Part 1

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_

Major General John S. Wood _Division Commander_ _18 June 1942-3 December 1944_

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.

“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.