At 6:47 on the morning of December 26, 1944, Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams stood in the open turret of his Sherman tank on a frozen hillside in southeastern Belgium and stared north toward Bastogne. Snow had been falling since midnight. The temperature hovered near 18 degrees below zero, and the wind cut through his tanker’s jacket as if it were paper. His fingers were so numb he could barely feel the binoculars pressed against his face.
The town lay 5 miles away. Inside it, nearly 10,000 American paratroopers of the 101st Airborne Division were surrounded by German forces. They were running out of ammunition, running out of food, and running out of time. They had been encircled for 8 days. German commanders had demanded their surrender. Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe had replied with a single word: “Nuts.” The answer had spread through the Allied armies, lifting morale during the darkest winter of the war. But Abrams knew that defiance alone could not stop artillery shells or feed starving men. Hope could not replace ammunition dwindling hour by hour.
Now he had to reach them.
Abrams’s 37th Tank Battalion had been fighting continuously for 5 days through snow, fog, and determined German resistance. In that time, they had advanced only 22 miles. Five more miles remained between them and Bastogne, five miles packed with German paratroopers, anti-tank guns, minefields, and ice-covered roads. Five miles that might as well have been a thousand.
Abrams was 30 years old and had commanded the 37th Tank Battalion for more than a year. In that time, he had helped turn it into part of a formation the German Army had learned to fear. His men called him “Colonel Abe.” They followed him because they trusted him, and they trusted him because he had never let them down.
The Germans had a different name for his unit. They called it the division that never stopped.
The 4th Armored Division had entered combat in France 5 months earlier. Since then, it had achieved results that seemed statistically impossible. It had killed an estimated 13,600 German soldiers, wounded approximately 30,000 more, and captured over 90,000 prisoners of war. Official Army records showed that only one man from the division remained in permanent German captivity at the end of the war. While a small number of soldiers were temporarily captured during combat, American counterattacks almost always recovered them before evacuation to German prisoner camps. The division’s culture of immediate rescue meant that virtually no one stayed a prisoner for long.
One man in permanent captivity, out of nearly 11,000 soldiers, fighting an enemy that had taken hundreds of thousands of Allied prisoners. The numbers defied logic, but they were real.
They began with how Major General John Shirley Wood built his division.
The 4th Armored Division was activated on April 15, 1941, at Pine Camp in upstate New York under Brigadier General Henry W. Baird. It was formed around a cadre of approximately 3,800 men drawn from the 1st Armored Division. Most of the remaining personnel were draftees from the northeastern United States: farm boys from Pennsylvania, factory workers from New Jersey, college students from Massachusetts pulled from classrooms months before Pearl Harbor. They knew nothing about tanks and nothing about mobile warfare. They were raw material.
John Wood shaped them.
Wood was born on January 11, 1888, in Monticello, Arkansas. His father served on the Arkansas Supreme Court. Wood graduated from the University of Arkansas in 1907 with a degree in chemistry, completing his studies in just 3 years, then entered West Point, graduating in 1912. He served in the First World War and later studied armored doctrine in France, learning from officers who had pioneered mechanized warfare.
When Wood took command of the 4th Armored Division in May 1942, he was 54 years old, ancient by armored warfare standards. But he understood something younger commanders often missed. Tanks did not win battles. Men did. Tanks were tools, nothing more. The decisive factor was whether the men using them could think faster than their enemy.
Wood demanded time to train his division and got it. While many divisions received 6 months of preparation or less, Wood trained the 4th Armored for 2 full years before committing it to combat. He began at Pine Camp, where brutal New York winters froze men to their vehicles. He moved the division to Camp Forest in Tennessee for large-scale maneuvers in rolling hills and dense forests. Then came the California Desert Training Center at Camp Ibis, where the division became the first armored unit to train there.
Temperatures reached 120 degrees. Sand clogged engines within hours. Men collapsed from heat exhaustion, vehicles broke down constantly, and supply lines stretched across hundreds of miles of barren terrain. Wood considered it ideal. He forced tank crews to perform maintenance in scorching heat and then launch mock attacks against prepared defenses. He conducted night maneuvers using only compass navigation. He staged surprise ambushes and criticized any commander who failed to post security. In Louisiana swamps, he ran 48-hour exercises without sleep, pushing men until their feet bled.
He trained them to fight Germans by thinking like Germans. He studied captured manuals, interviewed observers of German operations in Poland and France, and learned how Panzer divisions coordinated attacks and exploited breakthroughs. Then he taught his men to do it better.
Wood believed in combined arms above all else. Tanks alone were vulnerable. Infantry alone was slow. Artillery alone could not hold ground. Together, they were unstoppable. He organized the division into self-contained combat commands built around tank battalions, armored infantry, and artillery. These forces could operate independently or mass for decisive blows.
