Lieutenants Kovalyak, Stout and Howe pack the Michelangelo Madonna for return to Bruges. The statue was restored to the Church of Notre Dame in September of 1945.
The famous Ghent altarpiece by van Eyck was flown from the Alt Aussee mine to Belgium in the name of Eisenhower as a token restitution.
Karl Sieber, German restorer, Lieutenant Kern, American Monuments officer, and Max Eder, Austrian engineer, examine the panels of the Ghent altarpiece stored in the Alt Aussee mine.
On my way out I gathered up my luggage from the landing below and climbed into the waiting jeep. We turned the corner and followed the Prinz Regenten-Strasse to the river. I noticed for the first time that a temporary track had been laid along one side. This had been done, the driver said, in order to cart away the rubble which had accumulated in the downtown section. We turned right and followed the Isar for several blocks, crossed to the left over the Ludwig bridge, then drove out the Rosenheimer-Strasse to the east for a distance of about three miles. Our destination was the enormous complex of buildings called the Reichszeugmeisterei, or Quartermaster Corps buildings, in which the rear echelon of General Patton’s Third Army had just established its headquarters.
Even in the baking sunlight of that June day, the place had a cold, unfriendly appearance. We halted for identification at the entrance, and there I was introduced to Third Army discipline. One of the guards gave me a black look and growled, “Put your cap on.” Startled by this burly order, I hastily complied and then experienced a feeling of extreme irritation at having been so easily cowed. I could at least have asked him to say “sir.”
The driver, sensing my discomfiture, remarked good-naturedly, “You’ll get used to that sort of thing around here, sir. They’re very, very fussy now that the shooting’s over. Seems like they don’t have anything else to worry about, except enforcing a lot of regulations.” This was my first sample of what I learned to call by its popular name, “chicken”—a prudent abbreviation for the exasperating rules and regulations one finds at an Army headquarters. Third Army had its share of them—perhaps a little more than its share. But I didn’t find that out all at once. It took me all of two days.
My driver let me out in front of the main building, over the central doorway of which the emblem of the Third Army was proudly displayed—a bold “A” inside a circle. The private at the information desk had never heard of the “Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Section,” but said that if it was a part of G-5 it would be on the fifth floor. I found the office of the Assistant Chief of Staff and was directed to a room at the end of a corridor at least two blocks long. I was told that the officer I should see was Captain Robert Posey. I knew that name from the reports I had studied at Versailles, as well as from a magazine article describing his discovery, months before, of some early frescoes in the little Romanesque church of Mont St. Martin which had been damaged by bombing. The article had been written by an old friend of mine, Lincoln Kirstein, who was connected with the MFA&A work in Europe.