4 PANZER DIVISIONS ARE ROUTED
(Reprinted froth Stars and Stripes, Sept. 11, 1944) By Paul V. Connors

A year ago this month the 30th Infantry Division was going about the rather boring business of maneuvers in Tennessee wondering if it would ever get the chance to wear combat ribbons.

Last week the 30th Division received a special commendation given by Maj. Gen. Lawton J. Collins. Seventh Corps commander. The award was given for the magnificent job the 30th had done in holding off the last major attack of the German Seventh Army !n the vicinity of Mortain early last month. Addressed to the Division's commanding general, Major General L. S. Hobbs, it read in part:

"Your division, with the aid of the Third Armored Division and an infantry regiment of the Fourth Division, bore the brunt of the desperate attack of the German Seventh Army.

With the assistance of the artillery of the Fourth Division and the Third Armored, the
30th Infantry Division checked this penetration and then destroyed the German force which made the advance."

120th Cited Specially

Gen. Collins paid special tribute to "the tenacity of the Second Battalion of the 120th Infantry which, when isolated on a hill east of Mortaln, held out for five consecutive days against determined efforts of the Germans to annihilate it".

For five rugged days the "Old Hickory" Division slugged 1t out with the best of the Wehrmacht, four infantry-armor divisions, including the SS Adolf Hitler Panzers. The Germans were shooting for Avranches and the sea, attempting to split the American armies in Normandy and Brittany. They didn't quite make 1t.

The 30th didn't just "happen" to be holding the sector from Le Mesnil Tove through St. Barthelmy to Mortain when the Germans threw their last desperate punch before turning to ran.

Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley, commanding the 12th Army group, had selected the division to hold the major part of the bottom of the "pocket". releasing other units to work the side of the bag in which thousands of Heinies were finally trapped.

Attack Came Quickly

The Germans attacked shortly after the 30th took up its position. Taking advantage of Food road networks, the enemy struck furiously in several sectors. The fury of the attack stunned the Yanks.

A battalion, the 1st of the 117th, was overrun In the St. Barthelmy sector; the second battalion of the 120th was isolated "lost" on a hill overlooking Mortaln. An artillery battalion used direct fire. so close were German tanks. In several instances, engineers, artillerymen and cavalrymen fought as infantrymen. The bayonet was an overworked weapon - it was that kind of scrap.

The bazooka played the most prominent of roles, knocking out numbers of tanks. stalling others which were then duck soup for rocket firing Typhoons of the RAF which flew to support the foot troops on the afternoon of the first day of fighting.

After three days of wild mixing the Germans were beaten off in most sectors. the supply line between the peninsulas remained intact. It took rive days to rescue the heroic "lost battalion". Though its casualties were high, the 30th Division had completed its assigned mission in a superb manner.

By FRANK CONNIFF, International News Service Staff Correspondent.
WITH THE 9TH ARMY INSIDE GERMANY, Nov. 18. - More than a score of 30th Division doughboys moving up through German territory Thursday night came upon a heavily mined area before a Nazi strongpoint and their cries after unexpected explosions tore their bodies echoed hideously through the night.

Screams and moans of the pain-tortured Americans came constantly from the area of that certain minefield while other doughboys trudging through the dark only a few feet away were forced to ignore the heart-rending pleas of the comrades calling for aid last they too incur the same fate.  Some who disdained the danger and heroically went to the rescue were blown up themselves.

The story was told by Pvt. Henry Philips, of Chicago, one of the survivors.  He recited the details in a command post during a savage Nazi shelling which ruined several jeeps parked outside and killed three persons down the street.

"IT WAS HEART-BREAKING."

Phillips actually snubbed that shelling although everybody around was scrambling for shelter.  But he was still rocky from the harrowing experience of the night before.
"Walking into the Siegfried line," he said, "was tough but nothing compared to last night. It was heart-breaking."

Phillips and Pvt. Charles Roach, of East Huntington, W. Va., were among five men charged with conducting a company back through the minefield from an exposed position.  They were the only ones of the five to come through unscathed.

"The company was dug in against a slag pile," he said. "It was dart. We reached them okay because our officer knew a path through the minefield. He had been through three times. While returning, however, he lost the way.

WALK HAND-TO-HAND.

"We started back holding hand-to-hand and stepping in the footsteps of the man ahead. "Suddenly our leader stepped on a mine and was blown up. He was about three men in front of me. Then we were lost.  "The first thing we knew mines were being blown .... all around. We were hitting Schu mines, and they take feet arms clean off.

