WITH THE 4TH ARMORED DIVISION IN GERMANY--The iron tread of the 4th
Armored Division is moving across Germany and nothing can hold it.
Everywhere along the way the earth-shaking power of its big tanks is
visible. The crowds of people streaming along the roads--French,
Russian and Czech--are freed peoples beginning to march home through
the furrow plowed by the armor. That armor is still ahead of us, it
doesn’t stop. What is more, even the CPs behind it don’t know
exactly where it is.
“Get to the next town and keep going,” they say. “You’ll find
it.”
We are on its track all right, for we’re moving through towns where
the ruins still smolder and smoke. “The 4th Armored was here two
days ago,” someone says. Elsewhere, a great furrow in the fields
shows where the tanks bedded down and rested for a few hours.
Our jeep follows the armor’s tracks. There are fires on the horizon.
Around us lie the hostile fields, the stretches of woods where no one
moves. Someone is probably watching from there, though, for it is off
the track of the armor. The following Infantry will have to clean this
hostile country up.
We came to a town which Combat Command “B” of the 4th Armored
plastered a day ago. It is still smoking. The effect of the roaring
tanks and of the long, black gun-muzzles that stick out ahead of them
shows in the faces of the German civilians of this community.
“They’re around here somewhere,” says somebody. “Get on the
autobahn, pick up a 4th Armored supply truck and keep following.”
There is a low sky overhead. We find the armor’s deep furrow in the
muddy hills, and climb and reach the autobahn, a great German highway,
where traffic is meager and fast. A 4th Armored truck is ahead and we
are catching up. Some planes make their turn and we get out of the
jeep and, by God, they are Me-109s beating up the road toward us.
There is nothing faster than a plane and nothing slower than a man at
a time like this. We scramble down an embankment and into a culvert
and all hell is breaking out above us. The 50 calibers on the ground
and the 20mm cannonfire of the planes are both going at once and the
ground above is being rapped with the sound of giant hailstones. Then
silence.
Again they come. The Germans don’t want us on their favorite highway.
Three times more we hear the thunder of their engines, the whistling
of their wings, and the rapping of the 20 mm. hailstones. Then it’s
quiet again. We climb up the embankment and into the jeep and get
going.
We wish we could find that armor somewhere and 25 miles farther on we
finally overtake its tail-end. Down below the highway rest the tanks,
the half-tracks, the jeeps and the big guns spread out in a pasture
like resting cattle, right in the middle of Germany as if to say:
“What are you going to do about it?”
[Illustration: Armored Doughs]
[Illustration: Slowed but never stopped]
There are fires on many parts of the horizon. The biggest is to the
south, where a whole train is burning as one car after another
explodes. “We were trying to get a couple of Panther tanks on the
other side of the tracks,” says someone. “So we got the train
which was in our way.”
The nose of the 4th. Armored is still farther up, past Creuzberg. We
are some 25 miles west of Gotha and more than 75 miles from Frankfurt,
which was yesterday’s news. German women who pass in the village of
Nesselroden move about with their faces averted. In the house we stop
at there is a place marked for everything and everything is in its
proper place. A place is marked for the table towel, another for the
glass towel, a third for the blessing of God on the house, a fourth
for the picture of the son in the Nazi uniform. Signs and slogans are
everywhere. All night long a clock in the house rings out the hours
and half hours, adding another touch of order to this
too-perfectly-ordered home and providing assurance that even in his
sleep a good German will know what’s what.
The next day we move up the long train of armor toward Combat Command
“B”. It is a winding trail that avoids the autobahn and the big
town of Eisenach, which has not yet been taken. On we go, over
back-country roads, past civilians with beaten faces. The Werra River
isn’t wide here, but there was a tough fight for it yesterday. The
4th Armored’s 24th Armored Engineer Battalion bridged it under enemy
fire, saw their bridge knocked out, and put it in again. A small river
and small bridge, but a big operation.
We get past Creuzberg, which resisted yesterday and paid for it, for
there is no patience in the 4th Armored. The 4th wrecked Creuzberg
because Creuzberg wouldn’t surrender, and now people are shoveling
through the still-smoking ashes, looking for things.
Farther on we move, through a woods, and get one of those shocks of a
kid moving through a toy chamber of horrors at Coney Island. There are
dead German tanks in the woods, facing the road and hidden until you
come right up on them. Then it’s as if the tanks were alive and had
got you right there. But the tanks are dead. This was a German
tank-maintenance and repair area. Live American armor has already
caught this crippled German armor, lighting charges under it and
throwing white phosphorus stuff at it. Now the German tanks smoke and
burn, and one is just a pink stove, silently burning in the woods.
This is evidence of how the Germans have been driven to cover. They
have had to hide tank-repair areas in the woods because nothing that
shows in Germany is safe from our air these days. We have driven them
to the woods and to the caves, and now we are pushing them east, out
of their own country.
We get out of the woods in a hurry because it is eerie there and maybe
Germans are watching us go by. More fires are burning on the horizon.
The deep track of the tanks is still ahead of us. We reach a town
which is only a few miles from the big city of Gotha. The German air
comes up again and the sky is filled with smoke and the sounds of
anti-aircraft and cannon. We climb a hill to another woods, where
Me-109s are tucked in among the trees. The Germans had smashed these
planes themselves as the armor ran them down. These deadly little
planes have knocked out may Forts and Libs, and here they are broken
and burnt by the Germans in a woods.
The 4th Armored is moving out of Metebach now, and we get in behind a
half-track and follow down the road. The tanks wheel in their iron
treads, the machineguns point at the sky, and Aspach shows up, five
miles from Gotha. From within the houses, the civilians watch, but if
you look at one of them steadily he turns away. The power of the armor
is shadowed in these German faces. They stick their heads out of their
windows and watch blankly, absolutely neutral.
