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CHAPTER I |
| The 90th Infantry Division was born on the
soil of Texas, drew its strength from the North and South and East and West,
grew to lusty manhood on the beaches of France, and fed itself on victories
plucked from the forests and wrenched from the rivers of Europe. The new division was born quietly but proudly at Camp Barkeley, Texas, on March 25, 1942. Quietly, because no one knew that this was a unit whose destiny it was to smash the German defenses in Normandy, to break the enemy's back in the Foret de Mont-Castre, and later to break his heart on the banks of the Moselle. Quietly it was born because no one knew of the victories that lay before it, of Chambois and Oberwampach and the Saar and Koenigsmacker, of the triumphant thrust across the soil of France, and the part the 90th was to play in the reduction of the impregnable fortress of Metz. The newspapers said, "The 90th Infantry Division was re-activated under command of Major General Henry Terrell, Jr." But they had no way of knowing that its men would storm the bulwarks of the vaunted Siegfried Line, race to the shores of the Rhine, cross the Moselle once more, and crown its career with an epic march across the Hessen and Thuringian hills and thence into the Sudetenland of Czechoslovakia, cutting the German body in half. The 90th Division was born proudly, too, rich in the tradition of past accomplishments. Its forbears in the previous war, although arriving late in France, did not arrive too late to play important and vital roles in the drive at Saint-Mihiel and in the Meuse-Argonne offensive. So much for the future and so much for the past. In 1942 the 90th Infantry Division was merely young and eager, confidently watching its muscles grow. On its left sleeve it wore an olive drab patch with the red inscription. To inquisitive strangers the 90th patiently explained that in past days the letters stood for Texas and Oklahoma, for originally the division was made up almost exclusively of men of those two states. Later, however, the division drew its men from every corner of every state in the nation, and the T-O came to represent, by common consent, "Tough 'Ombres". |
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