans struck, Patton eagerly threw himself into the battle, demonstrating his previous operational and tactical skills, and contributing to a victory that broke the back of the German army in the West.
Let’s look at Patton’s performance from several perspectives: executing Eisenhower’s strategy and direction; application of the operational art; and style of combat leadership. We will then consider his practice of the operational art and close with some thoughts on his combat leadership.
Reconciling Patton’s Lorraine Operations with Eisenhower’s Strategy and Direction
The first matter to be assessed is the extent to which Patton’s conduct of the Lorraine Campaign was consistent with the intentions of his boss, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commander, Supreme Allied Expeditionary Forces (SHAEF). The 29 January 2023 posting, “Assessing Operations in Lorraine,” provides the framework for addressing this issue. I relied heavily on John A. Adams’ summarization of Eisenhower’s intentions for the campaign as articulated in The Battle for Western Europe, Fall 1944 — An Operational Perspective.
The Objective — Geographical or Destruction of the Enemy?
Eisenhower clearly identified the primary objective of the Allied Expeditionary Force as the destruction of the German armed forces. Geographical objectives, particularly the seizure of intact ports to sustain the Allied offensive, were priorities at times. He sought objectives such as industrial areas or communication centers that the Germans would be compelled to defend to their disadvantage and at high cost to them in terms manpower and material.
As an army commander, Patton clearly had a killer instinct and believed that the destruction of the enemy army was the key to victory. In Sicily and recently in Normandy, he watched German armies make their escape, despite heavy losses, blaming that on restraints imposed at the army group level, including General Bradley’s 12th Army Group. Patton was increasingly frustrated by Eisenhower’s reticence to tightly hold his senior commanders when they failed to adhere to the SHAEF plan.
Yet Patton could allow himself to become overly focused on geographical objectives — most notably Metz, the Rhine, and Frankfurt, at least partly because by the Lorraine Campaign he believed that the German armed forces near to total collapse. Related to this was his firm belief that the Allies had a fleeting opportunity to enter Germany and complete the destruction of the Nazi regime. Second, always at heart a cavalryman, Patton understood that pursuit was the surest way to destroy a defeated army. His rapid advance across France was his preferred style of war. Third, he no doubt wanted to be in on the final kill.
Unfortunately, the path ahead for Third Army led only to the Saar industrial area — a secondary region of industrial and mineral wealth. Moreover, his zone of advance was much poorer for maneuver than the North German Plain, which provided much better approach routes to the primary industrial area of the Ruhr and a direct path to Berlin.
As the Loraine campaign wore on, Patton strove to keep his momentum going, continually engaging the enemy, and hoping that success would persuade Eisenhower to accord Third Army a higher priority. Patton could indeed be a very difficult subordinate.
Engage the Enemy as Close as Possible to Allied Supply Sources
Transportation rather than the availability of supplies, particularly fuel and artillery ammunition, were among the greatest challenges facing Third Army in late 1944. Given the unexpectedly rapid advance across France, Eisenhower cancelled the planned halt to restore rail and road networks, and resupply and regroup, before advancing to the German border. Patton no doubt thought this a good idea. As noted above, he wanted a bigger role in the kill, believed Third Army was positioned to contribute to that, and constantly badgered Bradley and SHAEF for a higher logistical priority. Yet, he was now fighting in difficult terrain and, as he drew closer to the West Wall, the opportunity for the cavalryman’s deep battle of maneuver became increasingly difficult. Recall that, even before Third Army reached the Meuse River in France — far short of the Moselle, Saar, and Rhine Rivers — Patton had set his sights on Frankfurt-am-Main, hundreds of miles distant.
Had British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s 21st Army Group placed priority on securing the waterways to the massive and ideally located port of Antwerp, which had been captured intact, the Allied logistical situation would not have been as dire. But this is a subject for a later case study….
Fight a War of Maneuver
What surprised most military analysts and historians was the uncoordinated manner in which Patton fought the corps of his Third Army during the campaign. Virtually all of the books and studies previously mentioned in this case study concur that Patton divided rather than concentrated his limited strength. (In particular, I refer you to John Nelson Rickard’s superb study of the campaign.) For that matter, so did the First Army to his north. This was unavoidable as the US Army, with less than 90 divisions, was simply too small for the global task it was given in the Second World War.
While it was logical that a smaller army should fight a war primarily of maneuver rather than attrition, Patton was particularly slow to realize that Third Army could not fight in such a manner between the Moselle and Saar. Some analysts have made the case that Patton could have attacked on narrower fronts in echelon of divisions, or that he should have concentrated all of his armored divisions under XII Corps in the less constricted terrain of the southern part of the Third Army zone. However, this seems far easier said than done. Regardless, Patton inexplicably made little effort to do this.
Most unusual for a proponent of maneuver warfare and a naysayer of the value of fortifications, Patton increasingly became obsessed with taking Metz, and missed opportunities south of that fortified city which might have allowed for a stronger push toward the West Wall. Thus, the German plan to use the Metz-Thionville area as the anchor for their defense of the line of the Moselle — something not anticipated by the Allies — enabled them to disrupt Third Army’s offensive to Germany.
In short, throughout the campaign, Patton failed to modify his plan to the conditions of the battlefield, rather than the other way around. This was Patton’s fundamental error in the campaign.
