In 1945, Japan Trapped U.S. Marines on Iwo Jima. Nobody Warned Them About the Bulldozers. JJ

In August of 1943, the United States Army relieved one of the best fighting generals it had. And not because he lost. He had just won the hardest fight of the entire Sicily campaign 2 days earlier with [music] his face still sitting on the cover of Time magazine. His name was Terry De La Mesa Allen. He drank hard. He brawled.

 He ignored nearly every uniform regulation the army printed. and he ran his command post so far forward that a visiting general once left in a hurry after Allen’s bodyguards clicked the safeties off their submachine guns as a hint. George Patton was exhausted by him. Omar Bradley could not stand him and the soldiers under him would have followed him into anything because Allan had figured out something the buy the book generals had not.

 He owned the dark. 30 years before Sicily, the army had already decided he was not officer material. Allan arrived at West Point in 1907 and never left it with a diploma. He was held back a year for failing mathematics. He fought a bad stutter that put him behind the other cadetses and he finally washed out over a gunnery course he could not pass.

 So he got his commission the hard way through a competitive exam and rode out to the Mexican border chasing gun smugglers with the cavalry. Then came France in 1918. As a temporary major in the Muzargon, he led a battalion of the 90th division through some of the worst fighting American troops saw in the First World War.

 [music] He was wounded twice. One round went straight through his jaw and his mouth. And the strange gift of that wound was that it cured the stutter he had carried his whole life. Something else took root in those trenches. He watched men die crossing open ground in daylight in full view of German machine guns and artillery observers and he came away certain there was a better way. Move in the dark.

 Hit them before they know you are there. The [music] surprise he believed was the thing that saved lives. Between the wars he became exactly the kind of officer a peacetime army did not know what to do with. He drank, [music] he brawled, and he played polo well enough to win an Olympic medal. [music] He finished near the bottom of his class at the staff college that Dwight Eisenhower finished at the very top of.

[music] But George Marshall, the man who would build the wartime army, had watched Allen handle troops and never forgot it. In 1940, Marshall jumped him straight [music] past the rank of colonel to brigadier general. And by the summer of 1942, he had the big red one, the first infantry division, with America about to learn what he could do with it.

 [music] The problem waiting for him in North Africa was ugly. In February of 1943, at a pass called Casterine, [music] Green American troops ran head first into Raml’s veterans and were taken [music] apart. Thousands were killed, wounded, or captured. Whole battalions came apart in the Tunisian mountains where the Germans held the high ground with better optics, longer ranged guns, and that [music] dreaded flat shooting 88 covering every open approach.

Crossing that ground in daylight [music] was close to suicide. Allen’s answer was the thing the manuals warned against. [music] He would attack at night. His men had already shown they could do it. On a freezing night that December, a company of the 26th Infantry [music] slipped through the black at McNassie, hit an Italian position that never saw them coming, [music] and walked back out with prisoners, and not a man lost.

 It was small. It was also a preview of everything to come. The real proof came at Elueder. [music] By that march, the first division was pushing east through southern Tunisia, and the passes ahead were exactly the kind of ground the enemy meant to hold. Allen did not line his men up for a dawn assault across open [music] desert.

 On the night of March 20th, he sent two columns into the darkness at once. The 18th Infantry crossed an exposed plane under a hazy moon, felt their way through a minefield in [music] silence, and came up behind a height the maps called Hill 336. [music] The defenders woke to find Americans already on top of them from the rear in the dark.

 By daybreak, the hill was taken and more than 400 prisoners were marched down off it. A few miles away, Darby’s Rangers made a night march of nearly 10 mi over the shoulder of a mountain to strike a defended gap from behind while the 26th Infantry hit it head-on. That trap closed on more than 700 more. Two positions, [music] one night, over a thousand men taken, and Allen’s division had barely been scratched doing it.

 This was the method the rest of the war would remember him for. Then the Germans came for him. On the morning of March 23rd, the 10th Panzer Division counterattacked out of the hills with roughly 50 tanks, trying to shove the Americans back [music] into the desert. Armor broke clean through the forward infantry, overran an artillery battalion, and rolled miles into the rear.