"The cries of the sufferers were pitiful. We had to keep going and try to find the path. Somehow some of us got back on it.  "There must have been 20 or 30 fellows who stepped on mines. Many lay there all night in terrible agony".  "You can't imagine the awful feeling to be walking through the dark feeling each moment yon might hit a mine - especially when your pals are getting it all around you" Roach said.

FINDS 2 HEROES.

This correspondent visited the pile and found it was still shelled. Two genuine heroes discovered there - Sgt. James Watkins, of Barnie, Mo., and Pvt Andrew Chrystal, of San Francis.  Both still were dug in deep foxholes, their rifles pointing atthe sky. All night they had crouched there, listening to the cries of men caught in the minefield. At dawn they decided they not bear it any longer.

"Our lieutenant really led the way," said Watkins. "There were three men still out there bawling terribly. The lieutenant started for them and we followed. We found them seriously wounded. It was a great wonder they were still alive. We pulled them back to safety."

(Reprinted from Minneapolis StarJournal)
NEAR MORTAIN, FRANCE (AP) - An American infantry battalion, the 2nd of the 120th Regiment, was rescued late Saturday after being cut off by the Germans for five and one-half days on a hill just east of Mortain.

The Germans repeatedly demanded the battalion surrender, but at the blackest hour, on Wednesday night, the captain sent this message back to the crack 88 troops surrounding his force:  "I will surrender when every one of our bullets has been fired and every one of our bayonets is sticking in a German belly."  The captain was R. A. Kerley.  The captain stood gaunt and black bearded against the wall of an old stable, now the battalion command post, and related his reply as calmly as if he were repeating some casual street corner conversation from his home town of Houston, Texas.

A nearby officer said, "you had a hell of a nerve to tell them that."  "They had a hell of a nerve to put a proposition like that up to me," replied Kerley with a grin.

He and the survivors of the lost battalion came down the hill this afternoon after being relieved by the counter-attack of two other infantry battalions, one of them commanded by the colonel of this regiment, who since Monday morning had sweated in silent agony to free his trapped men.  Now they are free and are holding another hill which is quiet, and they can rest.

In the successful relieving assault, the colonel went up the hill in his jeep.  "The German doesn't make me walk often, but I had to hit the dirt from the jeep three times going up because of his fire;' the colonel said.

Acting commander of the battalion was Capt. Reynolds C. Erickson, Miles, Iowa, farmer until the war, but it was Kerley to whom the Germans delivered the ultimatum Wednesday.  "He (the German emissary) was an officer in shiny boots and very
polite;" said Kerley.  "He came up under a white flag and told me the battalion was surrounded and he would give us until 8 o'clock to quit, and if we didn't, he would destroy us all."

Gesturing with one hand and digging into a can of field rations with the other, the thin, tough looking American said, "I told him to go to hell."  Then Kerley told him the only terms under which the battalion would surrender, and even the wounded lifted their heads and yelled approval at the captain's defiance.

The men of this battalion had been up there since early Monday, and the best efforts to help them had delivered them by air only enough food for two meals, while field guns shot medicines to them in the cases of smoke shells.

They got blood plasma, bandages, sulpha powder and morphine, and all arrived safely except the morphine, which was too battered for use.  The men also managed to catch a few rabbits and chickens, and said indomitable French civilians slipped up the hill at night and gave them fresh milk

Capt. Erickson said the Germans also sneaked close to the top of the hill each night, "but in the daytime they stayed back from us.  "There were Germans on all sides of us," he said. "When they came out with their flag of truce our men were in fine spirits. We had just been killing some rabbits and chickens."

"One thing I remember most of all was once when we were alerted that the Germans were going to attack by air, I was walking around up there and one of my men said to me, "is this it?"  "I don't know why, but that sticks in my mind more sharply than anything else in all of it."

The battalion held the hill beyond every reasonable hope, standing firm even when battalion and regimental command posts were overrun and medical officers captured and with the full force of an entire German 88 division ranged against it.

Besides Capt. Erickson and Kerley and their companies, others who came back with their companies, but not in the strength in which they went out, were Capt. Delmont K. Bryn of Brookings, S. D.; Lt. Joseph F. Reaser of Gettysburg, Pa.; and Lt. Elmer C. Rohmiller.  The battalion command directed artillery fire on German positions, and the infuriated Germans retaliated with mortar fire and a renewed counter attack. But the battalion held.  During daylight Friday the Germans, striving desperately to withdraw, took to a road with a large convoy of tanks and guns.

