Patton Called Him the Best Division Commander in the Army. Then He Let Them Take Him

Get both copies of German Command Ebooks here: https://highcommandww2.com/ Terry Allen was called the best division commander in the army by Patton, then fired in the middle of his hardest battle. Two years later he commanded a second division to one of the war's most lopsided records. Allen led the First Infantry Division through North Africa and Sicily, stopping a panzer division at El Guettar and holding the Gela beachhead against German armor within a mile of the water. After a brutal week at Troina that cost over a thousand American casualties, Eisenhower relieved him for disciplinary issues—his men drank, brawled, and ignored paperwork, and Allen would not fix it. The army sent him home at fifty-five. He was given the 104th Infantry Division, an untested unit training in Oregon, and in 1944 he took them into Europe. By the end of the war the Timberwolves had captured over fifty thousand Germans and lost twenty-seven men as prisoners, one of the most lopsided records any American division posted. Same commander, same methods, different supervisor. The relief was never about his ability to fight. It was about an army that could measure conformity but not combat effectiveness, and when the two diverged, it punished the latter.