1942
--- Nov - The division stormed the beaches of Algiers
1943
- 31 Jul - The 39th first serious reverse at the battle of Troina.
1944
- 10 Jun - The 39th landed at Utah Beach, joined the 47th
----- Infantry Regiment in capturing Roetgen, fought valiantly
------through the Battle of the Bulge and helped secure the
----- Remagen bridgehead.

After the First World War the 60th Infantry was inactivated in South Carolina in 1921. A generation later, in August 1940, war in Europe resulted in a rapid expansion of the US Army. The 60th Infantry was reactivated and assigned to the 9th Infantry Division.

The 60th Infantry spearheaded the November 1942, invasion of French Morocco at Port Lyautey in Operation Torch, winning the arrowhead assault landing device in an action which laid the basis for its nickname 'Scouts Out'.

At the time of the invasion, there was great confusion among the Navy coxswains about the landing sites. They either placed their units in the wrong sector, or put them on the beaches very late. The 60th, for example, landed at 05:30, 40 minutes late, giving the defending Vichy French time to organize. The 1st Battalion landed 2,800 yards north of their assigned beach, and were engaged by French light tanks once ashore.

The 2nd and 3rd Battalions were strafed by French planes. Company E, 2nd Battalion, was stopped completely at a strongpoint, the Port Lyautey lighthouse. The 2nd Battalion's eventual objective was to take an ancient fortress, the Kasba. Once the landing points were completely secured, engagements were fought between small units and opposing batteries. The regiment culminated its successful North African campaigns with a defense on 18 April 1943 (Easter Sunday) against a massive German attack, and earned a Presidential Unit Citation.

The Germans hit the "Go Devils" from all four sides with 2 full battalions of infantry supported by artillery. After a four hours attack that failed, the Germans threw in the towel, leaving 116 dead, 48 wounded, and many prisoners in American hands.

In 1943 during the battle of Sedjenane Valley along the Tunisia-Algeria border, it was during the fanatical drive by the 60th Regiment that a captured German general's diary gave the regiment its nickname. In his account of American actions against the Germans, he wrote "Look at those devils go!" Thereafter, the 60th Infantry Regiment became known as the "Go Devils".

In Sicily the regiment continued its winning ways, culminating in the famous "Ghost March," where the unit infiltrated enemy lines and broke open the last of the German resistance. The Regiment landed at Palermo, Sicily on 5 August. Their first combat action was the first of the infiltrations they would make in Sicily. The Regiment flanked the city of Troina, which forced the German artillery protecting the Infantry in the city to withdraw, allowing other U.S. divisions to easily swallow up the Germans in the city.

Next, the Go Devils chased the retreating Germans east towards Randazzo. The pursuit was hindered by a number booby traps, demolitions, anti-tank and personnel mines, craters and blown bridges. Regardless, the 60th completed its flanking movement around Randazzo, which allowed its sister regiment, the 39th Infantry, to take the city. With Randazzo taken the road to Messina was open; and the city was taken on 17 August. Rest and further training followed for some two months. On 11 November 1943, the 60th embarked for Winchester, England.

On 11 June 1944, the 60th Regiment debarked at Utah Beach on the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, France. On the 12th, driving hard toward the St. Colombe in France, the 2nd Battalion, 60th Regiment completely outdistanced the rest of the 9th Division. For a time, the unit was even believed to be lost. Actually, the battalion had overrun the German defenses in the face of murderous fire and had cut the main highway to the northwest.

Instead of withdrawing, the battalion set up a bridgehead on the Douve River and held the position for seven hours until the rest of the division caught up to them, thus facilitating the cutting of the peninsula. Due to this demonstration of rapid penetration and maneuver, the "Scouts Out" motto originated for the Second Battalion. "Scouts Out" is the official greeting of the battalion.

In France during the heroic days of June 1944, the Regiment once again led the way for the 9th Division as it spearheaded the American advance out of the beachhead that cut the Contentin Peninsula. While the 39th and 47th Infantry Regiments secured the vital Port of Cherburg, the 60th cleared Cape La Hague, northwest of Cherbourg, where John E. Butts was killed. At the pivotal crossing of the Douve River, 1LT John Butts earned the Medal of Honor and the Battalion earned its second Presidential Unit Citation.

Following the breakout at St. Lo, the regiment rushed south in Operation Cobra and helped relieve the battered 30th Infantry Division, that had been surrounded by the Germans in their own counterattack (Operation Luttich). Next, the regiment turned east and helped in the closure and clearing of the Falaise Pocket. Continuing east, the regiment crossed the Marne, Aisne, and the Seine Rivers in a matter of days. Next the regiment entered Belgium and made its second combat crossing of the Meuse River. Here, LTC Matt Urban earned his Medal of Honor, having gone AWOL from a hospital to rejoin his troops and lead them in combat.

