CORPORAL DAVID L. MALOOF: A “BLACK CAT” IN THE 13TH ARMORED DIVISION IN WORLD WAR II
David L. Maloof was a Corporal in “The Black Cats”, the 13th Armored Division in the 7th Army in World War II.
The young man from Rhode Island’s military career got off to a rough start — literally. He trained for months in Texas before sailing in January 1945 on an ocean liner used as a troop ship to Le Havre, France. The ship hit rough weather and the troops were seasick for much of the trip. When the weather cleared, Maloof finally went up to the kitchen, starving. The cooks informed him that dinner was over.
He said: “What is that?” pointing to some food on a plate.
The cook informed him: “That is garbage.”
“Not to me it isn’t” he said, quickly making up for several days of missed meals.
Then his land-based service started even rougher — again, literally. Once in France, an officer told the troops that they needed volunteers who knew how to drive to chauffeur the officers in their jeeps. Corporal Maloof’s family never had a car, but he quickly volunteered. Within a day, an officer told Corporal Maloof: “You don’t know how to drive a car” and looked for other drivers.
That was a blessing in disguise. On April 15, 1945, several officers in their jeeps, including the Division General Wogan, were seriously injured by Nazi rifle fire while waiting to clear a roadblock.
Corporal Maloof signed up to be the radio man in a M4 Sherman Tank. It was, in and of itself, an act of remarkable bravery. Tank teams were the elite in World War II, like SEAL teams today. Sherman tanks were aptly nicknamed “Ronsons” because with their thin metal, they lit up “first time, every time,” like the cigarette lighter ads stated. The tanks always went into battle first. The Third Armored Division started out with 232 M4 Sherman tanks in Normandy, and over time replaced and replaced and replaced, and ultimately lost 1348 of them — a loss ratio of 580%, according to the aptly named book “Death Traps” by Belton Cooper.
As depicted in the 2014 film “Fury,” starring Brad Pitt as a Sherman tank commander, the German Tiger tanks vastly outmatched the American tanks, with a shooting range of 1100 meters vs. 600 meters. The only good news — the tanks usually could avoid meeting head-on, and we made 50,000 Sherman tanks, twice as many as there were German tanks.
The “Black Cats” tanks marched through France and Germany, seeing first moderate and then heavier fighting, which was described as follows:
“Well, we fought north all right, through every roadblock the Heinies could throw up, and every artillery barrage they could throw at us. It took us just 6 days to blast our way across four rivers and the valleys between — the Sieg, the Agger, the Duhnn, and the Wupper. A kraut with a burb gun could hold a doughboy up for just so long, and there was the tanker to ease the kraut out of the picture. Or that other one with the Panzerfaust could slow up the tank, but the Infantryman was there to knock him out with an M-1. And behind them both was their long-armed buddy and an M-7 ready to reach out with his 105 and smash the enemy. It was the teamwork that did the trick — and General Wogan who called the plays. Only we lost the general in the Ruhr when he was struck by Nazi rifle fire. Seriously wounded, he was evacuated by the 83rd Medics and later shipped stateside. General Millikin took over from there.”
The unit is described in Army history books as neophytes who fought like hardened veterans in a “relentless surge,” and who were never once stopped by the Nazis. General Patton thus incorporated them into his Third Army for the final push of the war, literally a race into Germany to arrive ahead of the Russians. So then Corporal Maloof served in Patton’s Third Army.
The 13th Armored Division consisted of roughly 15,000 men, 56 tanks, artillery, medics, and even a band. Their accomplishments were as follows:
▪ Cleared 21,185 square miles of German minefields
▪ Survived attacks by German anti-tank artillery guns (88s) and powerful machine guns (MG34s)
▪ Captured 29,585 prisoners, including two German Generals with their full staffs
▪ Liberated 11,000 prisoners of war, 4,100 of them American soldiers
▪ Suffered 1,165 casualties, 255 killed in action, 34 prisoners of war, 16 missing in action.
▪ Earned 102 Bronze Stars, 6 Silver Stars, 2 Distinguished Crosses
They spared the German town of Braunau, the town where Hitler was born, after the enemy there sent a message pleading for mercy. Then the division used Hitler’s birth home as their headquarters.
In mid-1945, Corporal Maloof was himself injured in battle twice, once when the gunner in his tank jammed a shell too hard into his tank’s cannon, causing it to explode. He suffered shrapnel wounds in his hand and leg, which could not be removed and caused him discomfort his entire life. He was treated in the field and then returned to active duty. He earned two Purple Hearts.
Among those captured by the Division were thousands of Hungarian soldiers. The Division had to keep moving and had no accessible prison facilities. In Russia, soldiers captured by Germany were being shot. In Japan, captured American soldiers were being forced into death marches. The Third Armored Division, in contrast, told the now disarmed Hungarians that they could march in the middle of them with full rations “so long as they behaved themselves.” They did.
Germany surrendered on May 7, 1945. “The Black Cats” were so well respected that on July 14, 1945, they shipped out en masse to be re-deployed to California to be trained to be one of the first U.S. Army Divisions to begin the invasion of Japan. They were designated to take Honshu (the main island), including eventually Tokyo. Corporal Maloof calmly accepted this assignment and expected to be killed as part of the first wave of the invasion. But once again, the fates protected him. Before he departed, on September 2, 1945, Japan surrendered.
When asked about his wartime experience, Corporal Maloof told a story about a soldier from Kentucky who he spent the night guarding a reservoir with, who all night long fired his rifle into the sky repeatedly for no reason: “In the Army,” he said, “you met every kind of person, from all over America, and you could choose who you wanted to be, and not be.”
Later, Corporal Maloof would say simply that: “I went to war a skinny, shy boy from Rhode Island. I came home a man.”
And what a man he now was. Despite being raised poor, because of the “G.I. Bill” David L. Maloof went to college. Something he, as one of six boys out of seven children, whose mother died in childbirth and who lived for six months in an orphanage, had never expected to accomplish.
Then he graduated first in his class with straight A’s from Manhattan College.
He interviewed at Columbia Law School but the admissions officer told him that despite his stellar academics he was not accepted because they had religious quotas, which were already filled, and he was Catholic.
Then he became an Editor of the Law Review at NYU Law School. He anchored the NYU Moot Court team.
Consisting of Maloof, an African-American and two Jewish students, the NYU Moot Court team crushed Columbia’s finest.
Then he clerked for federal judge John F.X. McGohey, and once word of his brilliance made it around the courthouse, he was asked to write bench memos for the legendary Second Circuit Court of Appeals jurist Learned Hand, the most respected legal scholar of all time.
Then he won his first fifteen trials in a row and was listed in the “Best Lawyers in America.” He was also a law professor.
Then he founded the law firm of Donovan, Donovan, Maloof & Walsh, one of the leading international law firms in the world, where his partner was James B. Donovan. The director Steven Spielberg made the film “Bridge of Spies” (2015) about the remarkable work of the firm in foreign relations, negotiating for the release of American captives in the Soviet Bloc, with Tom Hanks playing Donovan.
He thus had a pretty good Hollywood “afterlife.” Not only was Tom Hanks chosen to portray the work of his amazing law firm, but in “Fury” (2014) Brad Pitt portrayed the courageous work of his precise type of tank battalion, also in southern Germany and also in April 1945.
He was routinely described as one of the classiest, happiest and most generous men that many people had ever met. An amazing husband, father and grandfather.
Once we asked him: “Do you have any regrets?”
“A few, like everyone” he said, “but I have no shame.”
