by Harry Yeide
The Tank Destroyer Force had entered Hitler’s Fortress Europa.
* * *
The U.S. Army had allocated forty-eight tank destroyer battalions for the fight in Western Europe, plus four that were scheduled to transfer from Italy when Operation Anvil (later called Dragoon)—the invasion of southern France—commenced in August. In accordance with the wishes of higher headquarters, half of these battalions were towed. As of 4 June, nineteen self-propelled and eleven towed battalions were ready for battle in England.5
The important role played by TDs in Italy as supporting artillery had made an impression on Army planners. All TD battalions in England were issued fire direction sets, switchboards, telephones, wire, aiming circles, and the other accoutrements necessary to accomplish basic surveys and fire direction. The battalions all conducted indirect-fire training as time allowed.6
June 1944 was a portentous month for the Tank Destroyer Force, although there is little sign that anyone on the chain of command fully realized it.
Amphibious maneuvers before the invasion indicated that the towed battalions were extremely vulnerable when offloading on the beach and deploying for battle. As a result, the Army reduced the towed-gun element of the invasion force to a single battalion.7 At the same time, the only towed battalion in Italy was being converted to M18s. Clearly, the towed-gun concept was in trouble. The situation was somewhat reminiscent of the dispatch of the first TD battalions to North Africa with an obsolete organization and equipment.
The first M4 Shermans with 76mm main guns had arrived in England by D-Day. Although the new version did not enter combat immediately, the fire-power gap between tank and tank destroyer had been erased. Indeed, the new Sherman had thicker armor than a TD, boasted machine guns, and was about as fast as the M10. If a tank was as good or better than a TD in almost every respect, what was the point of having a separate TD arm?
On 16 May, Army Ground Forces had asked the ETO whether it wanted any of the new M36 tank destroyers under development by Ordnance. The M36 was essentially an M10 with a 90mm antiaircraft gun mounted in a redesigned, open-topped turret to perform the antitank mission. The ETO expressed no interest.8
* * *
The GIs and Tommies fell short of almost all of their D-Day objectives. Four days of hard fighting passed before the troops in the two American beachheads were able to link up.
The men of the 635th Tank Destroyer Battalion (towed) splashed ashore across Omaha Beach from LSTs and Rhino barges on D+2 and were initially attached to 1st Infantry Division artillery. By nightfall, the gun companies were parceled out to the infantry regiments and the gun platoons to the infantry battalions in what became standard operating procedure for the employment of towed TD battalions. As the outfit’s AAR noted, “[the gun platoons] were not under 635th Battalion control but were part of each [infantry] battalion and were used by the battalion commanders as antitank guns.”
This use reflected a recognition that the doughboys’ standard-issue 57mm antitank gun could not handle the threat posed by German tanks. Indeed, the Army command planned before the invasion to attach a towed TD battalion to each infantry division and to hold the SP battalions in corps and army reserves. By D-Day, it had already amended this decision by attaching one SP TD battalion to each armored division.9
* * *
The 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion landed at Omaha Beach on 11 June. The men expected to surge ashore in six feet of water with guns blazing so were pleasantly surprised to roll ashore almost dry and find military police directing traffic. The battalion moved that night to La Mine, where the stench convinced the men that they were surrounded by German corpses. Dawn revealed a dead bull in the center of the CP.10
After consolidating the beachheads, Allied forces built up with amazing speed. In less than four weeks, nearly one million men and 177,000 vehicles landed, along with more than 500,000 tons of supplies to keep them fighting.11 In the American sector, two more corps—VIII and XIX—became active during that time.
The Tank Destroyer Force kept pace. The 1st Tank Destroyer Group came ashore at Utah Beach on 12 June 1944, the M10s of the 803d Tank Destroyer Battalion rolled across Omaha Beach that same day, and more outfits followed. By the end of the month, the 801st, 612th, 607th, 823d, 821st, 813th, and 634th had arrived in a parade of clanking M10 and prime mover tracks.