The lost battalion on the hill spotted the column, called on artillery, and every American gun along that sector poured in shells while the battalion corrected their fire. 
The total destruction of the column was told in these words by an observer on the fading radio: "Tired as we are and hungry as we are, there is not a man who is not happy as can be at the sight."

Late Saturday a regiment fought its way to the battalion position, opening up a relief route.

A German was so enthusiastic with his "Kamerad" that he knocked a rifle right out of the hands of Pfc Joseph Reddy, of Cardiff, Ala.  Roddy was skirting some buildings in a Siegfried Line town when a Nazi soldier in a doorway flung his arms skyward so violently that he disarmed the 30th Division infantryman.  Smiling apologetically, the Jerry picked up the rifle and handed it back to the Yank.

30th Men Cite Crimes

By RICHARD LEWIS, Stars and Stripes Staff Writer

PARIS. Jan. 19. - Capt. Joseph E. Brown switched on the captured Tiger radio in his Jeep as he rolled southward from the Roer River with the 30th Div. It was Dec. 17 and suddenly the division was on the move.  He heard Axis Sally's broadcast . that the crack 30th was on its way to meet Von Rundstedt's winter offensive in the Ardennes.

"That," said Brown, "cleared it up -where we were going."

The 30th pushed down into the surging north flank of the salient. They came across a trail of atrocities which shocked the Nazi-wise veterans of the "Old Hickory" Div.

Brown. S-3 of the 120th Regt's second battalion, who comes from Swansea. S. C., and Sgt. Robert C. Jones, 743rd Tank, Bn., platoon leader from Hamilton, O., told about it at a press conference.

50 Doughs Slain

When the division entered Profondruy, they found 50 doughs from another outfit lying in a field where as prisoners they had been shot down. That was the initial evidence that the First SS Div. had passed that way. There was more.

They found the body of a pregnant woman whose stomach had been slit: two more bodies of old women shot through the head and the body of a dead baby of seven months, also shot through the head. In one house, an old man sat dead in his rocker where he had been shot.

They found the stripped body of an invalid woman of 30. She had been shot through the head as she sat in a wheelchair. At the town of La Gleize, they found the bodies of two raped girls whose throats had been cut.

Captured SS men said they had orders to eliminate anybody who got in their way. The baby had been crying, the SS prisoners said.

Cold In Ardennes

It was 20 degrees colder in the Ardennes than it had been up on the Roer River. The daily pair of dry socks which are supposed to reach front line troops with daily rations arrived about once a week.  Combat boots weren't warm enough and your feet would freeze in 10 minutes in combat shoes, Jones said. Brown described how they were making moccasins out of blankets to wear in galoshes. That was warmer.

Trench-foot wasn't licked up there, they said, and men went down with it.  Brown's feet were frozen.  "Painful," he said. "I couldn't ' walk for a couple of days."  They dug holes to crawl into for the night with TNT.

SURPRISED

Pfc John Morris, of Flint Springs, Ky., was more surprised than anyone else in his First Bn. when he knocked out a Nazi Panther tank and scared off two others with a single rifle grenade. The three Panthers were wading L'Ambleve river into Stavelot, Belgium, apparently believing the town was unoccupied by Yank troops, since the armored vehicles had their turrets open.  When Pfc Morris and other doughs of the 117th Inf., 30th Inf. Div. spotted them, Morris launched a rifle grenade at the lead tank.  It fell through the open turret and set the Panther on fire.  The other two backed off.

Messenger Best Known in Unit

(Reprint From Boston Globe)
WITH THE 30TH INFANTRY DIVISION IN GERMANY-Johnny Pszenny of Salem, Mass., belongs to the 30th, a fighting infantry unit that not only can take it, but can dish it out. It has done a lot of both since it arrived in the European Theater of operations.
Pfc. John A. Pszenny is perhaps the best known soldier in his particular unit. He is the unit messenger. He joined the unit two days after his induction at Fort Devens, and has been in the same outfit ever since. He says he knew everybody in the unit at one time, but now there are so many replacements it is hard to keep track of everybody.

Lt. Col. Dwight McReynolds of Cleveland, Tenn., says of Pszenny he is the best guy to get a job done he knows in the army. "Tell Pszenny to do a job," he says, "and the thing is done before you can turn around. He really knows his job."

KILL 64, NAB 50 WITHOUT A LOSS

WITH THE 30th INFANTRY DIVISION, Nov. 8. - In a single 30-minute engagement the 30th Reconnaissance Troop killed 50 Germans and captured 64 without losing a Yank.

