By every measure, Third U.S. Army should have kept moving through France in the late summer of 1944. Instead, its advance toward Metz stopped cold at the Meuse River in early September, and stayed stopped for eleven weeks. Third Army had run out of gasoline.

This documentary traces why Patton's Third Army ran out of fuel outside Metz: the Red Ball Express and its mathematical limits, Cherbourg's crippled port capacity, Antwerp's capture on September 4, 1944 and its unusable, German-held approaches, and General Eisenhower's decision to prioritize fuel for Field Marshal Montgomery's Operation Market Garden, launched September 17, 1944, over Third Army's advance toward the Moselle. It follows the resulting eleven-week campaign against the fortified city of Metz, defended by Generalleutnant Heinrich Kittel's garrison in forts dating to the 1870s, through XX Corps under Major General Walton Walker, the costly assault on Fort Driant, and the city's fall on November 22, 1944 — plus the forts that held out weeks longer still.

Built from Third Army after-action reports, SHAEF planning records, unit histories, and the documented record of the September 1944 Eisenhower-Montgomery meetings — not the shorthand version of the story.

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