Gen. DePuy describes his initiation as a battalion commander, leading the crossing of the Saar River:
So, there were three lines of pillboxes, plus some scattered ones up in the woods. Up on top of the hill, on the left flank, there was a highway intersection, not really a major one but an important one for that area. Well, anyway, my job was to cross the river, get on that hill and block that major road junction on the left flank of the division’s bridgehead.
My concept of crossing that river is one that reflects my view to this day on how to do things. I felt that if we stopped to fight at the river, or at the railroad track, or at the road, then we would never get to where we were going. So, I felt that the only way we could ever get through that maze of pillboxes and up on top of that hill was to totally decentralize things down to individual squads. So, in the day and a half that I had, I personally talked to every company commander and then I had the company commanders bring in every platoon leader and squad leader and I gave them all the same orders — “Get in the boats and cross the river. If you are shot at from the pillbox, go to one side or the other of it. Don’t stop and don’t go back. Go to the right or go to the left, but go inland and cross the railroad track. Don’t stop to fight anybody. When you get to the road, turn right and move south until you come to the end of the woodline. When you get to the end of the woodline wait until at least a platoon is there and then go up the hill to the road junction and wait. Get yourself set up for defense and wait until we all get there. Then we’ll organize. If you are the only one who gets there, the mission is to block that road. If we all get there, we’ll all block that road. If only one company gets there, fine. But, block that road junction!”
Well, we all got there. I think we might have lost two men out of 500. The crossing really was hairy because I initially made a horrible mistake. In the little town of Rehlingen, which was right on the near riverbank, I infiltrated in a platoon of quad 50s mounted on the back of half-tracks. I wanted them there just in case we got stopped in the middle of the river by pillbox fire and weren’t able to get across. Well, my mistake was that I gave the antiaircraft lieutenant in command of that platoon, responsibility for deciding when to open fire. I actually thought I had given that responsibility to the commander of the tanks; I also had a tank platoon and a tank destroyer platoon in there, and some .50 caliber machine guns from the battalion trains. In other words, I had that town loaded with firepower, but what I didn’t have, was clear responsibility as to whom would decide when to use it. You see my orders were, “Don’t open fire unless we’re getting heavy fire from the pillboxes on the river.” Well, it turned out that heavy fire to me and heavy fire to that lieutenant from the antiaircraft platoon, who never had been on the front-line in his life, was quite different.
What happened is that we had the boats lined up about 100 yards from the river. The engineers had put them there and we had engineer tape leading from the assembly areas to the boats. After they picked up a boat, each squad was to go straight to the river, get in, and go and do all of those good things that I talked about. Well, just about the time the first two companies got to the boats and were picking them up, about two machine pistols fired from the other side of the river and the whole goddamned town of Rehlingen lit up. All the .50 calibers, all the tanks and all the tank destroyers were firing tracers. It lit up the whole Saar River Valley and it woke up every defender for 25 miles. So, it really was a very inauspicious initiation as a battalion commander. Once we got them shut down and the enemy fire died down a little bit, my S-3, a guy named McAlister, and I, walked along and went to every boat and every squad. A few of them we had to put into the boats at pistol point. I suppose that is not an approved leadership technique.