The liberation of Nancy

Nancy, the old capital of the Dukes of Lorraine and the city of Stanisław Leszczyński, was liberated by American troops in September 1944. In Lorraine the attacking force was General George Patton’s Third Army; General Courtney Hodges’s First Army was fighting further north at the time, in Belgium and on the borders of Germany. The Americans entered the city on 15 September. According to French accounts, the first unit to enter that day, without a fight, was the 3rd Battalion, 319th Infantry Regiment, 80th Infantry Division, advancing from the direction of Toul. The unit history of the 35th Infantry Division, which attacked Nancy from the south and took over the city in the following days, also counts its capture on 15 September among its achievements. Both divisions belonged to General Manton Eddy’s XII Corps.

Another important event falls on 19 September. That day, a dozen or so kilometres east of Nancy, the German Fifth Panzer Army struck the US 4th Armored Division at Arracourt. The fighting, which lasted until 29 September, turned out to be the largest tank battle involving Americans on the Western Front before the Ardennes offensive. The liberation of Nancy and the Battle of Arracourt were two sides of the same operation: the crossing of the Moselle and the Third Army’s attempt to reach the Saar and the Rhine.

Halted for lack of fuel

At the end of August 1944 the Third Army was the fastest-moving Allied army in France. After the breakthrough in Normandy and the advance to the Marne, its leading divisions crossed the Meuse at Verdun and Commercy on 30 and 31 August. There, however, they were stopped not by German resistance but by a lack of petrol. Supplies were still coming mainly from the beaches and ports of Normandy, hundreds of kilometres by lorry, and the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, was then giving priority to the northern wing – Field Marshal Montgomery’s 21st Army Group and the neighbouring US First Army, which were heading for Belgium and Antwerp. For nearly five days Patton’s tanks stood idle on the Meuse. Recollections of those around him attribute to him at that time the remark that his men could eat their belts, but his tanks had to have gas.

For the Germans the pause proved invaluable. In the first days of September only the shattered remnants of units withdrawn from France stood between the Meuse and the Moselle. During that time, however, General Otto von Knobelsdorff’s German First Army, subordinate to Colonel General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G, received reinforcements: Volksgrenadier divisions, NCO schools and officer candidates from Metz, as well as the 3rd and 15th Panzergrenadier Divisions transferred from Italy. Metz, in the Moselle department that had been de facto annexed to the Reich in 1940, was ringed by forts dating from the period of German rule before 1918. When the Third Army moved off again on 5 September, a defence was waiting for it on the Moselle.

Crossing the Moselle

The Third Army attacked with two corps. In the north General Walton Walker’s XX Corps was to take Metz; in the south General Eddy’s XII Corps was to take Nancy. The first attempts to cross the river on the march failed. At Pont-à-Mousson on 5 September the 317th Infantry of the 80th Division attempted a crossing without reconnaissance or artillery preparation and was thrown back. At Toul the Americans crossed the river but were halted at the line of forts west of Nancy.

The costliest crossing was that of XX Corps. On 8 September the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Infantry Division crossed the Moselle at Dornot, south of Metz. For two days and nights the small bridgehead was under fire from the forts and under constant counter-attack. On the night of 10–11 September the survivors were withdrawn across the river. The failed attempt cost the 5th Division heavy losses – the US official history (Hugh M. Cole’s The Lorraine Campaign) ranks the fighting at Dornot among the bloodiest episodes of the September crossings. The bridgehead won on 10 September a few kilometres further on, at Arnaville, held, however. From then on XX Corps laboriously widened it towards Metz.

The encirclement and liberation of Nancy

General Eddy gave up the idea of a frontal attack on Nancy and decided to bypass the city on both sides. In the north, at Dieulouard, the 80th Division crossed the Moselle on 12 September without much opposition and built a bridge. The next morning the Germans counter-attacked and pushed the infantry back almost to the crossing itself, but the bridgehead survived – largely thanks to the tanks of Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams’s 37th Tank Battalion, part of Colonel Bruce Clarke’s Combat Command A of the 4th Armored Division. That same day, 13 September, the combat command crossed the bridge and drove deep into the German positions towards Château-Salins, and on 14 September it swung onto the hills near Arracourt, into the rear of Nancy’s defenders.

