Found on another page of web page whose link JCFalk provided
Gen. Patton vs. Gen. Hodges
"First Army Performed Many Feats For Which It Was Never Acclaimed"
BY HAL BOYLE
Associated Press war correspondent, WWII
BERLIN, May 8, 1946 - (AP) - One year ago this week the finest army that ever fought under the American flag ceased battle operations, its victory won. This was the United States First Army. Because neither of the two men who commanded it had a flair for personal publicity, it never had the acclaim won by General George Patton's famous Third Army. It galls many wearers of the square black "A" shoulder patch [and the 3AD Spearhead patch] that the public and some staff officers of the Third Army still believe that Patton engineered the break through at St. Lo, took Paris, and made the initial crossing of the Rhine.
All these and many more battle feats were performed by the First Army. No outfit has suffered more from the public adulation of that great and grand figure, George Patton, than the patient First Army. Let's thumbtack the old battle maps back on the wall, and give them an anniversary gander. They show us that it was the First Army that spearheaded into Normandy in the greatest amphibious operation of the war.
It was the First Army that captured Cherbourg, first great continental port to fall. It was the First Army that broke the German defensive crust at St. Lo, turning the battle of France into a hare-and-hounds chase. Some Patton divisions were in the attack, but the main wedge was First Army troops. It was the First Army that took Paris. The American Fourth Infantry Division of the First Army had to boot skylarking French tankmen into town to claim the glory of liberating their own capital. The Third Army was miles away and heading toward Metz.
It was the First Army that first entered Germany on September 11,1944. It was the First Army that captured the first German city, Aachen. It was the First Army that first crossed the Rhine river by the epic seizure of the Ludendorff Bridge at Remagen. It was the First Army that made the longest armored march in history in a single day during the smash from the Rhine, a feat accomplished by the late Maj. Gen. Maurice Rose, Commander of the 3rd Armored Division.
It was the First Army alone that attacked simultaneously in two directions, taking more than 260,000 prisoners in the "Rose pocket" in the Ruhr to the west while driving steadily eastward toward the Elbe river. And it was on the banks of that stream that the First Army first made contact with the Russians, ending Europe's greatest squeeze play and the war.
The First Army was led in turn by Gen. Omar N. Bradley of Missouri and Lieut. Gen. Courtney H. Hodges, a gentleman from Georgia who began army life as a private.
Patton and the Third Army did a swell job. But he does not need and never wanted the credit that belongs to the First U.S. Army.
First Army "firsts"
