Part 6

Knowing that no medical aid man was present, and that none was available, Fields went to the aid of the man himself. He arrived just in time to see one of his squad leaders shot through the head. He turned to take a shot at the Nazi marksman, but before he could fire, he was hit.

The Jerry bullet ripped through Lieutenant Field’s cheek from left to right, knocked most of his teeth out, cut his tongue and filled his mouth with blood and jaw fragments. Rendered speechless, he refused to leave his platoon and continued to direct fire with hand and arm signals and pencilled notes which he dispatched from one foxhole to the next.

“Only when his objective had been taken and the enemy scattered did he consent to be evacuated to the battalion CP,” the War Department citation reads: “At this point he refused to move farther back until he had explained to his battalion commander by drawing on paper the position of his men and the disposition of enemy forces.”

This was not the first time that Lieutenant Fields had been conspicuously gallant. During an attack on the city of Troyes, France, in August he deliberately exposed himself to enemy fire again and again in order that the positions of the enemy might be found. He received the Silver Star for that action. Lieutenant (now Captain) Fields also wears the Purple Heart and the Combat Infantryman Badge.

JERSEY HERO WOULDN’T LEAVE BUDDY, CAUGHT IN FLAMING TANK

Cut Down by Nazi Machine Guns as He Tried Rescue--French Honor Him

By Robert W. Richards United Press War Correspondent

WITH THIRD ARMY in Alsace Lorraine, October 11, 1944 (U. P.)--In this tiny village which must go unnamed for fear of German reprisals, men and women come from their homes smiling proudly whenever American tanks null past.

Sometimes these people wave and sometimes they just stand looking. They tell their children:

“There go your brothers.”

For these Frenchmen in this town, near the quiet Marne Canal and only a stone’s throw from the hated Boche, are blood brothers of all American armored men--especially the crack Fourth Armored Division.

It was the Fourth Armored which shattered remnants of German forces in their village. And it was a sergeant of the Fourth Armored who showed them that these tank-riding Yankees not only know how to fight but how to die.

From hidden places, from haylofts, barns and attics, they had watched the dramatic action. When it ended the entire town was so moved by what it had seen that the people gathered in a body, walked to the square and picked up the sergeant’s crumpled body.

They buried him not far from the spot where he fell and every day since then some of these villagers cover his grave with fresh flowers.

When the people watched the fighting this is what they saw:

Two German 88’s were concealed near the town square.

Down the road, rumbling over rough pavement, came a long line of American Sherman tanks. The people held their breaths. They had no chance to shout warnings.

The first Sherman roared past the square and turned left into the town moving north. The German gunners were surprised or unprepared for they did not fire.

A second tank rolled into the square. By this time the Nazi gunners were ready and the 88’s roared.

The crippled tank wheeled and faced its enemy but it was unable to return the fire. Other tanks pulled back behind the protection of a house.

While the people watched this tank became a roaring furnace. They were happy to see a man leap from the top of the burning turret. They screamed to him:

“Come to us. Come this way.”

But the soldier wearing sergeant’s stripes returned to the blazing tank.

This hard-muscled young tank commander who used to work in a New Jersey copper plant had realized that his bow gunner remained trapped.

He scrambled to the tank’s top and attempted to pry open the red hot hatch. While he struggled German machine gunners got busy. They riddled him through and through and he fell in the mud of the road.

He lay there while fellow tankmen from another direction destroyed the enemy 88s. They were so occupied with the task of killing Germans that they roared past his body without stopping.

Later they returned hut the sergeant wasn’t there.

Admiring townsfolk already had buried him.

* * *

4TH A. D. HERO GIVES LIFE, WINS TOP HONOR

Sgt. Joseph J. Sadowski, of Perth Amboy, N. J., a tank commander in the famous 4th Armored Division, who returned to his flaming tank in the face of withering enemy fire and almost certain death in an effort to rescue a trapped comrade, has been awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously, the War Department has announced.

