The Liberators: America's Witnesses to the Holocaust Read Online Free PDF

landed at Utah Beach on July 11, 1944, and entered combat barely a week later. To attack the Germans at Bastogne in order to help relieve the besieged 101st Airborne Division—the Battered Bloody Bastards of Bastogne—under orders from General George S. Patton they’d raced into Belgium, covering 150 miles in nineteen hours. Even for an armored unit accustomed to outpacing the infantry and artillery, that’s nothing short of incredible.
    They fought hard, crossing the Rhine on bridges built by U.S. Army engineers, heading into the heartland of Germany on March 24 and 25. They went east of Frankfurt and drove north to the city of Bad Hersfeld, the last population center in what would come to be known as West Germany. Then they headed east into the future German Democratic Republic (aka East Germany), toward the ultimate objective of Dresden. The map Irzyk switched to in the turret of his tank covered the Erfurt sector of the country. The Americans gambled on traveling down the Autobahn as far as practical, because it was quick going. They were hit; they fought back and kept going. They went through Eisenach and on the following day, April 4, around midmorning, the 4th Armored Division took Gotha without firing a shot, but only because the town’s burgomaster had been given an ultimatum: surrender the city or see it destroyed by artillery fire. Combat Command B, which included the 37th Tank Battalion, formally accepted the surrender of Gotha.
    The commander of one of the 37th tanks was Sergeant Harry Feinberg. A lanky, six-foot-tall Jewish kid from Brooklyn, Feinberg had left home in 1937 at the age of seventeen without finishing high school to tour the country for nearly four years with a vaudeville act called Borrah Minevich and His Harmonica Rascals. He practiced a lot, made recordings, and even appeared in a movie with the child star Jane Withers.
    In late 1940, with the glamour of show business fading, Harry returned home to work in the building business with his father. Little more than a year later, he was drafted, sent to Fort Knox, Kentucky, to learn all about tanks and to discover that training was going to require a good imagination: the entire division had only six tanks; they simulated firing at targets made by painting the word TANK on big Army trucks.
    Eventually, while on exercises in the Mojave Desert, the unit got real tanks as well as a commanding general the men loved, Major General John Wood. Feinberg says that prior to deployment Wood was being questioned by reporters who asked him why the 4th didn’t have a nickname like the other armored divisions, such as “Hell on Wheels” or “Old Ironsides.” According to lore, Wood said, “We don’t need a nickname. We will be known by our deeds alone. Name is enough: 4th Armored Division.” And that’s how the division nickname became “Name Enough.”
    At the end of 1943, the division sailed for England in a fifty-two-ship convoy and then trained in the British countryside for months until finally being sent to France weeks after D-Day. It didn’t take long for the reality of war to strike home. They were in the Normandy hedgerows, just beyond Sainte-Mère-Église (recall the famous scene in The Longest Day where the paratrooper’s chute is caught on the church steeple next to the clock), and had just jumped off the tanks to begin routine cleaning and maintenance. Feinberg recalls that “As soon as we got off the tank, I hear a whistle. That’s the loudest whistle I ever heard. A plane came over, and right into the next hedgerow, a bomb fell there, and you see a flash, and you hear screaming, ‘Medic! Medic!’ And I started shivering.
    “You could hear a lot of excitement. ‘Over here, guys, over here, c’mon!’ And you’d hear another guy say, ‘I can’t feel my legs, I can’t feel my legs.’ And this all came down as a big surprise. You can imagine my head just spinning. What can I do here? Where can I run to?”
    Feinberg survived