Word: metzing
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...smashed into the tough outposts of Germany. Suddenly shedding its cloak of secrecy, the U.S. Ninth Army showed up on the left flank of the First Army, attacked toward Cologne behind the heaviest rain of bombs and shells the west had ever seen. The Third Army, whose assault on Metz last fortnight had touched off the winter offensive, probed into Germany below Luxembourg...
...French used to call Metz La Pucelle ("the Virgin"). Up to last week this historic Lorraine stronghold had never been taken by storm. Attila's Huns destroyed it in 451 A.D., but there were no Roman legions there to defend it. It was still in possession of the French when they surrendered in 1870, of the Germans in the autumn of 1918. The French claim that quislings gave it up in 1940. Last week, for the first time, Metz gave way under attack-by Americans...
...Pincers Close. From a line be tween Metz and Nancy, Major General Manton S. Eddy's XII Corps had jumped off in midweek, behind an artillery barrage so heavy that, according to one correspondent, the firing sheets looked like railroad timetables. Next day 1,300 heavy bombers came. The weather was too bad for close support, but they dropped 4,000 tons of bombs on Metz itself and on Saarbrücken...
...North of Metz, the U.S. forces captured Mezieres, fought over for weeks in bloody local actions. Still farther north, beyond Thionville, they put a substantial bridge head across the Moselle River. Here the Nazis launched their heaviest counter attack, for they were being backed up into the old Maginot Line, two miles from the German border. They threw the Yanks back nearly two miles before their strength was spent. Then Patton's attack rolled forward again...
...week's end all the communications of Metz from north and south had been cut; the roads and railways to the east were in range of Patton's Long Toms. His pincers closing east of Metz were only nine miles apart. Then the guns of Metz itself opened up on the attackers for the first time in six days. Nevertheless the Yanks took three of the small outer forts...