Protecting the flank of a main task force, the unit, commanded by Capt. James Hume Jr., Richmond, Va., swooped down in its armored cars on a town and caught the enemy garrison by surprise.

Recon Fighter Gets a Stooge

WITH THE 30th INFANTRY DIVISION ON WESTERN FRONT (AP). - Pvt. Raymond Wynant, of Momence. Ill., was with a platoon of the 30th reconnaissance troop which ran into a hornet's nest of Germans. Fellow GI's noticed Wynant was firing as fast as two men.

He had a newly-captured German prisoner reloading his tommy gun clips

OLD HICKORYMAN TURNS DOWN FURLOUGH IN U.S.

WITH THE 30TH INF. DIVISION. - T/Sgt Frederick Unger turned down a 30-day furlough in the U.S. the other day to stick with his platoon in combat on the Western Front.

Unger, who has been awarded the DSC, the Silver and Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart with Oak Leaf cluster, was the No. 1 man in his outfit when rest and recuperation furloughs to the States were handed out.  1n combat six months, he has fought with the 30th through Normandy, all the way up to the Siegfried Line.

But when he was offered the furlough, he declined, saying: "I'm adjusted to combat now, and I don't want to have to readjust myself to it after a furlough at home. When I go home, I want to go home to stay."

Unger, a heavy weapons platoon sergeant from Long Island and the 119th regiment, won his DSC for ordering the men of his platoon to shelter during an artillery barrage while he stayed out in the open to direct mortar fire. Stunned and shaken by a shell blast nearby, he was taken under protest to the aid station, and insisted on returning to the lines the next day.

THE STAR AND STRIPES
Dec. 22, 1944

30th Takes Six Towns

SUPREME HEADQUARTERS AEF-(AP)- Oct. 8 -Doughboys of the U.S. First Army cracked German defenses wide open along a six-mile front north of Aachen Saturday and swept up six German towns in a high-powered three-mile drive that encountered wilting resistance.

The American 30th Infantry division over-ran Beggendorf, Basweiler, Herbach, Merksteln, Hofstadt and Alsdorf as they hammered to a point five to six miles Inside Germany in the onrush that was described by an American staff officer as a
-definite breakthrough. The U. S. troops are meeting less artillery fire and weaker opposition, field dispatches reported Saturday night.

Wide Gap Torn

Tanks, infantry, artillery and supplies poured into Germany through the gap torn by the Americans. Planes and tanks battered at the enemy as the U. S. advance units pressed ahead.

"This is definitely a breakthrough and not a withdrawal," a First army staff officer declared. '"There still are defenses ahead of us but we have driven through the main line of resistance in this sector."  The power drive, rolling over the bitterly-fought Ubach sector, nine miles north of the historic invasion gateway to Germany at Aachen, overran the German town of Basweiler, severing one of two main roads leading 30 tulles northeast to Dusseldorf at the doorway to the rich Ruhr valley.
THE STARS AND STRIPES Oct. 8, 1944

OLD HICKORY WINS GLORY

(Reprint from Indiana (PA.)
Gazette)
The Old Hickory 30th Division which received part of its training at Camp Atterbury has covered itself with glory in Europe.

According to a United Press dispatch from Germany today, the division captured the famous Belgian Fort Eben Emael Sept. 10 and became the first Allied unit to enter Holland.   By Sept. 20 forward elements of the Division were across the German frontier, dug in close to the Siegfried line and ready to attack.

HOBBS IN COMMAND

The 30th Division was in training at Camp Atterbury from Nov. 8, 1943 to Feb. 1944. The Division commander Maj. Gen. L. S. Hobbs, was also In command when the Division was at Camp Atterbury.

The 30th Division, according to the U. P. release, relieved the First Division in the vicinity of Mortain, France, Aug. 7 and the next day began the historic Mortain-St. Barthelmy defense in which the Division stopped four armored German divisions which Hitler had ordered to break through to Avranches and the sea, separating the American First and Third Armies.

A drive across France followed and Sept 1 and 2 put the finishing touches on a march that carried the doughboys 180 miles in 72 hours to Tournai, Belgium, which later was turned over to the British.

The 30th Division was created in July, 1917 from National Guard units of North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee.  It was called into service in Sept. 1940 with National Guard units of Georgia.  A number of units were drawn off during a long training period and replacements brought in, men representing nearly every state.

Maj. Gen. Hobbs received the Silver Star for the Division's crossing of the Vire river in the battle toward St. Lo and an Oak Leaf Cluster for gallantry when he took personal command of a task force which screened the Division's advance into Belgium.