by Harry Yeide
The First Accounting
Some senior American officers judged that the North Africa campaign had tested the tank destroyer and found it wanting. Patton was among the critics; he concluded that the tank destroyer had proved unsuccessful in the conditions of the theater. Lieutenant General Jacob Devers went farther; he argued that “the separate tank destroyer arm is not a practical concept on the battlefield.”73
The tank killers had tripped over at least three obstacles. The first was the field commanders’ lack of training in and experience with the use of the weapon in combat. They tended to order tank destroyers to expose themselves recklessly to enemy fire and assigned to them missions for which they were not suited. After surveying commanders at the close of the campaign, moreover, Allied Forces Headquarters concluded that the tank destroyer battalions had at times been too widely dispersed to be effective. The headquarters issued training notes urging that the battalions be kept intact—at least within one division’s sector—to enable the TDs to repel large armored thrusts.74
A second issue was a certain degree of confusion among the tank killers themselves over how to implement the offense-minded doctrine they had been taught. The Army responded to these challenges by ordering the Tank Destroyer Center to rewrite FM 18-5 to clarify for infantry and armor commanders and tank killers alike the necessity for the force to fight using concealment and surprise.75 As one experienced battalion commander told Camp Hood, the proper way to attack enemy armor was with massed firepower. Charging German tanks was a recipe for disaster.76
The third obstacle was the frequent mismatch between the flat, cover-less terrain and the tall vehicles issued to the battalions. Concealment in the desert was often impossible for a self-propelled tank destroyer, whereas a towed gun could be dug in with little more than its barrel exposed. Bradley, among others, indicated that he would prefer towed tank destroyer battalions. Tankers had told Bradley that dug-in German antitank guns were virtually impossible to spot, and that four hidden 88s could hold off a company of American tanks.77 This was doubtless music to LtGen Lesley McNair’s ears, and as early as January 1943, Army Ground Forces ordered the Tank Destroyer Center to organize an experimental battalion armed with towed 3-inch guns. A failure among senior American officers to ponder the conditions likely in the next campaign led to a decision in November 1943 that would dog the tank destroyer force until 1945: Half of all battalions were converted to towed guns.78
The view of the tank destroyer’s utility was more enthusiastic at the fighting level up to the very end of the campaign. A 1st Armored Division report on the action at Mateur between 4 and 9 May, for example, indicated that the use of tank destroyers on the flanks as close support had yielded excellent results. The report credited the men of the 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion with putting the enemy to flight on several occasions merely through reconnaissance by fire. (The report lamented, however, that the recently arrived tank killers had been too interested in looting and had thereby given the enemy time to destroy his equipment!)79
Moreover, teething problems in the tank destroyer force to some degree resembled kinks elsewhere in the U.S. Army. Air-ground coordination had been a mess. Ground commanders accused the high command—almost as inexperienced as they were—of criminal negligence in ordering attacks at dawn, when the sun was invariably in the eyes of American gunners.80 And the evolution in combat of task force-style groupings of armor, infantry, tank destroyers, and artillery revealed other holes in doctrine and training. Task force commanders, for example, were typically armor officers who viewed the infantry through the prism of the doctrine for employing specialized armored infantry, a situation that led to misunderstandings between commanders and infantry officers.81
A fair assessment of the tank destroyer battalions’ performance would acknowledge Omar Bradley’s overall observation on the North African campaign: “On reflection, I came to the conclusion that it was fortunate that the British view [in favor of Torch] prevailed, that the U.S. Army first met the enemy on the periphery, in Africa rather than on the beaches of France. In Africa we learned to crawl, to walk—then run. Had that learning process been launched in France, it would surely have… resulted in an unthinkable disaster.”82
The tank destroyer program had, in any event, reached its high-water mark. In April 1943, McNair recommended that no more than one hundred six battalions be established, rather than the planned two hundred twenty. This was about the number of units that already existed or were in the activation process. In October, the War Department indicated it wanted to inactivate forty-two existing battalions, leaving only sixty-four. AGF thought this excessive but agreed to disband twenty-five tank destroyer battalions in light of the need to provide replacements for divisions suffering high casualties in Italy. Further inactivations would reduce the force to seventy-eight battalions by 1944.83 Fifty-six would serve in the European or Mediterranean theaters and six in the Pacific Theater. Eleven would be converted to armored field artillery, amphibious tractor, chemical mortar, or tank battalions.84
* * *
The use of tank destroyers in the artillery support role during the North Africa campaign spurred Allied Forces Headquarters to inform the War Department that field commanders wanted tank destroyer battalions to improve their capability for indirect fire. A TD battalion had the same number of pieces as three battalions of light field artillery, and by the end of the campaign, TD battalions had fired more rounds in artillery missions than in any other role.85 (Army Ground Forces suggested that tanks could make a similar contribution.)
