Thirty-two American soldiers died on a road in southern Germany on March 27, 1945, and for 36 years the United States Army buried the reason why.
They died because a four-star general sent 314 men 60 miles behind enemy lines on a mission that every officer in the room told him would fail, and because the one man that mission was truly meant to save was the general’s own son-in-law.
The general was George S.
Patton Jr. , commander of the Third United States Army, the most famous American general still alive in the spring of 1945. The mission was Task Force Baum.
The man who told Patton to his face that it would not work was a 30-year-old colonel named Creighton W. Abrams.
Today, every American main battle tank in service carries Abrams’ name.
Every one of them carries the name of a man who was right.
The war in Europe had six weeks left. The Third Army had crossed the Rhine four days earlier at Oppenheim, and Patton had marked the crossing in his own way, stopping on the pontoon bridge his engineers had thrown across the river and urinating into the water while a photographer recorded it.
He wanted the newsreels to see it. He wanted Montgomery to hear about it. He wanted history to remember who got across first.
Now he was moving east faster than his own supply lines, faster than Bradley wanted, faster than Eisenhower had planned. Every man at Third Army headquarters could feel the war slipping past them like a train they were trying to catch.
In a room that had been a schoolhouse before the Wehrmacht took it, six men stood around a map table.
Someone had drawn a red circle around a town called Hammelburg, 60 miles behind the German front line. At the head of the table stood Patton, 59 years old, polished helmet, riding pants, pearl-handled revolvers.
There is a prisoner of war camp here, he said.
Oflag 13B. American officers, 900 of them, maybe more. We are going to get them out.
He talked about speed and surprise, about a small fast armored task force cutting through the German lines in the night, reaching the camp before the Germans could organize. Three hundred men, a dozen tanks, half-tracks, jeeps. In and out, 48 hours.
He made it sound simple.
It was not simple. Abrams did not look at the map.
He looked at the man across from him, Major General William Hoge on his left, and in the space of one long breath two officers who had commanded American armor across half of France and all of Germany understood something at the same time, and understood that the other man understood it.
There was no military reason for this mission. No American commander sent 300 men on a raid to a prisoner of war camp 60 miles behind the German front in the last weeks of a war that was already won.
Not while the front was advancing. Not while another two weeks of normal operations would liberate every camp in southern Germany without losing a single tank.
It was not doctrine.
It was not strategy. It was not the war Patton had been fighting for four months. Every man in that room knew what it was.
Nine days earlier, an intelligence report had crossed Patton’s desk. Among the American officers held at Oflag 13B was a lieutenant colonel named John Knight Waters, captured in Tunisia in February 1943, two years a prisoner, 38 years old, a cavalry officer, and the husband of Patton’s daughter, Beatrice.
Patton’s son-in-law was in that camp.
Nobody in the room said the name Waters. Nobody had to.
Brigadier General Anton Eddy, commander of XII Corps, spoke first.
General, the distance is a problem, he said. Sixty miles is a long reach. If we are going to do this, we should send Combat Command B.
All of it. Three thousand men. Full artillery.
Air support if we can get it.
Patton shook his head. Too big.
Too slow. The Germans will see it coming.
Hoge tried next, more carefully.
General Patton, if we commit a full combat command, we can hold the ground behind them, open a corridor, bring the prisoners out with proper security. Three hundred men going 60 miles into hostile territory without a corridor, without air, without artillery in range is a very difficult operation.
Patton did not answer.
Abrams had not spoken yet. He took the cigar out of his mouth, set it in a tin ashtray on the corner of the table, and looked at Patton.
Sir, Abrams said, give me the whole combat command.
Give me all of CCB. I will take it to Hammelburg and I will bring your prisoners back. Three thousand men and I will open a corridor as I go.
Three hundred men, 60 miles, no support, no corridor. That force will not come home.
The room went still.
Patton had let Eddy argue. He had let Hoge argue. They were general officers and he owed them a hearing.
Abrams was a colonel. Abrams was 30 years old. Abrams had just told the one man in the United States Army whose judgment on armor he actually respected that his order was going to get American soldiers killed for nothing.
Patton did not raise his voice. He looked at Abrams for what felt like a long time, with a look that was not angry exactly, because anger was too clean a word for it. Something older than anger.
Something that had to do with being told a thing you already knew and did not want to hear.
It has to be small, Patton said. It has to be fast.
It has to move tonight.
