"Arracourt was the largest tank battle of the war on the Allied front." This is how American Major General John S. Wood described the Battle of Arracourt, which took place in the last weeks of September 1944 in northern France. Allied forces had landed in Normandy in June 1944 and by the summer had managed to escape from their beachhead. This began the great pursuit of German forces across northern France towards the German border. By the early fall of 1944, General George S. Patton's Third Army had crossed into France faster than anyone had anticipated and was poised to cross the Moselle River in the Lorraine area. Here his forces would face supply problems due to the speed of advance, increasing resistance from prepared German forces, and increasingly difficult weather conditions. Patton's first obstacle was the Mosel River and the fortress city of Metz. After crossing the Moselle with most of the Third Army by mid-September, the armored units of the US Third Army were engaged in the largest tank battles of the Western Front at Arracourt. The next phase of the campaign was reorganization and training. In early November, the Third Army attacked again and managed to capture Metz by the end of November, reaching the Sarre River and the Western Wall. During the long Lorraine Campaign in late 1944, the armored units of the U.S. Third Army were able to overcome stiff enemy resistance, superior vehicles, rugged terrain, and difficult weather conditions with the use of superior tactics, doctrine, and leadership .Strategic OverviewTo understand the Lorraine campaign of 1944, one must look back a few months to June 1944. Here on 6 June 1944 the Western Allies carried out the opposing landings of Operation Overlord in Normandy. From then until the end of July, the Allies were not as capable… middle of the paper… as the Shermans. The main weakness of the German tanks used in the Lorraine campaign were their crews, who were mostly raw recruits compared to the battle-tested American tankers. The German destroyers at the beginning of the Lorraine campaign were the Sturmgeschütz III or Stug III (assault gun) and Jagdpanzer IV (tank hunter). The Sturmgeschütz III was also an older model, having been in service since 1940. It weighed 24 tons, carried a 75 mm high-velocity gun, and had 3 inches of armor. Then came the Jagdpanzer IV, a 26-ton tank destroyer designed after the German defeat at Stalingrad and based on the Panzer Mark IV chassis. It was relatively new, had a high-velocity 75mm gun and 3-inch armor. Both of these tank destroyers had one major disadvantage; they had no turret, which meant that the entire tank destroyer had to be trained on the target, taking up valuable time.