In late August 1944, a column of American tanks sat motionless in a village in eastern France, not because of enemy resistance but because they had run out of fuel. Crews were draining gas from some tanks and pouring it into others so that a single vehicle could continue toward the front line. On the far bank of the river, a German officer watched through his field glasses in disbelief. For a month, his army had been in full retreat, unable to halt or even slow the American advance across France.
Now, inexplicably, the enemy had stopped. It was not German resistance that halted General George S. Patton’s Third Army at the end of August 1944. It was gasoline.
To understand the fuel crisis, it is necessary to understand the speed of the campaign that preceded it. After the breakout from Normandy in late July, the American armies in France shifted overnight from grinding infantry battles among the hedgerows to a war of rapid movement. Patton’s Third Army, activated in early August, led that advance. Its armored divisions covered up to 50 miles in a single day, capturing towns in days that planners had expected to take weeks.
The German army before them was in chaos, and Patton’s method was to never allow it to recover. That speed came at a staggering cost in fuel. A Sherman tank might travel less than two miles per gallon, often far less, and an armored division contained hundreds of tanks and thousands of other vehicles, halftracks, trucks, jeeps, self-propelled guns, and repair vehicles, all of them consuming gasoline. A single armored division on the move could burn tens of thousands of gallons a day.
A full field army required hundreds of thousands. Every gallon had to come from across the Atlantic, through the English Channel, to the beaches or the captured port of Cherbourg, then be trucked forward over roads that grew longer every day as the army advanced. The fuel shortage was not the result of negligence. It was built into the Allies’ entire invasion plan.
Planners had expected a slow, stubborn German retreat across France, which would give the Allies time to seize and repair ports, rebuild railways, and extend fuel pipelines at a steady pace. Their timetables assumed the armies would reach the German border months after the invasion. Instead, after the breakout, the armies reached it within weeks. The supply system had been built for a slow campaign and was now being asked to support a sprint.
The ports were the first problem. Cherbourg was captured in late June, but the Germans had thoroughly destroyed the port, and rebuilding it took time. The Brittany ports depended on by the plan were either still in German hands or wrecked. The great port of Antwerp was captured in early September, but its sea approaches remained in German hands and it could not be used for months.
The railways were the second problem. Before the invasion, Allied air forces had deliberately bombed the French rail network to prevent the Germans from moving reinforcements. The bombing had worked, but it meant that when the Allies needed those railways themselves, they were destroyed. Bridges were down and marshaling yards were ruins.
Rebuilding took time. What remained were trucks. The famous Red Ball Express, a dedicated one-way truck route carrying supplies from the beaches and Cherbourg toward the front, was organized in late August and ran around the clock. It was an extraordinary effort, driven largely by African American soldiers serving in the Army’s segregated transport units, and it kept the armies alive.
But trucks had a problem of their own. The longer the route, the more of a truck’s cargo was consumed merely in delivering it to the front. By late August, the distances had grown so great that a significant share of what left the beaches never reached the tanks at all. Fuel pipelines were pushed forward from the coast, and transport aircraft were tasked with carrying gasoline in cans to forward airfields.
It helped. It was not enough. By the end of August, the supply system was consuming itself while trying to feed the army. Adding more trucks only meant burning more fuel.
There was no simple way out except to bring ports and railways into operation, and both took time. Above all, there was a decision to be made about priorities. At the end of August 1944, Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower had to decide where his limited supplies would go. There was not enough fuel, ammunition, or transport to keep every army advancing at full speed.
Eisenhower gave priority to the northern armies, the British and Canadian forces under Field Marshal Montgomery and the American First Army beside them, whose line of advance ran toward Antwerp and the Ruhr industrial region. Patton’s Third Army, on the southern flank, had its supplies cut. In certain days in late August, the Third Army received only a fraction of the fuel it needed for daily operations. The tank columns stopped in place.
Patton was furious. He believed with all his considerable pride that his army was on the verge of breaking into Germany and that the enemy before him was beaten. He argued with Bradley, his immediate superior, and with Eisenhower. He is widely quoted, in one form or another, as saying that his men could eat their belts, but his tanks had to have gasoline.
It is one of the most famous quotes of the war, and like many of Patton’s celebrated lines, the exact wording varies from source to source. No one who knew him doubted the sincerity of the sentiment. George Patton in late summer 1944, furious at being halted by fuel shortages, iconized American general. The men who drove the Red Ball Express, who kept the entire Allied advance alive in late 1944, driving day and night on broken roads, many serving in a segregated army that gave them little recognition, are among the least remembered soldiers of that campaign.
Patton’s response was a catalog of every device a determined commander could use when ordered to stop. He kept moving as far as the fuel would allow. His instinct and instructions to his commanders, as commonly recounted, were to keep advancing with everything they had, and when the tanks stopped, dismount and continue on foot. Units drained their vehicles to fuel others, as the column described at the start did, so that at least some force could push on to the next river line.