In the south the 35th Division and Combat Command B of the 4th Armored Division crossed the Moselle on 11 September at Bayon and Bainville-aux-Miroirs, beat off a counter-attack on the newly built bridge and on 14 September forced the Meurthe. That evening patrols of the two combat commands of the 4th Armored Division met on the Marne–Rhine Canal east of the city. Nancy was now half encircled, and Blaskowitz had already authorised its abandonment on 13 September.

Nancy was therefore not taken by storm. According to French accounts, three members of the French Forces of the Interior brought the Americans word that the Germans had left the Forêt de Haye west of the city, so that the planned artillery bombardment of the forest was called off. On the morning of 15 September a battalion of the 319th Infantry drove into the city along the road from Toul (today the Avenue de la Libération) and, meeting no resistance, went right through to the eastern suburbs. In the following days the 35th Division took over the city, and its 320th and 137th Infantry Regiments cleared the surrounding area as far as Saint-Nicolas-de-Port. Nancy was the first large city in Lorraine to be recovered by the Allies. It was spared street fighting and major destruction.

On the Third Army’s right wing, in the Vittel and Épinal area, its XV Corps was fighting together with General Leclerc’s French 2nd Armoured Division. On 12–14 September the French smashed the German 112th Panzer Brigade, one of the units earmarked for the counter-offensive, at Dompaire. On this wing the Third Army was already in contact with the forces advancing from Provence – the link-up near Dijon closed the Allied front from the English Channel to Switzerland.

The Battle of Arracourt

At the beginning of September Adolf Hitler had planned a counter-offensive from Lorraine into the flank of the Third Army. It was to be conducted by General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army, reinforced by newly formed panzer brigades equipped with new Panthers. The Americans’ rapid progress meant that instead of the planned blow there were only hasty counter-attacks against Clarke’s combat command, which had pushed forward in a wedge to Arracourt. On 18 September the 111th Panzer Brigade attacked near Lunéville and was repulsed. On the morning of 19 September, in thick fog, the tanks of the 113th Panzer Brigade ran into the American outposts at Arracourt. The German crews, often with only a few weeks’ training, came up against Shermans and tank destroyers concealed in favourable positions, which hit them in the flank. Even self-propelled howitzers near the combat command’s headquarters joined the fight.

The attacks were renewed until 29 September, with the participation of the remnants of the 11th Panzer Division. From 21 September, when the skies cleared, P-47 Thunderbolt aircraft of the US XIX Tactical Air Command attacked the German columns. The American historian Steven Zaloga estimates that of the 262 tanks and assault guns the Germans committed, 86 were destroyed and 114 damaged or disabled. According to the same figures, Clarke’s combat command lost 25 tanks and 7 tank destroyers. Hitler, dissatisfied with the results, replaced Blaskowitz with General Hermann Balck on 21 September.

The chief of staff of the Fifth Panzer Army, General Friedrich von Mellenthin, wrote after the war that despite heavy losses the Germans had achieved their aim, because the Third Army came to a halt. The reason, however, was a different one. On 22 September Eisenhower accepted Montgomery’s plan: the main effort was to lie on the northern wing, where Operation Market Garden had been under way since 17 September, and the priority was to open Antwerp. On 25 September the Third Army was ordered to go over to the defensive.

Significance

The liberation of Nancy was the Third Army’s last major success of the summer pursuit across France. After it the Lorraine campaign turned into slow, gruelling fighting for every hill and fort, as along the whole Western Front, where in mid-September the Germans had halted the Allies at the Siegfried Line. After the failed attacks on Fort Driant near Metz at the beginning of October, the November offensive brought the capture of Metz only on 22 November, and the last of the forts surrendered on 13 December. According to American figures, the conquest of Lorraine – an advance of 60–100 km – cost the Third Army some 50,000 men, roughly a third of its losses in the entire war in Europe. In December, when its units had reached the Saar, the Germans struck in the Ardennes and Patton had to turn his army north.

The dispute over whether September in Lorraine was wasted has gone on since the war. Patton and his supporters believed that if the Third Army had been given the petrol it could have broken through the still thinly manned West Wall. Critics point out that the supplies for a rapid advance on both wings at once did not exist, and that Patton’s narrow wedge would have been just as vulnerable as the corridor to Arnhem. One thing is certain: on the Moselle the Wehrmacht, which in the summer had seemed beaten, managed for the first time since Normandy to halt an American army for any length of time.