Yes, sir. You will pick the officer.
Yes, sir. Someone good. Yes, sir.
Patton looked at the map one more time, at the red circle around Hammelburg, then up at the men in the room, and said the sentence every one of them would remember for the rest of their lives.
This one matters to me.
Nobody answered.
Patton walked out. The door closed behind him. For a moment there was no sound in the room except the wind pulling at a loose window pane on the far wall.
Who, Hoge said.
Abrams did not answer at first. He was looking at the map.
Sixty miles, small roads, river crossings, a dozen towns held by German garrison troops, Panzer training units at Hammelburg itself, a whole enemy army group somewhere to the south retreating but not broken. An operation that violated every principle of armored warfare he had learned at West Point and every lesson he had learned in the field since Normandy.
Baum, Abrams said finally.
Captain Abraham Baum, 10th Armored Infantry. He is 23. He is good.
He is the best I have got at his rank.
Do you know what this is, Hoge asked.
Abrams looked at Hoge, and in that look was the answer neither of them wanted to say out loud, because saying it out loud would make it a thing that had been done on purpose, and neither of them was ready yet to admit that this was the kind of order they had followed.
No, Abrams said. He does not know, and he is not going to.
Outside, the sun was starting to fall and the temperature was dropping.
Three miles down the road, a 23-year-old captain from the Bronx, a Jewish tailor’s son who had joined the Army in 1941 and become one of the best small-unit commanders in the Fourth Armored Division, was cleaning his sidearm and waiting for an order that would come within the hour.
He did not know yet that he was going to be given 300 men. He did not know yet that he was going to be told to drive them 60 miles into Germany.
He did not know yet that the man he was being sent to rescue was the son-in-law of the general who had signed his orders. He did not know yet that not one of the officers who had just left that room believed he was coming home.
The order was on its way.
Captain Abraham Baum walked into the command tent at Schweinheim at dusk. Five foot ten, red hair going brown at the temples from six months of combat and not enough sleep. He had a bandage on his left hand from a mortar fragment he had caught outside Bitburg two weeks earlier and had not bothered to have looked at properly.
His father made women’s blouses in a shop on the Grand Concourse. His mother had cried when he shipped out and had written him a letter every week since.
He came to attention in front of Colonel Abrams.
Abrams did not sit. He stood in front of a folding table with a map on it and told Captain Baum, in the calm, even voice of a man who had made his peace with what he was about to do, that Baum was going to take 300 men 60 miles behind German lines to a prisoner of war camp at Hammelburg, break the American officers out, and bring them home.
Baum listened.
He did not ask why the mission had not been given to a full combat command. He did not ask why there was no air support, no artillery in range, no relief force following behind him. He was a captain.
Abrams was a colonel. The war had six weeks left in it, and every man in that tent had been raised on the idea that when a colonel told a captain to do something, the captain saluted and did it.
He asked one question.
Sir, who is in that camp.
One second. One breath.
One heartbeat. Colonel Creighton Abrams could have told him. He could have said: There is a lieutenant colonel named John Waters who is General Patton’s son-in-law, and that is why you are going, Captain.
Not for 900 American officers. For one.
He did not.
American officers, Abrams said. Nine hundred of them. They have been prisoners a long time, Captain.
Some of them since North Africa. Get them home.
Baum saluted.
Yes, sir. He walked out of the tent, past the sentries, into the last hour of daylight he would see as a free American soldier for a long time, and he did not know it, and nobody who did know it told him.
At 9:00 that night, Task Force Baum assembled at Schweinheim.
Ten M5 Stuart light tanks, six Sherman medium tanks, three M8 Scott assault guns, 28 half-tracks, 13 jeeps. Three hundred and fourteen men, 57 vehicles in all. A doctor, a signal officer, two forward observers with nothing to observe because there was no artillery within 20 miles of where they were going.
The men did not know where they were going. They lined up in the dark, checked their weapons, smoked, and made the small quiet jokes that soldiers make when they know they are about to be sent somewhere and do not yet know how bad it will be. Tank crews warmed their engines.
Half-track drivers ran their hands along the tracks the way a rider runs his hand along the flank of a horse.
At eight minutes past nine, the lead tank rolled through Schweinheim and turned east. The others followed.
Three hundred and fourteen men rode into a country that did not want them, on a road that did not know they were coming, toward a town that did not know they existed.
