“TIGER JACK’S” SPEARHEADS

By Wes Gallagher

“GENERAL PATTON’S armored spearheads ripped...” Week after week last summer that phrase dotted the news stories of the American Third Army’s unprecedented race across France. The lifting of security wraps now makes it possible to introduce you to Lieutenant General George Patton’s prize “armored spearheads.”

That is, if you can catch up with one. At the height of the summer campaign it was worth your life to do so—particularly with Major General John S. “Tiger Jack” Wood’s crack Fourth Armored Division.

From July 28, when the Fourth jumped off from Cherbourg peninsula, until late September, when it breached the German line on the Moselle River, it operated virtually continuously behind the German lines. And when the Germans launched their big counteroffensive in December, tanks of the 4th rumbled to the relief of the American forces holding the besieged communications center of Bastogne.

During the summer campaign, the Fourth at times was as far as seventy-five miles ahead of the bulk of the Third Army moving in its wake. Supplies had to be brought up in tank-guarded convoys.

Correspondents could catch up with the Fourth’s combat commands with one of these convoys or could take their chances in sixty-mile-an-hour jeep dashes through German-sprinkled territory.

The roads behind Tiger Jack’s clanking hard-boiled armored family were usually considered unsafe for “thin-skinned” vehicles, which means anything less armored than a light tank. And the Lord knows nothing is more thin-skinned than a jeep, unless it’s a correspondent.

Most of Wood’s thousands of soldiers from American farms and fields act as though they themselves were armor-plated—especially Wood. When mine fields halted his tank columns just outside of Coutances in the dash down the Cherbourg peninsula toward Brittany, Wood suddenly appeared at the head of his columns clad immaculately, as always, in polished boots, riding pants, a trim jacket, and sun glasses, which he wears rain or shine.

Wood marched into the town on foot under fire, captured a German soldier and found a patch through the mine fields. He picked his way through the town on foot, sending back a message for his tanks to follow him. The columns never stopped again until they ran out of gasoline six weeks later at the Moselle. The general was later awarded the Distinguished Service Cross for his bravery at Coutances.

Burly and as athletic at fifty-six as he was when he played end for the University of Arkansas and the Military Academy just before the last war, Wood is one general who looks the part. Eternally restless, he paces ceaselessly back and forth, even finding it difficult to sit still long enough to eat his meals. When he does stand still it is with feet wide apart, hands on hips, in an attitude that dares anyone to start something.

Wood is a long-time crony of the rough, tough Third Army’s pistol-packing commander, and is one of the few subordinate generals who are not intimidated by Patton’s roars of disapproval. When Patton roars, Wood roars right back at him. The pacing and roaring prompted one of the division’s Cub observation pilots to pin the nickname “Tiger Jack” on him last summer and it shows signs of sticking. Wood lives in the field with his division and refuses to move out of his tent—and the mud—until his men can do likewise. That means he will be in a tent for the rest of the war. His restlessness and tremendous pride in the division send him on daylight-to-dark visits to every unit, and every man in the division feels Tiger Jack knows him personally.

The best description of Wood comes from an officer in the division who, for the sake of his personal safety, must remain nameless. “The general is a sort of Army edition of Clarence Day’s father in Life with Father,” he says.

In peacetime Wood used to work out his surplus energy on the tennis and squash courts, running his officers ragged, until he got the Palm Springs, California, tennis professional, Lieutenant Lewis Wetherell, as his aide. Wetherell can beat him at tennis, but Wood is tops in squash.

In battle, the Fourth’s commander either flies over the area in a Cub plane as a passenger for a personal look, or grabs his field radio and indulges in a play-by-play direction of the fighting with his field commanders.

No order in the Fourth Armored Division is ever written. Wood gives orders to his field commanders verbally and in person, to make sure they are understood. His commanders do likewise.

The 800-mile drive through the heart of France conducted by the Fourth Armored Division, a masterpiece of strategy, was conducted on such a verbal and personal basis. Wood trained his division to work as a family. He mixed units until every commander was able to recognize another’s voice over the field radio. That did away with confusing code names.

To understand the magnitude of the task of operating such an armored force, visualize a fair-sized small American town suddenly put in steel houses and trucks and zigzagged from New York to Chicago over strange highways so as to cover 1,900 miles—the mileage rolled up by some of the Fourth Armored’s tanks in the fighting from July to September.

