The Armored Fist: The 712th Tank Battalion in the Second World War by Aaron Elson

Author:Aaron Elson [Elson, Aaron]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fonthill Media
Published: 2013-11-20T22:00:00+00:00

23

The First Moselle Crossing

While the third platoon of Company C was fighting in Maizières les Metz, much of the battalion was in reserve or used for indirect firing on the fortresses. In the beginning of November, that was about to change. The 90th Division was about to cross a flooded Moselle River that was as much as a mile wide. Before the crossing, Patton addressed the troops. Arnold Brown recited the speech almost word for word nearly fifty years later when I interviewed him in Owensboro, Kentucky.

‘We got a message from the regiment, “All officers report to the division rear.” So we don’t know what’s up. We all go back and they had a building there, kind of like a sports arena where they can get all of the officers of the entire division in the building. I thought that’s taking quite a chance if somebody dropped a bomb. You can imagine how many officers were in that building. With a stage up front and we’re all waiting to see what’s going to happen. The first thing, here comes General Patton walking across the stage. He walks from one end of the stage to the other and he walked back and stopped. And he said, “Men, this is it!”

‘I’m not going to quote all his curse words. He said, “We’re going to cross that damn Moselle River at 2 o’clock in the morning. I want to tell you a little bit about the enemy over there. Now, in these fortress battalions, the Germans don’t have their best troops. Their armored forces, their crack troops, they’re back in reserve. But some of the fillers in these fortress battalions, some of them are old men. Kill the sonofabitches. Some of them have been slightly wounded in combat or maybe they’ve got a cripple leg or one arm missing, but they can man those machine guns in these forts. Kill the sonofabitches. This business about taking prisoners. When you accept an enemy as a prisoner, you’ve searched him and disarmed him and he’s in your possession, you treat him according to the Geneva Convention. Now there’s nothing says you can’t shoot the sonofabitch before you’ve accepted him as a prisoner. What I mean is, some of their snipers. They’ll take camouflage in a tree and some of them are going to let you pass and are camouflaged behind you, and they’ll kill a few of your men. Then when you locate his position, he wants to come out and surrender. Don’t accept that sonofabitch. Kill him.”’

Dick Bengoechea, the replacement Pfc, also remembered seeing Patton prior to the Moselle crossing. ‘At Metz, when we were all out of gas,’ he said at the 1995 reunion in Louisville, ‘they made us stand in the rain, miserable, in our raincoats waiting for him for about two hours. And he drives up in a command car and he says, “You’re the sloppiest bunch of goddamn soldiers in this whole Third Army.” And then he said, “That outfit I just came from was a sharp bunch of soldiers.

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