Also, does he know about his own experience at the Battle of Metz, where his “attack and attack and attack some more” approach amounted to basically the human-wave attacks that Westerners accuse the Soviets of doing? (although admittedly, I couldn’t find a date on that quote, so it may have been from before this)

https://bigserge.substack.com/p/the-last-effort-germanys-final-battle

Meanwhile, farther to the south, General Patton’ 3rd Army had a damnably difficult slog trying to clear the Germans out of the Loraine Region. In particular, the Germans put up a fierce resistance at the fortress complex around Metz, and Patton’s attack - which began on September 27 - could not clear out the last pockets of resistance until December 13.

The Lorraine Campaign became a topic of notoriety and great criticism against Patton (though today most people have never heard of it). Like the rest of the allied operations in the autumn of 1944, Patton’s assault towards Metz was nothing more than a frontal assault which generated huge casualties, with the American advance greatly complicated by both incessant rain and logistical difficulties. Patton became somewhat obsessed with Metz, which he grandly (and incorrectly) proclaimed had not been captured in centuries. However, Patton the cavalryman was completely out of his element in a grinding positional slog, and really did very little to direct the battle - he communicated only infrequently with his subordinates, rarely intervened in battle management, and generally spent most of his time griping at his command post and in his diary. He speculated that his army was being deliberately starved of fuel as a sop to Montgomery, and that the supply difficulties were somehow being manufactured to influence the presidential election back home in the USA. Meanwhile, he wrote to his wife asking her to send him Pepto-Bismol - what he called “pink medicin” - claiming that the rain and the slogging attack were giving him an excess of bile.

love to get so fucking angry at how much I suck that I give myself acid reflux

By any measure, the Loraine Campaign was not Patton’s finest moment. He was essentially missing in action, exerting little control over the operation, preferring to gripe and pout in his headquarters. Meanwhile, his Third Army created a meatgrinder in its assault, suffering 55,000 casualties in addition to some 42,000 “nonbattle” casualties - frostbite, sickness, trench foot, and the like. The latter in particular had become an epidemic among American troops, who found that the army regulation footwear was simply inadequate for cold or wet weather. The American quartermaster in Europe, General Robert Littlejohn, admitted that in snow the standard issue boots were “nothing but a sponge tied around the soldier’s foot.” But boots or no boots, the attack went on. When Bradley urged Patton to break off the attack on Metz - “For God’s sake, lay off it”, he said, “You are taking too many casualties for what you are accomplishing” - Patton ignored him and railed about Bradley’s timidity in his diary.

you want me to not waste the lives of thousands of men in stupid attacks? what a fucking pussy

one of the “greatest” American generals btw

But Bradley had a point - Lorraine was remarkably costly to Patton’s Army. According to a 1985 US Army study of the campaign (which emphasized Patton’s indifference to overstraining his logistics) fully a third of all the casualties suffered by Patton’s 3rd Army in the entire war were incurred in Lorraine during only a three month period. Probably the most poignant summary of the autumn fighting came from a war reporter embedded with Patton’s 5th Infantry Division, which took tremendous losses reducing one of the Metz forts. He wrote, simply: “We were attempting to assault a medieval fortress in a medieval manner.” But perhaps we are being too hard on Patton - Bradley’s Operation Queen fared no better, nor were the British going anywhere fast up in the Netherlands.

It was by any reckoning a miserable autumn, one which has been largely forgotten in the historiography simply because it seems to be such an aberration - an archaic throwback to the last war. Instead of sweeping mechanized operations, the war had devolved into ugly frontal assaults that burned through entire infantry battalions to advance 200 yards through the forest and the mud. Losses were severe enough that American units became chronically understrength, and casualties routinely outstripped replacements. Patton, in an effort to keep his frontline units as strong as possible, began rounding up rear area personnel - clerks, administrative personnel, drivers, and so forth - to be added to his rifle units after a cursory infantry training. By December, fully 10% of Patton’s rear area personnel had been thus “drafted” into the infantry. We are of course used to the idea that the Germans had to increasingly resort to emergency stopgap measures to fight the war, but the idea that the powerful American Army would have to do likewise is more troubling.