He captured enemy fuel. In the chaos of the German retreat, abandoned or seized German fuel stocks were a prized asset, and the Third Army used them. Captured gasoline, in some cases tens of thousands of gallons at a time, went directly into American tanks. So did captured German food and German vehicles that could be repaired.
He begged and scrounged. Stories emerged about Third Army supply officers quietly diverting shipments or convincing depot officials assigned to other armies to hand over gasoline. Some of these stories are certainly true, some exaggerated, and some are the kind of tales soldiers enjoy telling. They capture the atmosphere of an army that treated shortage as an obstacle to be overcome rather than an order to be obeyed.
He attacked under other names. When Patton was told to halt major offensive operations, he was allowed to continue what the army called reconnaissance, and his concept of reconnaissance tended to involve a great many tanks. Accounts of that period describe him pushing forward under that label and handing his superiors gains he had already taken. He pressed constantly, spending much of that period demanding more fuel, more priority, more freedom of movement.
He did not get everything he wanted, but he never stopped asking. For a tank crew, a tank stopped for lack of fuel was not at rest. It was a thirty-ton target sitting still in territory the enemy knew better than the Americans. Crews that had spent a month in hard driving now waited in villages and fields, aware that the German units they had been chasing were reassembling somewhere ahead.
Every hour of waiting was an hour the enemy used. Patton’s diaries, letters, and the memories of his staff describe a commander who believed he had been stopped at the moment of victory, convinced he could see the German army collapsing before him, restrained by decisions made far away. Despite everything, the Third Army continued to advance slowly. By the first days of September, its spearheads had crossed the Meuse and reached the Moselle River.
The German border was close, but the momentum was gone. On the other side of the line, the Germans used every day they were granted. During September 1944, the German army in the west achieved a recovery that its own officers later described as bordering on miracle. Dispersed units were gathered and reorganized.
Rear-area troops, training units, and air force and navy personnel were called up and sent to the front. New formations were raised. Defensive positions along the rivers and the old border fortifications were manned. The cost of the delay appeared almost immediately.
When elements of the Third Army crossed the Moselle in early September south of Metz, they met far stiffer German resistance than weeks earlier. At one crossing, an American infantry force was counterattacked and trapped in a small bridgehead for days, suffering heavy losses before being pulled back. Other crossings succeeded, but slowly and at high cost. The enemy that had been fleeing in August was fighting again in September.
The key on Patton’s path was the fortress city of Metz on the Moselle. It was ringed by fortifications built over decades, some dating to the nineteenth century and many since modernized. The Germans garrisoned it and prepared to defend. When the Third Army resumed its advance in earnest, it was no longer chasing a beaten enemy.
It was attacking fortified positions in autumn rains and mud, across rivers, and against forts. The Lorraine campaign that followed became one of Patton’s hardest and most frustrating battles of the war. It lasted months. Metz itself did not fall until late November, and its last forts held out into mid-December.
The Third Army’s losses during the operation were severe, fought in weather that turned the countryside into a sea of mud. The German officer on the far bank of the Meuse, watching the American tanks stand still in the village, had just been given the thing his army needed most: time. The debate over what might have happened had Patton received the fuel he requested has continued ever since. Patton and his admirers believed, then and later, that the Third Army could have broken through the disorganized German forces, crossed the border, and driven into the Saar and possibly the Rhine, potentially shortening the war by months.
Many historians are far more skeptical. The supply problem was not simply a matter of who got fuel. It affected the entire Allied force. Even if the Third Army had been given absolute priority, the whole supply system was stretched to the breaking point, and any army driving deep into Germany would have strained it further.
German defenses along the border, though weak, were not nonexistent, and an overextended spearhead deep in enemy territory could have been cut off. There is also the question of what awaited them across the border. Driving into Germany was not like driving across France. The Germans, no matter how exhausted, would have fought on their own soil.
Eisenhower’s decision to favor the northern drive toward Antwerp and the Ruhr rested on sound reasoning, even if the specific operation that grew out of it, Market Garden, failed. What this episode demonstrates beyond doubt are two things. The first is that the American way of war, based on speed, firepower, and mechanical mobility the Germans could not match, depended entirely on a supply system the Germans never built and rarely thought about. Tanks cannot outrun the fuel that sustains them.
In August 1944, the Americans discovered the limits of their own abundance. The second concerns Patton himself. Faced with an order to stop and a shortage he could not fix, he did not stand still. He drained his tanks, seized enemy fuel, scrounged what he could, argued, and pushed forward under whatever name he could find.
It was not always obedient and not always wise, but it was the instinct that had driven his army across France. The German officer on the riverbank is a composite figure. The Third Army’s advance in August 1944, the fuel consumption of armored formations, the destroyed ports and railways, the Red Ball Express, Eisenhower’s allocation of priority to the northern armies, the shortage that stopped the Third Army at the end of August, the use of captured German fuel, the German recovery in September, the long battle for Metz, and the ongoing argument about whether Patton’s offensive would have succeeded are all documented.