Leonard Smith, standing by in reserve along with several other tank crews, felt the ground shaking from the heavy artillery of the Fuhrer Begleit Brigade. The men had grown used to the lighter artillery, but no one ever got used to the 150s (known as “Screaming Meemies”) and 203s when they came that close. Despite the extraordinary sacrifices of the 87th Infantry, the battle around Tillet throughout January 7 and 8 was at best a bloody stalemate.
TEN MILES EAST OF TILLET, on the morning of the eighth, Patton was driving in an open, unmarked jeep. On the narrow highway he passed a convoy of trucks stretching for several miles, carrying the 90th Infantry Division forward into battle. Heading in the opposite direction was a convoy of ambulances bringing the wounded of other divisions back to the rear. When the men of the 90th recognized Patton, they broke into wild cheers, waving, leaning out of their trucks. Patton, well aware of what the ambulances on the other side held, and what would happen within a matter of hours to many of these same men who were his direct responsibility, described it as “the most moving experience” of his life.
THE NEXT DAY, THE 761ST received orders to take the lead in a renewed assault on Tillet. While the infantry had repeatedly reached the outskirts of town in the last few days, engaging in punishing house-to-house combat, on each attempt they had been pushed back by the suicidally determined Fuhrer Begleit Brigade. Today would prove a crucial turning point. Pop Gates was responsible for deploying the tanks of Able and Charlie companies in spearheading for the 87th throughout the woods, fields, and ridges of the valley.
Leonard Smith's “Cool Stud” tank, having logged well over a thousand miles, had finally joined the numerous ranks of the battalion's mechanical breakdowns. The other crew members enjoyed the rare chance for a rest while the overworked maintenance department struggled to repair their vehicle. But the irrepressible Smith, who, for all he had been through, was still eager to go out and engage the Germans, volunteered to act as loader in another Charlie Company tank—William McBurney's “Taffy.” Pop Gates was simply too short of men by this point to caution him away.
The battalion had taken so many casualties with only limited replacements that most tanks were reduced to crews of four, operating without their bow gunners and the firepower of the .30-caliber ball-mounted machine guns. Without Smith, “Taffy” would have been forced to function with a crew of just three men (the tank commander doubling as loader). “Taffy”'s commander was a young sergeant from Cleveland, Ohio, named Teddy Windsor. McBurney had the gunner's seat. The driver was Smith's best friend, Willie Devore.
The temperature that day stood at –6 degrees Farenheit. As McBurney checked over his equipment in the early-morning darkness, the steel of the tank was so cold that even wearing his gloves, he could hardly stand to touch it. Pop Gates had been ordered to cover as wide an area as possible with his two tattered, depleted companies of Shermans. He had no choice but to split up Able and Charlie along platoon lines, and further to split up these platoons. Gates would lead the largest force, consisting of ten tanks; his other teams on the ground were to be led by S. Sgts. Henry Conway, Johnnie Stevens (recovered from his November injuries), Frank Cochrane, and Moses Dade, as well as Sgt. Teddy Windsor and Sgt. William Kitt.
In the breaking dawn, all along the designated line of departure, infantrymen gathered around the M-4 Shermans. Though Leonard Smith had just recently turned twenty himself, as he prepared to mount “Taffy”'s turret he was struck by the foot soldiers' youth and their air of bewilderment and vulnerability; some of them had been pulled straight out of high school. One of the soldiers closest to his tank carried a bazooka so awkwardly that Smith realized he had likely never fired it before. Smith wondered, for the briefest of moments, just what it was that all of them were about to head into.
There were no clear military guidelines for their mission. So wide was the area they had to cover, and so divided was the terrain by ridges and thick stands of trees, that Gates was forced to disregard many fundamental tenets of his training. Advancing in a clear line was a practical impossibility. Radio communications were occasionally scrambled. As they buttoned up and started rolling forward, each one leading its own small group of infantry, the Shermans quickly lost sight of one another. At Tillet, more than in any other battle site they experienced, each individual tank fought its own war.
