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Title: What they said about the Fourth Armored Division
Author: Fourth Armored Division Public Relations Section
Release date: February 16, 2026 [eBook #77963]
Language: English
Original publication: Landshut: Herder-Landshut, 1945
Credits: Fabbian G. Dufoe, III
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK WHAT THEY SAID ABOUT THE FOURTH ARMORED DIVISION ***
WHAT THEY SAID
ABOUT THE
Fourth Armored Division
_Compiled and published by the Public Relations Section, Headquarters,
Fourth Armored Division. Cover design and Bastogne page by S/Sgt.
Frank Besedick. Chapter titles by Sgt. Edward R. Thomas. Photographs
by 5th Detachment, 166th Signal Photo Company_
Printed in Landshut, Germany, September 1945
Printed and bound by Herder-Landshuk
CONTENTS
_Shiniest Helmet In ETO Page 1_
_Tiger Jack’s Spearheads ” 4_
_The Furrow ” 15_
_Bastogne ” 25_
_Rat Chase to the Rhine ” 36_
_The Victory of the Rhine ” 51_
_Ohrdruf ” 54_
_Death and Apple Blossoms ” 59_
_“Colonel Abe” ” 64_
_Three Division Heroes ” 75_
_Hello BBC ” 84_
_Men and Medals ” 88_
_They Called Us ” 92_
_The Presidential Citation ” 96_
_Collier’s Excerpts ” 101_
FOREWORD
“What They Said,” is a book compiling various magazine articles
and newspaper stories that have been written about the Fourth Armored
Division since it entered combat.
To print everything that has been written about the division would
require several volumes. Therefore, we have tried to make a
representative selection that will give you a general idea of what
“They”, the war correspondents, the home town newspapers, and the
radios all over the country thought and said about the Fourth Armored
Division.
Some of these stories you may have already read. Others you may be
reading for the first time. Although you might have already read
everything that lies between the covers of this little book, it will
still be prized in years to come--years when you can lean back with
the satisfaction of knowing that you shared in a great victory, and be
reminded of “What They Said”
For those who are new to the division, this book will help you
understand what it means to be a member of the Fourth Armored.
Something of what the Fourth Armored is and has done is related in
this book by impartial people outside the division whose job it was to
report the news as they saw it. _(Public Relations Section.)_
_FDR CITATION TO_
_FOURTH ARMORED_
_SHAEF, March 28--The War Department, by direction of the President,
has cited the entire 4th Armored Division for “extraordinary
tactical accomplishment during the period from December 22 to March
27, inclusive,” it was announced here today._
_This made the 4th Armored the second complete U. S. Army division in
history to be so cited. The 101st Airborne was presented with a
Presidential Citation by General Eisenhower on March 15._
_Referred to by the Nazis as “America’s elite 4th Panzer
Division,” the infantry and tank teams of the 4th spearheaded the 3d
Army’s race across France._
_The 4th has been commanded by Major General John S. Wood and Major
General Hugh J. Gaffey, and is now operating under Major General
William M. Hoge, of Lexington, Mo._
_The 4th Armored’s most recent accomplishments include its move from
Sarreguemines to Arlon; its great drive to relieve the 101st Airborne
at Bastogne; the history-making 60-mile dash to the Rhine River; the
move to Mainz, and the current drive on into Germany._
_Stars and Stripes, March 29, 1945_
[Illustration: General Wood]
Major General John S. Wood
_Division Commander_
_18 June 1942-3 December 1944_
[Illustration: General Clarke]
Brigadier General Bruce C. Clarke
_Division Commander, 20 June 1945-5 July 1945_
_CCA Commander, 1 Nov. 1943-1 Nov. 1944_
NAZIS BLINK IN FATEFUL GLOW
OF SHINIEST HELMET IN E.T.O.
By Roelif Loveland
(Cleveland Plain Dealer)
When Patton came to Third Army briefings his boots were shining
And his helmet was shining, and campaign bars were thick.
Somebody said: “The Germans will see them, general.”
“Hell,” replied Patton, “I want the Germans to see ’em
“And send word back that Patton is on the job.”
That was in Normandy, and a lot has happened since Normandy.
The American Third Army has taken its place in history.
The American Third Army, tanks and tank destroyers and bloody infantry--
The American Third Army, which swept across France, and kept going.
It has gone a long way since that apple orchard in Normandy.
Where Patton gave his first press conference
And talked about his chances of getting to Paris first,
Before any of the other American generals,
Told of a little bet he had made, but that’s his business.
They let the French enter Paris, for obvious reasons,
And Patton and his army kept on fighting.
Third Army correspondents went to Paris en masse; that was
the story,
But the Old Man with the burnished helmet kept on fighting--
Patton and his boys.
They kept going until gasoline and ammunition ran out.
It had been told.
And they sat by the Moselle for nervous weeks.
And when they got the stuff to go with, they went.
And they brought the war home to the German people,
Who had always fought past wars in other people’s back yards.
And the Germans didn’t like it, damn them!
They could dish it out, but they couldn’t take it--
At least not the way other people had taken it for weary years
and years.
I can remember the Fourth Armored Division.
The last time I saw them they were sitting in a field of mud,
And the wind was cold and the rain drenching,
“They dropped some in this morning,” a captain said, “but
hit nothing.”
By one of the tanks the lads had constructed a sort of lean-to.
They were sitting there, on boxes which had contained rations.
The colonel of the outfit, guests being present, broke out cigars.
“German cigars,” he said. “Not too bad, either.”
They weren’t too bad, and they weren’t too good.
There was always one nice thing about an armored outfit--
They got there first, and they corralled most of the wet goods.
They were generous lads, these boys who rode in the stinking tanks.
It was always nice to go and see an armored outfit.
Yesterday the paper said: “The Third Army’s Fourth Armored Division,
“Plunging 19 miles eastward, raced into the outskirts of Gotha,
“Reaching a point three-fourths the way across the Reich
from Czechoslovakia
“And 140 miles from Berlin.”
A lot of the tanks which were in the rain-soaked October mud,
And a lot of the men who were sitting on boxes by the tanks,
And a lot of the infantrymen who were slogging in wet shoes
Very probably never got to Germany at all.
Some of them went to hospitals, and some of them died,
For of such is the institution of war.
But I cannot help feeling proud when I read of Third Army.
I cannot help but feel proud when I think of Third Army.
I cannot forget Patton, with the shiniest helmet in the E. T. O.
Who wanted the Germans to know he was there,
And who, by God, made ’em regret it.
[Illustration: Liberty magazine]
“TIGER JACK’S” SPEARHEADS
By Wes Gallagher
“GENERAL PATTON’S armored spearheads ripped...” Week after week
last summer that phrase dotted the news stories of the American Third
Army’s unprecedented race across France. The lifting of security wraps
now makes it possible to introduce you to Lieutenant General George
Patton’s prize “armored spearheads.”
That is, if you can catch up with one. At the height of the summer
campaign it was worth your life to do so--particularly with Major
General John S. “Tiger Jack” Wood’s crack Fourth Armored
Division.
From July 28, when the Fourth jumped off from Cherbourg peninsula,
until late September, when it breached the German line on the Moselle
River, it operated virtually continuously behind the German lines. And
when the Germans launched their big counteroffensive in December,
tanks of the 4th rumbled to the relief of the American forces holding
the besieged communications center of Bastogne.
During the summer campaign, the Fourth at times was as far as
seventy-five miles ahead of the bulk of the Third Army moving in its
wake. Supplies had to be brought up in tank-guarded convoys.
Correspondents could catch up with the Fourth’s combat commands with
one of these convoys or could take their chances in sixty-mile-an-hour
jeep dashes through German-sprinkled territory.
The roads behind Tiger Jack’s clanking hard-boiled armored family
were usually considered unsafe for “thin-skinned” vehicles, which
means anything less armored than a light tank. And the Lord knows
nothing is more thin-skinned than a jeep, unless it’s a
correspondent.
Most of Wood’s thousands of soldiers from American farms and fields
act as though they themselves were armor-plated--especially Wood. When
mine fields halted his tank columns just outside of Coutances in the
dash down the Cherbourg peninsula toward Brittany, Wood suddenly
appeared at the head of his columns clad immaculately, as always, in
polished boots, riding pants, a trim jacket, and sun glasses, which he
wears rain or shine.
Wood marched into the town on foot under fire, captured a German
soldier and found a patch through the mine fields. He picked his way
through the town on foot, sending back a message for his tanks to
follow him. The columns never stopped again until they ran out of
gasoline six weeks later at the Moselle. The general was later awarded
the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery at Coutances.
Burly and as athletic at fifty-six as he was when he played end for
the University of Arkansas and the Military Academy just before the
last war, Wood is one general who looks the part. Eternally restless,
he paces ceaselessly back and forth, even finding it difficult to sit
still long enough to eat his meals. When he does stand still it is
with feet wide apart, hands on hips, in an attitude that dares anyone
to start something.
Wood is a long-time crony of the rough, tough Third Army’s
pistol-packing commander, and is one of the few subordinate generals
who are not intimidated by Patton’s roars of disapproval. When Patton
roars, Wood roars right back at him. The pacing and roaring prompted
one of the division’s Cub observation pilots to pin the nickname
“Tiger Jack” on him last summer and it shows signs of sticking.
Wood lives in the field with his division and refuses to move out of
his tent--and the mud--until his men can do likewise. That means he
will be in a tent for the rest of the war. His restlessness and
tremendous pride in the division send him on daylight-to-dark visits
to every unit, and every man in the division feels Tiger Jack knows
him personally.
The best description of Wood comes from an officer in the division
who, for the sake of his personal safety, must remain nameless. “The
general is a sort of Army edition of Clarence Day’s father in Life
with Father,” he says.
In peacetime Wood used to work out his surplus energy on the tennis
and squash courts, running his officers ragged, until he got the Palm
Springs, California, tennis professional, Lieutenant Lewis Wetherell,
as his aide. Wetherell can beat him at tennis, but Wood is tops in
squash.
In battle, the Fourth’s commander either flies over the area in a
Cub plane as a passenger for a personal look, or grabs his field radio
and indulges in a play-by-play direction of the fighting with his
field commanders.
No order in the Fourth Armored Division is ever written. Wood gives
orders to his field commanders verbally and in person, to make sure
they are understood. His commanders do likewise.
The 800-mile drive through the heart of France conducted by the Fourth
Armored Division, a masterpiece of strategy, was conducted on such a
verbal and personal basis. Wood trained his division to work as a
family. He mixed units until every commander was able to recognize
another’s voice over the field radio. That did away with confusing
code names.
To understand the magnitude of the task of operating such an armored
force, visualize a fair-sized small American town suddenly put in
steel houses and trucks and zigzagged from New York to Chicago over
strange highways so as to cover 1,900 miles--the mileage rolled up by
some of the Fourth Armored’s tanks in the fighting from July to
September.
Visualize the problem of bringing up some thousands of tons of
supplies weekly to feed and maintain this traveling steel village, not
to mention the vast amounts of gasoline necessary to keep it rolling.
In one day’s advance last summer, the steel monsters consumed 700
gallons of fuel for each mile gained.
Then visualize traveling hospitals, repair shops, kitchens, and a
complete telephone and radio system linking all the various units into
a co-ordinated whole.
An armored division does not travel as one strung-out column. Usually
it is broken into combat commands known as CCA, CCB, etc. The
composition of the combat commands changes from task to task. One day
CCA might be composed of a battalion of tanks and motorized infantry
backed by other attached units, such as combat engineers to build
bridges, its own antiaircraft units, tank destroyers, artillery, and
its own scouting force of Cub planes and reconnaissance squadrons of
armored cars and jeeps. The next day it might be changed to double the
number of tanks, half the infantry, and half the attached units,
depending on the objective.
The combat commands usually advance in parallel columns, with the
tanks in the middle and the infantry on the sides, or vice versa,
until opposition is met. Radio and Cub planes link the commands with
Wood’s headquarters, which is usually close behind the most advanced
command. Each command is self-sustaining for limited periods. At times
the commands of the Fourth have been engaged on separate tasks
hundreds of miles apart, but usually they are fairly close together so
as to be self-supporting.
After you have started this vast mass of material moving on a strange
road system, so co-ordinated as to arrive at a given spot at a given
time, you have the task of maintaining its complicated mechanism day
after day against a hostile force seeking to smash and disrupt it.
That, very roughly, is the problem of fighting the Fourth Armored
Division, or any American armored division, for that matter. It is a
problem which Tiger Jack’s division solved with a perfection that
has been unsurpassed in any battle during this war. No German Panzer
division that smashed through Poland in 1939 or France in 1940 or
Russia in 1941 accomplished as much in so short a period.
An armored division does not have the room or facilities to take
prisoners. Its mission is to cut up the enemy forces and destroy their
communications, leaving isolated pockets behind to be mopped up by the
infantry division. But the Fourth Armored in two months’ fighting
across France, from the last of July to October captured more than
15,000 prisoners, killed 5,000 more Germans, destroyed 317 tanks, 150
large artillery pieces, and 1,500 other German vehicles. During this
period the Fourth met and defeated elements of eighteen German
divisions and brigades.
An armored division is designed to destroy the fighting power of an
enemy and not particularly to capture territory. But consider what the
Fourth did in accomplishing its mission. It swept down the Cherbourg
peninsula on the right flank of the Third Army, captured Coutances,
and raced down the coast to Avranches, where it took vital bridges and
dams in an area where the Germans could have held up the American
advance for many days if they had had time to blow them. From
Avranches, the Fourth drove straight across Brittany, cutting off this
great peninsula with its vital harbors by capturing Nantes and Vannes.
As a by-product, the division contained the German U-boat base of
Lorient.
Then it turned north in a great right hook while still on the right
flank of the Third Army. It had the dual job of smashing the enemy
before it and at the same time protecting the Army’s exposed flank
in central France. This was one of the most difficult assignments of
the war.
Orleans, Sens, Troyes, St. Dizier, and Commercy fell in rapid
succession to the division’s highly-developed shock attacks. The
Fourth pushed on to cross the Moselle River and encircle Nancy,
forcing the Germans to withdraw from the city which for centuries has
been the key to northern France. During the advance, crossings were
forced on the Loire, Seine, Marne, Meuse, and Meurthe Rivers.
Once halted north of Nancy, and only by lack of supplies Tiger
Jack’s ironclad family proved it could fight as well on the
defensive as on the offensive when it repelled the heaviest German
tank counterattacks of the campaign, destroying more than 200 German
tanks in fifteen days of fighting from September into October.
So much for the cold statistics on Patton’s number one
“spearhead.”
The Fourth’s energetic commander is not the only individualist in
the division. It is full of happy extroverts, and all seem obsessed
with the idea that the war must be fought twenty-four hours a day,
seven days a week, at top speed.
For example, there is the general’s personal reconnaissance Cub
pilot, Major Charles Carpenter, a former Praying Colonel football
player from Centre College and more recently a history teacher in
Moline, Illinois, high school. A history teacher does not seem the
type to earn the nickname of “Bazooka Charlie,” but Carpenter is a
legend in an outfit where reckless bravery is commonplace.
If there is a fight within a hundred miles, he is in it or over it.
His nickname stems from the six bazookas tied to the muslin-and-wood
wings of his tiny Cub plane and fired from a trigger in the cockpit.
Cubs were made to fly behind the Allied lines, not over the enemy. A
good-sized rock in the right place would knock one of them down. But
Carpenter tied on his bazookas and started flying over the German
lines looking for tanks to shoot at. He has at least five of them to
his credit.
More often than not Carpenter has landed in the middle of a busy
battlefield to take a personal look, and he has taken an uncounted
number of loose Germans as prisoners.
The legend started last summer when Carpenter was commanding the Cub
unit attached to the division and was out in a jeep scouting for an
advanced landing ground. He came upon a group of infantry pinned down
in a ditch by sporadic 88 fire. There was also an American Sherman
tank which was not advancing.
Carpenter jumped on top of the tank, grabbed the 50-caliber machine
gun and fired a burst over the infantry’s head, with the advice that
the next burst would be lower unless they attacked. Then, riding on
top of the tank without a helmet and firing the 50‑caliber, he led
an attack that broke up the stalemate and took the immediate
objective.
But he drove on. The German tanks in the vicinity were fighting a
rear-guard action, and every time Carpenter came to a corner he would
yell down into the turret, “Let ’em have it!” and the tank’s
75-mm. would bang away. This worked fine for five corners, but on the
sixth he yelled, the 75 fired--and some distance away the bulldozer on
another Sherman flew high in the air. No one was injured, but since
both tanks involved belonged to another division, Carpenter was
arrested. The irate commander was all for shooting the hard-working
history teacher on the spot. Wood, hearing of the incident, rushed
over and rescued his Cub commander and made him his personal pilot.