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btw, this whole “forgotten” phase of the fighting on the Western front I feel is pretty important for understanding how truly important the Soviet war effort was, especially as we’re now inundated with narratives downplaying their contribution and overplaying the Western one. This was late '44 - the Allies were facing a thoroughly depleted Germany, one which had already lost a massive amount of men (and some of their best officers, either to death or to just being fired since they displeased Hitler) and equipment on the Eastern front, and whose industrial output was being heavily reduced by bombardment. They were also trying to get past a defensive line which, while hyped up in propaganda, was in actuality quite sloppy (more from the same article):

In theory, much of the German defense was now anchored on the infamous “Siegfried Line”, or the “West Wall” - a dense nest of German defenses erected in a sort of mirror image to France’s prewar Maginot Line. On paper, fighting on a prepared defensive line ought to have accrued significant advantages for the Wehrmacht, and indeed German propaganda relentlessly trumpeted the idea of the Reich’s impenetrable western border, defended as it was by both the West Wall and the Rhine. However, notwithstanding the obvious anachronism of an “impenetrable defensive line”, and even ignoring the obviously stark warning from Germany’s own experience in 1918, when they had lost the war despite having both the Hindenburg Line and the Rhine to defend behind, it turned out that the mighty West Wall was not all it was cracked up to be. In particular, the West Wall had several specific defects:

• Much of the original line had been built in 1938 and 1939, designed to withstand the ordnance of the day - consequentially, many of the emplacements were simply not built to survive the much more powerful weaponry in use by 1944.

• Many of the West Wall’s heavy weapons (particularly artillery) and equipment (like radios) had been stripped down throughout the war for use elsewhere, and in particular to equip the Atlantic Wall in France.

• An emergency construction program designed to get the wall back into fighting shape was entrusted to domestic Nazi party officials (Gauleiter) and civilian construction crews who had no real understanding of military engineering; consequentially, the new portions of the line tended to be haphazard tangles of bunkers, pillboxes, trenches, barbed wire, and tank obstacles which were not arranged in a systematic way - for example, there was relatively little thought given to lines of sight or fields of fire.

Thus, despite the ostensible impregnability of the West Wall, German troops found a disappointing mixture of sloppily built new fortifications and outdated prewar bunkers that would be pulverized by modern allied munitions - and underlying it all, an endemic shortage of heavy weapons, communications equipment, ammunition, mines, and men. Probably the best thing that can be said for the West Wall is that it did at least have plenty of obstacles to complicate the allied assault, and the presence of the belt helped give confidence to inexperienced Volksgrenadier units who did not know any better - green troops always feel and fight better in fixed defenses. But certainly, no German soldier with even a modicum of realism believed that they could hold the line in the west indefinitely.

And yet… the Allies, despite their massive advantages, were still slowed down substantially and forced to take great casualties overcoming these mediocre fortifications.

Wall to wall armies from the channel to the Alps, limited mobility, and fires-intensive frontal assaults across a broad front. If it sounds familiar, that’s because it is - and for the last three months of 1944, the Germans and the Allies would fight an attritional-positional battle reminiscent of the First World War: a gruesome homage to the war their fathers fought.

Meanwhile, the Soviets were out doing multiple massive offensives a year, over far larger territory, wiping out entire German Army Groups.

I’ve seen dozens of videos of 18 -20-something kids in the army talking about wanting to frag their recruiter, I can’t wait to see what heroic “fighting retreat” they put up

I love when my opponent is cornered with an unsinkable aircraft carrier the size of China to their backs.

That definitely gives the US an advantage!

I think they just mean retreat. Genuinely a baffling term to use in this context, “shape advantages” is at least somewhat comprehensible, but fucking going on about retrogrades like we’re doing astrology really sent me