by Harry Yeide
In the early dawn hours, company and platoon leaders conducted a foot reconnaissance under small-arms and mortar fire to survey possible firing positions. They then met with infantry commanders to coordinate team play. That night, as the men tried to get some rest in the assembly area, they were subjected to artillery and rocket fire.
The next day at 0500 hours, the M36s of Companies A and C moved forward over sloped terrain under enemy observation in support of the doughs of the 254th and 255th Infantry regiments. Ahead lay three belts of mutually supporting fortifications, the first cleverly concealed along a ridgeline running between two heavily wooded ravines. Minefields and dragons teeth protected the approaches. Antitank ditches further restricted the movement of armor. The defenses included pillboxes, covered trenches, and turrets mounting 75mm guns. Substantial artillery, mortar, and Nebelwerfer rocket launcher units backed the defenders.
As the first M36s advanced, the sound of their engines provoked a heavy barrage of artillery and rocket fire. Fragments whistled over the heads of the crewman crouching in their open-topped turrets, passing close enough to knock off two radio antennae in Company C. Staff Sergeant Oliver Stevens dismounted and ran through the incoming fire to the infantry observation post to make final arrangements about targets. For the rest of the day, he would race between the infantry and the TDs to coordinate action.
The TDs maneuvered into exposed firing positions as close to the pillboxes as possible while German artillery fire began to crash into the assault force. The infantry was forced back initially under the withering fire, but the TDs remained forward, pounding the German lines. Gunners maintained such a high rate of fire that crews had to periodically cease fire to allow their guns to cool. When that happened, a crewman would mount the exposed rear deck and continue to hit the enemy with the .50-caliber antiaircraft machine gun. As TDs ran through their ammunition, they would back to a covered position, reload, and advance again.
The Germans tried to drive the Americans back with infantry counterattacks. Crewmen grabbed their carbines, tommyguns, and fragmentation grenades to beat the assaults back. A bazooka round destroyed one M36, and several others were damaged by artillery and bazooka rounds. One shell blew Private First Class Canterbury’s hatch off where he sat in his radio operator’s seat. He climbed out, recovered the hatch, and put it back on. Fragments from exploding shells, meanwhile, were raining into the turrets of the forward platoons, and more radio aerials, guns sights, periscopes, and even .50-cals were lost.
Strongpoint by strongpoint, the return fire ceased under pounding from the TDs. The battalion noted that its 90mm fire destroyed embrasures and in many cases pulverized the pillboxes. The doughs were able to advance by the afternoon, and engineers blew gaps in the dragon’s teeth. German prisoners were shell-shocked.
The TDs passed through the dragon’s teeth, and they were able to engage some emplacements from a distance of only seventy-five to one hundred yards. As Staff Sergeant Stevens moved his platoon forward in one sector, the lead TD broke through a temporary bridge the engineers had established across an antitank ditch. Under heavy fire, Stevens tried to pull the TD out of the way but could not. Stevens drove back to the CP, where the infantry regimental and battalion commanders were anxious to speak with him because enemy fire had knocked out all of their communications with the infantry. He collected bridging material and some engineers and returned to the ditch. The engineer officer asked as they came under renewed machine-gun and artillery fire, “Nothing can live down there! Shouldn’t we go back?” In the end, the fire was too heavy, and the effort was abandoned.
The TDs supported the assault for sixty straight hours under constant fire, using the darkness to refuel, rearm, and perform critical maintenance. During the engagement, they fired 2,450 rounds of 90mm ammunition at the fortifications. Every M36 suffered damage, and three were total losses. Two men were killed and eleven wounded, many of whom refused evacuation and stayed with their under-manned destroyers.
