World Battlefronts: Durable Driant

Hell-for-leather Lieut. General George S. Patton fumed, and he had reason. A tank expert who specialized in roving maneuver, he was now forced to measure his progress in yards. His Third Army was barred from the Saar by defenses west of the Siegfried Line. Core of his army’s troubles was a 43 -year-old French fort manned by former cadets of the German officers’ school at Metz.

Fort Driant, south of Metz on the Moselle River, is three-quarters of a mile long by half a mile wide. Built as a defense against German invasion, it is shaped like a double-bit ax, with the cutting edges turned north & south. A barbed-wire-filled moat surrounds its dugouts, gun emplacements, pillboxes, underground tunnels, steel doors, sunken supply roads and guns that move up & down on elevators.

Ordinarily the fort would have been softened by rocket planes and concentrated bombing, but the weather was too bad. The infantry had to attack the hard way. Two weeks ago doughboys crossed the moat and scaled the sides of the fort, then were driven back by the Germans. Last week they tried again. Infantrymen fought their way into the fort through phosphorus and smokebomb clouds, tried to burn out its occupants with blazing oil. The Americans, clinging to the top, could hear the Germans scurry through the tunnels below, but they noted no sag in the defense, which went on from lower levels.

Tanks . . . Bulldozers. Tanks made a stab, were wrecked by Germans who sneaked through the tunnels, popped out behind them. Bulldozers tried to scoop dirt in front of the gun openings, failed to cut their fire power. In the fantastic melee, even headquarters became confused. Once it announced the fort’s capture, was flatly contradicted a few hours later by the Associated Press, which correctly reported that German resistance not only continued, but was rising in violence.

After four days Patton’s men, by hanging on to the northwest and southwest corners, digging in under the casemates of the big guns which could not be depressed to meet them, had hold of about one-tenth of the position.

A drizzling rain fell. Through the haze, artillery, rifles and machine guns worked without rest. The men crouched in trenches, in curious, strangely intimate warfare, often within the sound of the enemy’s voice. In the nearby town of Dornot, American and German dead lay sprawled together in too hot a corner for immediate recovery. Occasionally, when the rain lifted, Thunderbolt fighters whipped in to dive-bomb and strafe strong points.

By the fifth day of the fight, Third Army men had penetrated 100 yards into one underground passage, there were stopped by steel and concrete bulkheads. By the seventh day they reached 300 yards into the tunnels, cutting through metal doors with acetylene torches.

In the dramatically rapid shifts of World War II, forts and defensive tactics had fallen into disrepute. But the bitter defense of Fort Driant was proving to mobility-minded U.S. soldiers that there was an uncomfortable military virtue in good defensive positions after all.

South of Patton’s army, Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch’s Seventh Army was learning the same kind of lesson, taught by desperate Germans from the North Sea to the Alps. Through forests, hills and French hamlets in the Belfort area the Seventh gained a few hundred yards a day in hard, wary fighting against Germans who infiltrated and ambushed, kept the attackers on constant, red-eyed alert.