Carpenter weighs over 200, as does Wood, and with both of them flying
in a flimsy Cub, the plane waddles around in the air like a bloated
duck. However, weight or no weight, the bazookas are always loaded
when it takes off.
Carpenter is quite outspoken in his ideas on how to fight a war.
Briefly they are, “Attack, attack, and then attack again.” The
whole division, from the enlisted men to the commanding general,
echoes his sentiments.
There is Sergeant Edward A. Rejrat, a former steelworker from
Scranton, Pennsylvania. He’s a tank commander. Rejrat’s thirty-ton
Sherman turned a corner in a narrow street in Avranches to come face
to face with a fifty-six-ton German Tiger tank sixty yards away.
Rejrat ordered the tank driver to put on full speed and ram the Tiger
before it could bring its gun to bear. One shot, and the Sherman would
have been a tangled mass of wreckage.
The two steel monsters crashed with a metallic roar. The long-barreled
88 was too big to swing around at close quarters and engage the
American tank. Rejrat brought his shorter 75 up against the turret of
the Tiger and cut loose with four quick thunderous shots which rattled
the American tank crew around like peas in a pod. The concussion from
the last shell, a high explosive, overturned the Sherman, but Rejrat
and his crew scampered out and away from the burning Tiger.
You couldn’t spend any time around the Fourth without hearing a
dozen men say, “The guy you want to see is Clarke of the CCA.”
They were referring to General Bruce C. Clarke of Syracuse, New York,
then a colonel commanding the CCA of the Fourth. In eight weeks of
violent fighting he won the reputation of being one of the most
brilliant young armored-force strategists in either the First or Third
American armies, and certainly the most unorthodox and daring. Later
Clarke was promoted to brigadier general and put in command of a
combat team of the Seventh Armored Division. It was Clarke who delayed
the Germans’ December breakthrough in Belgium by holding the key
road junction of St. Vith against overwhelming odds, not for two days
--as he had been ordered to--but for five.
Clarke served as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery in the last
war and later was graduated from West Point. He also holds degrees in
engineering from Cornell and a bachelor of laws degree from La Salle
University. In one tour of duty he taught military science at the
University of Tennessee and served as wrestling coach there.
Clarke developed the CCA’s shattering shock assaults which captured
German strongholds before the Nazi commanders knew what happened. At
Troyes, where it looked like suicide to make a frontal assault, he
spread his command out in old desert style and rushed the city at top
speed, overrunning German gun positions before they could fire and
hurdling antitank ditches. He forced his way into Troyes and took the
garrison town in a matter of hours when it might well have taken days.
The rule book says that tanks should not try to fight in cities, but
Clarke sent his medium tanks racing into Orleans so fast that they
caught German officers walking in the streets with packages under
their arms and shot them down in their tracks. In the ensuing
all-night fight Clarke’s tanks fought up one street and down another
and cleared Orleans without losing a single tank.
While preparing to attack Commercy, of World War I fame, Clarke heard
that the Germans were about to blow the bridge. He quickly gathered up
every available vehicle and tank and charged down into the city,
firing every gun in a typical high-speed shock assault which makes use
of the tremendous fire power of an armored division’s automatic
weapons. So frightened were the Germans that they fled without blowing
a single bridge, and the Nazi commander escaped in a staff car without
his shirt.
Clarke led some of these attacks in his own tank. In others, he flew
in a Cub over the attacking columns, directing the battles verbally by
radio.
He has done just about everything with tanks that supposedly could not
be done. Tanks, for example, are not supposed to be a match for
Germany’s famed 88 gun, but Clarke’s Shermans have attacked and
overrun dozens of German guns and shut the crews before they could
fire a round. He has that rare faculty of being able to pick the
enemy’s weak spot almost at a glance, and has so inspired the
confidence of his men that they believe any attack he plans is certain
of success.
I first met Clarke on the side of a hill north of Nancy. A tank battle
was under way near by. He had rolled up in a dust-covered jeep for a
quick conference with General Wood and Major General Manton Eddy,
commander of the Twelfth Corps in the Third Army.
The enlisted men sitting around in foxholes and armored cars had taken
the arrival of the generals with the usual indifference of front-line
soldiers, but when the dusty jeep arrived with the husky tanned
colonel, necks craned and there were murmurs, “Here comes Clarke.”
A strict disciplinarian and rather coldly reserved, Clarke did not
enjoy the friendly place in the hearts of the men of the division that
Wood commands, but there was no doubting the respect of officers and
men for his ability.
While a stray German gun, which had been overrun but whose crew
apparently was unaware it was surrounded by portions of an armored
division, banged away so close that the concussion moved your shirt,
Clarke spread a map on the ground and the two generals knelt down on
each side and discussed the situation as though they were in their own
homes.
None of the three looked up as infantry probed the side of the hill
for the hidden gun. After getting his instructions, Clarke jumped up
and was gone in a matter of seconds back toward his combat command.
A few days later, when rain bogged down the tanks, I was able to
corner Clarke in a muddy straw-strewn tent and record some of his
ideas on tank warfare.
“Warfare is mental, not physical,” Clarke began. “When you upset
the enemy you have him licked, particularly the German. He is big and
slow to react, and if you cut his communications and lines of contact
he will just take to the woods. But if you give him time to sit down
and get out the rule book, he is tough as Hell.”
Clarke himself has little respect for rule books, although he knows
and reads them all. “We received the other day a battle-experience
note in which some joker wrote that the American Sherman with its 75
is no match for the German forty-five-ton Panther tank with its heavy
armor,” he explained. “That would have scared hell out of us if we
hadn’t just knocked out more than a hundred Panthers with our
Shermans and tank destroyers in a three-day battle.”
The American tanks were more maneuverable than the heavy German
models, he explained, and could race in and fire before the Germans
could bring their slower turrets to bear.
“Most people and too many officers think a tank was made to fire its
big gun,” Clarke continued, striking his fist in his hand. “It
wasn’t. It was made to carry a machine gun into close quarters with
the enemy. The tank machine gun is the greatest weapon of this war and
we should have more of them on our tanks. The big gun is for defense
against other tanks.”
Clarke believes that the desert battles in Libya in which large forces
of tanks stood off and slugged one another have warped the true
conception of armored fighting. Tanks must keep on the move and close
in on the enemy to get at the soft spots, such as supply columns,
headquarters, and gun crews, he said.
“Tanks are weapons of terror. They have a definite mental effect on
the enemy when they come charging in, firing their machine guns. From
Normandy to the Moselle River most of my tanks never fired their basic
loads for their big guns.
“In fact,” concluded Clarke, “the safest place to be in this war
is behind the enemy lines. They don’t know what the hell to do when
you get there, and they just run.”
Clarke had the statistics to prove his point. The whole division had
suffered fewer casualties in eight weeks of offensive warfare behind
the German lines than it did in two weeks of defensive warfare north
of the Moselle. Small wonder that the Fourth Armored Division’s
battle cry is “Attack, attack, and then attack again!”
_(Liberty Magazine, Feb. 10, 1945)_
[Illustration: YANK The Army Weekly banner]
THE FURROW
The saga of the 4th Armored as its iron
tread cut deep into Germany
By Sgt. Saul Levitt YANK Staff Correspondent
WITH THE 4TH ARMORED DIVISION IN GERMANY--The iron tread of the 4th
Armored Division is moving across Germany and nothing can hold it.
Everywhere along the way the earth-shaking power of its big tanks is
visible. The crowds of people streaming along the roads--French,
Russian and Czech--are freed peoples beginning to march home through
the furrow plowed by the armor. That armor is still ahead of us, it
doesn’t stop. What is more, even the CPs behind it don’t know
exactly where it is.
“Get to the next town and keep going,” they say. “You’ll find
it.”
We are on its track all right, for we’re moving through towns where
the ruins still smolder and smoke. “The 4th Armored was here two
days ago,” someone says. Elsewhere, a great furrow in the fields
shows where the tanks bedded down and rested for a few hours.
Our jeep follows the armor’s tracks. There are fires on the horizon.
Around us lie the hostile fields, the stretches of woods where no one
moves. Someone is probably watching from there, though, for it is off
the track of the armor. The following Infantry will have to clean this
hostile country up.
We came to a town which Combat Command “B” of the 4th Armored
plastered a day ago. It is still smoking. The effect of the roaring
tanks and of the long, black gun-muzzles that stick out ahead of them
shows in the faces of the German civilians of this community.
“They’re around here somewhere,” says somebody. “Get on the
autobahn, pick up a 4th Armored supply truck and keep following.”
There is a low sky overhead. We find the armor’s deep furrow in the
muddy hills, and climb and reach the autobahn, a great German highway,
where traffic is meager and fast. A 4th Armored truck is ahead and we
are catching up. Some planes make their turn and we get out of the
jeep and, by God, they are Me-109s beating up the road toward us.
There is nothing faster than a plane and nothing slower than a man at
a time like this. We scramble down an embankment and into a culvert
and all hell is breaking out above us. The 50 calibers on the ground
and the 20mm cannonfire of the planes are both going at once and the
ground above is being rapped with the sound of giant hailstones. Then
silence.
Again they come. The Germans don’t want us on their favorite highway.
Three times more we hear the thunder of their engines, the whistling
of their wings, and the rapping of the 20 mm. hailstones. Then it’s
quiet again. We climb up the embankment and into the jeep and get
going.
We wish we could find that armor somewhere and 25 miles farther on we
finally overtake its tail-end. Down below the highway rest the tanks,
the half-tracks, the jeeps and the big guns spread out in a pasture
like resting cattle, right in the middle of Germany as if to say:
“What are you going to do about it?”
[Illustration: Armored Doughs]
[Illustration: Slowed but never stopped]
There are fires on many parts of the horizon. The biggest is to the
south, where a whole train is burning as one car after another
explodes. “We were trying to get a couple of Panther tanks on the
other side of the tracks,” says someone. “So we got the train
which was in our way.”
The nose of the 4th. Armored is still farther up, past Creuzberg. We
are some 25 miles west of Gotha and more than 75 miles from Frankfurt,
which was yesterday’s news. German women who pass in the village of
Nesselroden move about with their faces averted. In the house we stop
at there is a place marked for everything and everything is in its
proper place. A place is marked for the table towel, another for the
glass towel, a third for the blessing of God on the house, a fourth
for the picture of the son in the Nazi uniform. Signs and slogans are
everywhere. All night long a clock in the house rings out the hours
and half hours, adding another touch of order to this
too-perfectly-ordered home and providing assurance that even in his
sleep a good German will know what’s what.
The next day we move up the long train of armor toward Combat Command
“B”. It is a winding trail that avoids the autobahn and the big
town of Eisenach, which has not yet been taken. On we go, over
back-country roads, past civilians with beaten faces. The Werra River
isn’t wide here, but there was a tough fight for it yesterday. The
4th Armored’s 24th Armored Engineer Battalion bridged it under enemy
fire, saw their bridge knocked out, and put it in again. A small river
and small bridge, but a big operation.
We get past Creuzberg, which resisted yesterday and paid for it, for
there is no patience in the 4th Armored. The 4th wrecked Creuzberg
because Creuzberg wouldn’t surrender, and now people are shoveling
through the still-smoking ashes, looking for things.
Farther on we move, through a woods, and get one of those shocks of a
kid moving through a toy chamber of horrors at Coney Island. There are
dead German tanks in the woods, facing the road and hidden until you
come right up on them. Then it’s as if the tanks were alive and had
got you right there. But the tanks are dead. This was a German
tank-maintenance and repair area. Live American armor has already
caught this crippled German armor, lighting charges under it and
throwing white phosphorus stuff at it. Now the German tanks smoke and
burn, and one is just a pink stove, silently burning in the woods.
This is evidence of how the Germans have been driven to cover. They
have had to hide tank-repair areas in the woods because nothing that
shows in Germany is safe from our air these days. We have driven them
to the woods and to the caves, and now we are pushing them east, out
of their own country.
We get out of the woods in a hurry because it is eerie there and maybe
Germans are watching us go by. More fires are burning on the horizon.
The deep track of the tanks is still ahead of us. We reach a town
which is only a few miles from the big city of Gotha. The German air
comes up again and the sky is filled with smoke and the sounds of
anti-aircraft and cannon. We climb a hill to another woods, where
Me-109s are tucked in among the trees. The Germans had smashed these
planes themselves as the armor ran them down. These deadly little
planes have knocked out may Forts and Libs, and here they are broken
and burnt by the Germans in a woods.
The 4th Armored is moving out of Metebach now, and we get in behind a
half-track and follow down the road. The tanks wheel in their iron
treads, the machineguns point at the sky, and Aspach shows up, five
miles from Gotha. From within the houses, the civilians watch, but if
you look at one of them steadily he turns away. The power of the armor
is shadowed in these German faces. They stick their heads out of their
windows and watch blankly, absolutely neutral.
And now the tanks and half-tracks move up to a crossroads outside of
Aspach. They cover the roads out of town in long powerful lines as the
evening comes down. More fires blaze on the horizon. The German air
comes over again, the Me-109s moving across the sky as the .50-caliber
fire goes after them. The planes twist, turn and plunge through the
sky after a Cub plane, like a hawk after a sparrow. The Cub comes down
low over the fields with an Me dropping after it and the guns of the
armor drive the Me off just in time. The German air comes in again as
the sun goes down--two, three, four times more--and one at last grabs
a vehicle in the long line on the road and the vehicle begins to burn.
Another Me comes across, no more than 10 feet above the column,
turning on one wing, almost striking the ground, but keeping going. No
planes are knocked down here tonight, but the report is that more than
34 were brought down yesterday and we have been able to count at least
six wrecked ones during this movement toward Gotha.
The 4th should be in Gotha by tomorrow morning, and now it rests
outside the city. Rain begins to fall, but the fires sowed by the big
guns still burn on the horizon and so does our column’s vehicle
which the Me hit on the road. The 4th will move through fires into the
city of Gotha tomorrow morning.
In the morning there is a brief moment of indecision. Gotha has been
asked to surrender, and if it will not, then the big guns will go to
work. The 4th isn’t going to wait very long. Finally, it appears
that Gotha will surrender. The surrender has been demanded by the
Division and at last the answer comes through the armored infantry
battalion, which is up front at the edge of the city. Minutes from now
another German city will fall and within 10 days and 200 miles of
movement we will have taken Darmstadt, llanau, Aschaffenburg, Hersfeld
and Gotha.
The German air comes up over the road and we get into a patch of
woods. Under the roar of the guns and the enemy engines overhead, the
infantrymen had a word or two to say about this ebbing war. Pfc.
Joseph Tegge of Anderson, Ind., a. rifleman, wanted to know what the
hell the Germans are fighting for at this stage of the game.
“A stubborn bastard,” he says. “He knows he’s done for, but he
keeps on fighting anyway.”
The men are exasperated; it doesn’t make sense anymore. Yesterday,
16 of our infantrymen had been killed while protecting a tank.
We leave the woods and move on, and then the enemy air goes to work
again and we get into a barn where T/5 Wilson E. Kendall of
Ogdensburg, N. Y., who has been with the 4th Armored since Pine Camp,
comes up with that one about going home.
Then the air is clear once more, like after a rain squall, and we get
into the jeep and move slowly down a hill into Gotha, past German dead
in ditches, past a burnt-out American tank, past a hospital for German
soldiers where a guy at a window thumbs his nose at us and then
disappears. If he tries that on our tankers, they’ll surely go up
after him.
We get down into the square and are at the City Hall, where pieces of
broken glass lie all over the streets.
We are again in the midst of one of those starting-from-scratch
moments. In the City Hall are the temporary German officials of the
city of Gotha together with Lt. Robert Townsend of San Antonio, Tex.,
aide to the 4th Armored commander, Major General William M. Hoge.
“You will first of all bring in all arms, cameras and ammunition,”
says Townsend. He sits down in the old council chamber of the City
Hall, surrounded by murals of the ancient city. A Hollander, a young
fellow from Rotterdam who speaks both English and German, acts as
interpreter. He has been in Germany for several years, another one of
the millions of dragooned “auslanders,” or foreign laborers, in
the Reich.
The Germans around the table look shrewd and they talk with the tact
of losers. Order begins to appear. The men of the 89th Infantry
Division show in the town, moving from house to house, and you can see
them in the square from the windows of the City Hall.
A Polish woman with a small child stands outside the door and the
assistant Division commander, coming into the council chamber, pauses
for a moment in the doorway and tells the woman that things will be
better for them soon.
We leave Gotha that afternoon, grabbing the tail of the 4th Armored as
it goes through, and now the columns curve south, driving 15 miles to
Ohrdruf and Mühlberg, and coming to rest more than 200 miles from the
Rhine.
