Army & Navy – COMMAND: Patton Legend: More

No other U.S. general has got himself in so much hot water or made so many legends in this war as flamboyant George S. Patton Jr. Last week, as he was banished to the command of a phantom Fifteenth Army (see FOREIGN NEWS), he landed in the middle of another. The background:

In March 1945 the 4th Armored Division of Patton’s Third Army rested, out of breath, on a bridgehead along the Main. Some 50 miles northeast, near the town of Hammelburg, was a stalag filled with Allied prisoners of war. Hammelburg was in the path of General Alexander Patch’s Seventh Army, which eventually would overrun it. But slashing Georgie Patton, at the pinnacle of his career, decided to take matters into his own hands. He ordered a task force of the 4th Division to deliver the prisoners.

The man who got the assignment was tall, quiet Captain (now Major) Abraham Baum. His task force: 301 men, 53 armored vehicles. They took off, thundering out obliquely from the main course of Patton’s spectacular drive.

The country was solidly held by the enemy. Baum’s force crashed through Aschaffenburg. German rocket and small-arms fire riddled them. They lost men and vehicles. They hit Gemünden, where a whole German division had just unloaded. They destroyed 50 cars in the railroad yards and “barreled through.”

End of an Exploit. Apparently convinced that the whole 4th Division was driving through, the Germans rushed in men and weapons, counterattacked with tanks. A German plane spotted Baum’s column. All that day, in Gemünden, Baum and his men fought desperately. They freed 500 Russians from a stalag. Finally, with the remnants of their force, they assaulted Hammelburg.

They stormed inside and opened the gates to 4,500 Allied prisoners. Some took to the woods and mountains, others were too weak to escape. German tanks closed in on Baum’s remaining half-dozen tanks. Baum was wounded and captured. His force was wiped out and all but seven of his men were captured or killed.

Ten days later, Hammelburg was duly overrun by Patch’s Seventh Army.

Why did Patton order such a desperate undertaking? One of the prisoners at Hammelburg was Patton’s son-in-law, Lieut. Colonel John K. Waters, who was badly wounded in the fracas. Patton, denying that he even knew Waters was there when he launched the operation, displayed his personal diary to prove it; his motive, he said, was concern for all Allied prisoners. Some men (including Hearst Correspondent Austen Lake, who was with the Third Army at the time and told the story last week) wondered if Patton should not have shown more concern for his own soldiers. Major Baum, hospitalized and back in the U.S., offered an explanation which Patton himself did not think to mention. The 4th Division was able to pile through for a gain of 140 miles as a result of the confusion created among the Germans by Baum’s gallant force.