re: #172 DaddyG

I have not read that.

My Dad (Korean era vet) always felt like he’d rather be in Bradleys corp than Pattons. Yet Patton had a better casaulty rate despite his hard charging ways. Patton is another favorite - especially the George C. Scott version.

I wonder if part of the difference was Bradley coming up through the infantry and Patton being a cavalryman (which included him passing up an initial opportunity to get into armor in the early 30s despite his experience with it in WW1.)

Patton was aggressive in the belief that you had to keep pushing to keep the enemy off-balance. Don’t let him dig in and consolidate since it will be more costly to make the set-piece assault later. Push, go around the flanks, and displace him by threatening his rear and supplies.

And, if anything, the US Army of that time was built to exploit that way. Fully motorized divisions, armored units designed in part for flexible use with dependable tanks built for explotation. Very few tanks and weapons designed for direct fortification assault (and many of those were field expedients of putting extra armor on Shermans). And a lot of the German equipment losses in the fall of 1944 were due to abandonment. If you get out-flanked/cut-off you need to retreat, and it generally doesn’t help that at the same time the Jabos are ripping up all your hard to replace soft transport.