Speed was the principle he taught above all others. Never stop moving. Never allow the enemy time to prepare. Strike before he knows you are coming, strike again before he recovers, and keep striking until he breaks. Every man learned to shoot. Every man learned vehicle maintenance. Everyone understood that the division’s purpose was forward movement, always forward.
The men called Wood “Tiger Jack” for his ferocity and “Professor” for his intellect. He refused to give the division an official nickname. When asked what they should be called, he answered simply that the 4th Armored Division was name enough. They would be known by their deeds alone.
On July 11, 1944, the 4th Armored Division landed on Utah Beach. After months of training in England and 13 days at sea, they entered combat in Normandy, facing the hedgerow country that had already consumed thousands of American lives. German defenders had turned every field into a killing zone.
The division’s first combat near Périers on July 17 was costly. They lost 14 tanks and over 100 men in 2 days. But they learned. They learned how German anti-tank guns were positioned, how infantry supported them, and where weaknesses lay. More importantly, they learned their training worked. Units reacted instantly without waiting for orders. Tank crews fought as infantry when vehicles were disabled. Medics ran forward under fire.
Within 11 days, the division broke through German lines. On July 25, Operation Cobra began. After massive aerial bombardment shattered German defenses, the 4th Armored Division spearheaded the breakout. When General George Patton ordered Wood to advance as fast and as far as possible, no one stopped them.
What followed would redefine American armored warfare.
Over the next 2 weeks, the 4th Armored Division demonstrated what speed, coordination, and aggressive leadership could accomplish. Rather than advancing in a single continuous line, the division launched multiple thrusts simultaneously. One combat command might race toward a town while another swung wide to cut the roads behind it. German commanders struggled to identify the main effort, often reinforcing positions that were already being bypassed.
On August 12, 1944, the division swept south to capture Nantes, cutting off the Brittany Peninsula and trapping approximately 40,000 German troops at Brest. Without pausing, the division then wheeled east and raced across France north of the Loire River. German headquarters received reports of American tanks approaching from one direction, only to be attacked from another hours later. Supply columns were overrun before they could unload. Command posts were captured with maps still spread on tables and coffee still warm in cups.
Between September 11 and 13, the division smashed across the Moselle River, flanked Nancy, and captured Lunéville on September 16. The speed stunned both German commanders and Allied headquarters. Supply trucks could not keep up. Fuel shortages became constant. Wood ordered his men to capture German fuel depots intact whenever possible, and often the division advanced on captured gasoline. When fuel ran out entirely, they simply halted, refueled from whatever arrived, and resumed the advance.
A captured German colonel later explained the shock to his interrogators. German doctrine assumed armored divisions required days to reposition for new attacks. The 4th Armored did it in hours. By the time German units established defensive lines, American tanks were already behind them.
The secret was coordination. Wood had trained his division to operate as a single organism. Tank battalions, armored infantry, artillery, engineers, and reconnaissance moved together instinctively. When resistance appeared, one element fixed it while others maneuvered. Forward artillery observers rode in lead tanks, calling fire missions under direct enemy fire. Engineers repaired bridges and cleared obstacles so rapidly that the advance rarely slowed.
Wood himself did not command from the rear. He flew above the columns in a light L-4 Piper Cub piloted by Major Charles Carpenter. Wood spotted German positions from the air and landed beside forward commanders to issue orders personally. Carpenter became legendary. He mounted six bazooka launchers to his aircraft, which he named Rosie the Rocketer. Diving on German armor, Carpenter destroyed six tanks during the war. Germans called him the Mad Major. Americans called him Bazooka Charlie.
By mid-September, the advance slowed not because of German resistance but because of logistics. Allied supply lines stretched over 400 miles back to Normandy. Fuel earmarked for Patton’s Third Army was diverted elsewhere, including to Field Marshal Montgomery’s operations in the Netherlands. The 4th Armored halted near the Moselle River in Lorraine.
The pause gave the Germans an opportunity. On September 19, 1944, General Hasso von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army launched a major counterattack near Arracourt. Hitler personally ordered the offensive, believing a victory in Lorraine could stabilize the Western Front. The Germans assembled 262 tanks and assault guns, including Panthers from newly formed Panzer Brigades 111 and 113, reinforced by elements of the veteran 11th Panzer Division.
The 4th Armored had only 163 tanks. The Panthers outgunned and outarmored the Shermans on paper. In clear weather, Panther guns could destroy Shermans at 2,000 yards. Shermans needed to close to within 500 yards. The battle should have favored the Germans.
It did not.
