The capture of Metz

Metz, the capital of Moselle Lorraine and one of the strongest fortresses in Europe, passed into American hands in November 1944. War chronologies record briefly under 23 November that Metz was captured. The events were in fact spread out over time. Soldiers of General George Patton’s Third Army entered the city on 18 and 19 November and closed the ring of encirclement on 19 November, and according to the US official history organised resistance in the city ended on 22 November – that morning the commander of XX Corps, General Walton Walker, handed the city over to a French governor. So 23 November was the first full day on which the city was in Allied hands. That did not, however, mean the end of the fighting for the fortress: several forts around Metz held out for another three weeks, and the last of them, Fort Jeanne d’Arc, surrendered on 13 December.

Encirclement

The November battle for Metz opened with the crossing of the flooded Moselle north of Thionville on 9 November. When on 14 November a bridge able to carry tanks was ready at Thionville, the 10th Armored Division moved east towards the Saar, and General James Van Fleet’s 90th Infantry Division wheeled south, behind the defenders of Metz. On 15 November, at Distroff, it beat off the last major counter-attack on its southern flank, by a battle group of the German 25th Panzergrenadier Division.

From the south the city was being bypassed by General Stafford LeRoy Irwin’s 5th Infantry Division. It crossed the Seille on 9 November and in the following days fought its way through the woods and villages south-east of Metz, against, among others, the remnants of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division. On 17 November its 10th Infantry Regiment entered Borny on the eastern outskirts and surrounded Fort Queuleu, while the 11th Regiment took Augny and reached Frescaty airfield. At 10.30 a.m. on 19 November soldiers of the 5th Division met cavalry units of the 90th Division north of Retonfey. Metz was surrounded.

From the west General Harry Twaddle’s 95th Infantry Division was attacking. On 14 November its 379th Regiment broke through between Forts François-de-Guise and Jeanne d’Arc and reached the Moselle, and on 15 November the 378th Regiment took the fortifications of the so-called Canrobert Line and entered the woods near Woippy. On the night of 16/17 November the German grenadiers at Woippy fell back in disorder into the city. On the east bank of the Moselle, from the direction of Thionville, a task force under Colonel Robert Bacon, made up of two battalions of the 95th Division, was advancing south.

A fortress without a fortress

On the German side Metz had been declared a fortress (Festung), whose commandant was to defend it to the last man and could not surrender without Adolf Hitler’s consent. On 14 November Generalleutnant Heinrich Kittel took command in the city. Previously commander of the 49th Infantry Division, he was a specialist in the defence of cities who on the Eastern Front had been commandant in Rostov, Zaporizhzhia, Ternopil, Lwów (Lviv) and Kraków, among other places. According to Cole, Kittel swore a special oath to defend Metz to the last man and the last round, while at the same time protesting to General Otto von Knobelsdorff, commander of the First Army, against his name being linked with “Fortress Metz”, which in his view was no fortress at all. He found food in the city for less than two days. On the night of 14/15 November a train still got through with supplies for two to three weeks, but a request for 12,000 civilian labourers to build fortifications was refused – preparations for the Ardennes offensive had priority.

The garrison consisted mainly of the 462nd Volksgrenadier Division, supported by the 38th SS Panzergrenadier Regiment, reduced to about 800 men, and a Volkssturm battalion numbering, according to French studies, about 400 men, mostly officials and civil servants. Kittel intended to hold the positions on the west bank of the Moselle, which protected the bridges into the city, for as long as possible, and as a last resort to defend himself in the great forts: Jeanne d’Arc, Driant, Plappeville and Saint-Quentin. It was to them that he sent the last supply convoys.

The inhabitants found themselves caught between the lines. On 12 November the German authorities announced the evacuation of the city for 14 November, but – according to French studies – most of the people of Metz did not obey and sat out the fighting in cellars and shelters.