After the bitter and bloody struggle in the Huertegen Forest, the Regiment fell back to the Monschau area where its efforts won it a third Presidential Unit Citation in the snow and bitter cold of the Battle of the Bulge. The 60th then was the first to capture the Schwammanuel Dam on the Roer River. Continuing south, the Regiment was one of the first to cross the Rhine at Remagen.

After expanding the bridgehead, the Go Devils shot northeast, where they helped seal and destroy the Ruhr Pocket. Continuing northeast, the Regiment advanced toward the Harz Mountains, where for the first time the 60th had attached to them a platoon of black volunteers. While destroying a German roadblock, one black soldier, Pfc. Jack Thomas, won the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions.

After relieving the 3rd Armored Division, the Regiment held that line until VE day, and met up with Russian soldiers soon after. For their actions in Central Europe, the regiment won a fourth Presidential Unit Citation. The Regiment was inactivated in November 1946 while on occupation duty in Germany.

Events bringing the United States Army to North Africa had begun more than a year before the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. For both the Axis and the Allies, the Mediterranean Sea area was one of uncertain priority. On the Axis side, the location of Italy made obvious Rome’s interest in the region. But the stronger German partner pursued interests hundreds of miles north. A similar division of emphasis characterized the Allies. To the British the Mediterranean Sea was the vital link between the home islands and long-held Asian possessions as well as Middle Eastern oil fields. To the Americans, however, the area had never been one of vital national interest and was not seen as the best route to Berlin. But the fall of France in June 1940 had also brought a new dimension to the region. The surrender of Paris left 120,000 French troops in West and North Africa and much of the French fleet in Atlantic and Mediterranean ports. Both the Axis and Allies saw overseas French forces as the decisive advantage that would allow them to achieve their contradictory objectives in the Mediterranean.

Victory at Casablanca, Oran, and Algiers gave the United States Army and its British ally solid toeholds in the western Mediterranean Theater of Operations. But it offered no guarantee of easy access to Italy or southern Europe, or even to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, where the British desperately needed assistance to secure Egypt and strategic resources in the Near East. The sudden entrance of American forces during 8–11 November 1942 created an awkward deployment in which two pairs of opposing armies fought in North Africa, one in Tunisia, the other in Libya. Neither Axis nor Allies found any satisfaction in the situation; much fighting remained before either adversary could consider North Africa secure.

If American commanders and troops thought their brief combat experience in French Morocco and Algeria in November 1942 was adequate preparation to face hardened Axis units in a lengthy campaign, the fighting in Tunisia brought about a harsh reappraisal. With few exceptions, French units in North Africa had been more intent on upholding national honor than inflicting casualties and damage; those that offered determined resistance were at a marked disadvantage in terms of weapons, equipment, supplies, and numbers. In Tunisia, however, American soldiers found themselves faced with well-trained, battle-tested units skillfully using the most advanced weapons and innovative combined arms tactics repeatedly to frustrate Allied plans. The result was painful to Army units involved and a shock to the American public: five months of almost continuous setbacks with commensurably high casualties.

On the night of 9–10 July 1943, an Allied armada of 2,590 vessels launched one of the largest combined operations of World War II—the invasion of Sicily. Over the next thirty-eight days, half a million Allied soldiers, sailors, and airmen grappled with their German and Italian counterparts for control of this rocky outwork of Hitler’s “Fortress Europe.” When the struggle was over, Sicily became the first piece of the Axis homeland to fall to Allied forces during World War II. More important, it served as both a base for the invasion of Italy and as a training ground for many of the officers and enlisted men who eleven months later landed on the beaches of Normandy.

The Rhineland Campaign, although costly for the Allies, had clearly been ruinous for the Germans. The Germans suffered some 300,000 casualties and lost vast amounts of irreplaceable equipment. Hitler, having demanded the defense of all of the German homeland, enabled the Allies to destroy the Wehrmacht in the West between the Siegfried Line and the Rhine River. Now, the Third Reich lay virtually prostrate before Eisenhower’s massed armies.

In August 1944, while his armies were being destroyed in Normandy, Hitler secretly put in motion actions to build a large reserve force, forbidding its use to bolster Germany’s beleaguered defenses. To provide the needed manpower, he trimmed existing military forces and conscripted youths, the unfit, and old men previously untouched for military service during World War II.

In September Hitler named the port of Antwerp, Belgium, as the objective. Selecting the Eifel region as a staging area, Hitler intended to mass twenty-five divisions for an attack through the thinly held Ardennes Forest area of southern Belgium and Luxembourg. Once the Meuse River was reached and crossed, these forces would swing northwest some 60 miles to envelop the port of Antwerp. The maneuver was designed to sever the already stretched Allied supply lines in the north and to encircle and destroy a third of the Allies’ ground forces. If successful, Hitler believed that the offensive could smash the Allied coalition, or at least greatly cripple its ground combat capabilities, leaving him free to focus on the Russians at his back door.