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.