The Washington Post
Washington, D.C.

Thursday, September 14, 1944, Page 1B

A 19-year-o1d Washington Private was in the first jeep to cross into Germany near Roetgen and told International News Service Correspondent Richard Tregaskis yesterday how the American advance guards on Hitler’s ‘holy soil’ were greeted by German snipers and fear-stricken civilians who “draped white sheets in their windows in sign of surrender.”

‘He is Pvt. Jerome B. Jacobs, whose mother, Mrs. Elizabeth Jacobs lives at 2901 18th St. NW. Mrs. Jacobs was overjoyed last night to hear her son was well and wanted it mentioned ‘prominently” in any story that he became uncle 10 days ago, when his sister, Mrs. Janet Parker of Greenbelt, Md, gave birth to a son. She thought the newspapers were a good means of informing her son of this joyful event in case he should get to see the story.

Tregaskis in a dispatch datelined Roetgen, yesterday quoted Jacobs in a story that contrasted the joyous welcome given to the Yanks in France and Belgium and their experience in Germany. “There were three peeps leading our reconnaissance.” Jacobs said, ‘We got across the border all right but then ran into trouble. We saw a couple of German soldiers in the street with their backs toward us. We shouted to them to come over but they wouldn’t and we opened fire. We wounded one and he dropped his gun but the other got away.

“Then snipers opened fire on us from concealed positions all over the place. We only had time to take a look at the hell beyond and to spot some pillboxes there but we were too busy ducking bullets to see much of anything else. The snipers nicked quite a few of our boys in the fighting.

“ The few Germans we met near the border seemed surprised to see us. Some of them were cutting wood. We found another sleeping and took him prisoner. “We passed a couple of trucks that were knocked out by our airmen and artillery. “At one town we ran into, a sports roadster with two Germans inside. “They didn’t stop when we ordered them to and we started shooting. We hit one in the leg and the other surrendered.

“In the town there were five or six women crying. One guy with a wheelbarrow put up his bands when he saw us. “The populace draped white sheets in their windows in sign of surrender. Tregaskis later saw these sheets along the main street and a group of six smiling women waving at the Americans after the discovery they were not going to be killed. There was also stolid peasant and his wife who were absolutely petrified with fear. They said they were told through Nazi propaganda that the Americans were barbarians and would butcher them.

A native of Pueblo, Colo., Private Jacobs came here with his family several years ago and was graduated from Central High School last year. He has been in the Army a year, was sent overseas in February and landed in France shortly alter D-Day. In his last letter of August 11 he said he was getting along fine.