4th Armored Mentioned in Congress

The fighting qualities of American tanks as compared with the German Tiger and Panther tanks, was the cause of a heated, but brief, discussion in Congress early in 1945. General Patton’s report to the Deputy Chief of Staff, which was read into the Congressional Reoord, included the following:

“In the current operation had the Fourth Armored Division been equipped with Tiger and Panther tanks and been required to make the move from Saarguemines to Arlon, then through to Bastogne, from Bastogne to the Rhine, and now to Mainz—it would have been necessary to rearmor it twice; and furthermore, it would have had serious if not insurmountable difficulty in crossing rivers.”

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200,000 Germans In Trap

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.”

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)

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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.