And the infantry won through. Stevens commented, “In this operation, the enemy artillery and rocket fire, direct AT fire, and all types of small arms fire exceeded any I have experienced in all the other assaults that I have been in, which include the crossings of the Volturno River, the assault on Cassino, the Gothic Line breakthrough, and the operations around Mateur in Africa.”17
* * *
On 19 March, Seventh Army finally took Saarbrücken. The next day, German resistance collapsed along the West Wall, and troops swarmed across the Saar-Palatinate triangle to link up with Patton’s forces, which had been driving south across the German rear. By 21 March, the Allies held the Rhine’s west bank from Arnhem to Switzerland.18
Across the Rhine
Montgomery’s operatic assault across the Rhine on 23 March was to have been the first Allied crossing, but it was almost the last. Not only had First Army jumped the river at Remagen, Patton sneaked the 5th Infantry Division across the night of 22 March, then quickly carved out two more bridgeheads on the east bank at Boppard and St. Goar on 24 and 25 March. Seventh Army crossed at Worms on 27 March.19 It was time for the Reich to experience American blitzkrieg.
On 25 March, Bradley told First Army to break out of the Remagen bridgehead. Seventh Corps struck eastward before turning north to isolate the Ruhr. The history of the 3d Armored Division recorded, “At 0400 hours on 25 March the combat commands were rumbling out of bivouac. They went out along the dawn-dim roads in multiple columns of spearheads, 32d and 33d Armored regiment tanks leading, squat and black in the gloom, with blue flame spitting from their exhausts. Tank destroyers of the 703d TD Battalion followed, clacking rapidly over the cobbles, their long 90mm guns perfectly balanced in heavy steel turrets. Armored infantrymen of the 36th, the ‘Blitz Doughs,’ rode in personnel halftracks.”20
Mobile warfare was back. The semi-official history of the 628th Tank Destroyer Battalion—which was operating again with the 5th Armored Division—observed, “After being penned for so many months by terrain and prepared defensive positions. . . the only limit on the armored forces was one of resupply of rations and gas. Reminiscent of the hard driving, fast moving armored slashes following the breakthrough at Avranches, France, last August, once again the 5th Armored Division and the tank destroyers were on the loose, deep in enemy territory.” Resistance was so fragmented that the battalion would lose only one TD east of the Rhine River.21
Ninety Allied divisions—twenty-five of them armored—began slicing through the Reich’s heartland.22
* * *
German tank strength in the West was dwindling toward the vanishing point. When news of Patton’s crossing at Oppenheim had reached Hitler, he had called for immediate countermeasures, but German commanders had nothing with which to respond. The only “reserve” was an assortment of five panzers under repair at a tank depot one hundred miles away. The bottom of the barrel had been scraped.23 As of 31 March, the entire force of panzers and assault guns in Third Army’s sector was estimated at only forty-five vehicles.24 German Army Group B in the Ruhr had only sixty-five tanks left.25
Still, panzers appeared now and again. On 30 March, 3d Armored Division relayed orders to the 703d Tank Destroyer Battalion to support the attack by the division on the road junction at Paderborn, the Fort Knox of the panzer arm. German instructors, officer cadets, and trainees drove their remaining tanks—including some sixty Tigers and Panthers from an SS replacement battalion—out to contest the American advance, and battle flared across the training grounds for two days.26
Task Force Welborn formed one of the division’s two prongs and was advancing near Etteln at dusk. The column had identified four Royal Tigers ahead, but they had been struck by fighter-bombers, and Col John Welborn had been assured that the panzers had been knocked out. The column advanced, and the very functional Tigers opened fire with their deadly 88s. Seven Shermans were soon burning.27 The TDs of 2d Platoon, Company B, returned fire and knocked out two Royal Tigers—a job that required thirty-f
ive rounds of AP and five of HE. One 703d recon jeep was destroyed by return fire.28 During this action, division CG MajGen Maurice Rose was killed when he was cut off by four Royal Tigers. A panzer commander, misinterpreting the general’s action, shot him when he reached to drop his holster.29
Belton Cooper, in his history of the 3d Armored Division, reports that Royal Tigers destroyed an entire company of Shermans from an unidentified task force and that one M36 was lost during the debacle.30 The incident is not mentioned in the division’s own history. Several sources concur that one M36 was destroyed that day, but the exact circumstances remain unclear.