On the very edge of Mühlberg the column comes across what must be the
last German train going east. The Division’s artillery simply wheels
a 155mm. howitzer around and knocks out the train. It is Sgt. Roy
Mercurio’s gun crew which does this. Mercurio is from Toledo, Ohio,
and his gunners are Cpl. Cleo Smith of Los Gates, Calif., Pfc. Homer
Garrison of Shelbyville, Mo., and Pfc. Joe Valenti of St. Louis, Mo.
When we reach Mühlberg, a soldier asks: “How far are we from
Texas?” We draw a map on the ground, using a stick for a pencil,
drawing the outline of the eastern coast of the United States, as we
remember it, and the outline of the western coast of Europe, and then
France and Germany as far as Gotha. We figure over that map for a
while and finally somebody says: “Nearly 5,000 miles to Texas,
maybe.” And the soldier from Texas sighs and walks off.
Heading back, we can follow the long furrow which the 4th Armored has
plowed since it broke through at a point above Frankfurt. This country
behind the 4th Armored, which was deadly three days ago, has been
cleared. Now the liberated, thousands of them, are going home through
the furrow. French and English soldiers of 1940, Czechs, Poles and
Russians are on the road. We can go back now along one of the
world’s finest roads, which Hitler built for war and not for
civilians, and which the Americans are now using for war. Our traffic,
our supplies and infantry, is pouring through, pouring east, as thick
as Fourth of July traffic on the Lincoln Highway.
It is one of the great sights of our time and on the faces of the
Germans along the way there is still the look of numb amazement that
an enemy from thousands of miles away actually rides through Germany
now.
And tomorrow morning the 4th Armored will cut its tread deeper into
the German earth again, moving eastward.
* * *
Every Man A Matricide
German soldiers facing the 4th Armored were told (according to a
captured document): each American had qualified for the Division by
proving that (1) he had been born a bastard, (2) he had murdered his
mother--_TIME, March 19, 1945._
* * *
[Illustration: Bastogne]
[Illustration: Christmas Day--Tomorrow, Bastogne]
“COBRA” GOT THERE FIRST
American Tank Headed the Relief of Bastogne
By Joseph Driscoll New York Herald-Tribune, January 1945
Cobra King is the name of a shell-scarred, stout, armored forty-ton
Sherman tank. With a first lieutenant from Texas in the turret the
Cobra sliced through the German circle about Bastogne the afternoon of
December 26, 1944. Other men and tanks of the Fourth Armored fought as
hard to relieve Bastogne, but the Cobra got there first--at 4:45 p.
m. the day after Christmas.
The tank commander was Lieutenant Charles P. Boggess, Jr., who played
high school football at Greenville, Ill., before moving to Austin,
Texas.
At the tank’s 75-millimeter gun was Corporal Milton B. Dickerman, of
Newark, who made bomb racks in a Kearny, N. J., factory before he
became a tanker three years ago.
The loader, Private James G. Murphy, hails from a small farm near
Bryan, Texas, and was attending Sam Houston State Teachers College at
Huntsville, Texas, until he got in the Army two years ago.
The bow gunner was Private Harold Hafner, of Arlington, Wash., who was
graduated from Arlington High School in 1943 right into the Army.
A Georgia tractor farmer, Private Hubert J. J. Smith, of Cartersville,
drove the tank. His initials stand for James Jackson, but he has no
idea why he has two middle names.
By noon of December 26 Cobra King squatted on a ridge south of the
Belgian hamlet of Clochimont. Its heavy-barreled snout pointed
north-east toward Bastogne three miles away.
One of the great tank fighters of this war, Colonel Creighton W.
Abrams, of West Newton, Mass., commander of the 37th Tank Battalion of
the 4th Armored, swept his arm forward in the signal to advance. Cobra
King snorted into the attack at the head of a column of tanks and
armored infantry halftracks. The armored vehicles charged up the
snow-covered road like a gray file of trumpeting elephants.
Incidentally, we saw a real elephant on this road one day, passing
tanks going the other way and making an odd contrast, but it was a
circus elephant entertaining children.
Lieutenant Boggess, commanding nine mediums in the tank push that
relieved Bastogne, had warned his men that it wasn’t going to be a
picnic. The men haven’t been on a picnic since the Fourth Armored
left the States a year ago, so that was all right with them.
A veteran of thirty-three years, Lieutenant Boggess described the
situation:
“The Germans had these two little towns of Clochimont and Assenois
on this secondary road we were using to get to Bastogne. Beyond
Assenois the road ran up a ridge through heavy woods. There were lots
of Germans there too.”
“We were going through fast, all guns firing, straight up that road
to bust through before they had time to get set. I thought of a lot of
things as we took off. I thought of whether the road would be mined;
whether the bridge in Assenois would be blown, whether they would be
ready at their anti-tank guns.”
“Then we charged, and I didn’t have any time to wonder.”
Spraying machine-gun and cannon fire, the tanks charged with throttles
open.
“I used the 75 like a machine-gun,” Gunner Dickerman said.
“Murphy was plenty busy throwing in the shells. We shot twenty-one
rounds in a few minutes and I don’t know how much machine-gun
stuff.”
“As we got to Assenois an anti-tank gun in a halftrack fired at us.
The shell hit the road in front of the tank and threw dirt all over. I
got the halftrack in my sights and hit it with high explosive. It blew
up.”
Dirt from the enemy shell burst had smeared the driver’s periscope.
“I made out okay, although I couldn’t see very good,” Driver
Smith drawled. “I sorta guessed at the road. Had a little trouble
when my left brake locked and the tank turned up a road we didn’t
want to go. So I just stopped her, backed her up and went on again.”
Unlucky Assenois was blowing to bits under artillery barrages laid
down by American guns. Through the smoke, dust, flying debris and
shell splinters the armor drove on. Our artillery kept the enemy down
and cut short his defensive fire.
“Bastogne was the next town down the road, but we still had those
woods to go through,” Lieutenant Boggess recalled.
Kafner kept his bow machine gun playing around the fir trees and the
road ahead. Dark enemy figures ran and fell in the dusk. In the forest
darkness a square concrete blockhouse painted green loomed ahead.
Dickerman sent three shells smashing into it. Later the infantry found
twelve Germans there.
Lieutenant Boggess pulled the galloping Cobra down to a canter.
Colored parachutes clotting the countryside; some of them caught in
the tall trees, indicated where ammo, food and penicillin had been
dropped to the American paratroops and tankers besieged in Bastogne
and its defense perimeter. The question now was whether the Cobra King
was among friend or foe.
“I spotted some foxholes filled with men in G. I. uniforms,”
Boggess continued. “I yelled for them to come out, because we
thought the Germans might have men in our uniforms around Bastogne
ready to knock us off. Nobody moved, so I called again.
“After they heard me say that it was okay and we were the 4th
Armored, a lieutenant from the engineers climbed out of his hole and
said he was glad to see us. They had me covered, too, I found out.”
“You know,” commented New Jersey’s Dickerman, “We never really
got to see that town of Bastogne after all. Wasn’t the M. P.’s
fault, either--no off limits business. Soon as we got to the perimeter
defenses we turned right around to guard the road on the edge of
town.”
4th Armored Moved
Suddenly and Fast
Sgt. Joe McCarthy, YANK Staff Correspondent, reporting the seemingly
impossible swing of Third Army units toward Bastogne at the height of
Von Rundstedt’s breakthrough, in the January 21, 1945 issue of YANK,
included the following:
The most spectacular role in the move was that played by the Fourth
Armored Division which dashed to the aid of the besieged 101st
Airborne Division at Bastogne. The story of what happened during the
same time to the 26th Division, which moved up on the Fourth
Armored’s right flank and tackled the tough job of crossing the Sure
River to the east of Bastogne without getting much of a play in the
newspapers, is less dramatic but more typical. It gives you some idea
of what it was like for the average infantry outfit that was in on
this deal during the joyous Christmas season of 1944.
Nobody in the 26th Division can get over the way their part of the
Third Army made its move north from Metz. Probably no military
movement of such a large scale was ever carried out with more speed
and less red tape. The book was thrown out of the window and all the
OCS rules about road discipline were forgotten. Each outfit simply
tried to get its vehicles on the road as soon as possible and, after
they were on the road, to keep moving.
“And them roads were jammed,” one of the truck drivers said. “Us
and the Fourth Armored and God only knows how many other divisions. We
were bumper to bumper all the way. Good thing it was a cloudy day. If
the Germans ever had air out, they would have slaughtered us.”
What YANK Magazine of January 21, 1945
said about the 4th Armored’s part in the
historic Bastogne fight
By SAUL LEVITT
Since December 27 it has been possible to come up from the south into
Bastogne through the corridor originally established by elements of
the Fourth Armored Division. The corridor is still so narrow that you
can see and hear the battle on both sides of the main Arlon-Bastogne
highway, but since the 26th there is no longer any Bastogne pocket.
Now the fight takes place three quarters of the way around Bastogne,
but the evidence of the desperate eight days of fighting until the
Fourth Armored Division broke through has not entirely disappeared.
* * *
Meanwhile, to the south, elements of the Fourth Armored Division
commanded by Colonel Creighton W. Abrams and its attached unit of
infantry from the 80th Division, the 318th Regiment, were fighting
north in a series of savage encounters, trying to force some kind of
passage to Bastogne.
Farther away, at the 12th Evacuation Hospital, volunteer doctors and
medics prepared to take off by plane and drop down by glider into the
Bastogne pocket. The next day five doctors and four sergeant medics
took off.
Some of them had never been in a plane before. The doctors thought it
was going to be a parachute jump at first but were ready anyway. They
took off on Dec. 26, landed near Bastogne in the snow, and set up
their hospital. There could be no question of taking their wounded
out, not until the lifeline from the south could reach Bastogne.
The lifeline was being made down below Bastogne. It was being forged
by tanks through teller mine fields on the roads.
The Fourth Armored was going north. Stopped cold at noon of the 26th
by heavy resistance and with further movement possible only at the
heaviest cost, they decided to force through at once. They knew it
would have to be a very fast and continuous movement. The armor took
off, playing machine-gun fire on the woods and surrounding hills. In
that drive through to Bastogne, lasting more than four days, they
killed, captured, and took prisoner more than 2,000 Germans. But they
did not come through easily. The straight rush through the German ring
cost lives.
In the woods north of Assenois, Lt. Charles Boggess Jr., lifted his
head out of a turret and spoke to the first American soldiers on the
inside of the pocket. They were engineers of the 326th Airborne who
had maintained the southernmost salient of the perimeter. As Lt.
Boggess lifted his head out of the turret nobody said anything to him.
He said, “Come on out, it’s all right. It’s the Fourth
Armored.” Nobody moved or answered. It was late afternoon under the
dark green firs. Boggess yelled again, and again nobody answered.
Finally a young officer crawled out of a hole, but the two men kept
each other covered. The engineer officer said at last, “I’m Lt.
Webster.” They shook hands. Later Gen. McAuliffe rode out in a jeep
and shook hands with some of the men. And as dusk started to come down
Col. Abrams rode through--a short stocky man with sharp
features--already a legendary figure in this war.
The Fourth Armored seems to span the history of this war. In France,
you met the division as it made its first big play in the hot summer
days, going through Coutances in our big breakthrough after St. Lo.
Again you ran across the outfit in the fall as its big tanks lumbered
through the mud of Vollerdingen, near the German border, with the
tanks out of contact across the mine-covered hills where neither man
nor jeep could follow them.
And now they showed in Bastogne, lumbering through the snow with the
men of the 80th Division, against the blooming green of the pine trees
and into the town itself ...
The battle of the Bastogne pocket ended at 1545 on December 26, 1944.
DEFENSE OF BASTOGNE
PROVED EPIC BATTLE
By Jack Bell
Columbus, Ohio, Citizen, January 6, 1945
WITH THE U. S. FOURTH ARMORED DIVISION, Belgium--The road to Bastogne
is paved with bad intentions--enemy and friendly tanks which slugged
it out during the dramatic drive up from the south to relieve the
101st Airborne Division and its complement of tanks.
Other battles are in progress as generals feint and parry with armies
across the frozen wastes. But the soldiers have their pets, and every
man of the Fourth Armored Division has the battle of Bastogne heading
the “Hit Parade.”
Bastogne caught the public fancy. We shot 20,000 troops in to save it.
Every soldier overseas knew of the encirclement which shut them off,
the days of fog which shut off air power for four days. The entire
Allied Expeditionary Force had one question: “What about
Bastogne.”
I was with the powerful and confident “Fourth Armored” the day its
tanks and armored infantry rolled off the line of departure toward
Bastogne. Snow fell gently. Mud was deep, but day after day they
forded and bridged streams, mopping up the steadily stiffening German
opposition. Each night they paused, then fought on.
“For if we get only 2,000 yards we’re that much nearer the men in
Bastogne,” was the expression of Lt. Col. Delk Oden, Elgin, Tex.,
tank battalion commander.
At last they met in pitched battle. South of Bastogne in the villages
of Chaumont and Assenois, dozens of tanks along the streets and in the
field are mute evidence of the mighty struggle that preceded the entry
into Bastogne, leaving both armies weaker when it was over.
Then one evening at 4 o’clock, Lt. Charles Boggess, Jr., Greenville,
Ill., up in the hatch of a tank, said: “You all know we’ve got to
get to those men in the town. All you’ve got to do is keep em
rollin’ and follow me. It won’t be any picnic but we’ll make
it.”
He buttoned down the hatch, roared away and the others followed. They
rumbled through wrecks of tanks in Assenois, through a terrific
barrage from American guns, a daring maneuver that paid fat dividends
for the artillery kept the Germans in holes and 400 prisoners were
taken by the infantry which followed.
Up the road Lt. Boggess and the tanks rolled. The smoke in Assenois
caused a slight break in the column after four had rounded a turn. The
others stopped to check the route. The pause gave the Jerries time to
toss Teller mines onto the road. A halftrack hit one. Captain Bill
Dwight, Grand Forks, Michigan, leaped from a tank and threw the mines
off the road and the rescue party rolled on.
They went full speed, with every machine gun spraying the roadside and
the woods every foot of the way, turning the quiet dusk into mad
warfare. Germans were running everywhere, usually away from the
blazing guns.
Lt. Boggess met outposts of besieged Americans outside of the city,
but the men were not quite convinced that his tanks were friendly. It
had been a long time since they had seen friendly troops. Nor was the
lieutenant sure that he had met friends, or Germans in American
uniforms, which they have been wearing wholesale since taking American
prisoners.
But both soon were convinced, and the siege ended.
That is, it ended after a fashion. The infantry followed the tanks,
mopping up both sides of the road. Trucks of food and shells and
ambulances dashed into town.
The world was joyous, excepting Germany and Japan that the Fourth had
fought through and everybody said, “Bastogne is saved; thank God.”
At which time the “Fourth Armored” men dug in for what they knew
would be a grim battle to keep the breach open. But, they’re old
hands at this business of war and went to work. Hardly had they had
time to set up their defenses before giant Tiger tanks rolled down
from north of Bastogne. Our pilots came through the clouds to bomb the
Tigers. We 30 lost tank destroyers, but wrecked the Tigers. A flock of
light tanks shot 30,000 rounds into the woods in five minutes, and the
Jerries lay dead by the hundreds. Infantrymen crawled through the snow
to hit the tanks, and--
Yes, the Germans swarmed into them so furiously at times that they had
to withdraw. But they never ran. Day and night they fought on,
unheeded because the world which had been so concerned and had heard
that Bastogne had been saved--and forgot it.
They’re having birthday celebrations just now, with fingers on
triggers--just one year overseas and six months in combat. They were
in the Normandy breakthrough and cut off the Brittany peninsula. One
combat team liberated Nantes, and Orleans. They drove to the Seine and
took the bridgehead at Troyes. They crossed the Marne three times,
forced the withdrawal of the Germans from Nancy on the Moselle, and
went on across the Saar. And when the Bastogne situation grew
desperate, the Fourth Armored was rushed up to spearhead the corps
drive to save it.
It is one of our Army’s good, tough outfits, the type that has made
General George S. Patton, Jr., famous. Its skipper (then) Major
General Hugh Gaffey, was Patton’s chief of staff until he came here.
What a swath they have cut in Jerry’s army: thousands of prisoners,
thousands killed and wounded, 450 tanks, 250 artillery pieces and
1,600 other vehicles since their landing in France.
And as this is written they await further attacks by the increasing
German power, in the war’s biggest winter battle.
[Illustration: The Saturday Evening Post: Rat Chase to the Rhine]
_“There has never been anything like it,” reports a Post war
correspondent, and that about labels the story of the immortal 4th
Armored Division’s stampede to glory._
By Collie Small
GERMANY, BY WIRELESS. It had been a fitful night filled with the
thunder of big guns and the rumble of German traffic moving along the
river road, but now the noise had died away. The tankers sat waiting
for the fog to lift, so they could move across the last 1,000 yards to
where the Rhine swept around the big bend from Coblenz.
