The Unknown 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!--Mannie Liscum