Retain the Initiative
General Eisenhower believed that the strategy of a broad advance offered greater opportunity for shifting the priority of Allied offensives along the front to take advantage of unanticipated emerging opportunities and operational setbacks. Shifting the offensive priority across his army groups and armies retained Allied momentum and denied the enemy opportunities to concentrate his forces for defensive and offensive opportunities.
From the strategic perspective, Patton’s frustration was that he believed strongly in his personal combat proficiency and wanted Third Army to be that main point of effort, and not relegated to supporting roles. As we have seen, rather than be a loyal subordinate committed to the SHAEF plan and his commander’s intent, Patton sought opportunities to keep his army actively and successfully engaged with the enemy to encourage change in the SHAEL plan and priorities. This partially worked, but never to his full satisfaction.
Within his own command, Patton missed multiple opportunities to shift his main point of effort. Virtually all of the source analyses and books for this case study highlight these failures. Several also make the case that his corps commanders also failed to do so. Patton’s increasing obsession with taking Metz seemed driven by emotion rather than military logic.
Patton as a Combat Leader in the Lorraine Campaign
Lastly, we will look at how Patton interacted with his subordinates.
In his campaigns prior to Lorraine, Patton provided his subordinate commanders and staffs a broad mission, scheme of maneuver, and intent for the conduct of the operation, and let his subordinate commanders and their staffs determine specific courses of action. Then, as the operation evolved, he personally confirmed that they understood this top-line direction and monitored their adherence to it by frequently visiting corps and division command posts and closely monitoring the reports from his roving 6th Cavalry Group (Mechanized). He also monitored how his subordinate commanders coordinated and interacted their operations, and would step in to assist them. However, he did this to a noticeably lesser extent during the Lorraine Campaign.
John Nelson Rickard’s Patton at Bay: The Lorraine Campaign, 1944 is especially insightful in how Patton interacted with his corps commanders: “A serious problem with Patton’s operations on the Moselle was his failure to keep a tight grip on developments. He tried desperately hard not to micromanage the campaign, and the result was too great a reliance on his mobile battle philosophy of minimal interference. Many of the difficulties arising throughout the campaign can be traced directly to this tendency. The moment was opportune for Patton to exert the ruthless driving power that has made him famous, but he declined.” (p.233)
Patton was surprisingly accepting of General’s Eddy rather slow, conventional, and unimaginative leadership of XII Corps. He might have replaced Eddy with the more capable and aggressive General Wood of the 4th Armored Division. It is surprising that Patton relieved Wood rather than Eddy when the two reached an irreconcilable point regarding the use of the corps armor. He also took no steps to realign his armored divisions within his corps to make better use of the talent of his armor commanders.
Rickard states that: “To generate and sustain momentum, Patton needed to be firm with his corps and division commanders. On 7 December he would make the general comment that “regrouping is the curse of war and a great boon to the enemy, and he had once sarcastically noted that regrouping seemed to be the chief form of amusement in the British Army. The ailment now seemed to plague his forces.
“The fate of Metz was sealed long before November 18 and should have directed the encircling units to head east much sooner. The slowness of the advance after the encirclement of Metz was not so much the fault of divisional commanders as it was of the consequences of the design of the November Offensive.” (pp. 201-202)
Unentangling the 5th and 95th Infantry Divisions inexplicably delayed the resumption of the advance by six days.
Clearly, Patton was not at his best as a combat commander in Lorraine.
Closing Thoughts
It should not be forgotten that Patton and his Third Army confronted serious challenges in Lorraine including the worsening weather, terrain that limited large-scale maneuver and greatly favored the defender, continuous supply problems, and a determined enemy who was recovering from his defeat in France, had been heavily reinforced with armor, and was determined to make a stand well short of the West Wall. Initially, Third Army was too small for its SHAEF-assigned mission of destroying the remnants of the German Army west of Rhine. Even when reinforced with additional divisions, it lacked the strength to reach the Rhine in late 1944, and certainly had no chance of reaching Frankfurt-am-Main, which was Patton’s desired end state.
In his book Advance and Destroy — Patton as Commander in the Bulge (The University Press of Kentucky; 2011), John Nelson Rickard noted that: “On the eve of the Battle of the Bulge [16 December 1944], Patton had barely seven months of combat experience in World War II. Nevertheless, he was the most seasoned of the four American army commanders in the European Theater of Operations (ETO)…. The other Allied Commanders in the ETO… most certainly would have failed to replicate Patton’s exploitation of enemy weakness in both the Sicilian and Normandy campaigns.” (pp. 1-2)
At the end of this book, Rickard states: “On January 14 Eisenhower informed [US Army Chief of Staff George C.] Marshall that ‘Patton has done a remarkable job,” and a few weeks later Eisenhower rated Patton as the fourth greatest contributor to victory in Europe (behind Bradley, Spaatz, and Bedell Smith) and described him as ‘highly intelligent.’” This meant that Eisenhower considered Patton the most valuable of the seven Allied army commanders.” (pp.322-323.)
The Lorraine Campaign, although a difficult time with a disappointing outcome for Patton, must also have been quite a learning experience for him as it proved to be more accurate in predicting how the remainder of the war would be fought. When the Germans launched the Ardennes Offensive, Patton neither hesitated nor fumbled.
Coming up next to close out the Lorraine Campaign case study is a miniature wargaming scenario covering the 35th Infantry Division in the November Offensive.