Visualize the problem of bringing up some thousands of tons of supplies weekly to feed and maintain this traveling steel village, not to mention the vast amounts of gasoline necessary to keep it rolling. In one day’s advance last summer, the steel monsters consumed 700 gallons of fuel for each mile gained.

Then visualize traveling hospitals, repair shops, kitchens, and a complete telephone and radio system linking all the various units into a co-ordinated whole.

An armored division does not travel as one strung-out column. Usually it is broken into combat commands known as CCA, CCB, etc. The composition of the combat commands changes from task to task. One day CCA might be composed of a battalion of tanks and motorized infantry backed by other attached units, such as combat engineers to build bridges, its own antiaircraft units, tank destroyers, artillery, and its own scouting force of Cub planes and reconnaissance squadrons of armored cars and jeeps. The next day it might be changed to double the number of tanks, half the infantry, and half the attached units, depending on the objective.

The combat commands usually advance in parallel columns, with the tanks in the middle and the infantry on the sides, or vice versa, until opposition is met. Radio and Cub planes link the commands with Wood’s headquarters, which is usually close behind the most advanced command. Each command is self-sustaining for limited periods. At times the commands of the Fourth have been engaged on separate tasks hundreds of miles apart, but usually they are fairly close together so as to be self-supporting.

After you have started this vast mass of material moving on a strange road system, so co-ordinated as to arrive at a given spot at a given time, you have the task of maintaining its complicated mechanism day after day against a hostile force seeking to smash and disrupt it.

That, very roughly, is the problem of fighting the Fourth Armored Division, or any American armored division, for that matter. It is a problem which Tiger Jack’s division solved with a perfection that has been unsurpassed in any battle during this war. No German Panzer division that smashed through Poland in 1939 or France in 1940 or Russia in 1941 accomplished as much in so short a period.

An armored division does not have the room or facilities to take prisoners. Its mission is to cut up the enemy forces and destroy their communications, leaving isolated pockets behind to be mopped up by the infantry division. But the Fourth Armored in two months’ fighting across France, from the last of July to October captured more than 15,000 prisoners, killed 5,000 more Germans, destroyed 317 tanks, 150 large artillery pieces, and 1,500 other German vehicles. During this period the Fourth met and defeated elements of eighteen German divisions and brigades.

An armored division is designed to destroy the fighting power of an enemy and not particularly to capture territory. But consider what the Fourth did in accomplishing its mission. It swept down the Cherbourg peninsula on the right flank of the Third Army, captured Coutances, and raced down the coast to Avranches, where it took vital bridges and dams in an area where the Germans could have held up the American advance for many days if they had had time to blow them. From Avranches, the Fourth drove straight across Brittany, cutting off this great peninsula with its vital harbors by capturing Nantes and Vannes. As a by-product, the division contained the German U-boat base of Lorient.

Then it turned north in a great right hook while still on the right flank of the Third Army. It had the dual job of smashing the enemy before it and at the same time protecting the Army’s exposed flank in central France. This was one of the most difficult assignments of the war.

Orleans, Sens, Troyes, St. Dizier, and Commercy fell in rapid succession to the division’s highly-developed shock attacks. The Fourth pushed on to cross the Moselle River and encircle Nancy, forcing the Germans to withdraw from the city which for centuries has been the key to northern France. During the advance, crossings were forced on the Loire, Seine, Marne, Meuse, and Meurthe Rivers.

Once halted north of Nancy, and only by lack of supplies Tiger Jack’s ironclad family proved it could fight as well on the defensive as on the offensive when it repelled the heaviest German tank counterattacks of the campaign, destroying more than 200 German tanks in fifteen days of fighting from September into October.

So much for the cold statistics on Patton’s number one “spearhead.”

The Fourth’s energetic commander is not the only individualist in the division. It is full of happy extroverts, and all seem obsessed with the idea that the war must be fought twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, at top speed.

For example, there is the general’s personal reconnaissance Cub pilot, Major Charles Carpenter, a former Praying Colonel football player from Centre College and more recently a history teacher in Moline, Illinois, high school. A history teacher does not seem the type to earn the nickname of “Bazooka Charlie,” but Carpenter is a legend in an outfit where reckless bravery is commonplace.

