The Unkown Battle Metz, 1944

Anthony Kemp's "The Unknown Battle: Metz, 1944" is a solid piece of historical literature that represents much of what fills the current written historiography about this portion of the US Third Army exploits in late 1944 along the German border. Kemp's research is thorough and his presentation clear and generally concise. The author is able to cover this largely neglected (from popular literature anyhow) series of engagements that pitted Patton's Third against an entrenched battered, but yet unbeaten, Wehrmacht, in the Metz area in just over 230 pp. Kemp presents a lucid treatise of how and why the Third Army got involved in battle so unsuited to Patton's temperament, and further how Patton coped with this tactically. The reader is left with a clear picture of attrition warfare at its worst; although generally outnumbering the Germans, Patton's forces were far from what would dogmatically be considered appropriate strength to take on fixed defenses. Those defenses, the Metz fortresses (Metz and associated series of fortifications), while not necessarily modern were nearly as effective in 1944 as 1000 years earlier! Patton of course was able to eventually ram his way through the fortifications and capture Metz, but at a horrible cost to his armies. But was it too high? This is one of the remaining questions that Kemp tries to address in "The Unknown Battle". Kemp rightly points out that Patton's continued attempts to break through the Metz area to the Rhine kept at least some focus on that region of the 'broad front', which almost certainly influenced how Hitler distributed his forces for the Ardennes Counteroffensive in December. Had the Germans been able to shift more weight north would the Ardennes battles been different? Probably not since the Germans were not required to expend huge numbers of forces or logistics defending the Metz area - this is the advantage of fighting from fixed positions in poor terrain for the attacker, under poor weather conditions that minimize the influence overwhelming attacker air power. Patton was fighting an uphill battle the whole time but did so as the consummate soldier he was. Yet in the end, as Kemp points out, there was much senseless loss of life in the taking of Metz which had only limited immediate strategic value. "The Unknown Battle" is history the way history should be done. Kemp does his homework and provides a full story of an otherwise ignored portion of the US GI's experience in NW Europe. Kemp's interpretations are valuable as well, making "The Unknown Battle" a worthy read for any serious student of the Second World War. 4.5 stars out of 5.