Then the explosions came--dull, muffled booms that rolled up from the
river and shouldered their way through the filmy mists hanging over
the orchards and gently rolling fields. Hidden in the fog, the slender
Crown Prince Wilhelm Bridge disintegrated with a roar as the center
span collapsed into the river. German soldiers and vehicles catapulted
from the bridge in a tangled shower of horses, carts and men. A
machine pistol spoke sharply in short sentences, then stopped. The
tanks moved.
[Illustration: General Gaffey]
Major General Hugh J. Gaffey
_Division Commander_
_3 December 1944-21 March 1945_
[Illustration: The blazing spine of a German column]
At the river front, they swung right and crunched over the broken
bodies and smashed vehicles strewn along the tree-lined highway. They
lumbered into Urmitz, moved through streets still heavy with the
pungent smell of battle smoke, than followed the road out to where the
ragged stump of the bridge stood in a maze of twisted railroad tracks
and girders hanging down into the river. There the column halted and
the fabulous colonel who commanded the tanks turned to the equally
fabulous major who commanded the armored infantry, and said, “Hell,
this is the Rhine, and we’re just sitting here looking at it. Let’s
go spit in it.”
They had come a long way. July, 1944, was hot and the dust swirled
across the beach in stifling clouds when the fledgling 4th Armored
Division’s shiny new white-starred tanks rolled up through the surf
and started down the road to Ste. Mere Eglise on the shattered
Normandy coast.
That was the first mile. The first prisoner was a gangling, bedraggled
SS deserter who shuffled across a marsh to give himself up to the
curious tankers. At Coutances, burly Maj. Gen. John S. Wood, who then
commanded the division, strode into the town during a heavy artillery
barrage and personally captured a German soldier.
Avranches was next. Pvt. “Red” Whitson, of Indianapolis, sat at a
curve in the road, playing his machine gun like a garden hose until
two dozen vehicles were burning fiercely and four dozen German bodies
sprawled in the road where a plunging mass of maddened horses tried to
wrench free from their traces. They left Whitson in Avranches, slumped
over his smoking gun.
Then the division broke through the German defenses with a tremendous
rush and sealed off the Brittany Peninsula. The mass of armor wheeled
east on the right flank of Patton’s 3rd Army and started a sweeping
right hook that carried clear across the face of France. In five days,
three German infantry divisions and four regiments from other
divisions were swept under the avalanche of clattering tanks. The
swift spearheads smashed fifty-four miles to Rennes, Breton capital,
hacking away at vital enemy communication lines. They sped seventy
miles to Vannes. One combat command struck toward Lorient on the
Brittany coast. Another drove eighty miles to the cathedral city of
Nantes. There has never been anything like it.
The 4th Armored Division became a shifting island of armor in a sea of
milling German troops. The tanks moved so fast that fuel and
ammunition had to be flown to them from England. They ran off their
maps and had to have new ones rushed from England by plane and dropped
to the columns on the road. On August fourteenth, they raced 153 miles
to St. Calais, refueled and within six hours were rolling again,
toward the city of Orleans on the Loire. Combat Command A attacked
Orleans early the next morning, took it by two-fifteen in the
afternoon and turned it over to the 35th Infantry Division. On the
same day, Combat Command B left the Lorient sector and sprinted
eastward 264 miles in thirty-four hours, finally halting at Prunay.
In a little more than seven weeks, the 4th Armored spearhead hurtled
from Normandy to the Moselle River, rolling up some 1,500 speedometer
miles. They threw a pincers around beautiful Nancy and in a roaring
fifteen-day battle knocked out 281 German tanks. It was on the Moselle
that Sgt. Constant Klinga, of Brooklyn, made his classic observation,
“They got us surrounded again, the poor devils.”
It was near Nancy that Captain James H. Fields, of Fort Worth, Texas,
an armored infantry platoon leader, took fifty-five men up the
bloodiest hill in Lorraine. Enemy tanks crawled up the other side of
the hill and rolled down at the doughboys in their foxholes. The
German tanks loomed over the desperate infantrymen and fired
point-blank into the foxholes with their big 88’s. The doughboys
fought wildly, but, one by one, the foxholes went silent. Shrapnel
ripped into Field’s face and filled his mouth with jagged steel
splinters and bone fragments from his shattered jaw. The young captain
jammed a compress into his mouth, held another over his gaping cheek,
and continued to fire with his left hand. He directed the shrinking
platoon with hand signals and penciled notes passed from one foxhole
to another. When he staggered down the hill twenty-four hours later
with thirteen dazed survivors, they carried him away to a field
hospital and awarded him the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Then the division plunged into the Saar. A cavalry troop stormed
Gosselming and captured, intact, the bridge across the Saar River,
after which they mopped up the village and took, among other
prisoners, the German demolition crew charged with blowing up the
bridge. They were sitting quietly in a local beer parlor when the
cavalry jeeps burst into the town.
At Domfessel, the enemy road blocks were strong and well defended. So
the leading Sherman charged out of an orchard and bulled its way
between two houses, tearing down the walls on both sides of the narrow
opening. The other tanks churned over the rubble in single file and
then fanned out into the town to complete the capture.
They were still slugging away in the Saar against bitter German
resistance when Patton called for Gaffey. The 4th Armored swung away
from the enemy and raced north over the black-topped roads on the
famous “Fire-Call Run” to besieged Bastogne under stern, aloof
Maj. Gen. Hugh J. Gaffey, of Austin, Texas, successor in December to
General Wood, and since promoted to corps commander. The tanks rammed
their way into Bastogne and left the battered 5th German Paratroop
Division reeling helplessly in its wake, 65 per cent of its strength
smashed. The siege was lifted.
The tanks drove on through Bastogne. Lt. Robert Pearson, of Highland
Park, Michigan, peered down from the cockpit of his tiny Cub
artillery-observation plane and spotted tank movements on the edge of
a woods. Pearson and his flimsy puddle jumper came down through a
storm of small-arms fire to seventy-five feet to make sure the tanks
were German. Then he swept away, marked the spot on a map and dropped
it to the American tankers on the ground.
Under Lt. John Kingsley, of Dunkirk, New York, six Shermans slipped
into ambush, only the tops of their round turrets showing above the
thick foliage. The Panthers poked their long-nosed 88’s into the
open and started moving across an open field. The big guns on the
Shermans roared. The first German tank burst into flames, but the rest
kept coming until eleven had strayed out to their death. Kingsley
leaned on his turret and gazed wonderingly across the field at the
eleven smoking tanks. “If the German who commands that tank company
isn’t dead,” he said, “I hope they promote him to battalion
commander. We could use more like him.”
The tanks were still attacking when orders came to disengage. In one
of its most ticklish operations, the entire division eased away from
the enemy at night, blacked out all its markings and quietly moved
southward into position east of Luxembourg, where German armor was
massing for an expected counterattack. The 4th Armored waited
patiently, but in vain. The counterattack never came.
Patton, ringmaster for this most potent collection of armor, long had
dreamed of fighting on the Rhine. At a press conference when the 3rd
Army was still grinding slowly ahead against subborn opposition in
Eastern France, the “Old Man” suddenly rose from his chair, strode
stiff-leggedly across the room and drew the curtains back from his map
while newspapermen crowded around. He waited until the room was quiet.
Then he pointed to the thin blue line that marked the storied river
and nodded his head slowly, as if in anticipation of some great and
deep satisfaction yet to come. “That will be the day, gentlemen,”
he said. “That will be the day.”
A wet snow was falling at seven-thirty in the morning when the first
light tank of Combat Command B clattered across the bridge over the
Kyll River near Metterich, under diminutive, bespectacled Brig. Gen.
(now Major General) Holmes E. Dager, of Union, New Jersey. The
objective was the Rhine, sixty-six miles away through the rugged
Schnee Eifel and across the undulating middle-Rhine plain. The night
before, Colonel Creighton Abrams, of Agawam, Mass., deceptively
pink-cheeked commander of the 37th Tank Battalion and a living legend
among tankers, told his men, “The board of directors has met. We
jump off at seven-thirty, and it’s ’Katy, bar the door.”
Fortified with a week’s rations, in case they outran their
food-supply trains, Combat Command B moved up through the bridgehead
which was established on the east bank of the Kyll by the veteran 5th
Infantry Division. Combat Command A was to parallel Combat Command B
to the north. The orders were simple; “Get to the Rhine.” Abrams
didn’t even bother to ask what lay between his tanks and the
objective. “If I plotted German divisions on my map,” he said,
I’d be too frightened to move.”
Five hundred yards out of its bridgehead, Combat Command A bogged down
hopelessly in the mud. Its route was hastily altered and Combat
Command A was ordered to fall in behind Combat Command B. They tried
to break Combat Command A away again, but the mud was too heavy on the
alternate roads available. So the 4th Armored Division, Combat Command
B leading, rolled along one narrow road, strung out along a sector
sixty-six miles long and twenty-five feet wide.
The spearhead slashed into the surprised Germans from the south
instead of from the west, the direction from which the enemy expected
the attack. For the first nine miles the tanks moved parallel to the
German lines, drawing fire from both the West and the east, but
rolling up the enemy flank as they went. Then they turned east and the
rat chase was on.
Nimble light tanks and heavy assault guns led the way over the narrow,
twisting roads through the pine-clad hills of the Schnee Eifel.
Halftracks and other vehicles became mired and the tanks had to tow
them a part of the way. The snow turned to rain at Badem and the enemy
attacked with tanks. Four of them were knocked out in a brisk duel on
the road and Combat Command B pushed on past the burning hulks.
Abrams raced up and down the column in his jeep or jumped into the
turret of his Sherman, pleading with his men, swearing at them,
encouraging them. It was he who kept them going when it looked as
though they might bog down. Once the irrepressible young colonel
knocked General Dager’s helmet off with a blast from his big gun
when the general got too close to the muzzle. The cherub-faced demon
was never still. He ran the gamut of vocal expression from stevedore
to senator and back. He often used an obscene battle cry that crackled
out of radios the length of the column like the snap of a whip. At
other times he just said quietly, when things were sticky, “All
right, boys. Let’s get a helpin’.”
When the tanks couldn’t do it, the armored infantrymen climbed down
off the tanks and did it. Major Harold Cohen, a hearty shirt maker
from Spartanburg, South Carolina--whose postwar plans are whimsical
enough to include shirts with pockets in their tails--commanded the
10th Armored Infantry Battalion attached to Combat Command B. With
complete faith that the particular tank crew with whom they rode was
the greatest tank crew in the world, the doughboys rode outside the
same tanks every day, clinging to the slippery Shermans by means of
special handles the tankers had welded on for them. Nothing short of
death could make a doughboy change tanks. When Cohen told Abrams how
proud his men were of the tankers, Abrams said, “Cohen, my boys are
fine. But they never forget they’re fighting with a nice thick wall
of armor plate wrapped around them. The OD shirts on your boys don’t
quite match it.”
It was like that all the way. Even the light tanks did more than they
were supposed to do. Once they knocked out two massive German Tigers
by slipping around to the rear of the enemy tanks while assault guns
laid down a thick white phosphorous smoke screen. The little tanks
darted in through the smoke and, like blow darts, shot 37-mm. shells
into the unprotected engine boxes in the Tigers’ sterns.
Casualties were astonishingly light, but some never saw the river. A
youthful jeep driver died in Abrams’ arms at a crossroad after
driving his jeep, at sixty miles an hour, back from an enemy village
two miles away. His jeep rolled to a stop and Abrams gently lifted him
out, his throat streaming blood from a half-dozen machinegun bullet
holes. A young platoon leader in a light tank company had his hand
torn off by a bazooka shell that went through the turret in which he
was standing. He looked incredulously at his hand lying on the floor
of the turret. Then he leaped from the tank and with his one remaining
hand he killed the German kneeling by the side of the road. The
tankers said, “He didn’t have to do that, you know.”
The long armored snake wound through the steep-sided canyons, through
the neat German villages where bed sheets and pillowcases fluttered
from the upper stories in token of surrender, while poker-faced men
and women watched the procession from behind lace curtains. The white
flags drooped from slender white spear-tipped rods. Those were the
rods the Nazis had distributed for the party flags that flapped in the
streets in better days.
The tanks stopped that night. They counted 1,200 prisoners streaming
hack toward the rear in ragged gray columns. While they waited for the
supply trains to come up, the tankers brewed coffee on little stoves
inside the tanks and passed hot cups out to the doughboys on the wet
ground. It was snowing again in the morning when the tanks moved out.
They gathered speed and raced through Daun, Darscheit and Ulmen,
faster than the Germans could warn the towns. In Ulmen, a tank rolled
up to the railroad station to cut the telegraph wires. A fat fraulein
was waiting on the platform for her train, and almost fainted with
fright when she saw the Americans. Inside the station, the telegraph
key chattered: “Such and such train has just left Coblenz.” A
tanker listened amusedly, then smashed the key with a rifle butt and
cut the wires.
Near Putzborn, the tanks had already gone through when a supply train
was ambushed. The column halted and engaged in a brisk skirmish with
the Germans in the hills. After the battle, while the tanks were still
parked on the road, a German staff car suddenly appeared, speeding
straight toward the column. The driver had told the German general
that the tanks were American, but the general, out inspecting his
“forward positions,” had said, “They can’t be. They must be
ours.” He was fifteen yards away when he discovered his mistake and
the car ground to a stop.
Hawk-faced Lt. Gen. Ernst George Edwin Graf von Rothkirch und Trach,
Prussian commander of the 53rd German Corps, looked around dazedly at
the Americans and the muzzles of their guns pointed at his stomach.
Lt. Bernard Liese, tank-company commander from Pittsburgh,
nonchalantly leaned up against his Sherman and waited while the
general walked over to him.
“Where do you think you are going?” Liege asked.
The Teuton looked around again. Then, with a rueful smile, he said,
“It looks like I’m going to the American rear.”
“That’s a good guess,” Liese said.
They took the general away in a jeep. Near Weidenbach, a tire went
flat. While the driver and escorting Lt. Alfred Maul, of Milwaukee,
worked over the tire, artillery fire began falling near by.
Maul and the driver moved into a ditch for protection, and Maul said
to Von Rothkirch, “That’s yours, isn‘t it?”
The German smiled sadly, “Don’t worry, son,” he said. “There
isn’t much left.”
The column thrust deeper. Startled enemy artillery units, accustomed
to being far behind the lines, were overrun before their brand-new
guns had time to fire their first shot in combat. Bewildered prisoners
came walking in from every conceivable type of unit, including the
226th Snow-shovel Company and the 40th Woodchopping Command. Two
sailors from the merchant marine were amazed to discover themselves
prisoners of an American armored division. A German officer was taken
as he leisurely strolled around a town arranging billets for his men,
who had come to defend the place.
At Mulheim, however, the aged Burgemeister stood defiantly on the
steps of the town hall and challenged the tanks with a pistol. He
fired until the gun was empty, than turned and ran into the building.
Infantrymen chased him through the building. The spry old gentleman
dodged nimbly from room to room, finally skipping out the back door.
The doughboys finally caught the winded Burgemeister two back yards
away. Puffing mightily, he surrendered.
At Kehrig, an antiaircraft regiment opened fire on the column with
20-mm. flak guns. Abrams ordered the hatches buttoned up, and the
armored mass rolled forward, crushing men and guns alike. On the
outskirts of the town, one tank was hit by an antitank gun and another
by a bazooka as they nosed over the brow of a hill. Abrams sent out a
distress call for “The Mad Russian,” a division character.
Alexis Sommaripa rolled up to the head of the column in his light tank
with a special loud-speaker. For weeks, the Millwood, Virginia,
evangelist had practiced a speech designed to induce Germans to
surrender peacefully. He also had spent considerable time practicing
in a tank, driving it through people’s back yards and testing the
various guns on assorted haystacks and manure piles.
Abrams had asked him, “Why all the practice with a tank? I thought
you used psychology.”
Sommaripa looked a little guilty. “Well, to tell you the truth,
colonel, sometimes this baloney doesn’t work.”
Actually Sommaripa’s spiel had proved highly successful. At Kehrig,
however, he didn’t quite make it. Sommaripa cleared his throat and
edged his little tank up to the outskirts of the town, where a
fanatical German lieutenant and fifty infantrymen were making a
determined effort to block the tanks. “Come on out!” Sommaripa
boomed out of the loudspeaker. “Civilians, stay in your houses! The
Fourth Armored Division is prepared to destroy your town if you do not
surrender! Do not expect to fire your last shell and then surrender!
Surrender now--or else!”
The tanks waited for five minutes. Then, when there was no answer,
they backed off and division artillery moved into position. They
drenched the town with incendiaries and high-explosive shells until it
was blazing. Then the tanks swept over the hill in a wave of armor and
plunged into the burning town. The German lieutenant, who had fired
his last shell in defiance of the warning, stepped out to surrender.
