DEATH AND APPLE BLOSSOMS

By Russell Davenport

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)