* * *
The first major American objective inland was the port of Cherbourg, and by 18 June, MajGen J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps had wheeled from Utah Beach and cut across the Cotentin Peninsula on which the city is located. The 1st Platoon of A/899th Tank Destroyer Battalion joined the task force that accomplished the mission the night of 17–18 June. Company A was strafed four times by American P-51 fighters on 22 June, and one TD was set on fire but saved.12
The remnants of five German divisions defended Cherbourg, and they had orders from Hitler to fight to the last.13 The M10s from the 899th pushed toward the port with the doughs of the 9th Infantry Division, and TDs engaged pillboxes and AT guns as the Americans approached the outskirts. On 22 June, one M10 crew from 2d Platoon of Company C—which was supporting the 47th Infantry Regiment—confronted a 77mm AT gun that commanded the road at Le Motel. Smoke was placed on the gun, and the M10 rolled onto the street and destroyed the German weapon from only three hundred yards distance. The next day, a second destroyer from the platoon boldly drove around a blind corner and from a distance of one hundred fifty yards engaged a concealed 88 that was pounding the infantry. The TD lost a track, but the 88 lost its crew.14
While the towed guns of the 801st Tank Destroyer Battalion placed direct fire on three of Cherbourg’s fortifications, the doughs, M10s from the 899th, and tanks entered the city on 25 June. 2d Platoon of Company C helped knock out five 20mm and one 47mm guns during heavy street fighting. Twice, the only tactic available to the crews was to dash around a corner while under fire—shooting while moving—and to engage the target.15
Cherbourg fell, but the Germans sabotaged the port facilities so thoroughly that the engineers needed three weeks to repair them sufficiently to handle minimal shipping.16
With the capture of Cherbourg, LtGen Omar Bradley on 3 July turned First Army south to drive inland through the heart of the bocage, as Normandy’s hedgerow country is known in French. The troops encountered stiff resistance at every turn. Casualties mounted alarmingly for little gain in territory. Indeed, the next three weeks would cause senior Allied commanders to worry that they were falling into a stalemate similar to that of trench warfare during World War I.17
Throwing Away the Manual
Allied planners had selected the invasion area in part because it offered superb natural inland defenses for the beachhead. The hedgerow-covered terrain in most of the zone was unsuitable for German armored counterattacks.18
The terrain also was not particularly suitable for Allied combined-arms attacks, either. The U.S. Army described the conditions in its lessons learned report on the fighting in Normandy:
The terrain in the area selected for the initial penetration of French soil was generally level or gently sloping. However, it was broken up into a “crazy quilt” pattern of small fields separated by hedgerows. These consisted of an earthen mound or wall eight to ten feet in width and four to six feet in height, covered with a scrub undergrowth.
Along the top of this wall grew rows of trees. Forming an important part of the obstacle thus created was the ditch that ran along one or both sides of the mound. The roads, narrow and winding, ran between these hedgerows, and offered the defenders many advantageous positions for ambuscades or surprise attacks on advancing foot-troops and armor. Observation was normally limited [to] from one hedgerow to the next….19
The Germans exploited the conditions to establish an extraordinarily effective defense in depth. The bocage became a seemingly infinite series of strongpoints, each concealing infantry with “bazookas” (TD crews applied this catch-all phrase to one-man panzerfausts and larger crew-served antit
ank rockets), machine guns, AT guns, sometimes armor, and nearly always mortar and artillery support.
Incredibly, American forces had conducted virtually no training to operate in the hedgerows, and units on the line were left to work out the best approach through trial and error. The U.S. Army’s Center of Military History attributes this lack of preparation to an assumption among invasion planners that the Germans would withdraw to the Seine River. Whatever the cause, the riflemen paid with a river of blood. A U.S. Army survey of casualties in portions of the 1st, 4th, 9th, and 25th Infantry divisions between 6 June and 31 July 1944 found that infantry companies lost nearly 60 percent of their enlisted men and more than 68 percent of their officers.20 These casualties, naturally, were concentrated in the combat elements.