Unfortunately, he met with a serious accident.
The tanks moved on. Now the traffic on the narrow road was slowing
their progress. Once division headquarters told the tankers either to
get everything except combat vehicles off the roads or else to get
staff officers out to direct traffic. More German equipment was being
destroyed every day on the dash to the Rhine than any single day
during the sweep across France, and at night the tanks and bulldozers
had to push the smashed enemy equipment off the road to permit the
jeeps and trucks to get through the tangle.
They had nearly reached the river when a Cub plane hovering over the
road reported that a German column was moving along a road near
Coblenz. “The column is two thousand yards from your rear tank,”
the pilot called.
Abrams switched on his radio and called to Lieutenant Liese.
“There’s a column of Jerry vehicles two thousand yards up the
road,” Abrams said.
“Shall I ambush them?” Liese asked.
“Hell, no!” Abrams shouted. “They’re going the same direction
you are! Catch ’em!”
Liese’s Shermans lumbered out ahead of the main column at full
speed. The Cub pilot, watching from the air, called down a
play-by-play account.
“They’re only fifteen hundred yards from you now,” he radioed.
“Go faster. Faster... Now they’re only a thousand yards from
you.” He was silent for a moment while the tanks raced ahead after
their quarry. Then he called again. “They’re around the next
curve. Go get ’em.”
There was another moment of silence while the straining Shermans
hammered down the road. Then Liese broke in excitedly, “I see ’em!
I see ’em! What’ll I do?”
Abrams jumped up and down in his turret. He screamed into his
transmitter, “Slaughter ’em! Slaughter the so-and-so’s!”
Liese’s tanks ran right up the back of the surprised enemy column,
big guns and machine guns spraying the road. Startled Germans toppled
from their vehicles into the road. Trucks exploded into flame.
Writhing horses thrashed about on the pavement. The rampaging Shermans
reached the head of the column and turned around. Then they raced back
the length of the column a second time, destroying all that was left
or living. Then it was all over and the tankers slowed down and
stopped.
Young Liese, as famed for his inability to read a map as for his
ability to fight, looked out of his turret at the countryside and
scratched his head. He called Abrams on his radio, “Where am I,
colonel?”
“How do I know where you are?” Abrams snapped. “All I know is
that you’re at least five miles past the place you were supposed to
turn, and you better get back here before you get more lost than you
are already.”
They first saw the Rhine at 3:45 in the afternoon when Combat Command
B moved into Kettig, overlooking the wide river. Abrams had spread his
tanks out in a skirmish line between the town and the river. The 8th
Tank Battalion, under Lt. Col. Albin Irzyk, of Salem, Massachusetts,
attached to Combat Command A, fanned out in front of Malheim and
Karlich.
All that night fleeing German columns streamed toward the Crown Prince
Wilhelm Bridge at Urmitz, last link with the east bank. The Shermans
unlimbered their big guns. A steady procession of high explosive and
incendiary shells hurtled across the 1,000 yards to the river road,
raking the German columns. Wreckage jammed the road, and flames
silhouetted the carnage. At 1:30 in the morning, the tanks stopped
firing and called for the divisional artillery. Every fifteen minutes
until 6:30, a salvo of artillery shells whistled over the tankers’
heads and dropped along the road where the Germans were still
struggling to move through the debris.
An eerie silence settled over the fog-shrouded fields. Then the
explosions came. While the fleeing German foot soldiers frantically
stampeded to get across the river before the bridge was demolished, SS
troopers on the far bank poured streams of small-arms fire into them
in an effort to drive them back from the double-tracked railroad
bridge, on which planks had been laid for the vehicles. Dozens of
Germans were killed or wounded by the SS men. The others, stunned by
the spectacle, turned wearily away from the river and began walking
back up the road toward battered Urmitz.
The tanks moved across the fields to the river road, swung through the
town and picked their way slowly through the smoking wreckage.
In the destroyed column they counted, among other items, three tanks,
thirty-six 88’s, twenty-two 75’s, ten 105’s, 137 trucks,
thirty‑eight staff cars and twenty-five half-tracks.
The tanks stopped where the fields and orchards slope down to the
Rhine’s edge, then rise sharply in steep gray bluffs on the other
side. Abrams picked up his radio transmitter and held it close to his
mouth. “We are on our objective,” he said.
* * *
Lee McCardell (Sunpapers) March 25, 1945
General George S. Patton’s invincible 4th Armored Division, pride of
the 3d Army, tonight is leading a breakthrough east of the Rhine into
the heart of Germany.
The 4th Armored Division, which registered a 27-mile gain before noon,
sent back an appeal for transportation for thousands of prisoners
taken. The American tank men were going too fast to bother with them.
THE VICTORY OF THE RHINE
LIFE Magazine, April 16, 1945
From battlefront interviews with leading U. S. generals and from the
reports of the team of “Time” and LIFE correspondents he was in
charge of on the Western Front, Charles Christian Wertenbaker included
the following in what was described as “the pattern of the victory
in western Germany,” and published in the April 16, 1945 issue of
LIFE Magazine.
During the First Army’s push to the Rhine, General Patton’s Third
Army, which had been stretched from the northern tip of Luxembourg 80
miles south to Saarbrücken, had been under orders to keep pressure on
the enemy and to get bridgeheads over the Kyll River, but not to do
anything rash. By March 4 Patton was through three-fourths of the
Siegfried line and had his bridgeheads across the Kyll. Then Bradley
struck simultaneously from the north and west.
It was a difficult operation, and particularly difficult to time it to
the minute. Bradley not only had to hold back the impetuous Patton
until Hodges reached the Rhine, but he had also to hold back Hodges’
III Corps, which had been set to push south for days, until the VII
Corps gained its objective. On March 5 the VII Corps fought its way
into Cologne while the III Corps, led by the 9th Armored Division, cut
south parallel to the Rhine. Patton’s armor sliced into the Eifel in
two places and the great 4th Armored Division sparked by Lieutenant
Colonel Creighton Abrams, Jr., started eastward on the journey that
was to carry it over more miles of German territory than any other
division in this battle.
By March 6 the 4th Armored was halfway from the starting point to
Koblenz, and Hodges’ 9th Armored was racing for Remagen. At ten
minutes to 4 in the afternoon of March 7 a sergeant named Mike
Chinchar of the 27th Armored Infantry Battalion led his platoon out on
the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen and ran for the farther shore. By
nightfall the lucky bridgehead was secure and, to the south, the 4th
Armored Division was in sight of Koblenz.
Next day Patton’s Fourth Armored and 11th Armored met outside of
Koblenz with a pocketful of prisoners caught between them. The
following day Hodges’ V Corps cut south into Patton’s territory
and caught another bag. For the next four days the two armies had a
prisoner race while Patton pushed down to the Moselle and Hodges built
up strength in his bridgehead. Hodges was impatient to attack but
Bradley wouldn’t let him. “I told Courtney,” Bradley said later,
“to stay there and swell out his chest.”
“Brad,” says a member of his staff, “plays on his Army
commanders like little David playing on the strings of his harp. Take
Patton, for instance. Sometimes he plays so soft and sweet that Patton
thinks he thought of the idea himself, and sometimes he just says,
‘Georgie, I know you won’t like this but this is the way it’s
got to be.’”
By now Phase III was developing and this time it was Hodges on whom
Bradley had to play. Neat little Courtney Hodges doesn’t have
Patton’s flair for publicity, but his army, on the whole, has fought
more and accomplished more than Patton’s. Now, through a stroke of
luck and fast thinking, he stood on the farther banks of the Rhine and
saw a chance to do something spectacular. Bradley would have none of
it; he was already timing his next move. He told Hodges to expand his
bridgehead a few thousand yards and to wait until Patton crossed the
Rhine.
Southward in the Saar and the Palatinate Patton and Lieutenant General
Alexander Patch of the Seventh Army were repeating the maneuver with
which Hodges and Patton had bagged so many prisoners in the Eifel.
Again the coordination between corps and armies was almost perfect.
While Patch kept the enemy tied down in the Siegfried positions of the
Saar, Patton struck twice across the Moselle. Between them Patch and
Patton caught one bag of prisoners and held another bag for the
advancing Seventh Army. With army boundaries erased, Patton continued
south as far as Speyer, but if the Germans had known that he had left
the 4th Armored Division between Mainz and Worms, they might have
guessed what was coming next.
On Friday, March 23, Phase IV opened without air or artillery
preparation when Patton’s 5th Infantry Division jumped the Rhine
near the town of Oppenheim. Both the time and place were well chosen.
The bulk of the remaining German armies was either in the north, where
Montgomery had been slowly building up to cross the Rhine and was to
do so before the next dawn, or around Hodges’ bridgehead or south of
where Patton crossed. Patton immediately sent the 4th Armored across
the Rhine and within 24 hours this irrepressible division was 18 miles
east of the river. The 6th Armored Division followed, striking north,
and Hodges burst out of his bridgehead.
By this time Hodges had three corps across the Rhine and was facing
elements of 16 German divisions. His armor struck eastward along the
small roads of Germany. Patton’s Fourth Armored, meanwhile, had
turned north toward Giessen and an enveloping move was in progress.
The battle of the Rhine had gone faster than General Eisenhower had
dared to anticipate, even in February 1945. He had foreseen two
battles: one west of the Rhine and the other to the east. Bradley
changed all that. The luck of Remagen and Patton’s quick crossing
had enabled him to overrun an area of Germany as large as the Saar and
the Palatinate. Now he had two armies striking north from Giessen
toward Paderborn, while the Ninth Army under Montgomery, north of the
Ruhr, was fighting eastward toward Hamm.
Bradley now had power to spare--so much that he could send the 4th
Armored Division out on raiding expeditions, one southeast toward
Nurnberg. The German armies were broken up and scattered; they fought
halfheartedly if at all; on one day the First and Third Armies
together had only 35 men killed.
OHRDRUF
By Sgt. SAUL LEVITT
YANK Magazine, May 11, 1945
OHRDRUF, GERMANY--There is no death smell yet in Concentration Camp
North Stalag III, in Ohrdruf. It was cold when the tanks of Combat
Command A of the Fourth Armored Division rolled into this town a few
days ago and it is still cold and damp. The victims had been killed
the day before the tanks arrived, but there had been no time to burn
and bury the bodies because we had been advancing too rapidly.
Now three days later, the bodies are still there, and it has stayed
cold so you can walk around them at fairly close range. There are 31
bodies lying on the ground in one place and more than that number
piled on top of one another in a shack. The bodies are all partly or
completely naked. Around some of them blood has made pancakes of red
mud on the ground. Some of the bodies are very thin with the
incredible thinness of severe malnutrition.
The living survivors of the camp say that one of the dead is an
American soldier and they point the body out. He lies on a stretcher,
naked with a blanket half over him. He had been a tall, clean-cut man.
There is a bullet hole through his throat.
The victims in the shack, piled six deep, were both beaten and shot to
death. Quicklime was thrown over them and all the bodies are naked,
thin and some with changed coloring, perhaps from the lime or from
illness.
The story of the dead is told by the living who hid away when it came
time to move the camp farther eastward by rail.
There were more than 2,000 men in the camp. Those who were killed were
too sick or too tired to climb into the railroad cars. So they were
clubbed until they fell and then were shot at close range.
[Illustration: Piles of bodies at Ohrdruf concentration camp]
[Illustration: Unconditional surrender]
The men in the camp included Belgians, French, Russians, Serbs and
Poles. There is one 16-year-old Jewish lad among the survivors. There
are also three Russian officers who made it. Two of them are
doctors--a major and a captain--and the third is a young lieutenant
who flew a Yank fighter plane for the Red Air Force. The doctors
worked as laborers until a few days before the evacuation of the camp.
Then, just before the end, they were put to work on some of the sick
in an effort to get them ready for the movement.
The Americans going through this camp are very quiet. They have
already seen much death, but they stare at this death, which is uglier
and harder to look at than the death of war, with impassive faces and
big eyes.
Major John R. Scotti of Brooklyn, N. Y., Combat Command A’s medical
officer-in-charge, burst out in a loud voice, not speaking to any one
in particular. He just stood in the middle of the camp and shouted out
what he felt and no one acted surprised to hear his voice booming out
big like that.
“I tell you,” he said, and his angry voice was shaking, “all
that German medical science is nil. This is how they have progressed
in the last four years. They have now found the cure-all for typhus
and malnutrition. It’s a bullet through the head.”
The commander of Combat Command A, Colonel Hayden Sears of Boston,
Mass., acted the next day. He must have been thinking of this all
night and what he did was to assemble the leading citizens of Ohrdruf,
including the richest man in the community. Ohrdruf is a neat,
well-to-do suburban town with hedges around some of its brick houses
and concrete walks leading to their main entrances.
The richest man in Ohrdruf is a painting contractor who made a lot of
money in the last few years on war work for the German Army and now
owns a castle on the way to the concentration camp.
Colonel Sears, a big, tough-looking man, ordered the leading citizens
of Ohrdruf out from behind the smug privacy of their hedges and
housefronts and had them driven in Army trucks to the concentration
camp to let them see this killing that is sprawled on the bare ground
and piled in a shack.
The crowd of the best people in Ohrdruf stood around the dead and
looked at the bodies sullenly. One of them said at last: “This is
the work of only one per cent of the German Army and you should not
blame the rest.”
Then the colonel spoke briefly and impersonally through an
interpreter. “Tell them,” he said, “that they have been brought
here to see with their own eyes what is reprehensible from any human
standard and that we hold the entire German nation responsible by
their support and toleration of the Nazi government.”
The crowd stared at the dead and not at the colonel. Then the people
of Ohrdruf went back to their houses.
The colonel and his soldiers went back to their tanks, and we went out
of this place and through Ohrdruf and Gotha, where the names of
Beethoven, Mozart and Brahms are set in shining, gold letters across
the front of the opera house.
Russell Davenport
With Patton’s Boys:
DEATH AND APPLE BLOSSOMS
By Russell Davenport
WITH THE 4TH ARMORED DIVISION, April 14--It has to be seen to be
believed--this great drive of the 4th Armored into eastern Germany. It
is spring here. We are in a gently rolling country, thickly wooded in
spots. The carefully tilled fields stretch away brown and light green
to the horizon and the apple trees are in bloom.
It is spring and the 4th Armored has its tracks set on one of the
great superhighways that Hitler built to transport his own military
supplies. A superhighway is a general’s dream in whichever direction
you use it, and it so happens the Americans have the ideal general to
make the dream come true. Nothing could be better suited to the
temperament and talents of General George S. Patton than four cement
lanes straddling the Reich from Frankfort-on-the-Main to the edge of
Silesia.
Nor is there any division readier to exploit this facility than
“Georgie’s” beloved 4th Armored commanded by Major General
William M. Hoge.
In their hands Hitler’s autobahn has become a gigantic sword
stabbing deep into the heart of the Reich. Here they are among the
apple blossoms, farther east than any unit on the Anglo-American
front.
The tactics of the 4th Armored in the present drive are essentially
the same as those by which they cut across France. But we are now in
enemy country--a country, moreover, of enslaved people, some half dead
from torture or starvation and all bearing in their hearts bitter
hatred toward the German people.
In the wake of the tankers this human melting pot explodes. There are
the prisoner-of-war cages suddenly opened and pouring forth American,
British, Russian and French prisoners by the thousand. The gaunt and
eager-eyed American boys seeing their own tanks again are unable to
speak. Their story is a cycle in itself.
There are the broken survivors of Ohrdruf, where the 4th Armored boys
discovered corpses stacked in line, of Buchenwald, which this division
reached a few days ago, liberating thousands of human wrecks held
there as political prisoners; of innumerable other camps where
indescribable atrocities have been perpetrated.
I have encountered Belgians, Dutch, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians,
Czechs and Yugoslavs and a Latvian woman with tears in her eyes who
asked me for a map that would show her the way back to her lost home.
Because we have been fighting barely 30 miles from the border of
Czechoslovakia a great portion of the refugees are Czechs. As we
pushed up the autobahn thousands of them ran out of farms and
factories to watch their liberators rumble by. Bright faces grinned
from ear to ear. Women cried. Men shouted in broken English. Leaning
out of my jeep I yelled “Czechoslovakia.” A roar went up that
drowned even the clanking of the tanks.
The reaction of our soldiers to the pathos and suffering around them
is strictly American. They are shocked by the brutality of the
Germans, shocked and mad as hell.
I was sitting last night with one of the division officers when a
young Czech was brought by a GI from the utter darkness of the street.
He was member of a group of 200 political prisoners who had been
marched by the Germans for four days without food. He had been sent by
a group to plead with us because he could speak English. Wan and
shaking with fatigue he told us the story of Buchenwald while tired
GIs searched for food in a black-out where almost everyone was in bed.
When he finished his story the American officer ran his fingers
through his hair. “Christ,” he said, “I feel as if I were living
in the Dark Ages.”
