Following his debrief of the Moscow Trio at the US embassy in Moscow during the third week of February, General Deane had cabled Washington with the news that Paul Goode and Johnny Waters were being transferred by the Wehrmacht deep into Germany at the head of evacuated US personnel from Oflag 64. Deane also made a point of contacting General George Patton’s headquarters with the same intelligence.
“One story they (Gruenberg, Colley and Dimling) told, which was of considerable interest to me,” Deane would say later, “concerned a lifelong friend, Colonel Paul R. Goode.” Via the trio of escapers, Deane learned that Goode had remained with the Schubin kriegies to look after the men under him, ignoring opportunities to personally escape. From the trio, too, Deane ascertained that Johnny Waters had remained with the party. “We were also able to let General Patton know that his son-in-law, Colonel J. K. Waters, was in the best of health but was still in German custody, being moved to a camp in the interior,” Deane would reveal.1
Clearly, Deane was hopeful that his close friend Paul Goode would be liberated by General Patton’s advancing US Third Army. And he sagely alerted Patton to the fact that his son-in-law was in Goode’s party, a fact that might be expected to win Patton’s attention and interest. It did. Patton sought information from US Military Intelligence on the precise whereabouts of Waters and Goode’s Schubin group. On Sunday, March 25, General Patton was informed that Waters was one of 300 Schubin inmates who were now in the Oflag XIII-B POW camp at Hammelburg.
At Patton’s headquarters, the general’s staff began poring over maps of Bavaria to pinpoint the exact location of this Hammelburg camp. Twenty-five miles west of the city of Schweinfurt, the center of German ball-bearing manufacture, Hammelburg was a sleepy town of 6,000 residents just sixty miles from the advancing Third Army’s current position. To date, the town had been hardly touched by the war.
The source of US intelligence about the presence of Waters and the other Schubin POWs at Hammelburg has never been revealed. To have been so close to the truth, even if the number of Schubinites said to be at Hammelburg was understated by some 200, that source was possibly a clandestine radio transmitter in the possession of the Serbs within XIII-B. But at this point, US Military Intelligence and Patton’s HQ were totally unaware that another 1,000 US officers had already been imprisoned at Hammelburg for some weeks when the men from Schubin arrived.
Late that same evening of March 25, an order was flashed from Patton’s HQ to the 4th Armored Division ordering the creation of an armored task force that would race to Hammelburg through enemy-held territory to liberate the Schubinites at Oflag XIII-B. Patton’s personal motto, as he’d told GIs in England just prior to D-Day, consisted of three words: “Audacity! Audacity! Audacity!” And that was what he expected the 4th Armored to apply to this mission, catching “Jerry” off guard and pulling off a stunning rescue.
The order was received by the 4th Armored’s commander, Brigadier General William M. Hoge. He resisted, complaining that his troops were exhausted and he couldn’t spare the men required for such a special operation. Not to be denied, Patton rang Hoge personally. Half-bullying, half-cajoling Hoge into agreeing to execute the order, Patton promised to make up any losses incurred during the mission, man for man, tank for tank.
For the job, the unhappy Hoge selected his Combat Command B. When informed of the task force requirements early on the morning of March 26, Combat Command B’s CO, thirty-year-old Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams, also resisted the order until informed that General Patton was flying down to see him personally about the mission. And that mission must commence at 5:00 that afternoon!
At 10:00 a.m., Patton duly arrived at Abrams’ HQ, complete with his famed varnished helmet displaying his general’s stars, his riding breeches, his tankers’ boots, and his holstered, pearl-handled revolver. When Patton demanded to know who would be leading the mission, Abrams nominated himself. But Patton said he wanted a small, fast task force under a less senior officer. Abrams had already ordered Lieutenant Colonel Hal Cohen to withdraw his 10th Armored Infantry Battalion from combat at Aschaffenburg on the River Main to act as his second-in-command on the mission. So Abrams now named Cohen to lead—depending on the condition of his piles.
“Piles!” exclaimed Patton. A student of military history, Patton knew that the emperor Napoleon had suffered from severe piles at the time of the Battle of Waterloo and had been forced to command his army from a chair rather than from the back of his horse for much of the battle. Patton sent for a medical officer.