The key to the solution lay in creating effective tactics for the infantry, their supporting separate tank battalions, and, less problematic, the artillery. The fate of the tank destroyers revolved around this dynamic because—with a single exception—they were not called upon to fight large German armor attacks during the fighting in the Normandy beachhead.21 The Germans faced the same difficulties as the Americans in the bocage and found that they could rarely employ more than a platoon or company of tanks at once.22 On the VIII Corps front in June and July, for example, German tanks were rare, but the enemy had many SP and assault guns that he employed in close support of the infantry. On the XIX Corps front, the TDs encountered some Mark IVs and Mark V Panthers, which were typically employed during frequent counterattacks in groups of between two and seven in support of the infantry.23
The Sherman tank could crawl across about half of the hedgerows, but in doing so it risked getting stuck, or exposing its thin belly to enemy fire, and having knocked loose everything inside the vehicle that was not tied down. The tankers first resolved the problem by using tank-dozers to knock holes in the hedges. Within two weeks of D-Day, the infantry-tank team began to develop through trial and error the technique that—with local variations—would see the men through Normandy. Engineers blew one or more holes through a hedgerow with explosives, and the armor raced through to support the riflemen on the far side. (Interestingly, the German Panzer Lehr Division also settled on using a mix of tank, infantry, and engineer companies amidst the hedgerows.24) The Germans naturally figured this out and quickly aimed their AT weapons at any gap that suddenly appeared in the far hedgerow.
This was as dangerous as it sounds. But there was nothing else to do.
The M10 Plays Tank
The U.S. Army concluded after the war that two factors determined the role self-propelled TDs wound up playing in the bocage.25
The first was the power of the terrain to force tactical decisions. Tank destroyers deployed even a few hundred yards behind the front line were unable to provide support and could not respond to the shallow, harassing German tank-infantry actions that characterized counterattacks. TDs, therefore, had to deploy more or less even with the infantry, no matter what doctrine said.
The second was the high attrition rate suffered by the separate tank battalions. Of those that landed on D-Day, for example, the 741st Tank Battalion lost most of its Shermans during the landing. From D-Day to 10 July, half the tanks in the 746th fell victim to enemy fire.26 By 31 July, the 70th Tank Battalion was down forty Shermans and six M5s.27 The 743rd Tank Battalion in June and July lost at least twenty-five officers and men killed in action and another one hundred sixteen wounded, or nearly one man in five.28 The infantry divisions had little choice but to turn to the tank destroyers to augment the tanks in offensive operations.
803d Tank Destroyer Battalion CO LtCol Charles Goodwin described a typical SP outfit’s experience during the hedgerow fighting in June and early July (in the course of which his men supported the doughs of the 2d, 29th, and 30th Infantry divisions and the 82d Airborne Division’s paratroopers):
This battalion has been utilized almost continuously as close support antitank defense immediately behind the front-line infantry and as actual tanks…. No previous theories or training directives contemplated the terrain or type of combat encountered in this zone. The hedgerows and heavily covered areas preclude observation and afford extremely limited fields of fire. Front-line infantry, with the exception of the 82d Airborne infantry, could not or would not point out targets of opportunity such as machine gun nests, pillboxes, etc. When such targets were located, however, excellent results were obtained from the 3-inch fire. OPs such as church steeples, tall trees, hilltops, etc., can be effectively eliminated.
In the earliest combat, there was a tendency on the part of the infantry commanders to order the destroyers out in front of the infantry. It cannot be emphasized enough that this is fatal. The destroyer cannot substitute for the tank inasmuch as it is lightly armored and has no machine gun to keep hostile infantry down. The .50-caliber antiaircraft mount is useless for ground work. [We] suffered eight tank destroyer casualties during this early period, seven of which were caused by the German rocket launcher or rifle AT grenade. It is believed that these weapons possess a range not in excess of seventy-five yards. These weapons can penetrate any part of the tank destroyer, including the front and final drive. Had the destroyers remained behind the advancing infantry, these losses could have been avoided. This is evidenced by the fact that no tank destroyer casualties have been sustained from infantry weapons since infantry commanders have been prevented from using destroyers in front of infantry. It will be noted that Sherman tanks have suffered the same fate when operating in front of infantry….