* * *
The German resistance was brave but futile. On 1 April, Paderborn fell, and the 3d Armored Division linked up at Lippstadt with Ninth Army’s 2d Armored Division—which had swung around the Ruhr industrial basin on the north. The Ruhr was cut off from the rest of Germany, trapping more than three hundred thousand German troops.
The 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, operating with its old partners in the 8th Infantry Division, supported the First Army push from the south to eliminate the pocket. The outfit’s informal history recorded, “At first the going was as rough as any we’d had. The TDs operated as tanks, assault guns, personnel carriers, recon vehicles, and anything else that occurred to those minds at higher headquarters. Recon Company showed the division how cavalry troops ought to do it, capturing towns, leading the infantry, poking up side roads to tell the doughs if there were enemy SPs waiting for them, operating twenty-four hours a day.” The TDs worked closely in combat teams with the 740th Tank Battalion.31
Ninth Army troops, meanwhile, compressed the pocket from the north. On 17 April while the jaws closed tight, the 8th Infantry Division took a record 50,192 prisoners, and organized resistance collapsed. Four days later, Generalfeldmarshall Walter Model, alone but for his intelligence chief, shot himself rather than surrender.32
* * *
While the battle to reduce the Ruhr Pocket raged, columns fanned deeper into Germany all along the front. The history of the 817th Tank Destroyer Battalion—recently re-equipped with M18s and now supporting the 104th Infantry Division—recorded:
The Germans were disorganized and scattered. Constant pressure had to be put on them to keep them from being able to reorganize. Daily, the battalion advanced from twenty-five to forty miles, and the supply sections of Headquarters Company were working twenty-four hours a day to fill the seemingly limitless thirst of the Hellcats for gasoline. The Weser had been crossed, and then there was a mad dash for Warburg; then the Leine River and Göttingen. The Leine River crossed, we pushed onward, ever eastward into the heart of the black Reich.
Along the highways of battle, the townspeople and farmers gaped in amazement out of the windows of their white-flag-bedecked houses at the equipment and material of this great American Army. They forgot the advances of their own blitz of ’39 and ’40 and marveled at ours. They were being conquered and overrun, and they knew it.
Each day, every installation of the battalion moved. The name of last night’s town was soon forgotten, and all eyes turned eastward. “Onward! Onward!” was the cry, and the 817th rolled onward, sometimes carrying the doughboys with them. Soon, perhaps, it would be “finis la guerre.”33
Odd situations cropped up as operations sometimes looked more and more like a somewhat violent installation of a military government than a war. On 5 April, for example, the CP group of 823d Tank Destroyer Battalion—which was sweeping toward Magdeburg on the Elbe River with the 30th Infantry and 2d Armored divisions—entered Lage about noon. The men discovered a state of anarchy, with Russian slave laborers battling the locals in fierce rioting. The Americans spent the rest of the day restoring order. The 823d’s AAR noted caustically, “The entire battalion’s heart bleeds for the German storekeepers who were so thoroughly looted.”
A week later, CP personnel had to disperse slave laborers and Germans who were looting a sugar warehouse at the outfit’s temporary home in Braunschweig. The next day, the CP had just set up in Farsleben when it was swarmed by refugees from a train that had been hauling nearly three thousand people to a concentration camp. They were in bad shape and had not eaten in four days, and some had died of starvation. Battalion CO LtCol Stanley Dettmar ordered the bürgermeister to get the bakeries operating and feed the people. Meanwhile, rioting broke out back at the sugar warehouse.34
* * *
The Germans resisted fiercely in a few cities where they could scrape together some infantry, a few tanks, and 88mm antiaircraft guns. The 3d and 45th Infantry divisions on 16 April encountered one such frustrating situation at Nürnberg, the scene of so many Nazi pageants but now a heap of ruins. The men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion fought their way into a city with the doughs, their first experience with urban fighting. The outfit’s informal history reports, “The enemy was in the cellars and on the rooftops and in every window and on all sides. The battalion took some casualties, but it inflicted tenfold and more upon the Kraut. Those ‘90s’ were everywhere, and in several instances the tubes were literally inside the windows of the Kraut strongpoints.”35
On 17 April, SSgt Bill Harper, who had battled panzers since the swirling dust at El Guettar, dismounted from his M36 and hunted down a troublesome sniper with his pistol.
