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.
In the wake of the tankers this human melting pot explodes. There are
the prisoner-of-war cages suddenly opened and pouring forth American,
British, Russian and French prisoners by the thousand. The gaunt and
eager-eyed American boys seeing their own tanks again are unable to
speak. Their story is a cycle in itself.
There are the broken survivors of Ohrdruf, where the 4th Armored boys
discovered corpses stacked in line, of Buchenwald, which this division
reached a few days ago, liberating thousands of human wrecks held
there as political prisoners; of innumerable other camps where
indescribable atrocities have been perpetrated.
I have encountered Belgians, Dutch, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians,
Czechs and Yugoslavs and a Latvian woman with tears in her eyes who
asked me for a map that would show her the way back to her lost home.
Because we have been fighting barely 30 miles from the border of
Czechoslovakia a great portion of the refugees are Czechs. As we
pushed up the autobahn thousands of them ran out of farms and
factories to watch their liberators rumble by. Bright faces grinned
from ear to ear. Women cried. Men shouted in broken English. Leaning
out of my jeep I yelled “Czechoslovakia.” A roar went up that
drowned even the clanking of the tanks.
The reaction of our soldiers to the pathos and suffering around them
is strictly American. They are shocked by the brutality of the
Germans, shocked and mad as hell.
I was sitting last night with one of the division officers when a
young Czech was brought by a GI from the utter darkness of the street.
He was member of a group of 200 political prisoners who had been
marched by the Germans for four days without food. He had been sent by
a group to plead with us because he could speak English. Wan and
shaking with fatigue he told us the story of Buchenwald while tired
GIs searched for food in a black-out where almost everyone was in bed.
When he finished his story the American officer ran his fingers
through his hair. “Christ,” he said, “I feel as if I were living
in the Dark Ages.”
Then he turned to me.
“Do the folks back home have any idea of this?” he said “Do they
have any idea at all?”
It is spring here. The apple trees are now in bloom. Daffodils dance
in neat German gardens. Hope has been lighted in hearts which for
years have known nothing but misery and fear. But there is death in
this spring, death in the memory of men and women. And there is death
in the frightened German towns.
Yes, there is even death in the hearts of the American tankers leaning
against their massive vehicles which crouch before the attack like
great beasts under the blossoming trees. The tanker boys are lonesome
for their girls and ice cream and decent jobs and they are sore as
hell at the Krauts.
_(New York Post, April 14, 1945)_
GENERAL DAGER OF 4TH DIVISION
PACKS SUNDAY PUNCH FOR
PATTON’S THIRD