Pounding Compounded

By measure of ground gained, Lieut. General George S. Patton's month-old offensive had almost ground to a halt. His big U.S. Third Army had been in hard going before--against the Maginot forts and in the Lorraine forests--but none had been so hard as the going along the Saar River and the first belts of the Siegfried Line.

But by other measure, "Georgie" Patton had a big week. Against increasing opposition, he still held the initiative, still got men across the river. And his artillery had delivered one mighty blow to the German war machine. Under fire of Patton's guns was almost one-tenth of Germany's iron-and steelmaking capacity. U.S. Long Toms knocked out towering blast furnaces, ripped out great sections of sprawling mills in the Saar's narrow industrial corridor.

To the enemy the Saarland was now no longer an arsenal, but a fortress to be held at whatever cost. Saarbruecken, the ''Little Pittsburgh,"* was apparently to be another Aachen, a building-to-building battleground. Saarlautern, the area's second city, was already a flaming ruin--the target for more than 6,000 German shells, because Major General Harry L. Twaddle's 95th Division had seized its chief bridge intact. In Dillingen, where Patton's men had overrun a major steel plant, the Americans were able to advance only a few hundred yards in five days. Dillingen was part of the Siegfried fortifications, bristling with ingeniously placed pillboxes. For each one reduced there seemed to be two more ahead.

South to North. The Third's men beat off sharp counterattacks all week long. Then Patton compounded his frontal pounding by starting new attacks to the south of the industrial area. He got two divisions across the river after one had broken through the last of the reversed Maginot forts near Sarreguemines.

This move gave the Germans more worries: Patton was evidently trying to swing his right arm into a south-to-north assault. The wheeling movement appeared to be coordinated with a new northward attack by Lieut. General Alexander M. Patch's U.S. Seventh Army.

"Sandy" Patch sent two columns into a pre-dawn assault without the usual artillery preparation, caught the Germans napping. In two days the Seventh's men had taken Haguenau, the enemy's anchor point along the Rhine, 16 miles above Strasbourg. Beyond Haguenau was the 25-mile-wide Rhine plain. If Patch's northward thrust could be developed, the whole Saar Palatinate area would be outflanked.

* Little indeed, by U.S. standards. The Saar Basin's entire 1939 output (1,743,000 tons of pig iron and 1,863,000 tons of steel) is matched by that of Bethlehem Steel Corp.'s plants at Johnstown, Pa. alone.

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