Nürnberg fell on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday.
* * *
As always, TD recon men were in the van. The 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division, and C/602d Tank Destroyer Battalion attacked Zwickau on 17 April, because the city had refused to surrender. Lieutenant Kilbourn’s reconnaissance platoon, with the help of an escaped British prisoner of war, made a bold dash through the streets in a bid to seize a bridge across the Mulde River. German riflemen and bazooka teams commanded the approach, but the platoon raced past the surprised defenders. The men dismounted and began cutting demolition wires under a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire. One man fell dead, and another was wounded. The platoon saved the bridge.36
Queried by 12th Army Group about reports that the long-serving M10s were in bad shape and breaking down in combat, the hard-charging Third Army reported that all of its M10s were in such bad shape they should be replaced by M18s or M36s. First Army indicated that one-third of its M10s were sidelined. Ninth Army, however, said it could squeeze another half year out of its equipment.37
The Fat Lady Sings
Way down south in Italy, the crews of the 804th Tank Destroyer Battalion pulled into firing positions behind the doughs of the 88th Infantry Division in early April 1945. Major General Geoffrey Keyes and other brass visited the battalion on 15 April, and Keyes fired the battalion’s 200,000th round at the enemy from a Company B M10.
The next day, the American line surged into motion. After cracking through the initial crust of resistance, American forces swept into the Po River Valley and crossed the river itself within ten days. There was resistance here and there, but German troops began to surrender en masse.38
The integration of TDs and tanks was nearly complete by now. The 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion was attached to the 10th Mountain Division, for example, as was the 751st Tank Battalion. Force Madden fell under the control of the 751st Tank Battalion and included the TDs of B/701st. Headquarters, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, commanded Force Redding, which included Companies B, C, and D of the 751st Tank Battalion. Furthermore, each tank destroyer company swapped one platoon with its correspondingly lettered tank company. Company A of the tank battalion, for example, had two tank platoons and one TD platoon, while the ratio was reversed in the tank destroyer company. The units also exchanged radios and aligned crystals to ensure perfect communications. The mixed companies combined the armor-piercing fire power of the 3-inch guns and the better HE and automatic weapons capabilities of the Sherman.
One mixed company supported each of the six assault infantry battalions. The TDs provided a base of fire while the tanks advanced in direct support of the doughs. Despite the installation of SCR-3
00 radios in many infantry support tanks in northwestern Europe, the armor and infantry components in Italy still could not communicate by radio at the tactical level.39
Life was still plenty dangerous. John Hudson recalled:
On or about April 13, 1945, C/701st was the first to cut the northwest highway going out of Bologna…. Out in front of my TDs, I was suddenly hit and knocked to the ground as I heard a German machine gun fire. The blow was as if somebody hit me with a baseball bat…. I took off my helmet (which I almost never wore) to discover three parallel tracks on the top right side, where three shots had hit just above the angle causing them to ricochet off after fracturing the steel and leaving three tracks in my skull!
As we drove fast northwest of Bologna, an artillery shell landed just behind my jeep. A fragment as big as your fist went through the steel spare wheel; the jeep body; the chain locker over the right wheel holding tire chains, wheel jacks, and other tools; the command radio behind my seat; the steel back to my seat; my tanker’s jacket; and my clothing. I could feel the hit and asked my driver to get me to the first aid station we came to. There’s where we discovered all this damage, plus a big blister on my back where the fragment had burned. Some burn stuff was applied with another band-aid, and we were on our way….
[That evening, battalion executive officer] Bob Childs arrived. He had come from promoting Jack Wright to major, and he brought me Jack’s old helmet, with the captain’s bars welded onto the front, to announce my own promotion to captain, after nearly a year off and on as CO, Company C. He said, “I just can’t have my officers going around without a bath, and your helmet with those three holes won’t let you bathe in it!”40