![]() The media and public back home were outraged that a general would treat an enlisted man in such a manner. In a widely publicized incident, he slapped and cursed a soldier suffering from battle fatigue in a field hospital in front of staff and patients. forces in the invasion of France the following year, but his inability to control his emotional outbursts and a personal sense of honor and duty that blocked him from sympathizing with the trials and tribulations of frontline troops caused him to stumble. Patton might have been destined to oversee U.S. Patton with General Manton Eddy (left), commander of XII Corps, and General Horace McBride, commander of the 80th Infantry Division. Montgomery, commanding the British Eighth Army, liberated the strategic island from Axis control. In little more than a month’s time, Patton, together with his archrival British General Bernard L. Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily in July 1943. Eisenhower, who was the supreme commander of Allied forces in North Africa at the time, picked Patton to lead the U.S. Lloyd Fredenhall after the debacle at Kasserine Pass. Against light opposition, he had secured Morocco during the opening phase of Torch and ably led the U.S. forces throughout Operation Torch, the invasion of North Africa. Patton had served with competence and distinction with the U.S. tank forces in World War I served as solid preparation for the challenges he would face as a commander when the United States declared war on Japan and Germany in December 1941. His training and experience in cavalry operations and his experience serving with the U.S. Patton arrived in France exactly one month after the D-Day invasion to set up the operational command for Third Army. The fight that began that morning touched off an 11-day running tank battle that raged across the hills of southern Lorraine and tested the resourcefulness of two of World War II’s most gifted practitioners of the art of mobile warfare. Manteuffel’s goal, as head of the 5th Panzer Army on the Western Front, was to transform Lunéville into a base from which to roll up Third Army’s flank on the east bank of the river. The attack, which came as a complete surprise, was being orchestrated by one of the Third Reich’s most talented panzer leaders, the diminutive General der Panzertruppen Hasso von Manteuffel, whom Hitler had plucked from the Eastern Front with his staff to drive Patton’s forces back across the Moselle. Panzergrenadier formations then swept forward to clear American antitank, machine-gun, and rifle positions. With their high-velocity guns, the Panthers easily knocked out the Yanks’ vehicles. Out of a morning mist that clung like a tight-fitting garment to field and forest on September 18 rumbled factory-fresh Panther tanks toward a thin screen of men and machines guarding the Third Army’s right flank at Lunéville, in the northeast corner of France. By the time the Third Army had gained a firm foothold on the east bank of the Moselle in mid-September, the masterminds of the German high command had hatched plans for a bold strike to regain the initiative. A severe shortage of fuel in the early days of September slowed Third Army’s advance to a crawl, giving the Germans time to rush reinforcements from as far away as Italy to cover thinly defended sectors. “I was certainly very full of hopes and saw myself crossing the Rhine,” Patton said.īut various factors were at work to derail those hopes. ![]() Manton Eddy that his XII Corps would lead the way. Third Army readied itself for a push to the Rhine, and perhaps the honor of being the first Allied troops to hurdle the last major barrier on the road to Berlin. As blue skies gave way to rainy spells signaling autumn’s approach, the U.S. Patton’s troops had fought desperately to secure bridgeheads in the Lorraine region from an enemy that had at last turned like a cornered animal and bared its fangs. ![]() Having raced 400 miles from the hedgerows of Normandy to the forested banks of the Moselle River in less than one month’s time, Lt. Third Army was poised to strike at the soft underbelly of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich along a fabled corridor in northeastern France used for centuries by armies tramping across Europe. ![]()
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