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"General Rose didn't mind coming up the front line,"
Bill Lovelady said to me recently. That is the Lt. Col. William
B. Lovelady of the 33rd Armored Regiment, a task force commander
of the 3rd Armored Division and the general was Maurice Rose,
division commander.
Returning to his theme about General Rose going to the front
line, Lovelady said: "He came up two or three times to relieve
me but when he saw I was doing a good job he didn't. Wesley Sweat
would tell me about it later." Sweat was a lieutenant colonel
and the division G-3, or operations officer and a native of Florida.
Lovelady was from Georgia.
Lovelady particularly recalls the fighting around Mons, the
two days - September 2 and 3 of 1944 - when, as the division
history so well puts it, "there was no front and rear."
He had established a road block when it was approached by two
Germans wearing the outfits of railway workers, riding in a horsedrawn
wagon. They were stopped, patted down for weapons, the wagons
contents searched and nothing improper or suspicious found. Our
troops were on the point of letting them continue their trip
toward Germany when General Rose arrived.
Rose immediately ordered the two out of the wagon, ripped
open their railway worker long shirts, exposing the close-fitting
uniforms of German army officers!
"I felt like a fool," Lovelady said.
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