SHORTLY AFTER SUNRISE, American field artillery teams sent a thunderous advance round of fire on German positions. They were immediately met with pinpointed return artillery fire, taking heavy casualties. The Fuhrer Begleit Brigade had carefully concealed its forward artillery observers throughout the valley. As the 761st's tanks moved out, enemy fire came in from every direction.
Able Company's Johnnie Stevens, attacking on rising ground, saw only one advantage between this situation and what he'd faced at Hill 309 in France: Here he knew in advance and had warned his men of the hopelessly entrenched positions they were heading toward. As the Shermans spread out, they took numerous hits, but the crews continued to fire off their high-explosive and armor-piercing shells. Henry Conway, rolling in advance of a second platoon, quickly became cut off from the rest of his unit, surrounded on a ridge by German infantry and several Panzer tanks. An artillery hit blew off a rear portion of his vehicle dangerously close to the fuel tank; he managed to find slight cover on the ridge for the Sherman, and he and his crew continued firing, single-handedly preventing the German forces from taking their position for over an hour.
Charlie Company, across the valley, faced a fury of fire. Moses Dade led his platoon forward a short distance when his turret took a direct strike. Despite injuries from ricocheting shrapnel and extensive damage to their tank, Dade and his crew continued pushing forward. The infantry and the platoon's other tanks followed suit, struggling over snow that had drifts up to four feet deep. Frank Cochrane, leading a second platoon, took several artillery hits to his hull and turret, but like Dade he kept advancing, radioing back that his crew was “still giving 'em hell.”
“Taffy”'s tank commander, Teddy Windsor, was ordered to advance on Charlie Company's outside flank. Despite the chaos they heard from hundreds of artillery shells and machine-gun nests merging into one sound across the valley, Leonard Smith and his crewmates advanced for some distance on their lone trek with no resistance. It seemed to Smith that he had once again gotten the luck of the draw.
Back at Gerimont, Preston McNeil's Dog Company received orders to halt its resupply duties. The M-5 Stuarts were to participate in a diversionary strike just outside of Gerimont to pull enemy fire off the hard-hit front. What began as a support mission quickly became an intense battle scene. The lightly armored tanks were not designed for the task, but McNeil's unit nonetheless successfully destroyed an enemy mortar team and ammunition dump.
Across the valley, Pop Gates had taken on the assignment of neutralizing a German defensive position that had devastated the 87th Infantry in the past few days. His team of ten tanks and infantry was to ascend a long, gradually rising slope defended by an organized fortification system containing dozens of machine-gun nests and self-propelled guns. Gates knew their chances of success were slim to none. But the Germans were raining fire on the American troops below. This would at least be a suicide mission—unlike the mindless orders for frontal attacks on Honskirch and Amberloup—in the service of a higher end, taking out key German artillery and antitank teams.
Gates had his tanks and infantry spread out as far as possible. He knew that their hopes of success rested on close communication, both from tank to tank and between the tankers and infantrymen, so that they could work in tandem to eliminate more entrenched defenses and then quickly spread out again to avoid becoming outflanked. The two-way headsets weren't functioning properly, so Gates chose to lead his team on foot. A barrage of fire was unleashed on them the moment they set out. But Gates ran in the midst of it, moving from tank to tank and squad to squad, calling out orders, giving hand signals, darting forward to scout enemy defenses, ducking down an
d firing his rifle, then dashing up again to signal routes of assault and attack plans to his men.
The German artillery took a brutal toll on the American forces; the Americans inflicted equally heavy casualties in turn. Dozens of tankers and infantrymen were gravely wounded, and many infantrymen were killed. The furious uphill battle raged for five hours. When the ridge was finally taken, only two tanks and a remnant of the infantry remained. Gates took just a moment to look down from the ridge at the battle still raging in the valley below, before going to see to the wounded.
LEONARD SMITH'S TANK CONTINUED on its solitary journey. Ten infantrymen trudged along stolidly beside and behind them. Smith could see almost nothing from his narrow loader's periscope; McBurney, through his horizontal turret sight, could see little more than slivers of white. Willie Devore was focused intently on the frozen snow immediately in front of his tracks. In their enlisted man's perpetual state of uncertainty, none of them knew exactly where they were—only that they had been told to advance in a certain direction, to neutralize any Germans encountered on the way.