Fog and rain reduced visibility to a few hundred yards, neutralizing German advantages. Colonel Bruce C. Clarke positioned Combat Command A in hull-down defenses with infantry and artillery covering all approaches. When German tanks emerged from the fog, American gunners were already sighted in. Over 11 days of fighting, German losses were catastrophic. Nearly 200 of their 262 armored vehicles were destroyed or abandoned. The 4th Armored lost 48 tanks.
The Americans prevailed because they fought the battle they had trained for.
Lieutenant Colonel Creighton Abrams commanded the 37th Tank Battalion at Arracourt. Stocky, cigar-smoking, and unassuming, Abrams led from the front. He named his tank Thunderbolt and painted the name on the turret so his men could always find him. Abrams believed a commander belonged at the point of maximum danger. By war’s end, he would fight from seven different tanks, abandoning each moments before destruction and immediately returning to the fight.
At Arracourt, Abrams exploited the weather, working closely with Major Harold Cohen’s armored infantry. German tanks advanced blindly into American ambushes. Corporal John Gatski, gunner on Abrams’s tank, destroyed tank after tank. On September 20, when a German armored thrust threatened division headquarters, Abrams counterattacked alone in his command tank, sowing confusion and buying time for his companies to regroup. His Distinguished Service Cross citation recorded that his ferocity broke the enemy assault.
The Arracourt victory shattered German hopes in Lorraine. The 4th Armored destroyed hundreds of German vehicles, killed thousands, and captured thousands more. The division’s own losses were comparatively light.
The reason lay in culture. The 4th Armored did not abandon wounded men. It did not leave broken vehicles unprotected. When a tank was hit, others covered its crew’s escape. When infantry was pinned, armor advanced to break the position. Rescue was not optional. Wood had rejected the idea that capture was inevitable. Immediate counterattack was doctrine. German intelligence reports noted that prisoners from the division were nearly impossible to hold because American forces always counterattacked before evacuation.
Then came winter.
After limited operations along the Saar River in November and early December, the division was resting when, on December 16, 1944, 200,000 German troops launched a massive surprise offensive through the Ardennes. The Germans advanced rapidly, surrounded Bastogne, and threatened to split the Allied front.
Patton pivoted his army north within hours. The 4th Armored Division led the relief force, racing 150 miles through snow and ice in 19 hours. Major General Hugh Gaffey, who had assumed command earlier in December, organized the attack into three combat commands. The fighting that followed was among the most brutal the division had faced.
German paratroopers defended every village. Forests and frozen roads channeled tanks into kill zones. Casualties mounted. Yet the division pressed forward relentlessly. On December 26, Abrams’s battalion spearheaded the final assault. After a devastating artillery barrage, Company C of the 37th Tank Battalion charged through Assenois, overran German defenses, and broke through to Bastogne.
At 4:50 p.m., First Lieutenant Charles Boggess’s tank, Cobra King, reached the perimeter of the 101st Airborne Division. The siege was over.
Abrams arrived in Bastogne shortly after the initial breakthrough. He reported directly to Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe in the freezing darkness while German artillery continued to fall around the town. McAuliffe asked what had taken so long. Abrams smiled around his cigar and replied that they had run into some traffic. For his actions during the relief of Bastogne, Abrams received his second Distinguished Service Cross, the first having been awarded for his solo counterattack at Arracourt in September.
General George Patton sent a message to Major General Hugh Gaffey that night praising the division’s performance. He wrote that the extraordinary rapidity of movement and the unremitting, vicious, and skillful manner in which the attack had been pressed, culminating after days and nights of continuous battle in the relief of Bastogne, constituted one of the finest chapters in the history of the United States Army.
The 4th Armored Division did not stop at Bastogne. For another 5 months it fought across the Rhine and deep into Germany. The weeks following the relief were among the most punishing of the war. German forces launched repeated counterattacks in an effort to sever the corridor to Bastogne. The division held under constant pressure, losing men and tanks daily but never yielding ground. By the time the German Ardennes offensive collapsed in late January 1945, the division had suffered more than 2,000 casualties since entering the battle.
In early February, the 4th Armored resumed the offensive. Advancing east from Luxembourg City, it crossed the Moselle River near Trier, drove through Worms, and reached the Rhine by March 21. On March 22, elements of Patton’s Third Army crossed the Rhine at Oppenheim and Nierstein, beating Field Marshal Montgomery’s highly publicized crossing by nearly a full day. The 4th Armored crossed shortly thereafter over pontoon bridges built under German artillery fire, advanced through the night, and crossed the Main River south of Hanau. In doing so, it facilitated the rapid advance of Seventh Army forces.
