Patton's offensive on the Moselle

On 9 November 1944 soldiers of General George Patton’s US Third Army crossed the flooded Moselle in assault boats north of Metz and threatened the city from the rear. War chronologies record under this date that Patton’s troops and tanks crossed the Moselle and threatened Metz. That needs some qualification. The Third Army’s November offensive had begun a day earlier, on 8 November, with an attack by XII Corps east of Nancy – and not on the Moselle, which that corps had already crossed in September, but on its tributary, the Seille. On 9 November it was XX Corps that forced the river, and in the first hours it was infantry, not tanks: because of the flooding, the first bridges able to carry armour were completed only after several days. Finally, Metz was not being threatened for the first time – the Americans had been attacking its fortifications without success since September.

Autumn stalemate in Lorraine

After the liberation of Nancy in mid-September the Third Army stalled. It was halted first by shortages of fuel and ammunition, and then by a decision of the Supreme Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, to give supply priority to the northern wing of the front – where the Allied armies had reached the Siegfried Line and were fighting for Aachen and the mouth of the Scheldt. On 25 September Patton was ordered onto the defensive. He was allowed only to improve his positions with local attacks.

The most important of these was the attempt to take Metz. The city, de facto annexed to the Reich together with the Moselle département since 1940, was ringed by forts built by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War and before 1918, and later taken over by the French. At the beginning of September the 5th Infantry Division lost a bridgehead at Dornot but held a second one at Arnaville, south of the city. From 27 September to 13 October the same division assaulted Fort Driant, which dominated the Moselle valley from the west. Despite fighting in the fort’s underground passages the attack failed and the Americans withdrew. In the north the 90th Infantry Division spent several weeks fighting house by house for the steel town of Maizières-lès-Metz. The commander of XX Corps, General Walton Walker, drew the lesson that Metz could not be taken by a frontal assault on the forts. It would have to be encircled.

October was a month of preparation for the Third Army. Artillery ammunition, of which there was a constant shortage, was stockpiled, divisions were brought up to strength and the infantry trained in taking fortifications – with demolition charges, flamethrowers and self-propelled guns firing at close range. Two new divisions joined XX Corps: General Harry Twaddle’s 95th Infantry Division and General William Morris’s 10th Armored Division. In October General James Van Fleet took command of the 90th Division, while the 5th Division remained under General Stafford LeRoy Irwin.

Patton’s plan and the German side

When at the beginning of November Eisenhower approved a general advance by all his armies to the Rhine, the Third Army was to move first. Its task was to reach the Saar and break through the Siegfried Line in the Saar basin. Patton assigned General Manton Eddy’s XII Corps an attack east of Nancy towards Château-Salins and Faulquemont, and XX Corps the encirclement of Metz. Walker’s plan envisaged a double envelopment. In the north the 90th Division was to cross the Moselle well downstream of the city, beyond Thionville, and wheel south, while the 10th Armored Division was to cross behind it and cover its left flank, at the same time sending reconnaissance units towards the Saar at Merzig. In the south the 5th Division, advancing from the Arnaville bridgehead, was to bypass the city to the east and meet the 90th Division. The 95th Division was to pin down the defenders from the west and, with a feint crossing at Uckange, divert attention from the main blow.

Facing them was the German First Army under General Otto von Knobelsdorff, subordinate to General Hermann Balck’s Army Group G. The Metz area was defended by LXXXII Corps with three infantry divisions. In the city itself and its forts stood the 462nd Volksgrenadier Division, formed from a former training division in which officer cadets and NCOs from the Metz military schools, among others, were serving. Along the Moselle north of the city the 19th Volksgrenadier Division held the line, and beyond it, on a sector more than 50 km long, the 416th Infantry Division. According to the US official history (Hugh M. Cole’s The Lorraine Campaign) this was a unit rebuilt from a division shattered in the east, made up of older age groups – the average age was 38 – and fit at best for defence. The Germans expected an attack on both sides of Thionville, not further north. Their reserves were few: most of the tanks and fresh divisions were already being assembled in secret for the offensive in the Ardennes.

Rain and flood

The autumn of 1944 in Lorraine was exceptionally wet. Cole writes that rain and snow squalls went on day after day, grounding the air forces and turning the roads to mud. The fields were so waterlogged that tanks bogged down off the metalled roads. In the first days of November the Moselle and its tributaries rose. According to Patton’s memoirs, on 7 November General Eddy and the commander of the 6th Armored Division, General Robert Grow, asked him to postpone the attack because of the weather. Patton refused, reasoning that every day’s delay gave the Germans time to dig in.

At dawn on 8 November, after a massive artillery preparation, XII Corps moved across the Seille. The same day the 95th Division attacked the German bridgehead at Maizières, and after dark engineers crossed the river at Uckange to clear lanes through the wire and minefields.