And now the tanks and half-tracks move up to a crossroads outside of
Aspach. They cover the roads out of town in long powerful lines as the
evening comes down. More fires blaze on the horizon. The German air
comes over again, the Me-109s moving across the sky as the .50-caliber
fire goes after them. The planes twist, turn and plunge through the
sky after a Cub plane, like a hawk after a sparrow. The Cub comes down
low over the fields with an Me dropping after it and the guns of the
armor drive the Me off just in time. The German air comes in again as
the sun goes down--two, three, four times more--and one at last grabs
a vehicle in the long line on the road and the vehicle begins to burn.
Another Me comes across, no more than 10 feet above the column,
turning on one wing, almost striking the ground, but keeping going. No
planes are knocked down here tonight, but the report is that more than
34 were brought down yesterday and we have been able to count at least
six wrecked ones during this movement toward Gotha.
The 4th should be in Gotha by tomorrow morning, and now it rests
outside the city. Rain begins to fall, but the fires sowed by the big
guns still burn on the horizon and so does our column’s vehicle
which the Me hit on the road. The 4th will move through fires into the
city of Gotha tomorrow morning.
In the morning there is a brief moment of indecision. Gotha has been
asked to surrender, and if it will not, then the big guns will go to
work. The 4th isn’t going to wait very long. Finally, it appears
that Gotha will surrender. The surrender has been demanded by the
Division and at last the answer comes through the armored infantry
battalion, which is up front at the edge of the city. Minutes from now
another German city will fall and within 10 days and 200 miles of
movement we will have taken Darmstadt, llanau, Aschaffenburg, Hersfeld
and Gotha.
The German air comes up over the road and we get into a patch of
woods. Under the roar of the guns and the enemy engines overhead, the
infantrymen had a word or two to say about this ebbing war. Pfc.
Joseph Tegge of Anderson, Ind., a. rifleman, wanted to know what the
hell the Germans are fighting for at this stage of the game.
“A stubborn bastard,” he says. “He knows he’s done for, but he
keeps on fighting anyway.”
The men are exasperated; it doesn’t make sense anymore. Yesterday,
16 of our infantrymen had been killed while protecting a tank.
We leave the woods and move on, and then the enemy air goes to work
again and we get into a barn where T/5 Wilson E. Kendall of
Ogdensburg, N. Y., who has been with the 4th Armored since Pine Camp,
comes up with that one about going home.
Then the air is clear once more, like after a rain squall, and we get
into the jeep and move slowly down a hill into Gotha, past German dead
in ditches, past a burnt-out American tank, past a hospital for German
soldiers where a guy at a window thumbs his nose at us and then
disappears. If he tries that on our tankers, they’ll surely go up
after him.
We get down into the square and are at the City Hall, where pieces of
broken glass lie all over the streets.
We are again in the midst of one of those starting-from-scratch
moments. In the City Hall are the temporary German officials of the
city of Gotha together with Lt. Robert Townsend of San Antonio, Tex.,
aide to the 4th Armored commander, Major General William M. Hoge.
“You will first of all bring in all arms, cameras and ammunition,”
says Townsend. He sits down in the old council chamber of the City
Hall, surrounded by murals of the ancient city. A Hollander, a young
fellow from Rotterdam who speaks both English and German, acts as
interpreter. He has been in Germany for several years, another one of
the millions of dragooned “auslanders,” or foreign laborers, in
the Reich.
The Germans around the table look shrewd and they talk with the tact
of losers. Order begins to appear. The men of the 89th Infantry
Division show in the town, moving from house to house, and you can see
them in the square from the windows of the City Hall.
A Polish woman with a small child stands outside the door and the
assistant Division commander, coming into the council chamber, pauses
for a moment in the doorway and tells the woman that things will be
better for them soon.
We leave Gotha that afternoon, grabbing the tail of the 4th Armored as
it goes through, and now the columns curve south, driving 15 miles to
Ohrdruf and Mühlberg, and coming to rest more than 200 miles from the
Rhine.
On the very edge of Mühlberg the column comes across what must be the
last German train going east. The Division’s artillery simply wheels
a 155mm. howitzer around and knocks out the train. It is Sgt. Roy
Mercurio’s gun crew which does this. Mercurio is from Toledo, Ohio,
and his gunners are Cpl. Cleo Smith of Los Gates, Calif., Pfc. Homer
Garrison of Shelbyville, Mo., and Pfc. Joe Valenti of St. Louis, Mo.
When we reach Mühlberg, a soldier asks: “How far are we from
Texas?” We draw a map on the ground, using a stick for a pencil,
drawing the outline of the eastern coast of the United States, as we
remember it, and the outline of the western coast of Europe, and then
France and Germany as far as Gotha. We figure over that map for a
while and finally somebody says: “Nearly 5,000 miles to Texas,
maybe.” And the soldier from Texas sighs and walks off.
Heading back, we can follow the long furrow which the 4th Armored has
plowed since it broke through at a point above Frankfurt. This country
behind the 4th Armored, which was deadly three days ago, has been
cleared. Now the liberated, thousands of them, are going home through
the furrow. French and English soldiers of 1940, Czechs, Poles and
Russians are on the road. We can go back now along one of the
world’s finest roads, which Hitler built for war and not for
civilians, and which the Americans are now using for war. Our traffic,
our supplies and infantry, is pouring through, pouring east, as thick
as Fourth of July traffic on the Lincoln Highway.
It is one of the great sights of our time and on the faces of the
Germans along the way there is still the look of numb amazement that
an enemy from thousands of miles away actually rides through Germany
now.
And tomorrow morning the 4th Armored will cut its tread deeper into
the German earth again, moving eastward.
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