Directly before them, over a slight rise, lay a wide, open field edged with woods on its far side. There seemed to be no easy way around it; approaching the field, they had a moment's choice either to advance or retreat. Smith could not see the utter exposure of the clearing, but in his headset he could hear the nervousness in the voices of crewmates Windsor and McBurney. They had no remaining illusions about the hazards of the Sherman tank, particularly when advancing with three and potentially four open flanks, beside a young, inexperienced, and frightened group of infantry. Windsor leaned out to confer with the infantry sergeant. The sergeant, too, was aware of the threat of ambush, but like Windsor he was doggedly determined to lead his troops forward as per their orders. Windsor called into his intercom mike for driver Willie Devore to proceed. Windsor, McBurney, and the accompanying infantry strained to look ahead.
Windsor radioed McBurney to zero in on the far trees; the veteran tanker had already done so. Devore took care to negotiate around the frozen bodies from previous attempts to take the field. Smith was tense, standing in position. It had been months since he'd been confined to the relative blindness of the loader's compartment. He used to complain about the narrowness of the gunner's horizontal sightlines, but he vowed he never would again—nothing was worse than the helplessness of the loader's post, enclosed on all sides by steel walls he knew offered little more protection than air against the German antitank shells. He tried to imagine the layout of the unseen field on which everything suddenly depended, listening above the roar of the engine for the slightest hint of trouble in his headset.
What he heard in his crewmates' voices, after the first few agonized minutes, was a gathering lightness of tone that made him begin to relax.
They advanced far enough to feel certain they would make it. Far enough—exposed enough against the sea of white—that when the first 88-millimeter shell came in they knew they had no hope.
Smith yanked an AP shell off the wall and rammed it into the breech, ducked aside as the breech kicked back after firing, ramming in another and ejecting the spent cartridges in one continuous motion. McBurney fired back with both machine gun and cannon on the whitewashed German Mark IV tanks and antitank guns. They were almost indistinguishable from the snow beyond the whitecapped trees in the opposing woods. Smith was reduced to his own rote motion, the pinging of machine-gun bullets against the tank's steel sides surely devastating the infantry, stark fear in Windsor's voice calling for armor-piercing then high-explosive, calling targets to McBurney, ordering Devore to turn any way he could. Above all this was the unmistakable sound of 88s as they began crashing in, first too long and then too short, trying to bracket them with their fire, while Willie shifted gears furiously, fighting to swing them around.
Even without the chaos of motion, neither the scrambling infantry nor Willie Devore had any chance, in the unmarked snow, of spotting the buried Tellermine. The thirty-two-ton vehicle rolling across it set off a full pound of TNT—rocking the tank with such force that Smith was sure they'd taken an 88. The Sherman jerked to a halt. Windsor called for Devore to back up, but the tracks had been blown off and the wheels were spinning deeper into the snow. Stuck out in the open in this motionless flammable target, they had no time. Windsor reluctantly gave the order to evacuate.
The surviving infantry were already fleeing, alternately running and crawling, being cut down. Smith scrambled out the turret hatch with McBurney and Windsor close behind. Outside of the tank, the bullets and artillery became one deafening roar.
The snow scalded Smith's bare hands and face as he crawled under the blanket of bullets. He glanced back to make sure Willie was with him. What he saw left him horror-struck. Willie was still inside the tank, standing up in his seat with his head and torso sticking out of the driver's hatch. Smith screamed to him. The others turned to look and started screaming Willie's name as well, telling him to jump. Devore seemed frozen with fear, blind to who or where he was.
The explosion from the incoming shell was as sudden as it was devastating—Willie folded and fell. Smith lurched back toward the tank, and McBurney stopped him. From his angle of vision McBurney could see how badly Devore had been hit. The artillery strike had taken off half of Willie's head, he tried to convey to Smith over the fury of incoming fire. A second later, the tank exploded.