Then he turned to me.
“Do the folks back home have any idea of this?” he said “Do they
have any idea at all?”
It is spring here. The apple trees are now in bloom. Daffodils dance
in neat German gardens. Hope has been lighted in hearts which for
years have known nothing but misery and fear. But there is death in
this spring, death in the memory of men and women. And there is death
in the frightened German towns.
Yes, there is even death in the hearts of the American tankers leaning
against their massive vehicles which crouch before the attack like
great beasts under the blossoming trees. The tanker boys are lonesome
for their girls and ice cream and decent jobs and they are sore as
hell at the Krauts.
_(New York Post, April 14, 1945)_
GENERAL DAGER OF 4TH DIVISION
PACKS SUNDAY PUNCH FOR
PATTON’S THIRD
Armored News, 26 March 1945
WITH THE 4TH ARMORED DIVISION IN GERMANY--Third Army’s fighting 4th
Armored Division, General George S. Patton’s “Sunday Punch,”
which made the “fire alarm” run from the Saar Valley to relieve
the besieged 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne, has long been a
thorn in the side of the German army. Aggressive leadership in this
aggressive division is believed to be its secret of success in battle.
Under the title of aggressive leadership can be placed the name of
Major General (then Brigadier General) Holmes E. Dager, 52-year-old
commander of the crack tank division’s Combat Command “B”.
Now engaged in his second war with the Germans, the scrappy little
general--he’s five feet seven inches tall--whose courage in battle
has been recognized by five awards, rose from the ranks in World War I
to build and command an armored element that is now known as General
Patton’s “work horse.”
General Dager resumed his private war with the Wehrmacht when he led
Fourth Armored troops against the Boche in Normandy hedgerows.
The speed and power of General Dager’s attack and advance achieved a
major breakthrough in the German lines.
At Avranches, the gateway to the Brittany peninsula, General Dager’s
troops captured 4,000 German prisoners in two days of fierce armored
battle. In that action the general earned the Distinguished Service
Cross. When the Nazis attacked his headquarters from three sides
simultaneously, General Dager directed the counter fire that beat off
the attack while manning the guns on his command tank.
General Dager’s latest award, a second Bronze Oak-Leaf Cluster to
the Bronze Star Medal, came for heroic action in the battle which
relieved the encircled American troops in Bastogne. General Dager’s
tanks, artillery and infantry cut through a thick wall of German armor
and troops to help open the corridor to the hard-hit 101st Airborne
Division. The Union, N.J., general was awarded the Bronze Star Medal
and an Oak-Leaf Cluster in September during the fierce fighting in
eastern France where the Fourth Armored pushed the Nazis behind the
Reich’s frontier in addition to protecting the south flank of Third
Army.
Enemy equipment knocked out or captured by fighting units of General
Dager’s command in six months of combat include 144 tanks, 224
vehicles, 15 self-propelled assault guns, 51 88s, 50 half-tracks, 62
anti-aircraft guns, 16 prime movers, as well as a locomotive and 32
freight cars.
In Combat Command “B” headquarters, officers and enlisted men have
won a total of six Silver Star Medals and 61 Bronze Star Medals.
[Illustration: Life magazine: “Colonel Abe”]
Tankman Creighton Abrams of the 4th Armored Division, Spearhead of
Patton’s Advances, Makes Himself a Terror to Germans by Basing His
Operations on Overpowering Violence
By Will Lang
Just before the U. S. armies plunged across the Rhine a captured
American soldier, one of thousands subsequently freed, was brought up
for questioning before a scowling German officer.
“So, you are from the 4th Armored Division?” the German asked.
The American looked the German straight in the eye and with the
aggressiveness of a good tankman said, “You bet I am.”
The German leaned back in his chair, smiled broadly and in the tone of
one anxious to hear all about an old friend, asked, “Well, and how
is Colonel Abrams?”
Colonel Creighton William Abrams, Jr., the object of this intimate
interest on the part of the German officer, is largely unknown among
U. S. civilians. It is one of the ironies of this sprawling global war
that outstanding young combat officers are better known to the enemy
than in their own country. Yet it is they who execute the battle plans
of the well-publicized higher officers.
As the rampaging commander of the 37th Tank Battalion of the 4th
Armored Division of the Third Army, Abrams is the cutting edge of the
U. S. spearhead. An even more pertinent question about him might have
been, “Where is Colonel Abrams?” For where Colonel Abrams is, that
spot is likely to be the farthest point of the U. S. armored
penetration into Germany. Last week, as advance man for the equally
aggressive George Patton, commander of the Third Army, he was reported
to be cutting clear across prewar Germany into Czechoslovakia. His
present whereabouts is cloaked in a security news blackout and at any
given time may not even be known to his commander. In his own words,
Abrams likes to be “way out on the goddam point of the attack, where
there’s nothing but me and the goddam Germans and we can fight by
ourselves without stopping to report back to headquarters.”
SHAEF headquarters by now is accustomed to having him and his running
mate, Lieutenant Colonel Delk Oden of the 35th Tank Battalion, turn up
unexpectedly in places far in advance of the theoretical battlelines.
This habit inspired a wisecrack by one of Abram’s officers that has
since been borrowed by half the other units on the Western Front.
While looking over a field map showing concentrated German positions
all around them in the forward areas, the officer shook his head in
feigned dismay. “They’ve got us surrounded again,” he said
“the poor bastards!”
The surrounding of Abrams’ and other units of the 4th Armored by the
Germans has almost invariably resulted in the 4th Armored’s soon
surrounding the Germans. This pattern, repeated elsewhere along the
front, has made the great campaign in the west a series of encircling
movements which have broken the back of the German defenders and
captured them in massive blocks of tens of thousands. The 4th’s
special skill in this technique recently won it a Presidential
Citation which followed a peculiar accolade from the Germans that was
almost as flattering in its own way. According to captured documents
the Wehrmacht rank and file, among whom the 4th is regarded with both
respect and terror, were told that each individual soldier in the
division was chosen because he was a professional murderer in civilian
life. Moreover, the documents charged, an American was entitled to
membership in the division only after he had first proved: 1) he had
killed his mother; 2) he had been born out of wedlock.
These documents are cherished at divisional headquarters along with
the records of the 4th’s career through a series of bold and
critically important field operations. It was the 4th, with Abrams
always out on the point of contact, that broke loose from the Normandy
peninsula in only 11 days’ fighting, a feat that has been described
as “astounding the Allies as well as the Huns.”
After that it was the 4th that led the Third Army in the breakthrough
at St. Lo, which drove the Germans back to their Seigfried
fortifications. In that epic drive the division destroyed 317 German
tanks and captured 20,000 prisoners, even though on several occasions
Abrams radioed back that “We are moving ahead without opposition.”
Division headquarters, following up, would find the “unopposed”
route strewn with German tanks and gun batteries and littered with
hundreds of German bodies.
When the Germans mounted their Ardennes counteroffensive, it was the
4th Armored, under command of Patton’s former chief of staff, Major
General Hugh Gaffey, that buttressed the southern flank. Later, with
Abrams in the lead, it broke through in a spectacular and devastating
dash to relieve the besieged 101st Airborne Division in Bastogne. More
recently, in the drive from the Kyll River to the Rhine, it plunged
ahead more than 50 miles in fifty-eight hours of concentrated mayhem.
Abrams and his outfit destroyed more than 300 German motor vehicles,
75 artillery pieces, 75 anti-tank guns, 15 Tiger and Panther tanks, 20
“screaming meemies” and overran a rear-area German hospital with
80 patients, three enemy ammunition dumps, one ordnance depot, one
fuel dump and a German army corps headquarters where an annoyed German
Lieutenant General and most of his staff were captured while still at
their desks.
Such accomplishments, in which Abrams has always been a leading
performer, have draped the cape of a legendary hero around Abrams’
shoulders. At 30, he is mature enough to be truly modest, and he does
not cultivate the hero worship that surrounds him. But there is a
dynamic quality about him and a great flair for leadership that cause
his men to idolize him. “We can always spot his tank,” says
Lieutenant John Whitehill, a company commander, “because it doesn’t
roll ahead like others. It gallops.”
“Abe’s tank,” says Lieutenant Colonel George “Jigger”
Jacques of the 53rd Armored Infantry, whom Abrams addresses over the
tank radio as “Sad Sack,” “Looks bigger than anyone else’s in
the field just because Abe’s in it.”
As he rides along, Abrams gnaws on a long, black, unlighted cigar.
“It looks just like another gun,” his men say. His present tank,
successor to six he has worn out, is named Thunderbolt VII. One of the
latest improved models of the M4 medium tank, it arrived just after
Christmas, when the battalion was resting after the breakthrough to
Bastogne. It has a 76-mm gun, a 17-inch tread, a cast turret and a
welded hull. Abrams spent a happy holiday wheeling it through its
vocabulary of paces within artillery range of the Germans. The tank it
replaced, Thunderbolt VI, had its name in letters eight inches high on
a background of billowing white clouds punctured by jagged red streaks
of lightning. In the interest of winter camouflage Thunderbolt VII was
painted a drab white, but with spring well along Abrams’ driver,
Sgt. Robert Stillwell, is giving thought to another appropriate motif
for VII.
One reason why the Germans are particularly fascinated and terrified
by Abrams is that they assume because of his name that he is Jewish,
and they imagine that race vengeance plays some part in his
destructiveness. Actually Abrams is a New England Methodist but he
lets people think what they like. However, Major Harold Cohen of the
division’s 10th Armored Infantry Battalion is Jewish and is not only
a close friend but an operational business partner of Abrams.
Cohen’s infantry usually either accompanies or follows Abram’s
tanks, so that the two units are often indistinguishable. To the
Germans the team of Abrams and Cohen seems like the instruments of a
wrathful Jehovah.
Perhaps, if the Germans could ever understand it, it would be
instructive to them to know more about Abrams and the background that
molded him. He was born in Springfield, Mass., on Sept. 16, 1914 and
grew up like any normal American boy whose parents see that he goes to
Sunday school, eats his vegetables and has plenty of milk to drink.
World War I was finished by the time he went to grade school, and the
only military background in the family was the story of his
greatgrandfather, who served with distinction as a drummer boy in the
Civil War until his left arm was blown off by a nervous comrade behind
him.
In Agawam High School, across the Connecticut River from Springfield,
young Abrams was known as “Toots.” His friends picked up the
nickname from the Abrams family, who started calling him “Tootsie”
because he was such a cute baby. He was able to live this down in high
school, however, where he was captain of a football team that went
through its season undefeated, untied and unscored upon. He was class
president in his senior year, editor in chief of the school paper,
president of Hi-Y, a member of the senior class play and class orator
at graduation. In summers he worked on the Jenks farm near by and in
his spare time took part in 4-H club garden activities. He also raised
chickens and later raised and exhibited steers for the 4-H Baby Beef
club.
After high school Abrams considered a scholarship to Brown University
but a friend persuaded him to try the competitive examinations for
West Point. He was third in a field of 57 and entered when the two
candidates ahead of him failed in their physical examinations. At West
Point he was too busy to spend much time on his studies and graduated
216th in a class of more than 480. He had his nose broken playing
hockey and was considered one of the most efficient hazers on the
academy’s “beast detail.” It took him four years to make his
letter in football because he was never able to get his weight up much
above 165 pounds, which is light for a guard. The 1936 Howitzer, the
academy yearbook, said he held the football “warm up record” as
well as the “undisputed title of the loudest, happiest,
fightin’est man on the squad.” “Indeed,” said the Howitzer,
“a team of Abrams might conceivably prove a champion.”
From West Point, Abrams went to the Cavalry School at Fort Bliss,
where his restlessness soon gave him a reputation as a prankster.
During one period he had a room directly across a court from the
officers’ club of the post. On Saturday nights, after other officers
and their friends had parked their automobiles in the court and
entered the club for an evening of fun, Abrams would sneak out and
attach smoke-producing firecrackers to the spark plugs of the cars.
Then he retired to the window of his room to watch and wait. When the
officers’ club eventually closed, gay, teetering officers climbed
into their cars and pressed the starters. The loud explosion and
ensuing clouds of black smoke, curses and frightened cries gave Abrams
much saturnine merriment. Intoxicated by a series of successes, one
night he wired a firecracker in the automobile of the general
commanding the post. Abrams never was identified as the culprit in the
inquiry which followed, but having achieved the ultimate he felt
justified in giving up his pastime.
In his second year at West Point Abrams had met Miss Julia Harvey of
West Newton, Mass., an attractive Vassar student who came down for a
hop as the guest of one of Abe’s friends. The friend got sick, Abe
got the date, fell in love and he and Miss Harvey were married two
months after he was graduated. Now the mother of 6-year-old Noel
Abrams and 4-year-old Creighton William Abrams III, she lives in St.
Petersburg, Fla. with her mother, waiting and hoping like millions of
other Army wives for the war to end quickly.
Abrams, too, wants the war to end quickly and as a cavalryman who
turned to tank warfare in 1940 his theories about how it can be done
quickly are illuminating. To a cavalryman’s belief in mobility be
has added a belief in the efficiency of violence properly and
unsparingly applied. “We don’t want the Germans to fall back,”
Abrams insists. “We want them to try to defend their positions so we
can destroy them and their equipment. There’s entirely too much
emphasis on getting prisoners and not enough on destruction. Whenever
the Germans get us in the wringer they show no quarter, so why should
we? We’ve got to set our minds to destroying them--that’s the only
way to get this job done, and done fast.”
“When we go into those pretty little towns in Germany,” Abrams
explains, “we don’t aspire to damage anything. But if there are
Germans there we use our violence, everything that can be burned is
burned and every building is destroyed.”
Abram’s theory is that overpowering violence not only destroys the
enemy’s soldiers and does it quickly but it also keeps down American
casualties. In one town in Belgium, for instance, German resistance
was mean and stubborn. In house-to-house fighting, Abrams’ tankmen,
working with Lieut. Colonel Jacques’ armored infantry,
systematically chucked grenades into every window and directed flame
throwers through every door. Before the village was completely cleared
of Germans it was necessary to burn every building in the area. The
score was 427 prisoners of war, 50 Germans killed and 42 wounded,
American casualties were negligible.
“Our operations are all based on violence,” Abrams says. “An
infantry division doesn’t have the type of violence we have. We have
more firepower than any infantry division in the world--German,
British or Russian. We have mobility, better communications and
support artillery which is right behind us. Why, I’d no sooner
tackle an American tank battalion having all that violence than I’d
try to trap a wildcat in my sleeping bag.”
When Abrams’ tank battalion starts rolling, it goes fast, with every
gun in its tremendous arsenal firing throughout the charge. “Even
the best German troops, like the 11th Panzer,” says Abrams, who
occasionally speaks in Mac Arthur-like formalism, “cannot collect
themselves fast enough. Our firepower spreads confusion and chaos in
the German command and fear in the German soldier. Perhaps the more
stouthearted fellow will hang on. But the vast majority take counsel
with but one thing--fear.”
The best illustration of the effectiveness of this blasting program
occurred during the 4th Armored Division’s dash to relieve the
Bastogne garrison. just before dusk on the day after Christmas,
Abrams’ tank battalion and the 53rd Armored Infantry under Jacques
had fought their way to the crest of the last hill before Bastogne.
Ahead a secondary road rolled over the countryside for more than three
miles before it finally reached the outskirts of the town. Two
villages, Clochimont and Assenois, straddled the road, both defended
by fanatical German paratroopers.
While supporting artillery laid down a heavy concentration on the two
villages, Abrams’ armor stood poised on the hillside, ready for the
swift downward swoop. Finally Abrams stood up in his turret and over
the interphone came his terse signal, “Let ’er roll!” Like one
great snake, the chain of armored vehicles jerked into motion and,
gathering momentum, raced down the road towards Clochimont with guns
blazing. The column whipped through the village and then rolled on to
Assenois where our artillery shells were still pounding German
hideouts. Four lead tanks sped through the inferno safely, but a
half-track next in line caught a direct hit which disabled the
vehicle, killing two infantrymen and wounding four others. The next
tank was pinned by a falling telephone pole and still another Sherman
floundered under half a ton of debris. In the street the remainder of
the column ground to a halt behind the immobilized vehicles. Abrams
and his crew scrambled out of their tank and wrested the telephone
pole from the trapped tank as infantry engaged German paratroopers in
a hot sniping duel. Once back in his tank, Abrams waved the column
forward and it roared ahead, leaving doughboys behind to clear the
burning village.
Thus Bastogne was relieved in a daring plunge which sent the Germans
reeling. As against their high casualties and equipment losses, ours
were few: 30 men killed, 180 wounded, and several tanks destroyed.