Maj. Gen. Francis Mallon, commanding general of the Army Ground Forces Replacement Depot No. 1, Fort George G. Meade, Md., presented the medal to Sergeant Sadowski’s father, Mr. John Sadowski, at a ceremony held April 21 at Fort Meade.

Mrs. John Sadowski, mother of the sergeant, and his five brothers and two sisters also attended the ceremony along with high ranking officers of Army Ground Forces.

The action in which Sergeant Sadowski gave his life occurred last September 14 at Valhey, France, when the tank which he commanded was struck by an 88-mm shell at close range while advancing upon the town with the leading elements of Combat Command A, 4th Armored Division.

With his tank disabled and in flames, Sergeant Sadowski ordered his crew to dismount and take cover in the adjoining buildings. Discovering that his bow gunner was still in the tank and for some reason unable to dismount, he rushed back to the burning vehicle, ignoring a hail of enemy machine gun and bazooka fire, and attempted to pry open the bow gunner’s hatch.

While working feverishly to release his comrade from the flaming tank, Sergeant Sadowski was cut down by a stream of machine gun bullets.

Other units of the task force, stunned and momentarily confused by the suddenness and ferocity of the enemy attack, witnessed the action of Sergeant Sadowski and, the citation states:

“The gallant and noble sacrifice of his life in the aid of his comrade, undertaken in the face of almost certain death, so inspired the remainder of the tank crews that they pressed forward with great ferocity and completely destroyed the enemy forces in this town without further loss to themselves.”

Sergeant Sadowski was active in outdoor sports and in boxing, in which he excelled, he was presented with a golden belt buckle as a result of his achievements in the Middlesex County Boxing Tournament of 1935.

In addition to the nation’s highest award, he earned the Purple Heart and was entitled to wear the American Defense and the European Theater Ribbons.

Sergeant Sadowski was a member of Company A, 37th Tank Battalion. _(Armored News, 30 April 1945)_

19-Year-Old Staff Sergeant Awarded Nation’s Top Honor

By Bob Moors Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

LANDSHUT, Germany, July 4--S/Sgt James R. Hendrix, a red-haired, freckle-faced 19-year-old farmboy from Arkansas, was summoned from guard duty into the awesome sanctum of Fourth Armored Division Headquarters here yesterday and informed that he had been awarded the nation’s highest decoration--the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Hendrix had won the medal as a private by single-handedly silencing two German 88 mm. guns, capturing their crews, wiping out two machine-gun nests, saving three comrades from death and attempting to save a fourth trapped in a burning halftrack.

The action took place in the Battle of the Bulge last December as his outfit, Company C, of the 53rd Armored Infantry Battalion, was fighting its way into Bastogne to relieve the 101st Airborne Division.

Thirty-nine-pointer Hendrix could request discharge as a CMH winner but says he will not. “I want to come back with the Fourth Armored after a furlough in the States and maybe stay in the Army for good,” he said.

Hendrix is a quiet, modest kid who shuns attention of any kind; typically, he was wounded three times in eight months of fighting, but never bothered to go to the medics.

When the major who broke the news asked him where he wanted to receive the decoration, here or in Washington, he replied promptly: “Washington, sir.”

Red probably would have decided otherwise if he had known President Truman is expected to pin on his award at a ceremony and review. All Red had in mind was that he had been stationed near Washington before coming over and knew the city well. Also he would be able to visit his parents, Pearl and James Hendrix Sr., on their farm in Lepanto, Ark., where Red had helped raise corn and cotton until he joined the Army Nov. 9, 1943.

When the major asked whether he wanted to go home via ship or plane, he said quickly: “Please, sir, I have never been in one before.”

Just what happened that confused night on the approaches to Bastogne is hard to piece together from what Red tells. “It’s all right there in the citation,” he says. “For conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life and above and beyond the call of duty,” was the way the War Department worded it in its prosaic style.