Behind them, the last lights of the American front line disappeared into the folds of the German hills, and then it was dark, and it was cold, and there was only the sound of the engines and the wind.
The first town was Lohr.
The Germans in Lohr had not been told the Americans were coming. Why would they have been. The American front line was 60 miles the other way.
Baum’s column came through the streets at 10 miles an hour with headlights taped down to slits. A German anti-aircraft crew on the edge of town looked up from a card game and reached for their weapons about six seconds too late. The Shermans fired first.
The gun went down. The crew went down. A house burned.
The column moved through Lohr in 11 minutes and kept going east.
Then Gemünden. Gemünden had a bridge.
It crossed the Sinn River and it was the only crossing for six miles in either direction, and the Germans had wired it two months earlier in case they ever needed to blow it.
At 20 minutes past midnight, when Task Force Baum came around the last bend and rolled toward the bridge with the lead tank 50 yards ahead of the column, a 19-year-old Wehrmacht engineer named Kessler turned a plunger handle in a small stone building on the far bank. The bridge lifted straight up in the air.
The lead tank was on it. The tank went with the bridge, and then it came down, and then it was in the river, and the crew was in the river with it, and one of them came up screaming, and two of them did not come up at all.
Baum lost his first tank without firing a shot.
He also lost his bridge. He turned the column around in the dark on a road not wide enough for it, took a farm track north, and found another crossing eight miles up the river at a village called Burgsinn. It cost him three hours, a tank, and three men, and by the time the last half-track was across the Sinn, the sun was starting to come up.
He was in daylight now. He had wanted to be at Hammelburg by dawn. He was not going to be at Hammelburg by dawn.
Behind him, in Schweinfurt, in Würzburg, in every German command post between the Main River and the Danube, the radios were starting to talk. American column, deep, moving east. Estimated strength unknown.
Estimated destination unknown.
The Germans began to move. They did not know yet that they were chasing 300 men.
They assumed it was more. They sent more. At Lohr, a battalion of infantry moving north on foot.
At Würzburg, a company of assault guns loaded onto flat cars. At the Panzer training school at Hammelburg itself, armored vehicles under a captain named Richard Köhl, commanding an anti-tank battalion that had spent the war training young officers and now had a chance to fight one.
Every direction, the pieces began to move, slowly at first, then faster.
And Task Force Baum drove east into a country that was closing behind it like a hand closing on a coin.
At midday on the 27th, Baum’s column crested a hill outside a village called Hessdorf, and the men in the lead half-track saw the town of Hammelburg spread out below them in the pale spring sun. Beyond the town, on a wooded rise to the west, the barbed wire fences and gray barracks of Oflag 13B.
Sixteen hours. Two tanks lost. A half-track lost.
Eleven men dead or wounded. And the American prisoners were down there, behind that wire, waiting.
Baum turned to his radio operator.
Tell them we are here.
Inside the camp, an American senior officer named Colonel Paul Good had seen the smoke first. Then he had heard the guns.
Then a German guard had run past his barracks with a rifle he did not know how to use, and Colonel Good had understood in the way a prisoner of two years understands things. Something was happening that had never happened before at Oflag 13B.
He walked out into the compound.
Other officers were already there, 1,500 of them. Some had been captured at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia in February 1943 and had not seen an American uniform outside a prison barrack since.
One of them was Lieutenant Colonel John Knight Waters, 38 years old, a cavalryman, son-in-law of the general who had sent Task Force Baum to get him, though he did not know that Task Force Baum existed, and he did not know that his father-in-law had sent it.
He was thin. He had been thin for two years.
He walked out into the compound with the other American officers, saw the smoke on the ridge to the east, and understood the same thing Colonel Good understood.
Americans were coming.
Colonel Good called for a truce party. A German officer would go out with a white flag and meet the American commander and negotiate the peaceful transfer of the camp.
It was the reasonable thing. It was the officer’s thing. The German commandant, an older Wehrmacht colonel named Günther von Goeckel, agreed at once.
He was ready to be done with the war.
Waters volunteered to go with the truce party. He was the ranking cavalry officer.
He was the man who had been thinking about his wife and his daughter and his father-in-law for two years. There was an American armored column on the ridge above the camp, and he wanted to be the man who walked out and met them.
He took a broomstick.
He took a white pillowcase. He tied one to the other. He walked out through the gate of Oflag 13B with a German officer beside him and a Serbian interpreter behind him and the makeshift white flag held above his head, and he started up the road toward the ridge where the American tanks were.