In the spring of 1943, indirect-fire tests had been conducted at the Tank Destroyer Training Center. Thereafter, a demonstration of indirect fire was included in the curriculum of the Tank Destroyer School, and battalions were permitted to practice artillery missions after completing all other requirements.86 In North Africa, the 776th Tank Destroyer Battalion, by June 1943, had begun training with field artillery units to coordinate their fire on specific targets.87 The 701st also conducted artillery training upon receiving its new M10 TDs beginning in August.88
In early September, a board that included Major General Bruce from the Tank Destroyer Center recommended extensive use of the tank destroyers—but not tanks—as artillery. The fall maneuvers demonstrated that tank destroyers were fully capable of operating as reinforcing artillery. In November, the War Department ordered that both tank and tank destroyer battalions receive one month of artillery training.89 This change would have a major impact on the activities of the tank destroyers in their next campaign.
* * *
The battalions received the equipment they needed for the artillery mission and their main job: Killing tanks. The M10 and the towed 3-inch gun replaced the vulnerable M3 halftrack as units prepared to leap the Mediterranean to their next objective.
Allied forces invaded Sicily on 10 July 1943. Tank destroyer battalions did not participate in the Sicily campaign as such. The 776th sent eighteen enlisted men who worked as radio operators and military policemen,90 the 813th sent six officers and four hundred men to handle POWs,91 and a detail from the 636th guarded Italian and German prisoners being transported back to the States.92
Instead, designated units prepared for the invasion of Italy proper. Men of the untested 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion entered the Fifth Army Invasion Training Center near Ain el Turck, Algeria, on 15 June 1943. There they fired thousands of rounds on ranges and trained in street fighting and air defense. In late July, the battalion moved to a staging area near Bizerte. In the first days of September, the men waterproofed their vehicles. On 5 September, they loaded their equipment onto the new-fangled Landing Ships, Tank (LSTs) and departed, destination unknown.93 The equally inexperienced men of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion boarded transports at Oran on 1 September and sailed to Bizerte to join the invasion convoy. On 6 September, a forty-five-minute air attack wounded three battalion men.94 The war was about to get very real again.
Chapter 4
&
nbsp; The Tough Underbelly
“The close country and rugged mountainous terrain greatly restricted the employment of armor.”
— Lessons from the Italian Campaign, Training Memorandum Number 2, Headquarters, Mediterranean Theater of Operations, 15 March 1944
At one minute after midnight on 9 September 1943, riflemen of the 141st and 142d Infantry regiments, 36th Infantry Division, began descending from troop transports into waiting landing craft off the Italian coast in Salerno Bay. There was no naval bombardment under way—an attempt to achieve surprise.
Monty’s Eighth Army had already crossed the Straits of Messina from Sicily to the toe of Italy on 3 September in Operation Baytown, which was designed but failed to draw German forces away from the Salerno area. That same day, Italy had secretly surrendered after quiet negotiations in neutral Portugal. Eisenhower had announced the capitulation only hours before the Salerno landings, but the Germans had expected as much; they rapidly disarmed the Italians and deployed their own troops in key positions.
Stubby landing craft prows turned toward shore, and at 0330 hours the initial wave hit the beach. Miraculously, all was quiet. The rumble and flashes of gun and rocket fire to the north, where two divisions of the British 10 Corps were conducting an assault closer to Naples, told a different story.