“On the night of December 26, 1944, a task force was engaged in a final thrust to break through to the besieged garrison at Bastogne. When leading elements were halted by a fierce combination of anti-tank, artillery and small-arms fire in the town of Assenois, Pvt Hendrix dismounted and advanced upon two 88 mm. gun crews, and by the ferocity of his actions compelled the German gun crews first to take cover and then surrender.

_Hendrix says merely: “We ran up on ’em yelling ‘come out,’ but they wouldn’t. One poked his head out of a foxhole and I shot him through the neck. I got closer and hit another on the head with the butt of my M1. He had American matches on him. Others came out then with their hands up.”_

“Later in the attack this fearless soldier again left his vehicle voluntarily to aid two wounded soldiers threatened by enemy machine-gun fire. Effectively silencing two enemy machine-guns, he held off the enemy by his own fire until the wounded men were evacuated.”

_“I just shot at the machine-guns like all the 50s on half-tracks were doing,” is Hendrix’s persistent version. “A half-track had been hit pretty bad and these fellows were wounded and lying in a ditch. Machine-gun fire was mostly toward them, but some bullets were coming my way.”_

Continuing the attack, Hendrix again distinguished himself when he hastened to aid still another soldier who was trapped in a burning halftrack. Braving enemy sniper fire and exploding mines and ammunition in the vehicle he extricated the wounded man from the conflagration and extinguished his flaming clothing with own body thereby saving the life of his fellow soldier.

_“A grenade exploded between his legs and everybody else got out. But he was hollering for help.” Hendrix said. “I tugged at him and got him out on the road, but he was badly burned. I tried to find water to put out the flames but the water cans were full of bullet holes, so I beat out the flames as best I could. He died later.”_

All company commanders who were with Red then either have been killed or wounded, but the present CO, 1st Lt Melvin L. Schuweiler, of Charlottesville, Va., was high in praise of the boyish soldier.

“He hasn’t got much formal education, only went to the fourth grade, but I’ve never seen a guy with more common sense. He’s got guts, but sense enough to go with them.”

Hendrix, who is the third Fourth Armored man to win the CMH, also wears the Combat Infrantryman’s Badge and the Presidential Citation ribbon, which was awarded the division.

HELLO BBC

The Fourth Armored Division was heard on numerous news broadcasts. Following is the script of a typical broadcast:

ROBERT REID TO BBC LONDON VOICECAST FOURTH ARMORED DIVISION

Hello BBC this is Robert Reid speaking from Third U. S. Army on March 21 with dispatch number 108--Title Fourth Armored Division. This story has been censored.

When the story of the big break up of the German army west of the Rhine is finally told it will be largely the story of the Fourth Armored Division of the Third United States Army--a division which staged a super blitzkrieg in the homeland of the blitzkrieg inventors, tearing the better part of the German army into ribbons and opening the way for the conquest of a huge slab of Nazi territory.

The Fourth had already made a name for itself back in Normandy and Brittany, and more recently when it burst through into beleaguered Bastogne. But its achievements of the past fortnight surpass all those other breathless adventures. It has become an epic of dash and audacity--the sort of thing the division’s first commander was possibly thinking about when he said that the Fourth would never need a motto. It would be known by its deeds alone.

When the Fourth was given the job of first of all breaking through to the Rhine from the Kyll River it set off in typical Fourth style--right out into the blue with ten days rations packed in its trucks for it fully expected to be cut off--a situation to which it is not unaccustomed and which, by the way, has given rise to what has almost come to be the divisional motto. It is credited to one of its sergeants and goes back to Brittany. During one tough spot down there this notability was heard to remark, “Gee, we’re cut off again, the poor so-and-so’s.”