He walked about 200 yards.
Somewhere in a farmhouse east of the road, a German infantryman who had not been told there was a truce, who had not been told anything except that Americans were in the area, saw movement on the road, raised his rifle, and fired.
The bullet hit Colonel Waters below the hip.
It broke his pelvis and severed a major artery. He went down on the road with the white flag still in his hand, the German officer beside him shouting in German for the shooting to stop, the Serbian interpreter kneeling in the dirt trying to hold pressure on a wound that could not be held.
The man Task Force Baum had come 60 miles to rescue was on the ground, bleeding out, 400 yards from the camp gate.
They got him back inside. The camp doctor, a Serbian officer with almost no supplies and no operating room, worked on him for three hours on a wooden table. Waters lived, barely.
He could not be moved. He could not walk. He could not sit up.
He could not be put on a half-track and driven 60 miles back across enemy country.
The one man the mission existed for was going to have to be left behind.
Captain Baum did not know that yet.
Captain Baum did not know that the mission had ever been about one man. On the ridge above the camp, he was watching German armored vehicles begin to appear on the horizon in every direction he looked, and he was doing the arithmetic a small-unit commander does when he realizes the ring is closing around him.
The camp had 1,500 American officers, not 900.
He had room on his vehicles for maybe 250 of them if the men rode on the outside of the half-tracks in the cold. Thirteen hundred men would have to stay behind. He did not know which 1,300.
He picked the ones who could walk. He picked the ones who could hold a weapon. He did not pick Colonel Waters, because Colonel Waters could not walk and could not hold a weapon, and Captain Baum did not know Colonel Waters’ name.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, Task Force Baum, now carrying 250 freed American officers on the outsides of its half-tracks and the decks of its tanks, turned west and began the drive back toward the American lines.
They did not make it five miles.
The Germans were waiting on a wooded rise called the Rossenberg.
Köhl’s armor from the Panzer school. Infantry from three directions. Anti-tank guns firing from a tree line the American scouts had not spotted because they had been driving too fast, in too much of a hurry, running from a clock that was already broken.
The first Sherman went up in flames at 4:11. The second at 4:14. The half-tracks tried to scatter.
There was nowhere to scatter to. The road was narrow, the fields on either side were soft with spring melt, and the tracks bogged down within 30 yards. Freed American officers in prison camp coveralls dove off the vehicles and ran for the tree line and were cut down by machine gun fire from positions they had no way of knowing were there.
Captain Baum was hit in the thigh, then in the hand, then a third time in the side. He went down behind a half-track and stayed down.
By nightfall on March 27, 1945, Task Force Baum had ceased to exist as a military unit.
Thirty-two Americans were dead. More than 100 were wounded. The rest, including Captain Baum, including most of the freed prisoners they had come to save, were being marched back through the dark toward the camp they had just tried to empty.
Eight miles from home. Every vehicle lost. Every man dead, wounded, or captured.
And in a small brick infirmary behind the wire at Oflag 13B, on a wooden table under a single electric light, Lieutenant Colonel John Waters lay on his back staring at the ceiling and did not yet know that he had been the reason for any of it.
Nine days. That was how long it took.
On April 6, 1945, the 14th Armored Division of the United States Seventh Army came down the road out of the north with tanks and infantry and air cover and everything a proper relief force is supposed to have. They broke the gate of Oflag 13B without losing a single man in the doing of it.
Nine days after Task Force Baum had died on the Rossenberg trying to do the same thing with 300 men and no support and no corridor and no hope.
The prisoners walked out. Fifteen hundred American officers. The ones Task Force Baum had left behind, and the ones Task Force Baum had freed and then lost again on the road.
They walked out through a gate the Germans had already abandoned, into the arms of an army that had come for them the way an army is supposed to come for its prisoners. In force. In daylight.
With everything it needed.
Lieutenant Colonel John Waters could not walk out. He was carried out on a stretcher.
The Serbian doctor who had kept him alive for nine days walked beside him and would not let go of the litter until he was inside an American ambulance.
Waters had lost a great deal of blood. He had lost a great deal of weight he did not have to lose.
He was going to spend the next four months in a hospital in Frankfurt and then in a hospital in Washington, and he was going to walk with a limp for the rest of his life. He was going to live. He did not yet know that his father-in-law had sent 300 men to die for him.