 When two German tanks ground their way toward Allen’s own command post, [music] his staff told him it was time to pull back. He refused. The words got remembered exactly afterward. I will like hell pull out and I’ll shoot the first bastard who does. The line held and the German armor drove straight into a minefield.

 And then the field guns and the anti-tank crews and a fresh outfit of M10 [music] tank destroyers went to work on them in the open. By 9 that morning, 30 [music] of those 50 tanks were burning wrecks on the valley floor, and the 10th Panzer was pulling back the way it had come. Watching from a forward trench, Patton is said to have muttered that it seemed a crime to murder good infantry like that.

 It was the first time in the war that American troops had beaten a veteran German Panzer division in a stand-up fight. 5 weeks after Casarine, Sicily [music] was next, and it was worse. In July of 1943, the first division went ashore at Gella on the island’s south coast. And the very next morning, the Herman Goring division counterattacked the beach head with 60 tanks, some of them heavy Tigers, driving to within a couple thousand yards of the water.

 [music] Axis headquarters actually reported that the Americans were re-mbarking, giving the whole thing up. Allen’s response with the panzers nearly on top of his guns was that they had not begun to fight yet and that their artillery had not even been overrun. Field artillery firing over open sights [music] from the dunes, naval guns reaching in from offshore and the last of the German armor stalled and burned on the flat. The beach head held.

 And then there was Troina. The town sat on a mountain a stride the highway held by the 15th Panza Grenadier Division and it became the hardest single battle of the Sicilian campaign. For 6 days at the start of August, Allen’s division and the units attached to it ground uphill against more than two dozen counterattacks over hilltops that changed hands and then changed hands again.

 He threw a full division night attack into it that very nearly broke the German line before a savage counter punch fought it to a standstill. One rifle company of the 26th Infantry [music] dug in on a bare ridge called Monty Basilio was chewed down to 17 men still on their feet. When the town finally fell, the defenders turned out to have been ordered to hold it at all costs and they very nearly had.

 It [music] was a victory. One of the ugliest, most expensive victories the division ever won. and it got Terry Allen fired. To [music] understand why, you have to understand how much the men above him had come to resent him. Bradley thought the First Division was a mob. Out of the line, Allen’s soldiers had a [music] reputation for looting wine shops, brawling, and treating rear area rules as a joke.

 That May, the division’s combat troops had rioted in Iran against supply men who had closed [music] their clubs to frontline soldiers. Bradley was convinced the whole outfit had soaked [music] up Allen’s contempt for discipline. And he was not entirely wrong. Allan genuinely saw spit and polish as a crutch for lesser commanders.

 [music] Patton’s feelings were more tangled. He admired Allen and he envied the headlines Allen pulled. [music] And when Eisenhower complained about the first division’s discipline, Patton shot back that you do not whip a dog right before you put him into a fight. But by the end of Sicily, Bradley had decided that Allan and his deputy Theodore Roosevelt Jr. both had to go.

2 days after Troy fell, [music] the order came down. On paper, the excuse was a failed first assault on the town. An assault that had actually been made by a borrowed regiment from a different division. Everyone [music] understood the real reason. Allan was too much his own man.

 Here’s the part that makes the whole thing strange. Nobody was willing to call it a firing for failure. Eisenhower flatly refused to let anyone suggest that Allen had been relieved for being bad at his job. Put in his own words, the message was plain. I will be glad to have General Allen again as a division commander. Patton insisted the relief go through without prejudice with a promise of an equal command waiting back home.

 They had just pushed one of the most effective combat leaders in the United States Army out of a war he was winning and every one of them knew it. If you are the kind of person who would rather have the real story than the movie version, take a second and subscribe. This channel lives on the ones the textbooks skip over. Now, the comeback.