If there is a fight within a hundred miles, he is in it or over it. His nickname stems from the six bazookas tied to the muslin-and-wood wings of his tiny Cub plane and fired from a trigger in the cockpit. Cubs were made to fly behind the Allied lines, not over the enemy. A good-sized rock in the right place would knock one of them down. But Carpenter tied on his bazookas and started flying over the German lines looking for tanks to shoot at. He has at least five of them to his credit.

More often than not Carpenter has landed in the middle of a busy battlefield to take a personal look, and he has taken an uncounted number of loose Germans as prisoners.

The legend started last summer when Carpenter was commanding the Cub unit attached to the division and was out in a jeep scouting for an advanced landing ground. He came upon a group of infantry pinned down in a ditch by sporadic 88 fire. There was also an American Sherman tank which was not advancing.

Carpenter jumped on top of the tank, grabbed the 50-caliber machine gun and fired a burst over the infantry’s head, with the advice that the next burst would be lower unless they attacked. Then, riding on top of the tank without a helmet and firing the 50-caliber, he led an attack that broke up the stalemate and took the immediate objective.

But he drove on. The German tanks in the vicinity were fighting a rear-guard action, and every time Carpenter came to a corner he would yell down into the turret, “Let ’em have it!” and the tank’s 75-mm. would bang away. This worked fine for five corners, but on the sixth he yelled, the 75 fired—and some distance away the bulldozer on another Sherman flew high in the air. No one was injured, but since both tanks involved belonged to another division, Carpenter was arrested. The irate commander was all for shooting the hard-working history teacher on the spot. Wood, hearing of the incident, rushed over and rescued his Cub commander and made him his personal pilot.

Carpenter weighs over 200, as does Wood, and with both of them flying in a flimsy Cub, the plane waddles around in the air like a bloated duck. However, weight or no weight, the bazookas are always loaded when it takes off.

Carpenter is quite outspoken in his ideas on how to fight a war. Briefly they are, “Attack, attack, and then attack again.” The whole division, from the enlisted men to the commanding general, echoes his sentiments.

There is Sergeant Edward A. Rejrat, a former steelworker from Scranton, Pennsylvania. He’s a tank commander. Rejrat’s thirty-ton Sherman turned a corner in a narrow street in Avranches to come face to face with a fifty-six-ton German Tiger tank sixty yards away. Rejrat ordered the tank driver to put on full speed and ram the Tiger before it could bring its gun to bear. One shot, and the Sherman would have been a tangled mass of wreckage.

The two steel monsters crashed with a metallic roar. The long-barreled 88 was too big to swing around at close quarters and engage the American tank. Rejrat brought his shorter 75 up against the turret of the Tiger and cut loose with four quick thunderous shots which rattled the American tank crew around like peas in a pod. The concussion from the last shell, a high explosive, overturned the Sherman, but Rejrat and his crew scampered out and away from the burning Tiger.

You couldn’t spend any time around the Fourth without hearing a dozen men say, “The guy you want to see is Clarke of the CCA.”

They were referring to General Bruce C. Clarke of Syracuse, New York, then a colonel commanding the CCA of the Fourth. In eight weeks of violent fighting he won the reputation of being one of the most brilliant young armored-force strategists in either the First or Third American armies, and certainly the most unorthodox and daring. Later Clarke was promoted to brigadier general and put in command of a combat team of the Seventh Armored Division. It was Clarke who delayed the Germans’ December breakthrough in Belgium by holding the key road junction of St. Vith against overwhelming odds, not for two days —as he had been ordered to—but for five.

Clarke served as an enlisted man in the Coast Artillery in the last war and later was graduated from West Point. He also holds degrees in engineering from Cornell and a bachelor of laws degree from La Salle University. In one tour of duty he taught military science at the University of Tennessee and served as wrestling coach there.

Clarke developed the CCA’s shattering shock assaults which captured German strongholds before the Nazi commanders knew what happened. At Troyes, where it looked like suicide to make a frontal assault, he spread his command out in old desert style and rushed the city at top speed, overrunning German gun positions before they could fire and hurdling antitank ditches. He forced his way into Troyes and took the garrison town in a matter of hours when it might well have taken days.