Nobody had told him. Nobody told him for a long time.
Back at Third Army headquarters on March 30, three days after the disaster on the Rossenberg, General George Patton held a press conference.
He stood in front of a room full of American war correspondents who had followed him from Sicily to the Rhine, men who had written the legend of him for four years, and he told them about the raid on Hammelburg.
He said it had been a diversion. He said it had been an operation designed to confuse the Germans about the direction of the main Third Army advance, and that the liberation of the prison camp had been a secondary objective.
He said the losses had been regrettable, but the strategic purpose had been achieved. He said nothing about a lieutenant colonel named Waters.
A reporter asked whether it was true that the general’s son-in-law had been a prisoner in that camp.
Patton said he had not known. He said it plainly, without hesitating, without looking away, in the voice he had used for four years to tell the American public what he wanted the American public to believe. He said he had not known that Colonel Waters was at Oflag 13B, and if he had known, it would not have changed anything.
The reporters wrote it down. Some of them believed it. Some of them did not.
The ones who did not believe it wrote it down anyway, because they had been embedded with the Third Army long enough to know that certain stories were not going to run in American newspapers in the last weeks of the war, no matter what a reporter thought he knew.
The story ran the way Patton told it for a while.
General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army Group and Patton’s direct superior, read the reports on the Hammelburg raid at his headquarters in Namur, Belgium.
He read the after-action summary. He read the casualty list. He read the intelligence appreciation prepared before the mission and the one prepared after.
He read Patton’s public statement.
Bradley did not say anything at the time. He was a man who had known George Patton for nearly 30 years, since their paths first crossed in the peacetime army after the First World War, and he knew what George Patton was capable of and what he was not capable of.
He knew what the mission had been.
Years later, after the war, after Patton was dead, Bradley wrote about it in his memoirs. He wrote that the Hammelburg raid was one of the two or three actions of the war that he could not defend.
He wrote that Patton had lied to him about it. He wrote that he had let it go because the war was almost over, and because he had loved George Patton like a brother, and because sometimes a man’s friend does something that a man cannot forgive, but cannot punish either. All a man can do is remember it and write it down after everyone is gone.
Eisenhower ordered an investigation. The investigation was opened, and it was staffed, and it ran for a few weeks in April of 1945, and then the war in Europe ended and everybody had somewhere else to be. The report was filed.
It was filed carefully. It was filed in a place where nobody was going to find it for a very long time.
Patton was not disciplined.
Patton was not reprimanded. Patton went on being Patton, and the war ended, and he was given the military government of Bavaria, and then he was relieved of it for saying something in public about former Nazi Party members that he should not have said.
In December of 1945, he was in a car in Mannheim, Germany, on his way to go pheasant hunting with his chief of staff.
The car collided with an American truck at low speed, and Patton broke his neck against the metal partition behind the driver’s seat, and 12 days later he was dead. He was 60 years old.
He had never publicly said anything about Task Force Baum other than what he had said at the press conference on March 30.
In his private diary, some weeks after the war ended, he wrote a single sentence about the raid on Hammelburg. Three words. Perhaps he was wrong.
Captain Abraham Baum spent the next nine days in the Serbian infirmary at Oflag 13B in a bed three feet away from Lieutenant Colonel John Waters. Neither man could walk. Neither man could be moved.
Neither man knew yet what he had in common with the other.
On April 6, the tanks of the 14th Armored Division came down the road from the north and broke the gate of the camp. Captain Baum and Colonel Waters were carried out on stretchers within an hour of each other.
Soldiers of the same army, and neither one of them said a word to the other on the way to the ambulance.
Baum weighed 131 pounds when the Americans found him. He had been shot three times.
He was 23 years old. He went home to the Bronx. He went back to work in the garment industry.
He got married. He had children.
For 36 years, he did not talk about what had happened at Hammelburg.
Not to his wife. Not to his children. Not to anyone.
In 1981, a writer named Richard Baron came to his house and asked him about it. Abraham Baum, who was almost 60 by then, sat in a chair in his living room in New Jersey and told the story he had never told. Richard Baron wrote it down, and it was published in a book called Raid: The Untold Story of Patton’s Secret Mission.
And the American public, 36 years after the fact, finally learned the name of the young captain who had led 300 men 60 miles into Germany for a reason nobody had bothered to tell him.
Baum lived until 2013. He was 91 when he died, at his home in Rancho Bernardo, California, on March 3, 26 days short of his 92nd birthday.