But the Fourth was not cut off this time. True its line was a very thin one--perilously thin--as it burst out of the Kyll River bridgehead and raced Rhinewards cutting a corridor--according to the current crack sixty-five miles long and twenty-five feet wide--that being the width of the road which carried them to the banks of the Rhine, through the depths of the Eifel Forest in fifty-eight hours. Nothing could stop them. They just rode down everything in their path leaving six thousand Germans prisoners to stream back behind them, capturing more than 500 German transports, 80,000 shells, Vee bomb sites, and so on.

But that was not the end of the story. There was still that huge tract of German countryside away to the south of the Moselle to be conquered before the last stretch of Rhineland was ours and once again the Fourth was given the job of bursting it open.

From a bridgehead secured by the Fifth and 90th Infantry Divisions across the Moselle River, two columns of the Fourth Armored Division suddenly burst as though from a catapult--shooting south and south east--two spearheads of steel cutting two long lanes deep into enemy territory then doubling and swerving and changing direction so often and so quickly that the Germans simply could not cope with these steel will of the wisp tactics and became swamped in general confusion which resulted in such little things as siezing three invaluable bridges intact over the river Nahe--one of the prizes of this rat race.

But if all this was an exciting job it was also a lonely job at times. The Fourth was roaring ahead with the infantry following up miles behind and mopping up the towns it had over-ridden. So when units of the Fourth took the little Rhineland spa town of Bad Kreuznach they hadn’t too many men to spare to act as patrols during the night to guard against any surprise counter attack by the Germans, or to patrol the streets in any force on the lookout for snipers.

What they did smacks of Red Indian warfare. It was both effective and spectacular and figuratively cocked a snook at any stray German plane who might also come nosing around during the night. Piles of wood were collected and bonfires lit at every entrance leading into the town--a device calculated to throw up in silhuette anything or anybody approaching the place.

Not that the Fourth was always lonely on this trip. There were some quite lively moments early on in the race when the Luftwaffe sent out its planes to try and stop the tanks. But the Fourth has a jolly good ack-ack battalion of its own and those gunners brought down thirty-two Jerry planes in three days.

Commanded by Major General Hugh J. Gaffey, a soft spoken Texan, who fights his battles in immaculate riding breeches and boots you could use as a mirror, the Fourth Armored Division has done one of the biggest jobs on the Western Front--and from what I have seen of General Gaffey and his men they intend to continue in the same way.

4th Armored Mentioned in Congress

The fighting qualities of American tanks as compared with the German Tiger and Panther tanks, was the cause of a heated, but brief, discussion in Congress early in 1945. General Patton’s report to the Deputy Chief of Staff, which was read into the Congressional Reoord, included the following:

“In the current operation had the Fourth Armored Division been equipped with Tiger and Panther tanks and been required to make the move from Saarguemines to Arlon, then through to Bastogne, from Bastogne to the Rhine, and now to Mainz--it would have been necessary to rearmor it twice; and furthermore, it would have had serious if not insurmountable difficulty in crossing rivers.”

* * *

200,000 Germans In Trap

Paris, March 17, 1945 (International News Service)--General George S. Patton’s 4th Armored Division raced to trap perhaps 200,000 German troops west of the Rhine south of besieged Coblenz today after smashing more than 20 miles southward in a sensational breakthrough below the Moselle.

Driving south along the Rhine Valley under a security blackout, the “Flaming Fourth” smashed through Rheinbollen and through Ellern, which lies more than 20 miles southeast of the Moselle bridgehead and 35 miles south of Coblenz, to within 60 miles of a junction with the U. S. Seventh Army.

In a 3d Army front dispatch, INS Correspondent Larry Newmann said the danger to Wehrmacht units within the 2,500-square-mile Rhine-Moselle-Saar triangle “grows hourly as Patton’s flaming Fourth Armored speeds forward against disorganized and wildly surrendering opposition.”

MEN AND MEDALS; Patton is a great morale-booster. He distributes medals lavishly, builds up rivalries among his units. The 4th Armored Division is his pace setter, the one that is always through for open-field running. It has a dazzling record. It cut off the Brittany peninsula, plunged through the Loire valley with only air protection on its flanks. In the Battle of the Bulge it raced to the rescue of Bastogne, went on to help carve up the German advance. In the Saar-Palatinate cleanup it sliced through in parallel combat columns, scored one of the big victories of the west.

