What Patton Did When a German Colonel Threatened to Execute 40 American POWs.

Late March 1945. Patton ordered 300 men fifty miles behind German lines to liberate a prisoner of war camp. Every officer who saw the plan knew the force was too small. They went anyway. One of the prisoners at that camp was Lieutenant Colonel John Waters. Waters was married to Patton's daughter. Task Force Baum drove fifty miles into a dying Reich, fought through town after town, reached the camp, tore down the wire — and found not a few hundred prisoners, but fifteen hundred. Five times what the column could carry. The mathematics of the mission collapsed in an instant. The task force was destroyed on the way home. Nearly 300 men killed, wounded, or captured. Captain Abe Baum, the twenty-four-year-old Jewish kid from the Bronx who led the column, ended up a prisoner at the same camp he'd driven fifty miles to liberate. A week and a half later, the regular advance reached Hammelburg and freed everyone. Patton always insisted Waters had nothing to do with it. Almost no one who has studied the raid believes him. And the question it leaves behind has never gotten easier: was it a rescue, or was it a father sending other people's sons to bring his daughter's husband home? 🔔 Subscribe for more untold military history everyday!