Patton, his aides, Abrams, and the battalion surgeon descended on Lieutenant Colonel Cohen’s headquarters, where Cohen and his deputies were discussing the makeup of the required task force. Patton promptly asked Cohen to step into the next room with the surgeon and himself.
“Drop your pants, and grab your ankles,” Patton then ordered.
When Cohen complied, the surgeon whistled, partly in surprise, partly out of sympathy, before declaring that half a dozen of Cohen’s hemorrhoids were the size of birds’ eggs.
“That is some sorry ass,” Patton declared.2
The ugly sight convinced Patton that someone else would have to lead this mission. Cohen chose his S3, his operations officer, Captain Abraham Baum. Just three days shy of his twenty-fourth birthday, the six-foot-two-inch, long-nosed Baum was a New Yorker, a native of the Bronx. Enlisting as a private in 1941, he’d been quickly commissioned and promoted. Baum would later say that, when invited in for a meeting with General Patton, he was thinking, “What the hell am I doing here?”3
Patton, apprised of Baum’s impressive combat record, immediately approved his appointment to lead the task force, which, from this point forward, would be known as Task Force Baum. Taking the young captain aside, Patton told him that, if he pulled off this mission, he would be up for a Medal of Honor. But what was the mission? Patton had yet to pass on that information. When he departed the 10th Armored Battalion HQ, the general left behind Major Alexander Stiller. Stiller had served with Patton during the First World War and had been his trusted aide all through this war. Major Stiller, said Patton as he went out the door, would fill everyone in on the details of the mission. Only now, from Stiller, would the armored division officers learn their precise objective.
Why, Cohen wanted to know, was the task force being sent to Hammelburg?
Stiller replied that there was a POW camp in the town that contained 300 US Army officers who had previously been imprisoned at Schubin.
“And…?” Cohen asked.
“Patton wants them liberated,” Stiller advised matter-of-factly.4
Not only were the Schubin boys to be liberated, Stiller revealed, the task force would have to bring them back to American lines. The plan was to race through the night to Hammelburg, arriving there by dawn and surprising its defenders. Stiller startled the gathering even further by announcing that he would be going along on the mission, but merely as an observer.
At the time, no one in that room could figure out why Stiller would be tagging along. Only later did they put two and two together: Stiller would be only man in the task force who knew John K. Waters by sight. Stiller actually admitted to Abe Baum before the task force set off that his mission was to rescue Waters, but, until his dying day, General Patton would declare that this mission was not about rescuing his son-in-law. Many others would think otherwise.
The task force was quickly put together by Baum and his superior, Lieutenant Colonel Cohen. Patton had specified that no more than 300 men be involved. Cohen felt that something more like 3,000 men should be sent on a mission like this, but orders were orders. The task force’s main element would be C Company, 37th Tank Battalion, made up of ten M4 Sherman medium tanks. With a crew of five and a 75 mm main gun, the iconic thirty-ton Sherman was a match for almost anything the Wehrmacht possessed.
The Shermans, commanded by Second Lieutenant William J. “Bill” Nutto, would be complemented by a platoon of five sparsely armored four-man M3 light tanks equipped with 37 mm guns. From the 37th Tank Battalion’s D Company, the M3s would be commanded by Second Lieutenant William Weaver. The M3 had the advantage of being able to turn easily and quickly in tight spaces, which the Sherman was not able to do. Further fire support would be provided by a platoon of three self-propelled 105 mm guns commanded by Technical Sergeant Charles O. Graham from Thurmond, West Virginia. Essentially, the SPGs (self-propelled guns) were Shermans with a fixed heavy gun in place of a turret. There would also be an M29C Weasel amphibious tank in the column.5
To bring out the 300 POWS, twenty-seven halftracks were included. They were manned by the 10th Armored Infantry’s Company A, commanded by Captain Robert Lange. Open trucks with normal wheels up front and rubber tracks on the rear, halftracks had a driver and radio operator who rode in the cab plus a machine gunner in the back and could also carry ten infantrymen comfortably. In Task Force Baum, one halftrack would serve as a maintenance vehicle for the tanks while another, equipped with a long-range radio, would be the column’s command vehicle. Some of the halftracks were loaded with jerry cans filled with enough gasoline to fuel the entire task force’s return from Hammelburg. Baum also had orders to use any German vehicles he captured to carry POWs should he lose halftracks en route to Oflag XIII-B.
