The U.S. Third Army gained fame during World War II while under the command of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton, Jr. Deployed to the Western Front in the summer of 1944, Third Army executed an impressive offensive drive across France, and during the Battle of the Bulge that winter elements of Third Army disengaged from an existing fight, pivoted northward, and relieved the besieged garrison at the Belgian crossroads town of Bastogne.
U.S. Third Army
By mid-September 1944, the U.S. 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. Read more
U.S. Third Army
The portion of the Siegfried Line guarding the Saar industrial region of Germany proved a sinister gateway into western Germany for Lt. Read more
U.S. Third Army
Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., the commander of the newly constituted U.S. Third Army, had one simple order that late summer of 1944: “Go east and go like Hell.” Read more
U.S. Third Army
The commander of the U.S. Third Army, General George Patton, Jr., took no great pleasure in the end of the war in Europe; he already knew that despite his lobbying of many influential figures in Washington, D.C., Read more
U.S. Third Army
The road to Fort Driant began for the United States Third Army when it landed on Utah Beach at 3 pm on August 5, 1944. Read more
U.S. Third Army
In the Academy Award-winning film Patton, the setting was all wrong when actor George C. Scott delivered General George S. Read more
U.S. Third Army
Lieutenant General Omar Bradley, commander of the U.S. First Army, considered his 90th Infantry Division a problem unit. Read more
U.S. Third Army
For the Allied tankers and infantrymen of the American, British, Canadian, and Free French armies battling German Panther and Tiger tanks in Normandy in the summer of 1944, the Sherman tank’s failures were glaringly evident as their own shells bounced off the hulls of the Nazi armor and they were themselves destroyed at a far greater range by the powerful German tanks. Read more
U.S. Third Army
By Michael D. Hull
August 1944 saw a rosy mood of optimism and self-deception sweep through the Allied high command in France as a result of the sudden, dramatic end to the campaign in Normandy. Read more
U.S. Third Army
After the humiliating fall of France in June 1940, two impassioned patriots—a general and an infantry captain—refused to accept defeat and determined, against all odds, to exact retribution from the German invaders. Read more
U.S. Third Army
General of the Army George C. Marshall called it America’s greatest contribution to modern warfare. General Dwight D. Read more
U.S. Third Army
By the late summer of 1944, the Third Reich was almost surrounded. Two years earlier Adolf Hitler had ground 10 European countries under his heel along with vast expanses of North Africa and Soviet Russia. Read more
U.S. Third Army
Historian Christian Wolmar concludes that the two world wars could not have been fought to such devastation without military railways, in his book Engines of War. Read more
U.S. Third Army
The October light was beginning to fade as the U.S. Army limousine sped along the autobahn in the American Zone of Occupied Germany. Read more
U.S. Third Army
With the defeat of the German Seventh Army and the closing of the Falaise Gap in the summer of 1944, the Allies pursued the retreating enemy across France. Read more
