In July 1943, Major General Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division was twelve miles beyond George Patton’s halt line, chasing retreating Germans through the mountains of Sicily. Patton’s chief of staff braced for an explosion, but none came. Patton crumpled the report, threw it away, and told his chief of staff to get Omar Bradley on the phone. When Bradley arrived, he expected Patton to demand Allen’s head.
Instead, Patton said, “I can’t fire him. He’s the only division commander who understands how to kill Germans. ”
Bradley was not satisfied. He had kept a careful list of Allen’s infractions since North Africa: bar fights in Tunis, a looted supply depot, open insubordination.
Bradley argued that Allen was making the command look weak. Patton replied with barely concealed contempt, “He’s making us look weak, or he’s making you look weak. ”
Bradley left knowing Patton had chosen sides, and it wasn’t his. What none of them knew was that the tension between these three men would shape the American army’s approach to night fighting for the rest of the war.
Terry Allen came from a military family. His father was an army colonel, and his grandfather had fought at Gettysburg. But he was not a typical officer. Dyslexia made reading agonizing, and he failed out of West Point twice.
He entered the army through the back door in 1912 after attending Catholic University and completing ROTC, and the regular officers looked down on him. He didn’t care. In World War I, Allen commanded an infantry battalion at thirty, personally leading patrols into no man’s land when regulations said he should stay behind the lines. A machine gun bullet tore through his jaw during the Meuse-Argonne offensive.
He talked the doctors into sending him back to his unit before the wound healed, and he showed up at the front still bleeding. His superiors found him impossible. He drank too much and ignored regulations he thought were stupid. But he won.
Every engagement his battalion fought ended in American victory. After the armistice, Allen bounced between cavalry posts and built a reputation as the man you wanted in a fight and nowhere else. By 1940, he was facing a possible court-martial, and then a telegram arrived. He had been promoted to brigadier general, skipping the rank of colonel entirely.
George Marshall had personally intervened. The chief of staff was rebuilding the army for a war he knew was coming, and he needed combat leaders. In May 1942, Marshall gave Allen command of the 1st Infantry Division, the Big Red One. George Patton was everything Allen was not.
West Point graduate, wealthy, Olympic athlete. He demanded absolute obedience, and his men feared him more than they feared the Germans. When Patton took command of the Western Task Force for the invasion of North Africa in 1942, he inherited Allen’s division. What he saw intrigued him.
Allen’s men wore wrinkled uniforms and unauthorized gear and walked with the casual slouch of dock workers, but they moved with a confidence that caught Patton’s attention. They weren’t afraid of anything. At their first meeting, Patton expected Allen to show respect for rank. Allen showed up in a dirty uniform with his collar unbuttoned.
Patton started to dress him down. Allen interrupted. “General, are we here to fight Germans or impress inspection officers? ”
Patton’s aide later said the silence lasted an eternity.
Then Patton laughed. “Get out of my office, Allen, and take Casablanca. ”
Allen took Casablanca. Then he took Oran.
Then his division stopped Rommel’s counterattack at Kasserine Pass when other American units were running. Patton watched Allen’s victories pile up and made a calculation. He could break Allen and turn the 1st Division into a conventional unit, or he could unleash him. Patton chose to unleash him, and the price was that Allen’s men started acting like they owned North Africa.
They raided other divisions’ supply depots. They got into massive brawls with British troops in Tunis. One night they beat up an entire platoon of Patton’s own military police. The MPs filed a formal complaint.
Patton threw it in the trash. Bradley watched all of this with growing alarm. He believed discipline was the foundation of an effective army, and he had started documenting every infraction. He brought his notebook to Patton and demanded action.
Patton looked at the list and said, “You’re keeping score like this is a goddamn tennis match. Allen is winning a war. ” When Bradley argued that Allen’s behavior was undermining coalition unity, Patton cut him off. “The British respect one thing: winning.
Allen wins. Now get out of my tent. ”
While Allen’s men were brawling in rear-area towns, they were also perfecting a form of warfare that would change the course of the Italian campaign: night attacks. Daylight attacks were bloodbaths against German artillery and machine guns, but at night, American infantry could close the distance before defenders knew they were coming.
Allen trained his division to fight in complete darkness, thirty to thirty-five hours a week versus the standard eight to twelve. His men learned to navigate by compass and stars and rehearsed attacks until they could execute them without speaking. Patton watched one night drill and told his staff, “That son of a bitch has invented something new. ”
In July 1943, the Allies invaded Sicily.
Patton commanded the American 7th Army, Bernard Montgomery the British 8th, and Patton specifically requested Allen’s division for the most difficult landing at Gela. The 1st Division landed on July 10th. Within hours, German panzers from the Hermann Göring Division counterattacked with ninety tanks, trying to push the Americans back into the sea. Allen’s division stopped them cold.
Then Allen did something that made Patton’s blood boil. Instead of consolidating the beachhead as ordered, he pushed inland hard, advancing so fast he left the flanking divisions behind and created a salient exposed to counterattack from three sides. Patton drove to the front to order him to pull back. He found Allen standing on a ridge, watching his battalions disappear into the interior.
“What the hell are you doing, Allen? I ordered you to hold the beach. ”
Allen didn’t turn around. “General, are we here to fight Germans or spit shine our boots?
