Task Force Baum - Aftermath

Aftermath

As Soviets were encroaching from the east, Americans began advancing into Germany days after the task force, with Germans moving POWs further away from combat zones. Those able to move were rounded up into unmarked boxcars and sent via train to Nuremberg, then to other prisoner camps away from the front lines. The remaining men were left behind at Hammelburg.

Baum was shot in the groin while trying to flee back to allied lines and captured by German Home Guard. He joined Waters in the Serbian hospital at the Hammelburg camp, which was liberated by the 14th Armored Division on 6 April—just 9 days after the failed liberation by Task Force Baum. Ironically, the failure of the task force did help set Waters free sooner: had he not been shot he would have been marched off to a camp further into Germany with the rest of the POWs.

Patton was alleged to have offered Baum a Medal of Honor for a successful completion of the mission. As a Medal of Honor warrants an investigation into the events behind the awarding of it, which Patton would not have wanted, Baum received just a Distinguished Service Cross. Patton awarded it to him personally.

It is disputed whether Patton knew his son-in-law was being held at the camp, but many at the camp and Abraham Baum believed so. Patton sent an aide, Major Alexander Stiller, with the task force, purportedly to identify Waters so he could be taken back with them. Diaries that Patton made publicly available indicate he was unaware of Waters’ presence there until after the task force had arrived, but a letter written to his wife just after the task force left indicates otherwise.

I sent a column to a place forty miles east of where John and some 900 prisoners are said to be. I have been nervous as a cat… as everyone but me thought it too great a risk…. If I lose that column, it will possibly be a new incident. But I won’t lose it." (The Longest Winter, p. 207)

A furious General Eisenhower reprimanded Patton for the incident. While Patton admitted the failure of the mission, he defended his actions due to fear that retreating Germans might kill the prisoners in the camp. Except for the Malmedy massacre during the Battle of the Bulge, the intentional killing of American prisoners was uncommon. According to Patton, the mistake was sending a force too small to perform the mission, saying, "I can say this, that throughout the campaign in Europe I know of no error I made except that of failing to send a combat command to take Hammelburg.”

However, Patton claimed its true goal had been to distract the German forces from a massive wheeling maneuver to the north of Hammelburg by a mass of his Third Army. As Patton insisted, that mission was in fact accomplished as the diversion of German forces to Hammelburg had caused them to lose sight of the Allied turn north. Task Force Baum actually also fooled the Germans into believing the Allies would be continuing east instead of planning their actual northern maneuver.

As a footnote, Captain Abe Baum was born in the Bronx, New York, March 29, 1921. He died, age 91, at his home in Ranch Bernardo, California on March 3, 2013. Baum fought at Normandy, suffering shrapnel wounds in a mine field. By March he was a battle-toughened officer. Surprised when Patton personally gave him his orders for the raid to Hammelburg, he later remarked: “I thought, what the hell am I doing here?”