There would also be eight jeeps in the column. An infantry reconnaissance detachment of nine men under Second Lieutenant Norman Hoffner occupied three jeeps. The other jeeps would be those of Captain Baum and his aide, Sergeant Ellis Wise, a medics’ jeep, a maintenance jeep, and one carrying Patton’s tag-along aide, Major Stiller. Altogether, Task Force Baum would consist of 54 vehicles and 312 men.6
Cohen and Baum decided to send the task force through the red-roofed German village of Schweinheim. Less than a mile south of Aschaffenburg, it was still held by German forces. After passing through Schweinheim, the task force would have just eight miles to travel before reaching Reichsstrasse (Highway) 26, the main east-west route to Hammelburg. Cohen and Baum figured that, once on that highway, everything should be plain sailing for the armored column.
To prepare the way for Task Force Baum, it would be necessary to blast a way through Schweinheim’s narrow streets. For this job, Cohen’s superior, Lieutenant Colonel Abrams, selected the Shermans of B Company, 37th Tank Battalion, under Captain Richard Pancake, and the foot soldiers of Captain Adrian Tessier’s B Company, 10th Armored Infantry. Pancake and Tessier worked together so regularly, and so well, that they had adopted novel radio code names: “Chicken” and “Shit.”
By 5:00 p.m., Task Force Baum and Pancake and Tessier’s units had assembled on a low hill within sight of Schweinheim. At 8:30, an artillery barrage raked the village. Thirty minutes later, Chicken and Shit ordered their units forward. Two hundred yards into Schweinheim, the lead American tank was knocked out by a handheld Panzerfaust. The German equivalent of the bazooka, the Panzerfaust was more effective than the two-man American weapon. Forerunner of today’s rocket-propelled grenade launcher, or RPG, and packing a warhead at the end of a rocket, this throwaway, one-time anti-armor weapon could be used by a single untrained operator to destroy even the heaviest tank if he could get close enough. Millions of low-cost Panzerfausts were produced, and there were plenty of them in Schweinheim.
Pancake’s second tank platoon peeled off into side streets, only for defenders to attack them from cellars in their rear and from rooftops. Those defenders were a combination of women and old men of the Volkssturm home guard and cadets from the Waffen-SS officer school that had until recently operated in Aschaffenburg. After a second Sherman was abandoned by its crew when it was rocked by a grenade blast, a German jumped into it, started it up, and turned one of its machine guns on the advancing Americans.
With Pancake’s armor stalled, Tessier’s infantry had to fight their way along the village’s main street, house by house, sustaining casualties all the way. An accurate German mortar proved particularly mettlesome, and Tessier personally led six GIs at the run in an outflanking move that caught the four-man mortar team by surprise. As one of his men kicked the mortar over, Tessier grabbed the German lieutenant in charge and shoved him up against a wall, knocking the man’s coal scuttle helmet off in the brief scuffle.
“Amerikanisches Schwein!” cursed the lieutenant.7
Perhaps it was the curse. Or the SS tabs on the lieutenant’s collar. Or the sneer on his face. Or all three. But Tessier didn’t take kindly to this guy. Using his free hand, he quickly reached down to the combat knife he kept sheathed in his boot, straightened, then slit the lieutenant’s throat. As the German sagged to the ground, gurgling, the three teenagers on his mortar team were on their knees, begging for their lives. Tessier had them taken to the rear.
Despite this, by 11:00 that night the main street’s last ten houses were still in German hands, and Pancake’s tanks and Tessier’s infantry were bogged down. Meanwhile, on the hillside overlooking the village, Abe Baum had been impatiently pacing back and forth in front of his waiting column. Below, he could see houses burning while exploding shells periodically lit up the moonless night. Pancake and Tessier had estimated it would take thirty minutes to clear Schweinheim. They, and Task Force Baum, were now way behind schedule.
Jumping into his jeep, Baum drove down into the village to find out what the holdup was. Seeing the blockages, Baum told Pancake to get his tanks up onto the sidewalks. Task Force Baum was coming through, no matter what. Back to the hilltop he raced. With sirens on his tanks wailing, Baum pushed his column down into the village and along the main street in single file, M3s leading the way. They took small-arms fire, but the entire column emerged undamaged on the other side of Schweinheim around midnight. With pedals to the metal to make up time, Task Force Baum plowed on through the night, heading for the highway to Hammelburg.