Part 3

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.

_“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.