Searching for the Heart

From a point in the U.S. Third Army's deep thrust into Germany this week, TIME Correspondent Sidney Olson cabled:

The long steel fingers of the armored divisions along the whole front are now hooking into the vitals of Germany, stabbing furiously about, searching for the still-pumping heart. This is a mighty spectacle, compounded of all the power of the Allies, directed skillfully in a coordinated series of enormous amputations. It is also a long series of little scenes, like shots from a movie that have not yet been glued together into a dramatic whole. If you follow one of those steel fingers into Germany, it looks like this:

You cross the Rhine through the artificial white fog, listening to the whine of woodsaws and the coughing of the red-eyed engineers who have been living in this chemical cloud for days as they throw bridge after bridge across the smooth, fast-flowing waters. On the other side, as the mist lifts, you pass through the familiar phenomena of big captured towns in Germany: mile after mile of smashed industrial sections, of ruined homes, of buildings broken, and broken over & over again into brick dust. Then suddenly you are past the last stretch of rusted junk that used to be a railroad yard, and you begin winding over the superb wide roads that sweep into the German uplands beyond the Rhine.

You thrust past the huge road blocks, rows of logs sunk deep in the road with earth piled in between, where the Germans had hastily improvised defenses. Around these lie the old familiar signs of another lost German battle, the scattered helmets, the ripped off pants legs and coat arms where wounds were dressed, the golden sprinkles of ammunition, the smashed ma chine guns and the still smoldering trucks overturned in the ditches.

Skier's Swoops. But after the armor had broken through this last crust, it had taken off in wide swoops over all the great road network. Lieut. General George S. Patton Jr.'s famed 4th Armored Division's Combat Commands A and B, led by the fabulously tough team of Lieut. Colonel Creighton Abrams Jr. and Major Harold Cohen, are expert in this type of war. In operations such as this penetration toward the German heart, the armor moves like a cross-country skier, sliding swiftly down roads, diagnosing the terrain on the fly. If an obstacle appears too difficult to slide over or through, the armor skids around it in a series of sashaying loops. The armor always works with two fingers at once.

As you follow the armor you sail along easily for several miles. Then suddenly you come to debris of war again: a bend in the road where the fleeing Germans turned for a delaying action. You see the tracks where the tanks hurriedly tore into the fields to hit the Germans from several sides at once. Then you pass the bend where the smashed trucks, guns and equipment are scattered over the fields.

You go through scores of little German country towns. They are untouched by war. All the glass is in the. windows; the pansy beds are trim and fresh with purple and yellow blooms; the big beds of straw-covered beets are carefully protected against the weather in regular brown mounds.

If They Want War--From each house flies a great white banner. (One of the first things the military police do is to tell the villagers that they must really show that they have surrendered by flying big white flags.) This is good psychology: it teaches these Germans that they are conquered. If sniping is done from a house flying a white flag the Americans treat it as they would a military obstacle. Here & there you come to a house that has been completely smashed and whose timbers are still smoldering. If resistance comes from a house, there is no dickering: a tank crew blows it apart, and rolls calmly on. After a few such examples the word seems to get around. The motto of the armormen is: if they want war they can have it.

Here & there and always you meet streams of the newly liberated. Down the road they come singly, in couples, in dozens, and then in great clusters of 50 and 100. These are the slave laborers of the Germans, people responsible for the carefully cultivated beauty of the German farmlands. They are so happy it makes you happy. They crowd around you and shake hands and try to kiss you, ten of them at a time. Here are Russians, scores and scores of them, with the SV for Soviet Union daubed on their backs. There are many Russian women, strong and heavyset, smiling with broken teeth from ear to ear. There are French; some have been prisoners for five years.

The exhilaration of this scene, endlessly repeated as we went down the steel finger, gradually uplifted you until you felt like bursting with pride at even being a spectator in this liberation.

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