What Patton Said When Commanders Wanted to Leave American POWs Behind D
March 26th, 1945. Oberst Wilhelm Schiller, Garrison Commander of the prisoner compound at Hammelburg, Bavaria, received a telephone call from Army Group G headquarters that he did not expect. The call did not concern the approaching American front lines, now less than 60 miles to the west.
It did not concern ammunition resupply or defensive reinforcement. It concerned the prisoners. Specifically, what to do with them if American forces broke through before the compound could be evacuated. Schiller had approximately 1,300 Allied prisoners under his authority at Oflag IV-B, officers mostly, captured across North Africa, Italy, and France.
Among them, though Schiller did not yet know the strategic weight this particular name carried, was Lieutenant Colonel John Waters. Waters was Patton’s son-in-law. Army Group G’s guidance was bureaucratic, measured, and deeply familiar in its logic. The prisoners were a complication.
Moving them deeper into Germany would consume transport the Wehrmacht could not spare. Leaving them risked their liberation. The headquarters wanted options. Schiller wrote down the options. He did not know that 60 miles to the west, a general was already moving. He did not know that Patton had known about Waters for 3 weeks.
And he did not know what Patton had said exactly, on record, in front of witnesses, when his own commanders had urged him to leave the rescue for later. To understand what Patton did at Hammelburg, and why it terrified German commanders far more than the act of liberation itself, you must understand the Wehrmacht’s fundamental assumption about Allied command behavior in early 1945.
The assumption was rational, grounded in observable evidence, and completely wrong. German operational planning in the final months of the war rested on a belief that Allied commanders, Eisenhower specifically, but all of them, were bound by committee. Every significant decision required coordination across Army Groups, approval from SHAEF, and political vetting that took days or weeks.
German delaying tactics were built on this assumption. Hold a river crossing for 72 hours, and the American advance would stall while staff officers debated the crossing plan. Fortify a town and the Americans would spend 48 hours requesting artillery support, air support, and engineer assets before attacking.
The Wehrmacht’s diminishing resources could still exact enormous cost if they could force the Americans to slow down and think. The assumption had worked. In the autumn of 1944, German delaying actions along the Siegfried Line had bought Model’s Army Group B nearly 3 months. American methodical doctrine, set piece, deliberate, coordinated, was predictable.
You could plan against predictable. Generalleutnant Hans von Obstfelder, commanding the German First Army in the Palatinate, had built his entire February 1945 defensive scheme around this predictability. He had mapped American decision timelines. He had calibrated his withdrawals accordingly. He had in his own operational diary written, “The American command system is its own best obstacle.
” He had never accounted for a commander who simply did not use the system. Intelligence reached Patton’s Third Army headquarters on March 5th, 1945, confirming that American officers were held at Oflag XII-B near Hammelburg, approximately 60 miles behind German lines. The report was specific.
The compound held over a thousand prisoners. They were in deteriorating condition following the brutal winter. And German forces in the area, while thinned, were not absent. The compound was not undefended. Patton’s staff presented the tactical situation without ambiguity. A raid force strong enough to reach Hammelburg and return would require, at minimum, a reinforced battalion.
Roughly 300 to 400 men with armor support, air cover, and a secured corridor. The corridor did not exist. The air cover, given the fluid front, could not be guaranteed. And the 60 mi of German-held territory between Third Army’s forward positions and the compound was not empty. It contained scattered Wehrmacht units, Volkssturm militia, SS security detachments, and a road network that German forces still used and watched.
Patton’s core commanders, specifically Major General Manton Eddy of 12th Corps, were direct in their assessment. The raid was not feasible at current force levels without diverting assets from the main advance. The main advance was going well. The prisoners had survived this long. They would survive a few more weeks until Third Army’s lines reached Hammelburg through conventional advance.
The argument was sound. It was the argument any competent staff officer would make. Eddy made it clearly and professionally on the record. Patton heard the argument. He did not dispute the logic. He said, and this is documented in Eddy’s own post-war account, that he understood the risks perfectly, and that he was ordering the raid anyway.
