World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF GERMANY: Happy Birthday, Dear General

From the town of Craincourt, southeast of Metz on Lieut. General George S. Patton’s Third Army front, U.S. officers trained field glasses on Germans struggling up the muddy slopes of Delme Ridge, a 1,300-ft. eminence, four miles long, which blocked a valley. With their fleece-lined greatcoats flapping in the wind, the Germans were lugging mortars and cases of ammunition to the top.

The defenders of Delme Ridge were well prepared for a frontal assault. Instead of that, Patton sent his 4th and 6th Armored Divisions to attack on the flanks.

An artillery barrage raked the summit. By the time the 80th (“Blue Ridge,”) Infantry Division got to the top, there was little need to fight. The place was strewn with enemy dead and smashed guns. Some anti-aircraft guns were captured intact with their crews. Among the prisoners was one man with a glass eye, one with a wooden leg, two with self-inflicted wounds.

To impatient Georgie Patton, it was good to be on the move again. Nothing much had happened on his front since his 5th Division troops were thrown out of the labyrinths of Fort Driant (TIME, Oct.

23). Now he was slamming ahead on a 75-mile front from the southern corner of Luxembourg to the Rhine-Marne Canal north of the Vosges. He was encircling the ancient fortress of Metz, German kingbolt position on this sector and strongest shield in front of the coal, steel and pig iron of the Saar Basin.

The Pincers Close. From a line be tween Metz and Nancy, Major General Manton S. Eddy’s XII Corps had jumped off in midweek, behind an artillery barrage so heavy that, according to one correspondent, the firing sheets looked like railroad timetables. Next day 1,300 heavy bombers came. The weather was too bad for close support, but they dropped 4,000 tons of bombs on Metz itself and on Saarbrücken.

Apparently surprised, certainly outnumbered and outgunned, the Germans backed up for a few days, fighting for time. On some days Patton gained as much as five miles, but weather and terrain were holding him back more than enemy opposition.

In places, men of the Third floundered waist-deep through mucilaginous mud. As sault boats as well as Bailey bridges were used to cross swollen streams.

North of Metz, the U.S. forces captured Mezieres, fought over for weeks in bloody local actions. Still farther north, beyond Thionville, they put a substantial bridge head across the Moselle River. Here the Nazis launched their heaviest counter attack, for they were being backed up into the old Maginot Line, two miles from the German border. They threw the Yanks back nearly two miles before their strength was spent. Then Patton’s attack rolled forward again.

At week’s end all the communications of Metz from north and south had been cut; the roads and railways to the east were in range of Patton’s Long Toms. His pincers closing east of Metz were only nine miles apart. Then the guns of Metz itself opened up on the attackers for the first time in six days. Nevertheless the Yanks took three of the small outer forts.

Objectives. If the Germans lose Metz and fail to stop Patton on the Lorraine plain, he will be in position to attack the Saar, or to swing around the north end of the Vosges toward southwestern Germany. With rugged terrain and stout defenses in his path, these objectives might seem overambitious as immediate goals. The elimination of Metz alone would level a tough obstacle and bring about a healthy straightening of the Allied line. If it also sucked in enemy mobile reserves, it would create German weaknesses and Allied opportunities elsewhere—e.g., on the approaches to Cologne, where the Germans were savagely counterattacking, or in the western Vosges, where German defense of the passes was holding the French and the U.S. Seventh Army away from the upper Rhine.

The Berlin radio shrilled that Patton’s thrust was the beginning of a “battle which will involve 5,000,000 men in the west,” and that suspicious Allied movements had been observed far to the north, in the Nijmegen sector.

General Patton felt fine. His 59th birthday fell, inappropriately, on Armistice Day. He observed it by touring the front lines, inspecting captured positions.