Part 4

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.