“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.
I first met Clarke on the side of a hill north of Nancy. A tank battle
was under way near by. He had rolled up in a dust-covered jeep for a
quick conference with General Wood and Major General Manton Eddy,
commander of the Twelfth Corps in the Third Army.
The enlisted men sitting around in foxholes and armored cars had taken
the arrival of the generals with the usual indifference of front-line
soldiers, but when the dusty jeep arrived with the husky tanned
colonel, necks craned and there were murmurs, “Here comes Clarke.”
A strict disciplinarian and rather coldly reserved, Clarke did not
enjoy the friendly place in the hearts of the men of the division that
Wood commands, but there was no doubting the respect of officers and
men for his ability.
While a stray German gun, which had been overrun but whose crew
apparently was unaware it was surrounded by portions of an armored
division, banged away so close that the concussion moved your shirt,
Clarke spread a map on the ground and the two generals knelt down on
each side and discussed the situation as though they were in their own
homes.
None of the three looked up as infantry probed the side of the hill
for the hidden gun. After getting his instructions, Clarke jumped up
and was gone in a matter of seconds back toward his combat command.
A few days later, when rain bogged down the tanks, I was able to
corner Clarke in a muddy straw-strewn tent and record some of his
ideas on tank warfare.
“Warfare is mental, not physical,” Clarke began. “When you upset
the enemy you have him licked, particularly the German. He is big and
slow to react, and if you cut his communications and lines of contact
he will just take to the woods. But if you give him time to sit down
and get out the rule book, he is tough as Hell.”
Clarke himself has little respect for rule books, although he knows
and reads them all. “We received the other day a battle-experience
note in which some joker wrote that the American Sherman with its 75
is no match for the German forty-five-ton Panther tank with its heavy
armor,” he explained. “That would have scared hell out of us if we
hadn’t just knocked out more than a hundred Panthers with our
Shermans and tank destroyers in a three-day battle.”
The American tanks were more maneuverable than the heavy German
models, he explained, and could race in and fire before the Germans
could bring their slower turrets to bear.
“Most people and too many officers think a tank was made to fire its
big gun,” Clarke continued, striking his fist in his hand. “It
wasn’t. It was made to carry a machine gun into close quarters with
the enemy. The tank machine gun is the greatest weapon of this war and
we should have more of them on our tanks. The big gun is for defense
against other tanks.”
Clarke believes that the desert battles in Libya in which large forces
of tanks stood off and slugged one another have warped the true
conception of armored fighting. Tanks must keep on the move and close
in on the enemy to get at the soft spots, such as supply columns,
headquarters, and gun crews, he said.
“Tanks are weapons of terror. They have a definite mental effect on
the enemy when they come charging in, firing their machine guns. From
Normandy to the Moselle River most of my tanks never fired their basic
loads for their big guns.
“In fact,” concluded Clarke, “the safest place to be in this war
is behind the enemy lines. They don’t know what the hell to do when
you get there, and they just run.”
Clarke had the statistics to prove his point. The whole division had
suffered fewer casualties in eight weeks of offensive warfare behind
the German lines than it did in two weeks of defensive warfare north
of the Moselle. Small wonder that the Fourth Armored Division’s
battle cry is “Attack, attack, and then attack again!”
_(Liberty Magazine, Feb. 10, 1945)_
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