World Battlefronts: BATTLE OF FRANCE: Ration’s Poniards

Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr. rapped the map with his leather riding crop, which sheathes a glistening poniard. He pointed with it to the next objective, a town 50 miles away. Said he to a Third Army corps commander: “Get there—any way you want to.” As he had before, he was demanding the impossible of his supply officers. As before, in this miraculous month, they would get the impossible done.

By last week “Georgie” Patton’s supply lines reached more than halfway across France. He was getting gasoline by parachute for his forward tanks. Exactly how far along toward Germany’s borders his 35-ton daggers were by this week was something for the enemy to worry about. As a rule, they did not find out until the tanks were upon them, blazing away at their rear. To keep it that way SHAEF clamped a news blackout on Patton’s deepest thrusts.

Through the blackout it appeared that Patton had used Troyes, 90 miles southeast of Paris, as he had used Le Mans (TIME, Aug. 21). Pivoting on Troyes, his columns had fanned out. One thrust had stabbed toward Alsace and the German Rhineland border, 130 miles to the east. Another had cut northeast and headed for Metz, in mid-Lorraine, next-door neighbor to Luxembourg and the Reich’s Saar Valley.

The Germans insisted for three days that another Patton wedge had penetrated to Reims, 30 miles northeast of Chateau-Thierry, where battles raged again in the wheat fields. Only 50 miles north of Reims was Sedan, at the Ardennes gateway through which the Germans had plunged into France in 1940.

West of Paris other elements of Patton’s Third and of Lieut. General Courtney H. Hodges’ First Army streaked across enlarged bridgeheads over the Seine. Their clear objective: a sweep northward to cut the retreat Allied pilots reported the Germans were making from their robomb coast. A parallel column, 15 miles to the east of Paris, was at the Marne near Lagny.

The Rim Expands. Among the western columns were reportedly those of Major General Wade H. Haislip’s XV Corps, which had swung in behind the enemy to form the pockets against the Seine where Field Marshal Günther von Kluge’s main force had met disaster. To set up that kill, calm, roly-poly General Haislip had managed another impossibility for Patton; he had driven his armor down from Normandy, across to LeMans, up to Alengon —300 miles—in twelve days. Haislip’s corps had been the first of Patton’s daggers to strike deep. Now Haislip could exploit the retreat he had helped to create.

To the north and east were terrain and towns he knew as one of World War I’s battalion commanders: the Somme, the Argonne, Sedan, Amiens, the Meuse. Those Allied objectives were reminders—if the German command needed any more —of how completely Lieut. General Omar Nelson Bradley had reversed their classic Schlieffen plan of enveloping France.*Now the Eisenhower-Montgomery wheeling movement, anchored at the mouth of the Seine, was developing arcs that expanded toward Belgium and Germany.

The Hub Moves. The Allied hub itself was on the move. General Montgomery’s British and Canadian armies, which had tied down the bulk of German armor by constant two-fisted slugging, had bashed their way east and crossed the Seine. While the Americans still threw out lariat-like loops to trip the enemy’s retreat, the Canadians could move north to clean him out of the rocket coast. Rouen and Le Havre were port prizes for immediate assault.

South of the Seine the expanding hub still ground over the shreds of Kluge’s Seventh Army and the dozen divisions of his Fifteenth that he had desperately thrown into the Allied trap. There the extent of Kluge’s disaster could not yet be fully estimated. But there were hints: 30,000 to 45,000 still writhed in the trap; in a week of constant pounding by guns and bombs, 1,200 tanks, hundreds of trucks, hundreds of Germans were blasted to bits.

In the narrowing trap, as across the Seine, the Germans still fought savagely in rear-guard actions. But in France the enemy would probably not be capable of more than delaying action. Wherever the Germans might choose to stand—the Somme, the Marne, the Meuse—they were likely to feel Patton’s poniards slashing at their backs.

*The German grand strategy of 1914 was a wheeling movement through Belgium and north France which pivoted on Verdun. It was first stopped at the Marne just east of Meaux, some 30 miles short of Paris, was halted again in 1918 by the Americans at Chateau-Thierry. Basically the Germans used the same strategy in 1940.