The rule book says that tanks should not try to fight in cities, but Clarke sent his medium tanks racing into Orleans so fast that they caught German officers walking in the streets with packages under their arms and shot them down in their tracks. In the ensuing all-night fight Clarke’s tanks fought up one street and down another and cleared Orleans without losing a single tank.

While preparing to attack Commercy, of World War I fame, Clarke heard that the Germans were about to blow the bridge. He quickly gathered up every available vehicle and tank and charged down into the city, firing every gun in a typical high-speed shock assault which makes use of the tremendous fire power of an armored division’s automatic weapons. So frightened were the Germans that they fled without blowing a single bridge, and the Nazi commander escaped in a staff car without his shirt.

Clarke led some of these attacks in his own tank. In others, he flew in a Cub over the attacking columns, directing the battles verbally by radio.

He has done just about everything with tanks that supposedly could not be done. Tanks, for example, are not supposed to be a match for Germany’s famed 88 gun, but Clarke’s Shermans have attacked and overrun dozens of German guns and shut the crews before they could fire a round. He has that rare faculty of being able to pick the enemy’s weak spot almost at a glance, and has so inspired the confidence of his men that they believe any attack he plans is certain of success.

I first met Clarke on the side of a hill north of Nancy. A tank battle was under way near by. He had rolled up in a dust-covered jeep for a quick conference with General Wood and Major General Manton Eddy, commander of the Twelfth Corps in the Third Army.

The enlisted men sitting around in foxholes and armored cars had taken the arrival of the generals with the usual indifference of front-line soldiers, but when the dusty jeep arrived with the husky tanned colonel, necks craned and there were murmurs, “Here comes Clarke.”

A strict disciplinarian and rather coldly reserved, Clarke did not enjoy the friendly place in the hearts of the men of the division that Wood commands, but there was no doubting the respect of officers and men for his ability.

While a stray German gun, which had been overrun but whose crew apparently was unaware it was surrounded by portions of an armored division, banged away so close that the concussion moved your shirt, Clarke spread a map on the ground and the two generals knelt down on each side and discussed the situation as though they were in their own homes.

None of the three looked up as infantry probed the side of the hill for the hidden gun. After getting his instructions, Clarke jumped up and was gone in a matter of seconds back toward his combat command.

A few days later, when rain bogged down the tanks, I was able to corner Clarke in a muddy straw-strewn tent and record some of his ideas on tank warfare.

“Warfare is mental, not physical,” Clarke began. “When you upset the enemy you have him licked, particularly the German. He is big and slow to react, and if you cut his communications and lines of contact he will just take to the woods. But if you give him time to sit down and get out the rule book, he is tough as Hell.”

Clarke himself has little respect for rule books, although he knows and reads them all. “We received the other day a battle-experience note in which some joker wrote that the American Sherman with its 75 is no match for the German forty-five-ton Panther tank with its heavy armor,” he explained. “That would have scared hell out of us if we hadn’t just knocked out more than a hundred Panthers with our Shermans and tank destroyers in a three-day battle.”

The American tanks were more maneuverable than the heavy German models, he explained, and could race in and fire before the Germans could bring their slower turrets to bear.

“Most people and too many officers think a tank was made to fire its big gun,” Clarke continued, striking his fist in his hand. “It wasn’t. It was made to carry a machine gun into close quarters with the enemy. The tank machine gun is the greatest weapon of this war and we should have more of them on our tanks. The big gun is for defense against other tanks.”

Clarke believes that the desert battles in Libya in which large forces of tanks stood off and slugged one another have warped the true conception of armored fighting. Tanks must keep on the move and close in on the enemy to get at the soft spots, such as supply columns, headquarters, and gun crews, he said.

“Tanks are weapons of terror. They have a definite mental effect on the enemy when they come charging in, firing their machine guns. From Normandy to the Moselle River most of my tanks never fired their basic loads for their big guns.

“In fact,” concluded Clarke, “the safest place to be in this war is behind the enemy lines. They don’t know what the hell to do when you get there, and they just run.”

Clarke had the statistics to prove his point. The whole division had suffered fewer casualties in eight weeks of offensive warfare behind the German lines than it did in two weeks of defensive warfare north of the Moselle. Small wonder that the Fourth Armored Division’s battle cry is “Attack, attack, and then attack again!” (Liberty Magazine, Feb. 10, 1945)