The bullets did not stop. McBurney pulled Smith into motion amid the tumult of falling shells. Smith followed numbly, looking only at the snow at his feet.
VISIBILITY WAS SO POOR THAT DAY that the Allied planes were able to fly only limited missions. On clear days, the German tanks had learned at great cost to keep under cover of woods; but with the fog and overcast they had no fear. One of the Panzers moved forward from the trees to fire its machine-gun and high-velocity shells on the three escaping tankers. The remaining Germans continued their barrage from the woods—infantry, a second Panzer, and two antitank guns firing 88s. They had obviously expected to face down a much larger assault force than one single Sherman. Glancing up around him, William McBurney saw no surviving American infantry.
McBurney and Teddy Windsor fired their .45-caliber submachine guns back toward the trees. Though they took out several of the white-clad infantry, it was ultimately an exercise in futility; grease guns had an accuracy of less than 50 percent at twenty-five yards, let alone over a hundred yards and moving.
Looking up for the first time, Leonard Smith was shaken by how isolated and exposed they were. It was worse than anything he'd imagined from the belly of the tank. He had no idea where Windsor was trying to lead them. He struggled, writhing across the drifts of snow.
Without warning the ground beneath him disappeared. Smith scrambled to his knees—staring directly into a pair of sky-blue eyes. It took him a moment to realize that the German soldier he faced was dead, that he'd stumbled into a shallow foxhole. He was close enough to the German to note the hollowed cheeks; the faint sandy-blond stubble on the boyish face; the eyes that were clear and not yet frozen over, indicating that the soldier must have been killed moments before. Smith considered stopping in the foxhole, but the Germans in the woods had likely spotted his position. More than that, Smith realized he didn't want to be left alone.
Windsor and McBurney had not gone far. The adrenaline rush that had accompanied their escape from the tank had passed. Initially, McBurney's every muscle had burned with an urge to action. But now he felt nothing; he seemed to be moving in place. His fingers were so numb, he couldn't find the trigger of his .45. The enemy rounds continued to fall. It occurred to McBurney with a curious detachment that these were in fact real bullets, these people he did not know were in fact trying to kill him, he was in fact here in this field, in this village and country the names of which he did not know, and there was no way out. It wasn't hopelessness that made him stop but the simple truth—it didn't matter what he did or did not do.
Leonard Smith's voice came out of nowh
ere. “Come on, man. Come on, man—think about the Savoy, so we can get back and do some more dancing.” McBurney was stunned enough to turn. Smith paused beside him. “Let's get the hell out of here so we can get back and party.”
The bullets and artillery kept falling. McBurney shook his head. “I ain't going no further. Go on.”
Smith pulled at his arm. “The Savoy, man. Remember the Savoy.”
“Shit, you're out of your damned mind.” McBurney was ready to give up. Smith was scared, truly scared—the first time McBurney had ever seen him so. Nonetheless, with his irrepressible spirit he kept on talking about Harlem, about dancing, about the beautiful girls at the Savoy, anything to get McBurney's mind off their present situation. He refused to let McBurney lie down.
Motionless, Smith knew, they'd be zeroed in at any second. McBurney again tried to wave Smith on, but Smith stubbornly stayed with him. Summoning his last remaining reserves of energy and will, McBurney started moving again. Moments later, an incoming shell struck the spot where he'd lain.
The clearing seemed endless. The unevenness of the ground and the mist and debris sent up by the German bullets provided them with some kind of obscuring cover—but this strange combination of luck and terrain would surely run out. Smith could hear McBurney's ragged breathing beside him. The German Panzer rolling toward them showed no sign of stopping.
Over the continuing hum and pop of the bullets, neither Smith nor McBurney picked out the sound of the engine above. The first they heard of the American P-38 was the thunderous crash as it strafed the German tank, exploding the Panzer's ammunition. The plane flew on out of sight.
After a stunned moment, Windsor, McBurney, and Smith turned to look up at the blank white sky. Smith started waving; the three of them began wildly waving and cheering. The P-38 blasted past once more before disappearing—tipping its wings to acknowledge the three lone Americans far below.
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