He never once said, in any interview he ever gave, that he blamed George Patton for what had happened. He said it was a bad order. He said it was a wrong order.
He said men had died who should not have died.
But he did not blame the general. He said the general had loved his son-in-law and had done a thing that a father-in-law does.
And that any man who had ever loved a member of his own family and been unable to help them understood what George Patton had done, even if what George Patton had done was wrong.
That was Abraham Baum’s answer. He never gave another one.
Colonel John Waters recovered from his wounds. He remained in the army. He rose through the ranks slowly and steadily in the peacetime service.
He commanded the 4th Armored Division in Europe. He commanded the Fifth Army in Chicago. In February of 1963 he was promoted to the rank of four-star general, and the following year he was given command of United States Army Pacific in Hawaii.
He retired in August of 1966 after 35 years in uniform. He died in Washington in January of 1989 at the age of 82, and he is buried at Immanuel Episcopal Church Cemetery in Sparks, Maryland.
He never spoke publicly about the raid on Hammelburg.
He knew by the end of his life what had happened. He knew who had ordered it. He knew why.
He kept it to himself.
Colonel Creighton Abrams, who had told Patton in a schoolhouse in Trier that the mission was going to fail, and who had then followed the order anyway and picked the officer to lead it, went on fighting through the last weeks of the war and won a second Distinguished Service Cross in April of 1945. He stayed in the army.
He fought again in Korea. In 1968 he was given command of all American forces in Vietnam, in the worst part of the worst war the United States has ever fought, and he did the job for four years and did not lose his composure and did not lose his sense of who he was.
In 1972 he was made Chief of Staff of the United States Army, the highest uniformed officer in the service.
He served in that office until 1974. He was diagnosed with lung cancer and died in September of that year at the age of 59. He was buried at Arlington.
In 1980, six years after his death, the United States Army fielded a new main battle tank. It was the most advanced armored vehicle in the world. It weighed 60 tons.
It was designed to fight and win against Soviet armor on the plains of Germany in a war that would have been the third one Creighton Abrams fought in Europe if he had lived to see it. The army named the tank the M1 Abrams.
There is a tank named for George Patton also, the M47 and the M60, good tanks in their day.
All of them are out of service now. All of them are in museums or on pedestals in front of American Legion halls or scrapped for the metal.
The M1 Abrams is still in service.
It has been in service for more than four decades. It fought in Iraq twice. It has fought in Afghanistan.
It has fought wherever the American army has fought since 1980. It is the tank American soldiers ride into battle today, and it is the tank that will carry them into the next war and the war after that, until it is finally replaced.
Every one of those tanks carries the name of a colonel who once stood in a schoolhouse in Germany and told George Patton that the mission was going to fail.
Every one of those tanks carries the name of a man who was right.
Thirty-two American soldiers died on the road from Hammelburg on March 27, 1945. Their names are on a wall in Washington.
Their names are on stones in cemeteries in France and Luxembourg and the small towns of America where they were born. Most Americans have never heard of them. Most Americans have never heard of the mission they died on.
Most Americans, if you ask them today, could tell you who George Patton was, and could not tell you who Abraham Baum was, or who Creighton Abrams was, or who John Waters was.
That is how history works. The men who give the orders are remembered.
The men who question them and lose are remembered by other soldiers. The men who follow them and die are remembered by their mothers and their wives and their children for as long as those people live, and then they are remembered by nobody at all, unless someone writes it down.
Somebody wrote this one down.
Abraham Baum told it to Richard Baron in a living room in New Jersey in 1981. Omar Bradley wrote it in his memoirs before he died. Creighton Abrams never spoke about it, but his officers spoke about it after he was gone.
The Serbian doctor who saved John Waters’ life at Oflag 13B wrote about it in a memoir published in Belgrade in 1962 that almost nobody in America has ever read.
The story is there. You have to know where to look.
If you look, you will find that in the last weeks of the greatest war the world has ever fought, an American general sent 300 American soldiers 60 miles into enemy country to bring one man home. And the young colonel told him it would not work, and it did not work, and 32 men died. And the man did not come home on that raid, and the general lied about it, and the colonel who had told him the truth went on to have his name written on the side of every American tank for the next 50 years.
That is the story. That is all of it.
Perhaps he was wrong, Patton wrote in his diary.
Three words. For 32 men.