Patton Versus the Panzers

General George S. Patton is the U.S. Army’s most famous tank commander, yet his tanks seldom fought large-scale battles against German tanks during World War II. His first large armor-on-armor battle—indeed the U.S. Army’s largest such battle before the Battle of the Bulge—took place in the French province of Lorraine in September 1944. Based on newly discovered American and German records and heavily illustrated with maps and photographs, Patton versus the Panzers reconstructs this little-known but important clash of armor.
 
In September 1944, after the summer campaign in Normandy and the liberation of Paris, Patton’s U.S. Third Army spearheaded the Allied drive eastward, deep into France. By the third week of September, Patton was in the contested province of Lorraine, about fifty miles from the Rhine River and, beyond it, Germany’s industrial heartland. Meanwhile, another Allied force was approaching from the south, having landed on France’s Mediterranean coast and now threatening to combine with Patton’s army in a pincer to trap the last large German formation left in France. The situation was dire for the Third Reich, and Hitler decided to attack Patton, aiming to bottle up and destroy his army before the southern force arrived. Legendary panzer general Hasso von Manteuffel, tasked with leading the armor-heavy operation.
 
Over the course of a week, hundreds of German and American tanks clashed near the town of Arracourt. The battle went badly for the Germans, whose local commanders committed their tanks piecemeal, thus squandering their resources and weakening Manteuffel’s offensive—which was shattered in a series of intense, close-range tank duels with U.S. forces led capably, at times brilliantly, by division commander John “Tiger Jack” Wood (also known as America’s Rommel), thirty-year-old battalion commander Creighton Abrams, and other skilled tankers.
 
Acclaimed armor expert Steven Zaloga explores this battle in unprecedented detail and explains how and why American tanks and tank commanders defeated the vaunted German panzer force.