While the assignment of the 803d Tank Destroyer Battalion in actual tank roles is contrary to basic policy, no member of this organization felt he could do otherwise. The infantry required every assistance they could obtain to perform their mission, and the morale factor plus the actual firepower of the tank destroyers did greatly benefit them. Casualties are no greater three hundred yards from the enemy than they were three thousand yards behind the front.29
As had his counterparts in Italy, Goodwin recommended in July that TD units be given a support mission—to be executed according to the best judgment of the TD commander—rather than being attached to an infantry unit. He also took the more practical step of welding the .50-caliber turret mounts on his M10s onto the front above the gun tube and providing crewmen with periscopes welded to the turret side so that they could fire the MG without exposing themselves. (Many other battalions adopted variants of this solution as the campaign progressed.) In July, Goodwin’s men destroyed two tanks, two SP guns (plus one probable), at least a dozen machine gun positions, and two antitank guns. It lost eight men killed and thirty-eight wounded—but no more M10s.30
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At 0300 hours on 11 July, Maj Hoyt Lawrence, commanding the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, was alerted to help doughs of the 9th Infantry Division repel what appeared to be a substantial German tank-infantry thrust in the vicinity of Le Desert. The infantry had reported the sound of tracked vehicles beginning around midnight, and fighting broke out a couple of hours later. Intelligence had detected the movement of the Panzer Lehr Division into the sector the day before. The armored division incorporated panzer tactics instructors from the training schools in Germany, but the unit had lost nearly one-third of its 15,000 men during fighting in the British sector. In the early hours of 11 July, division commander, Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, counted only thirty-one tanks ready for battle. He also had two panzergrenadier regiments and three battalions of 105mm howitzers.31
Panzer Lehr deployed three columns in its attack, dividing the available tanks among two of them. The three axes were to converge at St. Jean de Daye. Unknown to the Germans, the spearheads struck the Americans where a gap had developed between the 39th and 47th Infantry regiments. The attackers overran a battalion CP and pushed as far as two thousand yards behind American lines.
The M10 crews engaged the attackers in the darkness, firing at dimly seen shapes despite the knowledge that the flash from the 3-inch guns betray
ed their position to German panzers, infantry, and artillery. Sergeant Nicholas Peters and the other men in 1st Platoon, Company A, were holding defensive positions with the 39th Infantry Regiment, along with the rest of the company. The Panzer Lehr attack carried by their position about three hundred yards east of Le Desert. The TDs pivoted and raced down a parallel route until they could engage the head of the German column.
The TDs opened fire on the lead panzer, which burst into flames. The bonfire exposed three more Panthers, and Peters ordered his gunner to engage. The TDs set two more Mark Vs alight before the German column withdrew. But the Jerries accounted for one M10 before they left.32
The battle was the 899th’s first encounter with the Mark V, and by dawn the crews realized that their guns could not penetrate the Panther’s frontal armor.
The men knew what to do. They bravely maneuvered into flanking positions, often at nearly point-blank ranges. And the panzers burned.33
To the west of Le Desert, Pvt Pat Rufo sat in an M10 in 3d Platoon of Company A. The platoon had already destroyed a Mark IV—one of ten panzers advancing along an unimproved road—by firing at gun flashes in the darkness. One M10 had been KO’d during the fire fight, and the company commander requested infantry support.
Three Panthers were spotted on a nearby dirt road, and Rufo’s M10 was ordered into an adjacent field to engage them. The M10 had the drop on the panzers, and a dozen rounds destroyed the Panthers and a halftrack.34