Then he said the sentence that Eddy recorded verbatim, “I will not leave American officers in German hands when I have the means to reach them, however imperfect those means.” However imperfect those means. What Patton did next revealed something about his command philosophy that German intelligence had never successfully modeled, and that his own staff had consistently underestimated.
He did not wait for conditions to improve. He did not request additional resources. He took what was available and made it work as well as it could be made to work, which he understood would not be perfectly. Task Force Baum, named for Captain Abraham Baum, its 26-year-old commander from the 4th Armored Division, was assembled on March 25th, 1945 at the town of Schweinfurt.
Baum received his orders that evening. The force consisted of 57 vehicles, 10 Sherman medium tanks, six light Stuart tanks, 27 half-tracks, three motorized artillery pieces, and supporting jeeps. Total personnel, 294 men. Against 60 miles of hostile territory to reach a compound whose exact defenses Baum did not know, with no guaranteed air support and no securing force behind him.
Patton was not unaware of the risks to Baum’s men. He was not cavalier about them. Captain Richard Baron, Baum’s executive officer, recorded in his memoir that Patton appeared to the assembly point before departure and spoke to Baum for approximately 5 minutes privately. Baron could not hear the conversation.
What he saw was that when it ended, Patton shook Baum’s hand and held it for a moment longer than was customary. That detail matters. It is the human cost acknowledged before it became cost. Task Force Baum crossed the German lines at 2200 hours on March 26th. The first 60 minutes were deceptive.
The German rear areas were thinner than anticipated, and Baum covered 14 miles before encountering serious resistance outside the town of Gemünden, where a German rail bridge over the Saale River was defended by a flak unit and a company of infantry. Baum attacked without pausing. He lost one Sherman and 11 men killed or wounded. He took the bridge.
He kept moving. The speed of the penetration, over 20 miles in under 4 hours, triggered a crisis response inside German Army Group G’s headquarters that von Obstfelder later described as organized panic. The assumption had always been that American raiders would stop, consolidate, request support. Baum did not stop.
The German response system, calibrated for deliberate American advances, could not close fast enough. Units were alerted. Blocking forces were assembled. By the time those blocking forces reached their designated positions, Task Force Baum had already passed through them. At 14:30 hours on March 27th, Task Force Baum reached Hahmelburg.
Oflag II-B’s outer gate opened after a 40-minute firefight with the German garrison. The prisoners streamed out. And then the nature of the operation shifted completely. There were not 300 prisoners. There were 1,291. Baum had vehicles for perhaps 200. The rest began walking west on foot. And the German response, which had been scrambling to catch up, finally arrived in force.
The decision point that defined the operation came at approximately 1600 hours on March 27th, 1 mile west of Hahmelburg, when Baum’s scouts reported German blocking forces, elements of the 7th Panzer Replacement Training Division, reinforced with assault guns, moving to cut the withdrawal route. The column was stretched across nearly 2 miles of road.
Baum had his vehicles, approximately 200 mounted prisoners, and over 1,000 men on foot who could not outpace pursuing infantry. The German plan was precise and professionally executed. Oberleutnant Hans-Jürgen von Schiller, commanding the blocking force, positioned two StuG III assault guns on the ridge overlooking the Reisenberg Road and sent his infantry to encircle the column from the north.
It was a standard blocking engagement. Against a conventional raiding force, it would have ended the operation immediately. It did not end immediately because Baum did something von Schiller had not anticipated. Rather than attempting to break through the blocking position, a frontal assault against prepared assault guns that his remaining Shermans would likely lose, Baum dispersed.
He split the column into small elements and ordered independent withdrawal by any viable route. The vehicles scattered into the forested hills. The freed prisoners dispersed with them or continued on foot in small groups. Von Schiller’s encircling infantry, designed to close on a consolidated column, found no column to close on.