The division fought off German counterattacks near Hanau, captured Heilbronn on March 29, crossed the Kocher River, and pressed eastward. On April 4, 1945, the 4th Armored Division, along with elements of the 89th Infantry Division, made a discovery that permanently marked its soldiers. Near the town of Gotha, they liberated the Ohrdruf concentration camp, the first Nazi camp discovered by American forces.
Ohrdruf was a subcamp of Buchenwald, established in November 1944. At its peak it held approximately 11,700 prisoners forced to construct railway lines and underground facilities under brutal conditions. As American forces approached, the SS evacuated many prisoners. Those too weak to march were shot. When American soldiers entered the camp, they found hundreds of decomposing bodies, evidence of torture, starvation, and systematic murder.
Nothing in their training had prepared them for what they saw. Survivors were emaciated to the point of collapse. Corpses lay stacked or partially burned in crude attempts to destroy evidence. The shock was profound. General Dwight Eisenhower visited Ohrdruf on April 12 with Generals Omar Bradley and George Patton. Eisenhower was so affected that he ordered American soldiers in the area to tour the camp and urged Washington to send members of Congress and journalists so that no one could later deny what had occurred.
The division continued its advance. By mid-April it had crossed the Saale River, liberated Allied prisoner-of-war camps, and freed forced laborers. Entire German units surrendered rather than face the advancing Americans or the approaching Soviet forces. On May 6, the division crossed into Czechoslovakia and established a bridgehead over the Otava River, pushing toward Plzeň. They were advancing toward Prague when Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8, 1945.
By the end of the war, the 4th Armored Division had been in combat for 230 days. It had advanced farther than any other American division in the European Theater. It had destroyed or captured 579 German tanks, 3,668 other vehicles, 603 artillery pieces, and 103 locomotives. It had taken 90,354 prisoners of war. Official Army records indicated that only one man from the division remained in German captivity at the war’s end.
Veterans debated this statistic for decades. Some soldiers had been temporarily captured during combat, but the division’s relentless counterattacks almost always recovered them before evacuation. Even accounting for temporary captures, the record remained extraordinary.
John Shirley Wood did not witness the division’s final victories. He had been relieved of command on December 3, 1944, officially for health reasons, unofficially because he had alienated superiors through blunt criticism and refusal to compromise his principles. He believed that opportunities had been squandered, including the costly siege of Brest, a port that was never used by Allied forces after its capture.
After leaving the division, Wood commanded a training center at Fort Knox and later worked for the United Nations, overseeing the resettlement of more than a million displaced persons in postwar Europe and Asia. He never again held a combat command. He died in Reno, Nevada, on July 2, 1966, at the age of 78.
After Wood’s departure, Major General Hugh Gaffey commanded the division through the Battle of the Bulge. Brigadier General William M. Hoge took command in March 1945 and was promoted to major general. British historian Basil Liddell Hart later described Wood as the Rommel of the American armored forces, while Lieutenant General Willis D. Crittenberger stated that Wood exceeded in leadership capabilities any man he had ever known.
Creighton Abrams emerged from the war as one of the most consequential American officers of the 20th century. He commanded armored units in Germany during the Cold War, served in Korea, led the 3rd Armored Division during the Berlin Crisis, and in 1968 assumed command of all U.S. forces in Vietnam. He oversaw the transition to Vietnamization and later became Army Chief of Staff, guiding the Army from conscription to an all-volunteer force. He died on September 4, 1974. The M1 Abrams main battle tank was named in his honor.
The 4th Armored Division returned to the United States in April 1946 and was inactivated shortly thereafter, though elements remained in Europe as occupation forces. Its veterans returned to civilian life, raising families and building careers. They held reunions for decades, bound by shared experience and loss.
The division’s legacy was not its equipment. It used the same Shermans, half-tracks, and artillery as other units. What set it apart was training, leadership, and culture. The division proved that soldiers who trust their leaders and each other, who know they will not be abandoned, can achieve results that appear impossible.
Military historians have analyzed the 4th Armored Division for generations. The conclusion is always the same. The difference was not the tanks. The difference was the men. John Wood understood that an army is not a machine but an organism, shaped by morale, discipline, and belief. Those intangibles mattered more than armor thickness or gun caliber.
“They shall be known by their deeds alone,” Wood had said in 1942. The division’s deeds carried them across France, through Lorraine, into Bastogne, over the Rhine, and into the heart of Germany. They earned 13 campaign streamers, two Presidential Unit Citations, the French Croix de Guerre with Palm, and countless individual decorations. Thirty-two soldiers remain listed as missing in action, a reminder of the cost of victory.
That is what training can do. That is what leadership can do. That is what a division bound by trust and shared sacrifice can accomplish when everything is on the line.