The army needed him back almost immediately. They handed Allen a second division, the 104th Infantry, the Timberwolves, [music] and he built them in his own image before they ever left the States. He drilled night fighting so relentlessly, three and four times the hours any other division spent on it, that the men earned a name that told you everything about how they went to war, the Night Fighters.

And here’s the thing that never made it into the Legend of the Wild Rebel. In the Timberwolves, Allen ran a tight ship. He demanded standards in the field that he had never bothered to enforce in a rear area officer’s club because the standards that kept men alive in the dark were the only ones he had ever cared about.

 They landed in France in the fall of 1944. [music] The first American division shipped straight across from the United States with no stop in England and they went into the line almost at once. First under Canadian command, clearing the flooded [music] approaches below Antworp, then into Germany itself. Allan sent them in the way he always had [music] in the dark.

 Some of those assaults went in with bayonets and grenades only, no rifle fire at all, so that not a single muzzle flash would give away where his men were moving in the black. German defenders who had learned how to survive a daylight attack found themselves giving up ground at night to an enemy they could neither see nor rest against.

 The grind through the Rhineland proved it over and over. [music] Around Stolberg and Eshweiler and the wrecked village of Lucerberg, the Timberwolves clawed through the belt of German defenses in front of the rower river, often in freezing rain and mud, taking positions after dark that had held firm against daylight assaults.

 And when the rower itself finally had to be crossed in February of 1945, the river was running high and fast, deliberately flooded by the Germans upstream to drown any attack. Allan put his men across it at night anyway in assault [music] boats under fire and took the far bank in the black. Then they kept moving east.

 In March of 1945, the Timberwolves fought their way into Cologne, the first great German city to fall to Allied troops on the ground. The German commander defending it was killed in the fighting. They crossed the Rine, helped seal off the industrial heart of the Roar, and kept driving east until they shook hands with the Red Army on the elbow.

 By then, the division had been in continuous combat for 195 days without a break and had taken a staggering number of German prisoners, 51,724 of them. There was one more thing they found. In April, near Nordhousen, the Timberwolves walked into a concentration camp and its rows of the dead, thousands of bodies and a few hundred survivors barely holding on.

 It was the kind of thing the men never fully put down for the rest of their lives. Soldiers who had joked their way through months of night fighting [music] went quiet walking through it. Whatever anyone thought of their commander manners, [music] this was the war they had actually been fighting. It is worth being honest about the legend because the title on this video is doing what titles [music] do.

 Allen was not insane and he was not reckless. That is the myth. The reality runs [music] almost the other way. A night attack looks wild from the outside. A whole division vanishing into the black and [music] then exploding onto an enemy’s flank, but it was the careful option. It was the thing that let his men cross ground that would have killed them in daylight.

He trained it obsessively because he wanted to bring them home. The chaos his enemies felt was the entire [music] point, and it was deliberate. His real flaw was the one that got him relieved. >> [music] >> He could not make himself care about the parade ground army, the saluting and the pressed uniforms, and the rules that had nothing to do with staying alive.

 His men loved him for exactly the thing [music] his superiors could not forgive. In the field, there may have been no better division commander in the American army. In the rear, he ran an outfit that behaved like it owned the place. [music] Allan went home a major general, retired to El Paso, and lived quietly.

 And here is where the story turns into something [music] no screenwriter would dare to invent. He had one son, Terry [music] Deamisa Allen Jr., named for him, raised in the army, a fourth generation to wear the uniform. And in [music] 1967, that son was a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam, commanding the second battalion, [music] 28th infantry, a big red one battalion, his father’s old division.

 On the 17th of October, in a patch of jungle called Angan, the younger Allen led his men into a Vietkong ambush [music] that tore the battalion apart. 64 Americans were killed. The colonel died with them up front where his father had always insisted a commander belonged. The old general never really recovered. His health broke and he died 2 years later.

They buried him in El Paso, right next to his boy. Go back to that summer in 1943. To the general the army could not stand and could not do without. The one who owned the dark and answered to nobody. He spent his whole war finding ways to bring his soldiers home through the night.

 And the one soldier he could not bring home was the one who carried his name.