The dispersal did not save Task Force Baum. By the morning of March 28th, German forces had recaptured most of the freed prisoners, including Lieutenant Colonel Waters, who had been wounded in the initial breakout. Of Baum’s 294 men, 32 were killed and 26 wounded in the operation.
Baum himself was captured, badly wounded, after his jeep overturned in the dark. He would be liberated by Third Army’s advancing columns 3 weeks later. The operation, by every conventional measure, failed. The prisoners were not brought back. The force was largely captured or destroyed. Patton was publicly criticized by Eisenhower’s headquarters.
The after-action assessment in the SHAEF record called it an imprudent risk with insufficient force. Bradley was furious. The criticism was not wrong. But von Obstfelder understood something in those 72 hours that the SHAEF critics did not articulate. He wrote in his operational diary on March 29th, 3 days after Baum crossed his lines, “A commander who will send 300 men 60 miles behind our lines for a single officer’s release will not stop.
This type of command cannot be delayed. It can only be defeated, and we do not have the means to defeat it.” He did not mean it as a compliment. He meant it as a professional conclusion. It was both. The raid on Hammelburg failed tactically and succeeded strategically in a manner that its critics could not measure because they were looking at the wrong metric.
The question they asked was, “Did the prisoners come home?” They did not, not immediately. The question that mattered was, “What did the raid demonstrate to German commanders about the nature of the force they were facing?” Von Obstfelder’s response to Task Force Baum was to accelerate the thinning of his rear area defenses, redirecting units from blocking positions to the main line.
He could not afford to chase a threat that moved the way Baum had moved while also contesting Third Army’s primary advance. The raid had forced a choice. He chose the primary advance. The rear areas thinned. Third Army’s intelligence reports from late March and early April 1945 documented a consistent pattern.
German rear area resistance collapsed faster than front line resistance. Units that should have held river river crossings for 48 hours held them for six. Delaying actions that German doctrine prescribed as lasting 72 hours lasted 18. The Wehrmacht’s planning assumption that American advances could be reliably delayed by methodical blocking had broken.
A significant part of what broke it was the knowledge propagated through German command channels after Hammelburg that Third Army would pursue targets regardless of doctrinal risk. Task Force Baum’s 294 men changed the German calculus for the entire army group. That is not a small return on an imprudent risk.
Lieutenant Colonel John Waters was liberated on April 6th, 1945 by Third Army’s conventional advance. He had been shot in the hip during the original breakout and walked with a cane for the rest of his life. He and Patton never discussed Hammelburg directly according to Waters’ own post-war account. Some silences contain everything that needs to be said.
Captain Abraham Baum received the Distinguished Service Cross for the Hammelburg raid. He was 26 years old. He went home to New York, worked in the garment industry, raised a family, and gave occasional interviews to military historians who found the operation a useful case study in audacious failure.
In one such interview in 1981, he was asked whether he believed Patton had been right to send him. He paused for a long time. Then he said, “He was right that leaving men behind was wrong. Whether my way of fixing it was right, that’s harder to answer. That honest uncertainty is worth sitting with.
” Patton’s decision was not cost-free. It was not surgically correct. Men died for a mission that did not achieve its tactical objective. That is the full truth of it and it deserves to be the full truth. But what Patton said when his commanders urged him to wait that he would not leave American officers in German hands when he had the means to reach them, however imperfect, contains a principle that extends far past the military context it came from.
The moment you classify the difficult rescue as too complicated, too costly, too imperfect in its available means, that is the moment the people who needed you stop expecting help. And when people stop expecting help, something breaks in them that the eventual help, when it finally comes with better resources and cleaner conditions, cannot entirely fix.
Patton understood this. It was not strategy. It was not doctrine. It was the refusal to let the perfect conditions for action be the reason action never came. Imperfect means immediate action. That is the lesson. And it cost exactly what Patton knew it would cost when he shook Abraham Bombs’ hand and held it one moment longer than necessary.
