NEW TO WAR, BUT BATTLE-WISE VETERANS
The road was open. Of the nine roads and two railroads running into Bastogne, this path cracked by the 4th was the only link with the outside. The first of 200 trucks and ambulances poured into Bastogne at 0500, Dec. 27. Hundreds of wounded defenders of Bastogne were evacuated that day.
CC B, battling to the east of the roadway, cleared a swath to the north. The l0th Armd. Inf. also reached Bastogne's perimeter defenses. CC A, with the 35th Inf. Div. on its east flank, hammered against the heavy resistance that blocked the Arlon-Bastogne highway until Dec. 29. Although Bastogne no longer was besieged, the battle had not ended.
German reaction was swift, furious. Fourth Armd. had made the Bastogne road hub an offensive center. Nazi divisions swarmed to the corridor like wasps to a broken hive.
Dec. 30, the east flank of the corridor rocked from the crushing attack of a panzer division supported by elements of two Volksgrenadier divisions and remnants of the Para division. The enemy drove to Lutrebois, 1200 yards from the main highway.
The weather was murky, but 1st Lt. Robert E. Pearson, Highland Park, Mich., was flying observation in his Cub for the 22nd Armd. FA. Below, tanks were skirting the edge of the woods at Lutrebois. Lt. Pearson swooped down to 75 feet. The tanks looked German. Machine gun and rifle fire flashing past his cockpit confirmed it.
The lieutenant hustled off to warn the 35th. He marked the panzer's position on a map, dropped it to tankers. First Lt. John Kingsley, Dunkirk, N.Y., placed his six mediums in ambush. As the Mark Vs poked into the open with their flanks toward the Shermans, gunners let them have it.
Panthers surged forward in twos and threes past their own burning tanks while Shermans socked them from turret defilade. Eleven German tanks strayed out. All were destroyed without a scratch to Co. B's six mediums.
"If that German tank company commander isn't dead I wish they ; would make him a battalion commander," the lieutenant said. "I wish they were all that dumb."
Artillery, directed by Lt. Pearson, also worked over the panzers, set two more vehicles aflame. Fourth Armd., 35th Inf. Div., and Thunderbolts braving the low ceiling, knocked out 55 tanks that day.
Stopped cold, the Germans clung ; to the Lutrebois pocket. They kept it for more than a week at terrific cost. The 4th's three artillery battalions poured the heaviest barrage they had ever fired into the the small area.
From Dec. 30 to Jan. 6, a total of 24,483 rounds of 105mm howitzers cascaded into Lutrebois and the woods north and east. The New Year came in with a bang as armored artillerymen greeted it with 7000 shells on Dec. 31. The 66th FA alone fired 3046 rounds.
The corridor held. Impaled on Bastogne, the German offensive sputtered, then died. Von Rundstedt pulled back his 5th and 6th Panzer Armies and his infantry.
At the end of the battle, the 4th Armd. Div. could figure up what it had done to the Wehrmacht in six months of combat. It had taken 19,221 prisoners up to Jan. 7, 1945, killed and wounded as many, destroyed 414 tanks, 1618 vehicles and 225 drtillery pieces. Twenty-six German planes had fallen to division's anti-aircraft guns.
Knocking out a Panther, killing or capturing a platoon or battalion had become routine. No one, for example took particular notice of prisoner No. 19,000. No one could say who he was or who captured him.
It .was difficult with prisoner No. 1. Everybody knew about him. He was a tall, bedraggled SS conscript, who slogged through a Normandy marsh July 26, 1944, to surrender to Co. C, 24th Armd. Engr. Bn. He was received with curiosity by the men, with enthusiasm by intelligence officers.
War still was new to the division. The 4th had been in combat nine days and in France less than three weeks. Tough and confident after three and a half years training, it hit Utah Beach, July 11, 1944. LSTs and LCTs disgorged tanks, half-tracks and peeps off Varreville, near Ste. Mere Eglise.
By July 16, the outfit had assembled in the calvados and apple orchard country near Barneville-sur-Mer on the west side of the Cherbourg peninsula. Tankers, trained as a part of Gen. Patron's Third Army, learned with surprise they had been transferred to First Army.
Third Army was inoperative as well as top secret, so the division went to VIII Corps, First Army. From Corps, division received its first combat orders. By midnight July 17, the 4th was poised to take over the front held by the 4th Inf. Div. north of Raids, south of Carentan.
The 53rd Bn. was first into the line that warm summer night. In the first 30 hours, the battalion and division suffered its first casualties. An estimated 100 Nazi paratroopers and SS troops infiltrated the battalion's left flank. Six armored infantrymen and officers were killed, 25 wounded.
The l0th took over July 19 and pushed forward 100 yards in advance of the line held by the 4th Inf. Div. In battered Meautis, division headquarters got acquainted with 88’s during a 15-minute shelling.
The narrow defensive front settled down to a mortar, machine gun and artillery exchange over swamps, hedgerows and dead cows. Tank and TD’s sat back as artillery. The 25th Cav, Recon. Sqdn., Mech., commanded by Lt. Col. Leslie Goodall, Holyoke, Mass., dismounted to fight with armored infantry.
Allied forces crammed in the Normandy beachhead area got ready to hit the line July 26. The Air Corps struck first. Men of the 4th Armd. climbed from foxholes and tank turrets to watch the greatest display of air power ever witnessed up to that time. Bombs from 3000 planes rained down incessantly.
Fourth Armd. held the small sector between the 83 rd Inf. Div. on the east and the 90th Inf. Div. to the west. The plan called for the doughs to pinch off the 4th's zone. Then, armor was to spring through.
Eager to hit the road in the offensive, tankers clambered from foxholes into vehicles. Led by Maj. Gen. John S. Wood, the division moved out at 0500, July 28. CC B was the point for the combat command columns. Despite mines and road blocks, tanks lurched through the rubble of Periers and swarmed into Coutances, first city to fall to CC B and the division.
American armor was rolling everywhere. The 2nd and 3rd Armd. Divs. jabbed along on the left while 6th Armd. punched to the right. It was like old home week at Fort Knox.