8/5/2023 0 Comments Western tank force pattonAnd when the Germans made their thrust back into Belgium near the end of the war, General Patton’s tanks and army rushed to the defense of the surrounded Americans at Bastogne.įor those who do care about statistics, we shall say, in ten months, from June of 1944 when President Roosevelt gave him command of the 3rd Army, until May of 1945, Patton’s 3rd Army roared through six countries – France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Austria, crossing the Seine, the Loire, the Moselle, the Saar, the Rhine, the Danube rivers capturing, killing, or disabling more than 1,250,000 German soldiers.Įven if he was not a student of the Art of Politics, he was the consummate student of the Art of War. His phantom force in England kept the German forces at bay during the D-Day Invasion. And, even when he was not leading an army he was a threat. Lets just say that he lead his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily, and on the Western Front. His accomplishments are too numerous to cite. That is why German generals feared Patton the most of all American field commanders. Old Blood and Guts was where it mattered. And along with Russian General Georgy Zhukov, no one more successful. It is an impossible argument, and one must first distinguish between strategies and tactics, but I think it can be said that no general was more hands on, more involved, and more aware of battlefield tactics than Patton. Other forums have thrown various generals into the mix including: MacArthur, Rommel, von Manstein, Guderian, Montgomery, and Zhukov. We will leave the Pacific theater out of this and the Eastern Front, as this is not comparing apples to apples in terms of military tactics and battlefield success. He was the greatest fighting military general and tactician of the European theater during World War II for the American Army. That’s part of the reason why the movie Casablanca is also part of the story, as it was rushed to theaters within weeks of the invasion and helped inform American audiences at home, Rendell says, “showing people where their husbands and sons were fighting and what it was like there.I am an unabashed fan of General George Patton. This invasion was, Rendell says, “really the beginning of the Patton legend.” It was also the beginning of awareness, for many Americans, of where Casablanca was and what was going on in North Africa. He did, and the the museum later acquired the message from his family. “Patton read it and handed it back to him, and said, ‘Save this, it’s an important souvenir,’” Rendell says. It ended up in the collection, explains museum director Kenneth W. The copy of the decoded message seen above will be on display starting Wednesday as part of the exhibition The Real and Reel Casablanca American Troops Enter World War II, Landing in North Africa at the International Museum of World War II in Natick, Mass. fleet moved inshore and soon was heaving shell after shell into the Moroccan coast. Hewitt knocked out a bitterly resisting French cruiser-destroyer force while Navy flyers bombed the 35,000-ton battleship Jean Bart into a blazing hulk. Soon parachutists seized the city’s main airdrome and the tank force advanced. With that in his hands, he could cripple Casablanca if necessary. Foresighted George Patton shoved three tank columns ashore east and west of the sprawling city and hit first for an outlying reservoir. Though De Gaullist guns thus disrupted Nazi preparations, Casablanca still managed to put up the stiffest of all resistance to the U.S. When the meeting broke up, a blaze of gunfire silenced the Germans. De Gaullists followed the Germans, set up machine guns covering the hotel’s exits. struck, Hans Auer, German Consul General in Casablanca, had called a meeting of twelve Nazi armistice commissioners at the Hotel Plaza to warn them that an Allied invasion was imminent.
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