This crack division has had three crack commanders. First was doughty, 57‑year‑old Major General John S. Wood, who took a pounding as his tank bumped over Brittany, then rumbled 400 miles across France. Patton’s grey‑haired, hard-as-nails chief of staff, Major General Hugh Gaffey, took it over in December. Soon after the Rhine crossings, Gaffey was made a corps commander. Now the 4th is run by dark, handsome Major General William M. Hoge, who seized the Remagen bridge intact while he was with the First Army, then captured whole the Main River bridge at Aschaffenburg in his first east-of-the-river task for Patton.

The Third’s other armored divisions challenge the 4th’s dash and sometimes perform feats that would be textbook nightmares. Two Patton armored divisions once crossed each other at a right angle road junction in the midst of combat, but only the Germans were confused. Patton’s forces have run right off their tactical maps, and have had advanced maps, gasoline and ammunition parachuted to them.

_(April 9, 1945)_

WESTERN FRONT--General George S. Patton’s Third Army was going strong. So were the battle-famed 1st Infantry Division and other outfits of the First Army. They bore the scars of the Battle of the Bulge and were out for meat. Major General Hugh J. Gaffey’s 4th Armored Division (Third Army) had been given a task of exploiting to do after the Kyll River had been bridged near Trier. Its tankmen and motorized infantrymen were given rations for ten days, ordered to pour on the coal and get to the Rhine.

Fifty-eight hours and more than 50 miles later they were there, close to Coblenz. They had slashed out a corridor north of the Moselle with one of the war’s swiftest armor strokes. Behind their tanks the infantry mopped up thousands of prisoners from shredded German divisions. Among them was a befuddled German general. Out of touch with his troops, he had stood on a knoll looking for some sign of them. Finally his binoculars found a large patch of Germans. He hurried over to find that they--and he--were prisoners.

_(March 19, 1945)_

* * *

LONDON, May 8, 1945 (Associated Press)--The partisan-held radio in Prague announced Monday night that American tanks, racing to the relief of patriots in the Czechoslovakia capital, had smashed into the city’s suburbs within four miles of its limits.

...Patton’s Fourth Armored Division, famous for its spectacular exploits in France, was leading the drive, smashing through little resistance across western Bohemia in two swifty-moving columns.

4TH ARMORED, SPEARHEAD IN WAR, SWEATS OUT THE PEACE IN GARRISON

By James Cannon, Stars and Stripes

WITH 4TH ARMD. DIV., Landshut, June 8, 1945--The 4th Armd. Div., which usually moved ahead of the 3d Army like a pilot train laying its own track, waits for orders in the sun.

The orders may never come and the men may be here in these hills until they’re discharged. That’s all right with most of them. If you came all the way from St. Lo, you know every shell sounds like the first one, and the percentage runs against you every time one comes in.

The division was used as a vast patrol in constant journeys of military exploration through hostile country. They were always in a hurry, and the secret of their achievements was mobility. Now these tankers, who recognized no frontiers in combat, are garrison troops.

They do close-order drill and pull a lot of guard. They stand reveille and all the usual inspections and formations that plague troops in permanent installations. Seeing them out of their dirty combat clothes and tank helmets, you don’t recognize them in their clean ODs and helmet liners.

Although they don’t know how long they will be here, the tankers were getting barracks ready for winter occupation. They were still installing wash bowls, hot-water boilers, lockers and showers. They were carving baseball diamonds out of the flower-brightened meadows.

The I. and E. program is set to go, and a lot of guys want to go to school. But it will have to wait until text books are located.

Thirty per cent of them have enough points to go home, and reinforcements are coming in to take their places. They expect a training program as soon as the recruits arrive to fill in for the old-timers.