The first squads pushed inland toward their objectives. Suddenly, German flares began to pop in the night sky. A furious rain of mortar and machine gun rounds struck the men now crossing the beach.1
The main invasion of Italy—Fifth Army’s Operation Avalanche—had begun. The Allied spear struck what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill had described as the “soft underbelly” of Hitler’s Fortress Europa.
Waiting in a series of strongpoints along the shoreline and in the heights further to the rear was the entire 16th Panzer Division: 17,000 men, more than one hundred tanks, and thirty-six assault guns.
No tank destroyers were assigned to the initial waves, despite the waiting German armor. For the first several hours, infantrymen beat off small panzer probes with bazookas and hand grenades. By 0730, disorganized artillery elements joined the riflemen and established ad hoc batteries. At 0930, several 105mm howitzers of the 151st Field Artillery Battalion engaged German tanks and helped repel a counterattack. The first Sherman tank landed at 0830 hours, but the German fusillade prevented landing craft from delivering armor from the 191st and 751st Tank battalions except in dribs and drabs for most of the day.2
The infantry battled inland against poorly coordinated efforts by the 16th Panzer Division to stop them. Battered by bazookas, tanks, artillery, naval gunfire, and air strikes, the German division lost two-thirds of its tanks by the end of the day.3
That is when the TDs finally arrived.
* * *
The 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion landed one complete company of twelve guns, one partial company of eight guns, and one depleted company of four guns, plus command vehicles, on Red Beach near Paestum at 1630 hours. The veteran outfit’s mission was to support the untried 36th Infantry Division. Upon landing, the battalion CO, Maj Walter Tardy, reported to the CP of the 151st Field Artillery Battalion, where he received orders to support the artillery providing covering fire on the right flank of the beachhead and to cover the road from Ogliastro against possible tank attack.4
At 1900 hours, the men of the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion landed on Red Beach. The battalion was also attached to the 36th Infantry Division and ordered to protect the division’s left flank and help cover the seven-mile gap between the American VI Corps and British 10 Corps. The two Allied corps intended to anchor their abutting flanks on the Sele River, but neither reached the objective on 9 September. The next day, the battalion was shifted to support the advance of the 45th Infantry Division—VI Corps’ floating reserve—which was just coming ashore.5
Generalfeldmarschall Albert Kesselring, now in command of German forces in southern (and after November all of) Italy, ordered the 26th Panzer and 29th Panzergrenadier divisions to leave only delaying forces in front of the Eighth Army and to move the bulk of their organizations to the Salerno beachhead. He also set the 15th Panzergrenadier and Hermann Göring divisions—both rebuilding after taking a battering in the Sicily fighting—in motion from Rome. The Allies in Fifth Army could only wait for Monty to arrive, and he was, as usual, advancing with all due deliberation.6
* * *
Unaware that new German divisions were converging on the field, the men of the 36th Infantry Division were pleasantly surprised that they could find hardly any Germans at all on 10 September. The division easily seized its objectives on Fifth Army’s right flank. Two regiments of the 45th Infantry Division, meanwhile, moved into position on the American left near the Sele River.
Amidst the seeming calm, twelve M10s from the 601st reembarked as part of a task force rapidly organized to help the British, who faced stiff resistance to the north. Built around an infantry battalion, the task force sailed on 11 September to support Darby’s Rangers—who had been fighting beside the British Commandos since D-day—at Amalfi Peninsula. Various problems, including the offloading of the first M10 into deep water by the Royal Navy, delayed the TDs’ commitment to battle. The next day, the entire task force was attached to the British 46th Infantry Division.7
* * *
On 11 September, the U.S. 45th Infantry Division was ordered to cross the Sele River into what had been the 10 Corps zone in order to link up with the British right flank, which had been unable to push south. Company C/645th Tank Destroyer Battalion and a platoon of Sherman tanks from the 191st Tank Battalion supported the advance of the 179th Infantry Regiment. The infantry bypassed the town of Persano in the hills overlooking the beachhead, but German defenders amidst the buildings opened up with machine guns and cut communications between the doughs and the armor.8 The doughs of 2/179th Infantry Regiment, meanwhile, were struck by an armor counterattack and thrown back across the Sele River.9
The tanks and TDs tried to force their way into Persano to clear the Germans out. The advancing armor encountered roadblocks and blown bridges and could not maneuver off the road because of swampy ground. German guns opened fire on the column and knocked out seven of the M10s. Company A was called forward, only to find itself isolated when the infantry and tanks pulled back. When the company tried to extricate itself, two M10s got stuck in ditches and one was destroyed by artillery fire. The company claimed to have knocked out two Mark IV tanks, one Mark VI, and an 88mm gun, but the battalion’s first real contact with the enemy had not gone well.
