At this very moment 73 years ago, multiple formations of the U.S. Army were driving across France and ripping the guts out of the German Wehrmacht.
Gen. George Patton’s 3rd U.S. Army played the leading role in that offensive.
The story begins shortly before the D-Day landings. Instead of being assigned to lead an assault corps into France, Patton was held in England as the head of both a fictitious army and a real one, the 3rd Army. Though this appointment had been designed to deceive German commanders (and it succeeded), it greatly upset Patton. Whether at Guam in the South Pacific, or Granville in Normandy, he wanted to be at the tip of the spear.
Still, Patton fully expected that brutal combat waited just over the horizon. And so, just before D-Day, Patton addressed his soldiers and told them to prepare to annihilate the enemy.
“We’re not going to just shoot the sons-of-bitches, we’re going to rip out their living goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks.” Patton continued, warning that he expected his commanders to seize the strategic initiative. “I don’t want”, he said, “to get any messages saying, ‘I am holding my position.’ We are not holding a goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly, and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy’s balls. We are going to twist his balls and kick the living shit out of him all of the time.”
Patton meant it. And it’s what made him a great offensive leader.
When, on August 1st 1944, the 3rd Army became operational under Gen. Omar Bradley’s 12th Corps, Patton began one of the most successful offensives in U.S. military history. Utilizing a revolutionary combined arms offensive — infantry supported by tanks, and tanks supported by close air support aircraft — Patton stormed across eastern France. Patton’s reflexive aggression was tempered only by Bradley’s grand-strategic mind.
On this day, August 16th, Patton was compressing the southern edge of a pocket of German divisions around Falaise, France. That operation, supported by other allied armies, led to the capture of 50,000 German soldiers and a huge blow to the Wehrmacht morale. By August’s end, Patton’s soldiers had reached the outskirts of Metz, a French city on the Moselle river, just over 20 miles from Germany. There, Patton was indeed forced to hold his position, as Gen. Dwight Eisenhower re-allocated the 3rd Army’s supplies to British Gen. Bernard Montgomery’s offensive further north.
Yet, Patton’s 1944 was not yet done. In late December, Patton organized multiple armies in a remarkable counter-offensive to relieve encircled U.S. forces around Bastogne and Houffalize, Belgium. His aggression again redesigned the expectations of Allied and Axis commanders alike. But the moral victory was just as important: Patton’s leadership had saved thousands of American soldiers from capture or death.
The next year, Patton would invade Germany and help end a world war.
