Chapter II: Part 2

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.

_“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.

Major General Hugh J. Gaffey _Division Commander_ _3 December 1944-21 March 1945_

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.

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.

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!”