The crossing of 9 November

XX Corps’s main blow came on the night of 8/9 November. At 3.30 a.m. the assault battalions of the 90th Division’s 358th and 359th Infantry Regiments set off in boats across the Moselle at Malling and Cattenom, a dozen or so kilometres north of Thionville. The crossing took the Germans by surprise. The scattered outposts of the 416th Division could not stop it, and by morning several battalions were on the east bank. At Uckange, meanwhile, the 95th Division put two companies across, which were pinned down on the flooded plain under German artillery fire.

That day the river burst its banks. Cole describes how the Moselle overflowed, flooded the approaches and ran so fast that the light assault boats became unmanageable. At Cattenom the floodwater was about 900 metres wide. Engineers built bridges waist-deep in icy water under fire from the forts. Bridges were broken, and material had to be brought up along flooded roads. For several days the infantry on the east bank fought without tanks and with only limited heavy weapons, supplied by boat. The first vehicles crossed the bridge at Malling only on the night after it was completed, and on the morning of 14 November a bridge was opened at Thionville that Cole calls the largest Bailey bridge in the European theatre. Only then could the 10th Armored Division cross the Moselle.

Also on 9 November, in support of the offensive, heavy bombers of the US Eighth Air Force attacked forts and junctions in the Metz and Thionville area. French studies state that 1,299 B-17 and B-24 bombers dropped 3,753 tonnes of bombs. The effect was slight: most of the loads fell far from their targets, and the concrete forts held.

The battle for the bridgehead

The most dangerous obstacle in the 90th Division’s bridgehead was Fort Koenigsmacker, on a hill above the crossing at Kœnigsmacker. Cole writes that its position ruled out bypassing it: it had to be taken, and quickly. The 358th Regiment attacked it on 9 November, blowing in entrances and roofs with demolition charges. After three days of fighting, surrounded and under fire at the tunnel exits, the garrison raised the white flag. According to Cole, the Germans lost at least 301 men killed and captured in the defence of the fort, and the attacking battalion 111 killed, wounded and missing.

The Germans were slow to grasp where the main blow had fallen. Before dawn on 10 November they attacked at Kerling, and after long pleading the OKW finally released two battalions of the reserve 25th Panzergrenadier Division (PL). Early on 12 November they struck along the road from Kerling to Petite-Hettange, aiming to reach the bridge at Malling. The infantry of the 359th Regiment, supported by massed artillery fire, beat off the attack. According to Cole, the failure of this counter-attack ended any German hope of eliminating the American bridgehead north of Thionville.

South of Metz the 5th Division crossed the Seille on 9 November and began to bypass the city to the east. XII Corps, meanwhile, was advancing slowly across the flooded fields between the Seille and the Nied. The resistance of the German First Army and the mud meant that every kilometre came at a high price.

Logistics

The offensive began at a time when supply was still the Allied armies’ weak point. The port of Antwerp, captured in September, was still not receiving ships – the Scheldt estuary was cleared of Germans only by 8 November, and the first convoy entered the port only at the end of the month. Fuel and ammunition therefore came from Normandy and Marseille by rail and truck, over hundreds of kilometres. The Third Army had built up stocks during the October lull, but there was artillery ammunition for only a set number of days of intensive fire, and Walker had to husband it. That was why forts that could be bypassed were not assaulted frontally. The rain also hampered air support: XIX Tactical Air Command could operate only on the few days when the weather cleared.

Place in the war

The crossing of 9 November opened the way to the encirclement of Metz. Once the Thionville bridge was ready, the 10th Armored Division moved east and south-east, and the 90th Division wheeled south, behind the city’s defenders. The 95th and 5th Divisions attacked from the west and south. On 14 November General Heinrich Kittel took command in Metz, bound by Hitler’s order to defend it to the last man. On 18 and 19 November the Americans entered the city, on 19 November the ring closed, and on 22 November organised resistance in the city ended. Some of the forts, however, held out into December – the last, Jeanne d’Arc, surrendered only on 13 December. At the beginning of December both corps of the Third Army reached the Saar.

The Third Army’s November offensive was the first part of the general Allied advance to the Rhine. On 16 November the US First and Ninth Armies attacked in the north, near Aachen. Patton hoped to break through the Siegfried Line in the Saar basin at the beginning of December. He was stopped by the German offensive in the Ardennes – the Third Army had to turn north, towards Bastogne. The fighting in Lorraine, which had begun in September, cost the Americans some 50,000 men by their own figures. Historians still argue over whether Patton was right to attack on a narrow front in rain and flood instead of waiting for better weather and supplies. The crossing of the flooded Moselle at Malling and Cattenom nevertheless ranks among the Third Army’s boldest operations: for several days the infantry held the bridgehead without tanks, and the German First Army could not drive it back into the river.