While Abrams has never had a tank shot out from under him nor
sustained an injury in combat, his long periods spent in the vanguard
of the fighting have brought him close to death many times. One of his
narrowest escapes occurred north of Bastogne when a sudden heavy
German artillery barrage caught him standing in the open with two of
his officers. The trio instantly dove under the stern of a light tank
near by. While shells, mortars and rockets sliced the area to ribbons,
one officer had his helmet rapped by shrapnel and “Colonel
Abe’s” pants were torn by fragments. “I was considerably
concerned at the time,” Abrams commented later, “but our division
headquarters later reported only ‘sporadic’ enemy fire, so I guess
I shouldn’t have been.”
[Illustration: General Hoge]
Major General William M. Hoge
_21 March 1945-17 June 1945_
[Illustration: Outfit Magazine 28 May 1945 Battle Biographies]
PATTON PINS FIRST HONOR MEDAL
IN THIRD ARMY ON HEROIC TEXAN
Army Times, March 17, 1945
WITH THE 4TH ARMORED DIVISION, in Germany--The first Medal of Honor
to be awarded to a man in the 3d Army has been pinned on the breast of
1st Lt. James H. Fields of Fort Worth, Tex., by General George S.
Patton, Jr.
The “dauntless and gallant heroism” of Lieutenant Fields at
Rechicourt, France, after being seriously wounded were largely
responsible for the repulse of Nazi forces on September 27 and
contributed in a large measure to capture of his battalion’s
objective.
The 1st platoon of A Company, 10th Armored Infantry Battalion, which
Lieutenant Fields commanded, was sent up Hill 265 to fill a gap left
by two platoons, including one heavy weapons platoon, that had been
knocked out by savage enemy resistance. Fifty-five men went up the
hill and 13 returned almost 24 hours later after using two light
machine guns to wipe out a platoon of Jerries supported by artillery
and three Panther tanks.
Lieutenant Fields moved his men up under cover of darkness and assumed
a defensive position. They held out all that night and about 6
o’clock the following morning they received their first concentrated
attack. They repelled that, and a few minutes later, Fields heard one
of his men call for medical aid from a nearby foxhole.
Knowing that no medical aid man was present, and that none was
available, Fields went to the aid of the man himself. He arrived just
in time to see one of his squad leaders shot through the head. He
turned to take a shot at the Nazi marksman, but before he could fire,
he was hit.
The Jerry bullet ripped through Lieutenant Field’s cheek from left
to right, knocked most of his teeth out, cut his tongue and filled his
mouth with blood and jaw fragments. Rendered speechless, he refused to
leave his platoon and continued to direct fire with hand and arm
signals and pencilled notes which he dispatched from one foxhole to
the next.
“Only when his objective had been taken and the enemy scattered did
he consent to be evacuated to the battalion CP,” the War Department
citation reads: “At this point he refused to move farther back until
he had explained to his battalion commander by drawing on paper the
position of his men and the disposition of enemy forces.”
This was not the first time that Lieutenant Fields had been
conspicuously gallant. During an attack on the city of Troyes, France,
in August he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire again and
again in order that the positions of the enemy might be found. He
received the Silver Star for that action. Lieutenant (now Captain)
Fields also wears the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge.
JERSEY HERO WOULDN’T LEAVE
BUDDY, CAUGHT IN FLAMING TANK
Cut Down by Nazi Machine Guns as He Tried
Rescue--French Honor Him
By Robert W. Richards
United Press War Correspondent
WITH THIRD ARMY in Alsace Lorraine, October 11, 1944 (U. P.)--In this
tiny village which must go unnamed for fear of German reprisals, men
and women come from their homes smiling proudly whenever American
tanks null past.
Sometimes these people wave and sometimes they just stand looking.
They tell their children:
“There go your brothers.”
For these Frenchmen in this town, near the quiet Marne Canal and only
a stone’s throw from the hated Boche, are blood brothers of all
American armored men--especially the crack Fourth Armored Division.
It was the Fourth Armored which shattered remnants of German forces in
their village. And it was a sergeant of the Fourth Armored who showed
them that these tank-riding Yankees not only know how to fight but how
to die.
From hidden places, from haylofts, barns and attics, they had watched
the dramatic action. When it ended the entire town was so moved by
what it had seen that the people gathered in a body, walked to the
square and picked up the sergeant’s crumpled body.
They buried him not far from the spot where he fell and every day
since then some of these villagers cover his grave with fresh flowers.
When the people watched the fighting this is what they saw:
Two German 88’s were concealed near the town square.
Down the road, rumbling over rough pavement, came a long line of
American Sherman tanks. The people held their breaths. They had no
chance to shout warnings.
The first Sherman roared past the square and turned left into the town
moving north. The German gunners were surprised or unprepared for they
did not fire.
A second tank rolled into the square. By this time the Nazi gunners
were ready and the 88’s roared.
The crippled tank wheeled and faced its enemy but it was unable to
return the fire. Other tanks pulled back behind the protection of a
house.
While the people watched this tank became a roaring furnace. They were
happy to see a man leap from the top of the burning turret. They
screamed to him:
“Come to us. Come this way.”
But the soldier wearing sergeant’s stripes returned to the blazing
tank.
This hard-muscled young tank commander who used to work in a New
Jersey copper plant had realized that his bow gunner remained trapped.
He scrambled to the tank’s top and attempted to pry open the red hot
hatch. While he struggled German machine gunners got busy. They
riddled him through and through and he fell in the mud of the road.
He lay there while fellow tankmen from another direction destroyed the
enemy 88s. They were so occupied with the task of killing Germans that
they roared past his body without stopping.
Later they returned hut the sergeant wasn’t there.
Admiring townsfolk already had buried him.
* * *
4TH A. D. HERO GIVES LIFE, WINS TOP HONOR
Sgt. Joseph J. Sadowski, of Perth Amboy, N. J., a tank commander in
the famous 4th Armored Division, who returned to his flaming tank in
the face of withering enemy fire and almost certain death in an effort
to rescue a trapped comrade, has been awarded the Medal of Honor
posthumously, the War Department has announced.
Maj. Gen. Francis Mallon, commanding general of the Army Ground Forces
Replacement Depot No. 1, Fort George G. Meade, Md., presented the
medal to Sergeant Sadowski’s father, Mr. John Sadowski, at a
ceremony held April 21 at Fort Meade.
Mrs. John Sadowski, mother of the sergeant, and his five brothers and
two sisters also attended the ceremony along with high ranking
officers of Army Ground Forces.
The action in which Sergeant Sadowski gave his life occurred last
September 14 at Valhey, France, when the tank which he commanded was
struck by an 88-mm shell at close range while advancing upon the town
with the leading elements of Combat Command A, 4th Armored Division.
With his tank disabled and in flames, Sergeant Sadowski ordered his
crew to dismount and take cover in the adjoining buildings.
Discovering that his bow gunner was still in the tank and for some
reason unable to dismount, he rushed back to the burning vehicle,
ignoring a hail of enemy machine gun and bazooka fire, and attempted
to pry open the bow gunner’s hatch.
While working feverishly to release his comrade from the flaming tank,
Sergeant Sadowski was cut down by a stream of machine gun bullets.
Other units of the task force, stunned and momentarily confused by the
suddenness and ferocity of the enemy attack, witnessed the action of
Sergeant Sadowski and, the citation states:
“The gallant and noble sacrifice of his life in the aid of his
comrade, undertaken in the face of almost certain death, so inspired
the remainder of the tank crews that they pressed forward with great
ferocity and completely destroyed the enemy forces in this town
without further loss to themselves.”
Sergeant Sadowski was active in outdoor sports and in boxing, in which
he excelled, he was presented with a golden belt buckle as a result of
his achievements in the Middlesex County Boxing Tournament of 1935.
In addition to the nation’s highest award, he earned the Purple
Heart and was entitled to wear the American Defense and the European
Theater Ribbons.
Sergeant Sadowski was a member of Company A, 37th Tank Battalion.
_(Armored News, 30 April 1945)_
19-Year-Old Staff Sergeant
Awarded Nation’s Top Honor
By Bob Moors Stars and Stripes Staff Writer
LANDSHUT, Germany, July 4--S/Sgt James R. Hendrix, a red-haired,
freckle-faced 19-year-old farmboy from Arkansas, was summoned from
guard duty into the awesome sanctum of Fourth Armored Division
Headquarters here yesterday and informed that he had been awarded the
nation’s highest decoration--the Congressional Medal of Honor.
Hendrix had won the medal as a private by single-handedly silencing
two German 88 mm. guns, capturing their crews, wiping out two
machine-gun nests, saving three comrades from death and attempting to
save a fourth trapped in a burning halftrack.
The action took place in the Battle of the Bulge last December as his
outfit, Company C, of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion, was
fighting its way into Bastogne to relieve the 101st Airborne Division.
Thirty-nine-pointer Hendrix could request discharge as a CMH winner
but says he will not. “I want to come back with the Fourth Armored
after a furlough in the States and maybe stay in the Army for good,”
he said.
Hendrix is a quiet, modest kid who shuns attention of any kind;
typically, he was wounded three times in eight months of fighting, but
never bothered to go to the medics.
When the major who broke the news asked him where he wanted to receive
the decoration, here or in Washington, he replied promptly:
“Washington, sir.”
Red probably would have decided otherwise if he had known President
Truman is expected to pin on his award at a ceremony and review. All
Red had in mind was that he had been stationed near Washington before
coming over and knew the city well. Also he would be able to visit his
parents, Pearl and James Hendrix Sr., on their farm in Lepanto, Ark.,
where Red had helped raise corn and cotton until he joined the Army
Nov. 9, 1943.
When the major asked whether he wanted to go home via ship or plane,
he said quickly: “Please, sir, I have never been in one before.”
Just what happened that confused night on the approaches to Bastogne
is hard to piece together from what Red tells. “It’s all right
there in the citation,” he says. “For conspicuous gallantry and
intrepidity at the risk of his life and above and beyond the call of
duty,” was the way the War Department worded it in its prosaic
style.
“On the night of December 26, 1944, a task force was engaged in a
final thrust to break through to the besieged garrison at Bastogne.
When leading elements were halted by a fierce combination of
anti-tank, artillery and small-arms fire in the town of Assenois, Pvt
Hendrix dismounted and advanced upon two 88 mm. gun crews, and by the
ferocity of his actions compelled the German gun crews first to take
cover and then surrender.
_Hendrix says merely: “We ran up on ’em yelling ‘come out,’ but
they wouldn’t. One poked his head out of a foxhole and I shot him
through the neck. I got closer and hit another on the head with the
butt of my M1. He had American matches on him. Others came out then
with their hands up.”_
“Later in the attack this fearless soldier again left his vehicle
voluntarily to aid two wounded soldiers threatened by enemy
machine-gun fire. Effectively silencing two enemy machine-guns, he
held off the enemy by his own fire until the wounded men were
evacuated.”
_“I just shot at the machine-guns like all the 50s on half-tracks
were doing,” is Hendrix’s persistent version. “A half-track had
been hit pretty bad and these fellows were wounded and lying in a
ditch. Machine-gun fire was mostly toward them, but some bullets were
coming my way.”_
Continuing the attack, Hendrix again distinguished himself when he
hastened to aid still another soldier who was trapped in a burning
halftrack. Braving enemy sniper fire and exploding mines and
ammunition in the vehicle he extricated the wounded man from the
conflagration and extinguished his flaming clothing with own body
thereby saving the life of his fellow soldier.
_“A grenade exploded between his legs and everybody else got out. But
he was hollering for help.” Hendrix said. “I tugged at him and got
him out on the road, but he was badly burned. I tried to find water to
put out the flames but the water cans were full of bullet holes, so I
beat out the flames as best I could. He died later.”_
All company commanders who were with Red then either have been killed
or wounded, but the present CO, 1st Lt Melvin L. Schuweiler, of
Charlottesville, Va., was high in praise of the boyish soldier.
“He hasn’t got much formal education, only went to the fourth
grade, but I’ve never seen a guy with more common sense. He’s got
guts, but sense enough to go with them.”
Hendrix, who is the third Fourth Armored man to win the CMH, also
wears the Combat Infrantryman’s Badge and the Presidential Citation
ribbon, which was awarded the division.
HELLO BBC
The Fourth Armored Division was heard on numerous news broadcasts.
Following is the script of a typical broadcast:
ROBERT REID TO BBC LONDON VOICECAST FOURTH ARMORED DIVISION
Hello BBC this is Robert Reid speaking from Third U. S. Army on March
21 with dispatch number 108--Title Fourth Armored Division. This story
has been censored.
When the story of the big break up of the German army west of the
Rhine is finally told it will be largely the story of the Fourth
Armored Division of the Third United States Army--a division which
staged a super blitzkrieg in the homeland of the blitzkrieg inventors,
tearing the better part of the German army into ribbons and opening
the way for the conquest of a huge slab of Nazi territory.
The Fourth had already made a name for itself back in Normandy and
Brittany, and more recently when it burst through into beleaguered
Bastogne. But its achievements of the past fortnight surpass all those
other breathless adventures. It has become an epic of dash and
audacity--the sort of thing the division’s first commander was
possibly thinking about when he said that the Fourth would never need
a motto. It would be known by its deeds alone.
When the Fourth was given the job of first of all breaking through to
the Rhine from the Kyll River it set off in typical Fourth
style--right out into the blue with ten days rations packed in its
trucks for it fully expected to be cut off--a situation to which it is
not unaccustomed and which, by the way, has given rise to what has
almost come to be the divisional motto. It is credited to one of its
sergeants and goes back to Brittany. During one tough spot down there
this notability was heard to remark, “Gee, we’re cut off again,
the poor so-and-so’s.”
But the Fourth was not cut off this time. True its line was a very
thin one--perilously thin--as it burst out of the Kyll River
bridgehead and raced Rhinewards cutting a corridor--according to the
current crack sixty-five miles long and twenty-five feet wide--that
being the width of the road which carried them to the banks of the
Rhine, through the depths of the Eifel Forest in fifty-eight hours.
Nothing could stop them. They just rode down everything in their path
leaving six thousand Germans prisoners to stream back behind them,
capturing more than 500 German transports, 80,000 shells, Vee bomb
sites, and so on.
But that was not the end of the story. There was still that huge tract
of German countryside away to the south of the Moselle to be conquered
before the last stretch of Rhineland was ours and once again the
Fourth was given the job of bursting it open.
From a bridgehead secured by the Fifth and 90th Infantry Divisions
across the Moselle River, two columns of the Fourth Armored Division
suddenly burst as though from a catapult--shooting south and south
east--two spearheads of steel cutting two long lanes deep into enemy
territory then doubling and swerving and changing direction so often
and so quickly that the Germans simply could not cope with these steel
will of the wisp tactics and became swamped in general confusion which
resulted in such little things as siezing three invaluable bridges
intact over the river Nahe--one of the prizes of this rat race.
But if all this was an exciting job it was also a lonely job at times.
The Fourth was roaring ahead with the infantry following up miles
behind and mopping up the towns it had over-ridden. So when units of
the Fourth took the little Rhineland spa town of Bad Kreuznach they
hadn’t too many men to spare to act as patrols during the night to
guard against any surprise counter attack by the Germans, or to patrol
the streets in any force on the lookout for snipers.
What they did smacks of Red Indian warfare. It was both effective and
spectacular and figuratively cocked a snook at any stray German plane
who might also come nosing around during the night. Piles of wood were
collected and bonfires lit at every entrance leading into the town--a
device calculated to throw up in silhuette anything or anybody
approaching the place.
Not that the Fourth was always lonely on this trip. There were some
quite lively moments early on in the race when the Luftwaffe sent out
its planes to try and stop the tanks. But the Fourth has a jolly good
ack-ack battalion of its own and those gunners brought down thirty-two
Jerry planes in three days.
Commanded by Major General Hugh J. Gaffey, a soft spoken Texan, who
fights his battles in immaculate riding breeches and boots you could
use as a mirror, the Fourth Armored Division has done one of the
biggest jobs on the Western Front--and from what I have seen of
General Gaffey and his men they intend to continue in the same way.
4th Armored Mentioned in Congress
The fighting qualities of American tanks as compared with the German
Tiger and Panther tanks, was the cause of a heated, but brief,
discussion in Congress early in 1945. General Patton’s report to the
Deputy Chief of Staff, which was read into the Congressional Reoord,
included the following:
“In the current operation had the Fourth Armored Division been
equipped with Tiger and Panther tanks and been required to make the
move from Saarguemines to Arlon, then through to Bastogne, from
Bastogne to the Rhine, and now to Mainz--it would have been necessary
to rearmor it twice; and furthermore, it would have had serious if not
insurmountable difficulty in crossing rivers.”
* * *
200,000 Germans In Trap
Paris, March 17, 1945 (International News Service)--General George S.
Patton’s 4th Armored Division raced to trap perhaps 200,000 German
troops west of the Rhine south of besieged Coblenz today after
smashing more than 20 miles southward in a sensational breakthrough
below the Moselle.
