6/19/2023 0 Comments Crack german tank force![]() Waters and Baum are unsung American heroes, whose glory lay in honorable defeats against long and difficult odds. The 4th Armored benefited much from lessons learned in Tunisia and paid for by Waters and others like him, many of whom forever remain there.īy chance, these two soldiers’ paths would cross and their fates, for a time, would become common and joined, but not until the war itself was almost at its end, near an obscure and mostly forgotten German town called Hammelburg. In July 1944, Baum and the 4th Armored embarked on a nine-month marathon of continuous combat that would bring glory and honor to the division and the U.S. In December 1943, Baum shipped out to Great Britain with the 10th Armored Infantry Battalion of the 4th Armored Division. He had yet to deploy overseas, much less come to grips with the Wehrmacht. Fourteen years Waters’ junior, Baum enlisted as a private in December 1941 and worked his way to a junior officer’s commission. The son of a Jewish blouse cutter from New York’s Garment District, Baum’s background was nothing like that of the pedigreed Waters’. Abraham Baum looked forward to completing his infantry training and joining the fight against Hitler’s Germany. While Waters and his men fought for their lives on Djebel Lessouda, 1st Lt. ![]() However, this would come years in the future, on a continent and battlefield far from the scorched deserts of Tunisia. Yet, his capture would indirectly lead to the death or imprisonment of hundreds of other Americans. Waters, West Point Class of 1931, son of a Baltimore banker and son-in-law of Maj. Before the long morning was over and the sun reached its zenith, the Germans captured Lt. Waters’ own tanks were unable to stop the onrushing assault, as one after another “brewed up” from German fire. Waters told his artillery officer to move the guns back and open fire.Īs their frightened crews pulled the guns out, they were caught and overrun by the panzers. artillery tried to respond, but the German tanks were already under and through the guns’ preregistered target areas. Signal rockets from both sides arched into the dawn sky, and hundreds of German artillery shells and tank rounds fell on American positions at Djebel Lessouda, a desolate hill between the Grand and Eastern Dorsals of central Tunisia. Too late, he and the other Americans of Combat Command C of the 1st Armored Division realized that they were under attack by dozens of German panzers and thousands of panzergrenadiers from the battled-hardened 10th Panzer Division. John Waters watched columns of dust rise from the east. In the wan North African light on February 14, 1943, Lt.
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