The next morning, the newly arrived 29th Panzergrenadier Division tore into the 45th Infantry Division and the left end of the 36th Infantry Division line at Altavilla. The panzergrenadiers pushed the 36th off the strategic high ground at Altavilla and tried to drive to the sea. Over the next four days, a total of three panzer and three panzergrenadier divisions struck all along the perimeter of the tenuous Allied beachhead.10
Even as the men of the 36th Infantry Division fought desperately to hold their line, the crews of the 191st Tank and 645th Tank Destroyer battalions launched a second effort to reach the hard-pressed 45th Infantry Division doughs through Persano and this time succeeded. By 1500 hours, the infantry reported that the town was cleared.11 The Shermans and M10s then supported a hard-fought attack by the 157th Infantry Regiment that pushed the Germans out of a “tobacco warehouse” (actually five stone storage sheds) on the high ground above Persano, where the defenders a day earlier had knocked out seven Shermans.12 The men of the 645th had helped stop what a worried Fifth Army CG, LtGen Mark Clark, viewed as a spear pointing at the heart of the beachhead.13 But the Germans controlled more firmly than ever the corridor between the American and British toeholds.
The first elements of the 36th Infantry Division’s daughter unit, the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, began landing on 12 September. The transports bearing the green battalion had approached the Bay of Salerno under constant German air attack.14 As Sgt
Thomas Sherman waded through armpit-deep water from the landing craft, he was glad for the bath after being cooped up on a jam-packed transport for ten days. His joy ended abruptly when the recon men formed up on the beach. The roar of a plane and chatter of machine guns announced a German air raid, and Sherman dove for a depression in the sand as bullets kicked up sand around him.15
Among the first ashore with Sherman were some thirty men—all multilingual soldiers who had excelled at tank hunting and commando tactics during training—who were grouped together in what the outfit called the “Ranger Platoon.” Second Lieutenant William Walter, who spoke fluent German and several other languages, led the platoon off the beach and into the hills. Doubtless guided by the hand of Providence, they soon found themselves in an Italian wine cellar. Their joy dissipated when they heard German voices around the building and realized they were surrounded and well behind German lines. The men would spend the night hiding, killing the occasional German soldier who wandered in to snoop around, and capturing an oberleutnant.16
A see-saw battle raged along the 45th and 36th Infantry division fronts on 13 September. The TDs of the 645th in midafternoon rushed forward to support the doughs when a dozen German tanks struck the left flank of the 157th Infantry Regiment and another fifteen struck the right. But the attackers drove to within one hundred fifty yards of the 1st Battalion headquarters, and the line began to give way. The panzers and panzergrenadiers threw the Americans back out of Persano and the tobacco warehouse.17
The hungry men of the 636th’s Ranger Platoon, meanwhile, were trying to make it back to American lines. The men, who were wearing the uniforms of the German soldiers they had dispatched, spotted a German SP gun and infantry in a field. Lieutenant Walter decided to use their one bazooka round to knock out the vehicle when the time was right. About this time, doughs from the 142d Infantry Regiment attacked the Germans, who returned fire. To their consternation, the Germans came under fire themselves from three MG42 machine guns and from machine pistols at their flank and rear. The single antitank round hit the self-propelled howitzer—earning Walter the nickname “Bazooka Red”—and incapacitated the gun and crew. The bewildered Germans surrendered. Fortunately for the German-uniformed Ranger Platoon, the GIs had witnessed the action and did not cut them to pieces.18