Driving south along the Rhine Valley under a security blackout, the
“Flaming Fourth” smashed through Rheinbollen and through Ellern,
which lies more than 20 miles southeast of the Moselle bridgehead and
35 miles south of Coblenz, to within 60 miles of a junction with the
U. S. Seventh Army.
In a 3d Army front dispatch, INS Correspondent Larry Newmann said the
danger to Wehrmacht units within the 2,500-square-mile
Rhine-Moselle-Saar triangle “grows hourly as Patton’s flaming
Fourth Armored speeds forward against disorganized and wildly
surrendering opposition.”
[Illustration: Time magazine banner]
MEN AND MEDALS; Patton is a great morale-booster. He distributes
medals lavishly, builds up rivalries among his units. The 4th Armored
Division is his pace setter, the one that is always through for
open-field running. It has a dazzling record. It cut off the Brittany
peninsula, plunged through the Loire valley with only air protection
on its flanks. In the Battle of the Bulge it raced to the rescue of
Bastogne, went on to help carve up the German advance. In the
Saar-Palatinate cleanup it sliced through in parallel combat columns,
scored one of the big victories of the west.
This crack division has had three crack commanders. First was doughty,
57‑year‑old Major General John S. Wood, who took a pounding as his
tank bumped over Brittany, then rumbled 400 miles across France.
Patton’s grey‑haired, hard-as-nails chief of staff, Major General
Hugh Gaffey, took it over in December. Soon after the Rhine crossings,
Gaffey was made a corps commander. Now the 4th is run by dark,
handsome Major General William M. Hoge, who seized the Remagen bridge
intact while he was with the First Army, then captured whole the Main
River bridge at Aschaffenburg in his first east-of-the-river task for
Patton.
The Third’s other armored divisions challenge the 4th’s dash and
sometimes perform feats that would be textbook nightmares. Two Patton
armored divisions once crossed each other at a right angle road
junction in the midst of combat, but only the Germans were confused.
Patton’s forces have run right off their tactical maps, and have had
advanced maps, gasoline and ammunition parachuted to them.
_(April 9, 1945)_
WESTERN FRONT--General George S. Patton’s Third Army was going
strong. So were the battle-famed 1st Infantry Division and other
outfits of the First Army. They bore the scars of the Battle of the
Bulge and were out for meat. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey’s 4th
Armored Division (Third Army) had been given a task of exploiting to
do after the Kyll River had been bridged near Trier. Its tankmen and
motorized infantrymen were given rations for ten days, ordered to pour
on the coal and get to the Rhine.
Fifty-eight hours and more than 50 miles later they were there, close
to Coblenz. They had slashed out a corridor north of the Moselle with
one of the war’s swiftest armor strokes. Behind their tanks the
infantry mopped up thousands of prisoners from shredded German
divisions. Among them was a befuddled German general. Out of touch
with his troops, he had stood on a knoll looking for some sign of
them. Finally his binoculars found a large patch of Germans. He
hurried over to find that they--and he--were prisoners.
_(March 19, 1945)_
* * *
LONDON, May 8, 1945 (Associated Press)--The partisan-held radio in
Prague announced Monday night that American tanks, racing to the
relief of patriots in the Czechoslovakia capital, had smashed into the
city’s suburbs within four miles of its limits.
...Patton’s Fourth Armored Division, famous for its spectacular
exploits in France, was leading the drive, smashing through little
resistance across western Bohemia in two swifty-moving columns.
4TH ARMORED, SPEARHEAD IN
WAR, SWEATS OUT THE PEACE
IN GARRISON
By James Cannon, Stars and Stripes
WITH 4TH ARMD. DIV., Landshut, June 8, 1945--The 4th Armd. Div., which
usually moved ahead of the 3d Army like a pilot train laying its own
track, waits for orders in the sun.
The orders may never come and the men may be here in these hills until
they’re discharged. That’s all right with most of them. If you
came all the way from St. Lo, you know every shell sounds like the
first one, and the percentage runs against you every time one comes
in.
The division was used as a vast patrol in constant journeys of
military exploration through hostile country. They were always in a
hurry, and the secret of their achievements was mobility. Now these
tankers, who recognized no frontiers in combat, are garrison troops.
They do close-order drill and pull a lot of guard. They stand reveille
and all the usual inspections and formations that plague troops in
permanent installations. Seeing them out of their dirty combat clothes
and tank helmets, you don’t recognize them in their clean ODs and
helmet liners.
Although they don’t know how long they will be here, the tankers
were getting barracks ready for winter occupation. They were still
installing wash bowls, hot-water boilers, lockers and showers. They
were carving baseball diamonds out of the flower-brightened meadows.
The I. and E. program is set to go, and a lot of guys want to go to
school. But it will have to wait until text books are located.
Thirty per cent of them have enough points to go home, and
reinforcements are coming in to take their places. They expect a
training program as soon as the recruits arrive to fill in for the
old-timers.
[Illustration: They Called Us]
Breakthrough Armored News
Rolling United Press
Patton’s Pet New York Sun
Rip-roaring Indianapolis Times
Rough-necked London Daily Express
Roosevelt’s Highest Paid Butchers German Radio
American Elite 4th Panzer Division German Radio
Invincible London Telegraph
Flaming Fourth International News Service
Ghost London Times
Phantom London Express
Fire Alarm London Globe
Flying Herald-Tribune (Paris)
Great Life Magazine
Irresistible New York Times
Hard-hitting Washington Times-Herald
Colorful Boston Traveler
Patton’s Favorite Spearhead Chattanooga Free Press
Crack Sunday Empire News
Famous Associated Press
Fire-eaters London Daily Express
Veteran Chicago Sun
Immortal Saturday Evening Post
Bold New York Times
Hard-riding Armored News
Patton’s Sunday Punch Armored News
Irrepressible Life Magazine
Famed Time Magazine
Impatient SHAEF Intelligence Bulletin
Ubiquitous BBC Radio
Patton’s Fourth Armored Associated Press
Georgie’s Beloved Fourth Armored New York Post
Patton’s Pace Setter Time Magazine
Patton’s Rampaging Fourth Armored United Press
Fabulous Chicago Tribune
Patton’s Prize Fourth Armored Associated Press
Glorious Radio Luxembourg
Gaffey’s Whirlwind Detroit Free Press
Champions Stars and Stripes
Fantastic St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Patton’s favorite of all divisions Philadelphia Evening Bulletin
Romping Associated Press
[Illustration: We meet the Russians]
[Illustration: Pass in review]
THE PRESIDENTIAL CITATION
by Gregor Ziemer
_Gregor Ziemer, who wrote the following story, might well be known as
the “Man who Stayed for Dinner.” He joined the Fourth Armored
Division at Polch, Germany on March 7, 1945. At the time he expected
to remain for three days to do some broadcasts for Radio Luxembourg.
He liked what he saw so much that he has been with the division ever
since._
_The three months he has spent with the Fourth Armored have presented
Mr. Ziemer with sights that he always hoped to experience--but never
thought he would--as he had lived in Germany for twelve years before
the war, both before, and during the Hitler regime. Consequently,
Ziemer probably knows Germany as well as any living American._
_During his stay in Germany, Ziemer headed the American School in
Berlin, and on his return to the States wrote “1,001 Days of
Hitler” and the best seller, “Education for Death,” which later
became the movie, “Hitler’s Children.”_
_Since he has been with the division, Ziemer has written a detailed
account of defeated Germany for Collier’s magazine, and at present
is hard at work on a full length book about Germany, based on his
experiences with the Fourth Armored, that he hopes to publish in the
near future._
_Although the story that appears here will probably never appear
elsewhere in print, we felt that it was a great and sincere tribute
from a man who ranks high among the nation’s authors and from a man
that we feel we can call a fellow member of our great division. With
this in mind we pass it on to you.--Public Relations Officer._
LANDSHUT, GERMANY, June 14, 1945--There are some moments which only
the Angel of History should be allowed to record.
There are occasions when pride and memory and gratitude and humbleness
are so mixed up that the emotions go dull and words become even less
effective than usual.
Such a moment I experienced this afternoon.
I stood out under the blue sky of conquered Bavaria, and saw American
boys pass in review--their first review since they had come to Europe
a year ago, I saw American flags carried over a field of green, I
watched color guards carry banners. I saw a Four-star General pin
pieces of blue cloth on the banners. I saw the same general pin a bit
of blue ribbon in a small gold frame on the tunic of another general.
I heard a band play the “Star Spangled Banner.”
And it was as if a million voices were shouting “Thank You! Thank
you for what you have done!” And it was as if the hills of Bavaria
were echoing the sound, until the whole world was full of it.
For this afternoon, on that level field outside the old historic city
of Landshut, the Fourth Armored Division of the Third Army passed in
review and received the Presidential Citation.
“It was a broad field, and there were many boys on it--boys in
their best garrison uniforms. And they passed in review with a
precision and a compactness and a spirit that amazed even the old
veterans of many reviews who were present.
Yes, the Fourth Armored received the Presidential Citation this
afternoon.
“Motivated always by the highest esprit de corps and displaying the
greatest intrepidity and determination, these units successfully and
swiftly executed missions of an exceptionally hazardous nature against
the enemy.”
Those were the words they heard, those boys out there on the field.
And they knew what the words tried to say--those boys--boys who are
now doing occupational work when they would much rather be home, boys
who were thinking of their buddies who helped to earn this citation
but were not there to see it presented because they are lying in
heroes’ graves in France, Belgium and Luxembourg.
Yes, I attended a review in honor of a Presidential Citation. And my
heart was so full that a drop could have overflowed it. For more than
three months I have been with this Fourth Armored. I have seen them in
action. I crossed the Rhine with them at Oppenheim. I rolled across
the pontoon bridge with them at Hanau on the Main. I made a detour
around that burning half-track at Buchenwald. I crawled across the
Bailey bridge that dark bitter morning when the Nazis thought they had
us cooped up at Ifta. I rode into Czechoslovakia with them.
I am only a civilian, and know next to nothing about the tactical
difficulties the Fourth encountered on this historic odessey across
Germany. But I was there when they opened the road blocks, when they
cleared out the machine gun nests, when they evacuated their dead.
And today tears rolled down my cheek as I held my hand at salute while
the American flags were carried past the reviewing stand where stood
General Jacob L. Devers and Major General William M. Hoge. Out on the
field I saw them all, the heroes of the Fourth--Colonel Creighton W.
Abrams, Colonel Hayden A. Sears, Colonel Wendell Blanchard, Colonel
David A. Watt, Lt Colonel Leslie D. Goodall, Colonel Alexander Graham,
Lt Colonel Harold Cohen, Lt Colonel Delk M. Oden, Lt Colonel James
Bidwell, Lt Colonel Albin Irzyk, Lt Colonel Robert Mailliard, Lt
Colonel William Nungesser, Lt Colonel Arthur C. Peterson, Lt Colonel
Robert M. Parker, Lt Colonel Neil M. Wallace, Major Henry Crosby,
Major William Hunter, Major Charles Kimsey and Major Erbin Wattles.
Behind them were their men, of Headquarters, tank destroyers, cavalry,
engineers, armored artillery, armored infantry, tank battalions,
trains, medics, and ordnance...
And I also saw all the others, who were not there...
I saw them as an American civilian would see them, a civilian who has
had the good fortune of having been with them when they earned the
Citation, as a civilian who represents the Nation which bestowed it on
them.
And because I am a civilian, and because I happen to know what brought
the Fourth this recognition, I make myself the spokesman of my Nation
at this moment, and I say:
“I wonder if you know what you have done? I wonder if you realize
how history will thank you for ridding the world of a fear which a few
short months ago was still cowing the entire globe? I wonder if you
realize how majestic, how significant your acts, your sacrifices, your
spirit are? It was you and men like you who have brought the world a
new hope, a new lease on humanity.”
You don’t wish thanks. You didn’t do this because you wanted to be
heroes. You refuse to be heroes now. But, please believe me when I say
that for generations you will earn the undying thanks of a nation, a
world which has come out of oppression to the light as bright as the
sun which shone this afternoon over your polished helmets, and the new
paint jobs of your tanks on parade.
This thanks the world may not express in words. The world itself is
sometimes inarticulate when it comes to expressing gratitude. But
History, that timeless element which runs through the strains of life
and anchors in eternity, History knows, and History will give you
credit.
General Devers expressed it well when he said that on your
shoulders--on your young shoulders--rests the hope for the future.
You will accept this added responsibility for the future as you have
accepted every order for a new rat-race.
But meanwhile accept the humble thanks of your people; accept the
deeply rooted “Thank You” of a nation which has come to know its
own strength, when it watched your strength.
For as long as our nation can produce a unit like the Fourth Armored,
as long as it can create a spirit like yours--just that long there is
no fear for the future of America.
At I looked at you this afternoon, at the faces as they passed quickly
by, faces which came from every walk of American life, I knew I was
seeing a new America. It is an awakened America--an America which has
taken its place in the family of nations--and which will be a watchman
of the nations if necessary.
American soldiers marched under a German sky, on German soil, under a
German sun, and received a citation of an American President--how
impossible it would have seemed a short time ago.
And now I can quote the sacred words of our Savior who died to save
mankind, “It is finished.”
But, as for Him the task was not finished, even as He spoke those
words, so our task is not finished. But we of the Fourth Armored, we
Americans all who know so infinitely more of the world, of mankind, of
the human mind than we did a year ago, we fear not the future, we fear
no enemy, we fear not ourselves, nor our miserable charlatans and
fools who would make America a nation of bickering merchants and a
rabble of hypocrites.
We are going home with the bit of blue ribbon in the gold frame over
our right breast pocket. And it will always bring us just one message:
“We of the Fourth are not vainglorious. We are not conceited. We are
humble and grateful. We are conscious of our duties and our
responsibilities--now in peacetime as we were in wartime.
“But never again--NEVER AGAIN--will we be afraid of Fear; never
again will we be afraid to attack that which we consider wrong, no
matter where it is, no matter what kind of wrong it is. Never again
will we permit evil to grow under our feet!”
And so I salute the Fourth--today, every day, until the Last Review is
over, until the last one of us has joined those of the Fourth who have
gone before ...
And even then, from beyond the grave, we shall keep alive this spirit
born in battle, confirmed in peace, made symbolic by our Presidential
Citation.
So Help us God!
Amen!
[Illustration: Collier’s banner]
_The following paragraphs are excerpts from a Collier’s story written
by Gregor Ziemer. Although the story deals basically with the German
people, it is based on Ziemer’s experiences while traveling with the
Fourth Armored._
I am writing this on the running board of a confiscated automobile.
For what seems a century I have been rat-racing across Germany with
the famous U. S. Fourth Armored of Presidential Citation fame.
I, who have been worrying for many months how I could get back into
Germany soon after the war, have entered with a spearhead. With my
senses keyed to unaccustomed intensity, I crossed the Sauer, the
Rhine, the Mosel, the Nahe, the Main, and the Fulda and the
Werra--driving a civilian car, in battle khaki, as part of a column of
tanks and half-tracks, of jeeps and trucks.
My mind is urging me to get down on paper my first impressions of the
defeated Germany. I lived in Germany. I knew the sadistic, the
scheming, the malignant Hitler Germany. Now I am getting firsthand
impressions of a different Germany: the Germany of the white flags;
which shrugs its shoulders, which stares in amazement--and which takes
orders.
Overhead a dogfight is filling the blue April sky with staccato bursts
of death. Not more than a quarter of a mile away I see the green
shacks of the infamous Ohrdruf concentration camp which I have just
visited. I have seen such destruction of German war weapons recently
that my mind is a shambles. . .
“We had no idea you Americans were so strong.” That is another
chorus. A captured general, Edgar Rohrich, to whom I spoke in the
small town of Ifta, made that clear. And then he gave me an insight
into German psychology. “I’d ask nothing more of life than a chance
to command a division like this Fourth which I see here,” he said,
in that narrow corridor of the farmhouse where I interviewed him. And
if he had such a division? He would continue to fight, and he would
continue to attempt to conquer the world, of course .....
From where I am sitting I can still see in the evening twilight the
mound of the mass grave of Ohrdruf. I still smell the odor of death.
But I also see an old peasant trying to obliterate the traces left on
his field by tanks and foxholes. He is looking forward to the harvest
many months ahead. It will take almost bucolic patience, almost
superhuman endurance, to put Germany back in order, Is it worth it?
There will be many who say no. There will be others who will say yes.
After weeks of rat-racing with the Fourth Armored across Germany which
is, for the time being, humble, I can say only this: Let the world
decide, but only after a long heart-searching interview with its own
conscience, as to which is cheaper--another war or a long, patient,
firm, disciplined occupation of this country which we have conquered
with so much effort, so much weariness, and at the cost of so many
lives.
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