4th Armored Moved Suddenly and Fast

Sgt. Joe McCarthy, YANK Staff Correspondent, reporting the seemingly impossible swing of Third Army units toward Bastogne at the height of Von Rundstedt’s breakthrough, in the January 21, 1945 issue of YANK, included the following:

The most spectacular role in the move was that played by the Fourth Armored Division which dashed to the aid of the besieged 101st Airborne Division at Bastogne. The story of what happened during the same time to the 26th Division, which moved up on the Fourth Armored’s right flank and tackled the tough job of crossing the Sure River to the east of Bastogne without getting much of a play in the newspapers, is less dramatic but more typical. It gives you some idea of what it was like for the average infantry outfit that was in on this deal during the joyous Christmas season of 1944.

Nobody in the 26th Division can get over the way their part of the Third Army made its move north from Metz. Probably no military movement of such a large scale was ever carried out with more speed and less red tape. The book was thrown out of the window and all the OCS rules about road discipline were forgotten. Each outfit simply tried to get its vehicles on the road as soon as possible and, after they were on the road, to keep moving.

“And them roads were jammed,” one of the truck drivers said. “Us and the Fourth Armored and God only knows how many other divisions. We were bumper to bumper all the way. Good thing it was a cloudy day. If the Germans ever had air out, they would have slaughtered us.”