”
Patton grabbed his shoulder. “I gave you a direct order. ”
Allen looked at him and said, “Then you can relieve me, but my men are staying on those Germans. ”
Patton had two choices: fire Allen on the spot, proving he couldn’t control his own commanders, or let him go.
He chose the second. “If you lose one battalion to a counterattack, I will personally court-martial you. ”
Allen smiled. “I won’t lose a battalion, sir.
” Then he walked away. He was right. The Germans never counterattacked. The 1st Division cracked the German defensive line and allowed Patton’s army to race Montgomery to Messina.
It was a brilliant tactical gambit, and it was blatant insubordination. Bradley was taking notes. Patton tried to smooth things over with Eisenhower, writing that Allen was the finest combat leader he had ever seen but was completely uncontrollable. Eisenhower read the report and told Bradley to start looking for a replacement.
Patton found out and exploded, driving to Bradley’s headquarters to argue that firing Allen would be the stupidest personnel decision of the war. Bradley looked at him with cold satisfaction. “It’s already done. ”
Patton went over Bradley’s head to Eisenhower, arguing that Allen had saved the Sicilian invasion, that his division had the highest combat effectiveness rating in the theater.
He even threatened to resign. Eisenhower listened patiently, then said, “George, you’ve been protecting Allen for eight months. In that time, his division has become a gang, not a military unit. If we take them to France like this, they’ll be a liability.
”
Patton knew Eisenhower was right. He had created the problem by refusing to discipline Allen, and now someone else would pay the price. On August 7th, 1943, Bradley called Allen to corps headquarters. The conversation was brief.
Allen was relieved of command of the 1st Infantry Division, along with his assistant division commander, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. The official reason was discipline. Patton didn’t attend the change of command ceremony, but he sent his chief of staff with a private message: “Tell Terry I fought like hell for him. Tell him I’m sorry.
” Allen received the message on a transport ship heading back to the United States, crumpled it up, and threw it over the side. What neither Patton nor Allen knew was that George Marshall had been watching the entire drama unfold, and he had very different ideas about what Terry Allen deserved. On October 15th, 1943, Allen stood before a formation of raw draftees at Camp Adair, Oregon. They were the 104th Infantry Division, nicknamed the Timberwolves.
Two months after Bradley declared Allen unfit to command, Marshall had given him a second division. Marshall didn’t care what Patton thought or what Bradley wanted. He needed combat leaders, not politicians. Allen immediately reinstated the brutal regimen he had perfected with the 1st Division.
While standard divisions trained for daylight operations, the Timberwolves lived in the dark, learning to move without flashlights and execute attacks without speaking. The division adopted a motto: “Nothing in hell must stop the Timberwolves. ” By August 1944, they were ready. The 104th entered combat in the Netherlands on October 23rd.
Allen attacked at night, and his Timberwolves advanced fifteen miles in five days through flooded terrain that had stalled other divisions for weeks. Then they hit the Siegfried Line. Concrete pillboxes, dragon’s teeth, interlocking fields of fire. Other divisions had bled themselves white attacking those defenses in daylight.
Allen’s men attacked at night, and town after town fell: Stolberg, Eschweiler, Inden. They crossed the Rur River in a night assault Patton’s 3rd Army had been unable to execute in daylight, and finally they reached Cologne. German prisoners began calling the 104th the “night fighters,” complaining that fighting them was unfair. The Americans attacked when you couldn’t see them coming.
Terry Allen had invented those tactics in North Africa while Patton was protecting him from Bradley. Now he was using them to take objectives Patton’s own divisions couldn’t. By April 1945, the 104th had crossed the Rhine and was racing toward the Elbe. They had fought for 195 consecutive days, never yielded ground to a counterattack, and never failed to take an objective.
George Patton read the after-action reports and realized what he had lost. He wrote a letter to Marshall in March 1945 admitting that relieving Allen had been a mistake, calling Allen’s methods a weapon to be exploited rather than a problem to be solved. He never sent it. The letter sat in his desk until his death.
Patton died in December 1945 from injuries sustained in a car accident, and his private confession remained buried in his papers. Omar Bradley never admitted he was wrong. In his memoirs, he defended the firing as necessary for unit cohesion, though his own staff officers later said he had been jealous of Allen’s reputation and used discipline as an excuse to eliminate a rival. German prisoners consistently rated the 104th among the American divisions they least wanted to face.
British commanders studied Allen’s night attack tactics and adopted them. The Red Army sent observers to document his methods after the linkup at the Elbe. Nearly five thousand Timberwolves were casualties, over a thousand killed in action. Allen wrote hundreds of personal letters to the families of men who died under his command.
He never wrote a memoir or gave interviews about his conflicts with Patton and Bradley. When reporters asked about being fired in Sicily, he only said, “They made their decision. I made mine. The war decided who was right.
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Those words are carved on his headstone at Arlington National Cemetery, right next to the words “night fighter. ” Patton had said Allen was uncontrollable, and he was right. But Allen didn’t need to be controlled.
He needed to be unleashed, and when George Marshall finally unleashed him, he proved that the most dangerous division commanders are the ones who refuse to fight the way everyone expects.