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.”
[Illustration: Time magazine banner]
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