From this time until the end of the war we were fighting the SS and not the Wehrmacht. This had also been true as we came into Bad Tölz and there was ample evidence to substantiate the claim that the SS were terrorizing members of the Wehrmacht and civilians who showed any inclination to surrender. During the next three days the thousands of Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe troops that surrendered by company, battalion, regiment and division merely furnished an almost ignored background for the last days of our Division's drive through the very heart of the army that had conquered all of western Europe and threatened to dominate the world.

Our casualties in the Bavarian and Tyrolian Alps were by comparison to earlier campaigns negligible, but it was much harder to accept the fact that a screeching shell in the last minute of the war has the same lethal qualities it had during the most bitter of the early days in combat. American soldiers do not hate easily and they forget quickly, although there is no more deadly and determined animal than the GI at the climax of a battle. Yet during these last days there developed a new and acute loathing and hatred for the stupidity of the SS who fought on as American armored columns drove into the very heart of the Reich, making their cause utterly hopeless. We had a few men killed as the 1st and 2nd Battalions pushed into Bad Tölz and the 3rd Battalion suffered casualties south of Bad Tölz on the banks of the Isar River. Except for these grim incidents the pursuit into Austria from west of the Rhine would have been an adventure — physically tiring but mentally most gratifying to men who had fought across the endless procession of rivers, mountains and valleys of Italy, France and Germany.

On the afternoon of the 3rd, the 1st Battalion, followed by the 2nd Battalion, moved due east along the foot of the Alps while the 3rd Battalion moved straight south in the Isar River Valley and immediately encountered heavy resistance. The 1st Battalion turned abruptly to the south a few miles east of Bad Tölz and ran into self-propelled, mortar and small arms fire on the east shore of the Tegern See. Just before dark the battalion requested a fighter-bomber mission on Tegernsee, and held up offensive operations pending the delivery of the mission at sixt-hirty the next morning. During the night a woman from Tegernsee was apprehended and when brought to the battalion. command post, stated that the SS had agreed to withdraw to the south of Tegernsee and declare the town, which was filled with military hospitals, an open city. A patrol from the battalion moved into the town and found it undefended. The air mission was cancelled. In the meantime the 3rd Battalion, with I Company leading, cleared the first small town south of Bad Tölz and found that it had been an SS officer training school. Although of short duration the fighting here was bitter and a young tank commander was killed. Aggressive action by our tankers during the last few days of the war saved us many casualties. Six months later a platoon leader from I Company was reminiscing about the bitterness of those last days of fighting with the SS: "I'll never forget those medium tankers ... Jerry had plenty of stuff in that little town and they led all the way. We killed fourteen SS in one house." By darkness the rest of the battalion, with K Company leading, had advanced through Lenggries, and we were still being shelled by a pair of artillery peices south along the river.

The 4th of May found the three battalions of the combat team miles apart on separate routes, penetrating deeper and deeper into the Bavarian Alps. The 1st Battalion found little resistance south of the Tegern See and cleared Rottach and reached Velep, Himmler's summer home, which was unoccupied. The regimental command group, moving on the 1st Battalion's route, moved into the lavish home of Max Amann, Reichsleader of the Press and publisher of Mein Kampf and took the high ranking Nazi Party member into custody.

Swinging eastward from the north end of the Tegern See, the 2nd Battalion encountered light resistance on the east shore of the Schlier See, but dispersed it with long range tank fire. As the column rolled southeast down the hard surfaced highway dominated on each side by towering, snow clad and forested mountains the I and R platoon threw long range 50 caliber machine gun fire ahead of us, and when we met any resistance opened up with the convincing 76's and 90's from our Shermans and TD's on which our leading platoons were riding. As the Germans fled into the refuge of the wooded slopes we ignored them and drove deeper and deeper into the Alps, leaving thousands of armed enemy behind us. The roads were becoming jammed with prisoners coming down out of the hills. Soon the problems of disarming them, not to mention taking them into custody, became too time consuming. If we stopped at all it was to hurriedly collect their pistols and "issued" Wehrmacht watches, leaving machine guns, rifles and cannon intact. Most of them had thrown their weapons down — in the woods, into streams, in meadows or just into the ditches. In one spacious estate we found the swimming pool half filled with weapons. This was the only time during the war when we encountered a great number of the typical, movie-version German officers — monocled, arrogant, immaculately attired. German doughboys, like American, aren't the glamorous type. Prisoners we had taken had always been the muddy, weary GI Joe of the German army with a weeks growth of beard, a long and ill fitting grey-green overcoat that was muddy from lying on the wet ground behind an MG 42, a duckbill cap and instead of a K ration in his pocket he usually had a little plastic orange box of butter, a can of Norwegian herring or sardines, a peice of greasy pork and the end of a loaf of black bread wrapped in a dirty peice of muslin, a small pair of scissors and a straight edged razor. Not many of this type ever got back to the Bavarian "redoubt" — it had been a long war for the German doughfoot, too.

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