Fighting in the city

On the evening of 17 November the telephone exchange on the Île Chambière stopped working, and according to Cole Kittel lost contact with most of the units under his command. On 18 November regiments of the 95th Division attacked Fort Saint-Julien in the north-east (its garrison surrendered the next day) and Fort Bellecroix. In the process the retreating Germans blew up the Steinmetz barracks. On 19 November the 377th and 378th Regiments and Bacon’s task force entered the city proper, while the 5th Division was approaching from the south and east. Street fighting continued for several more days, but it was now scattered – individual soldiers and groups held out in barracks and fortified buildings.

On 21 November a patrol of the 95th Division found the seriously wounded Kittel in an underground field hospital – according to French studies, in the cellars of the tobacco factory. Kittel had fought in person in the last clashes. He refused to sign a surrender, claiming that he had handed over command to the commandant of the Saint-Quentin group of forts. On 22 November soldiers of the 377th Regiment drove the last defenders from the Île Chambière. French studies state that at 10 a.m. General Walker handed the city over to the new French governor of Metz, General André Dody, and that the German archivist Eugen Ewig negotiated with the last soldiers holding out around the prefecture in order to save the historic buildings. The US official history records that on 22 November resistance in Metz officially ended.

Forts until December

The capture of the city did not end the fighting for the fortress. Several forts west and south of Metz, in accordance with Hitler’s order, did not surrender. Walker did not want to assault them: artillery ammunition was needed for the advance to the Saar, and the experience at Fort Driant had shown how costly an attack on such fortifications was. The forts were therefore surrounded and shelled, and the Americans waited for their garrisons to run out of food and ammunition. The Verdun group of forts (formerly Feste Haeseler) surrendered on 26 November, Fort Saint-Privat on 29 November. At the end of November Forts Driant, Jeanne d’Arc, Saint-Quentin and Plappeville were still holding out, and watching them tied down most of the 5th Division’s infantry. Saint-Quentin and Plappeville surrendered on 6 and 7 December, Driant on 8 December, and Fort Jeanne d’Arc, the last, on 13 December. That date is taken as the end of the Battle of Metz.

A city on the border

For the French the recovery of Metz had a symbolic dimension. The city, for centuries a fortress on France’s eastern border, had surrendered in 1870 after a siege together with the army of Marshal François Achille Bazaine – the capitulation of 27 October 1870 was one of France’s greatest defeats in the Franco-Prussian War. From 1871 to 1918 Metz belonged to the German Reichsland of Alsace-Lorraine, and it was then that the Germans surrounded it with a ring of modern forts. After France’s defeat in 1940 the Moselle département was de facto reincorporated into the Reich: German administration and law were introduced, tens of thousands of inhabitants deemed French were expelled, and from 1942 young men were conscripted into the Wehrmacht. In November 1944 the city returned to France.

American accounts of those days repeated that Metz had fallen to assault for the first time since Attila took it in 451 – in 1870 Bazaine had surrendered the city after a siege, not after an assault. This is more a propaganda formula than a precise historical claim, but it captures well Metz’s reputation as an impregnable fortress. In reality the Americans did not take the forts by storm; they bypassed and cut them off.

Place in the war

The Battle of Metz is one of the most disputed episodes of Patton’s campaign. Its cost is not precisely known, but it was high on both sides. According to American figures, the whole Lorraine campaign from September to December cost the Third Army some 50,000 killed, wounded and missing, plus tens of thousands sick and frostbitten in the wet, cold autumn. Critics accuse Patton of bleeding his divisions white in frontal attacks on the forts in September and October, and of attacking in flood conditions in November instead of waiting for the weather to improve. His defenders point out that the November encirclement was efficient and relatively cheap, and that Metz blocked the road to the Saar. The Germans, for their part, achieved their aim: a garrison made up largely of second-rate units tied down an American army for nearly three months, allowing the Wehrmacht to withdraw in good order behind the Saar and the Siegfried Line and to prepare for its winter counter-offensive.

On the same day, 23 November, the French 2nd Armoured Division liberated Strasbourg. The Allied front reached the Rhine in Alsace, and in Lorraine the Third Army moved on towards the Saar, which it reached at the beginning of December. The offensive into the Saar basin that Patton was preparing never took place – on 16 December the Germans struck in the Ardennes, and the Third Army turned north to relieve Bastogne.