The Last Full Measure

by Michael Stephenson

  … Another soldier whose nerves cannot stand the pressure of being in the trench gets up and out, and the tank turns around and runs him down, tearing him in half.125

  Koschorrek’s tormentor was eventually destroyed by an antitank gun.

  The armored front slope of a tank is called a “glacis.” It is a term that harks back to the great age of fortress building in the seventeenth century, when it referred to the earth slope that fell away from the outer walls, the first line of protection to be overcome before the citadel could be breached. And this curious terminological connection between ancient and modern offers a broader understanding of how tankers died in battle.

  Part fortress, part knight (tanks came out of and still invoke a cavalry heritage), the tank shares with both not only some of their functions, but their intrinsic vulnerabilities. Just as the fortress could be destroyed by direct fire from specialized heavy-duty armament such as siege cannon, bombards, perriers, and mortars, tanks were killed by a variety of munitions delivered by artillery (the most likely way), other tanks, and mobile antitank guns, as well as “tank-busting” aircraft and handheld weapons such as the bazookas, Panzerfausten, and PIATs (projector, infantry, antitank), wielded by intrepid infantrymen.126

  The earliest such munition (developed even before the advent of the tank as a means to penetrate the steel shields that protected snipers during World War I) was the solid, hardened-steel, armor-piercing round, the German “K bullet” of World War I. Tank crews were often killed by “bullet splash”: “When a lead-cored bullet hit the outside of the armor, it flattened and squeezed out its lead core in a ‘splash’ which radiated in a circular pattern. Under the force of the impact, the lead became nearly liquid and spread out with an almost explosive velocity. At the range of a foot, bullet splash is very nearly lethal, and the fast-moving liquid lead will force its way through any crack that presents itself.”127

  High-explosive antitank shells (HEAT) were “shaped” or “hollow” charges that, on impact, squirted a molten jet of metal through a relatively small hole in the tank’s armor into the interior, igniting ammunition and fuel and causing hideous injury to the crew. It was a classic case of the thing that made the tank strong—its armor—being turned against it. When the armor plating was breached, fragments of the interior skin were transformed into lethal missiles whose impact was intensified within the tank’s interior. Keith Douglas, a tank commander (destined to be killed later in the war), looked inside an Italian tank knocked out in North Africa:

  Gradually the objects in the turret became visible: the crew of the tank—for, I believe, these tanks did not hold more than two—were, so to speak, distributed around the turret. At first it was difficult to work out how the limbs were arranged. They lay in clumsy embrace, their white faces whiter, as those of dead men in the desert always were, for the light powdering of dust on them. One with a six-inch hole in his head, the whole skull smashed in behind the remains of an ear—the other covered with his own and his friend’s blood, held up by the blue steel mechanism of a machine gun, his legs twisting among the dully gleaming gear levers. About them clung that impenetrable silence I have mentioned before, by which I think the dead compel our reverence.128

  After the battle of El Alamein in 1942, James Ambrose Brown, a South African officer, inspected the inside of a tank that had lost its track to a mine and then been pounded by the fearsome German 88:

  To know the truth about tanks, one must see them after the battle, pitted with holes where shells have penetrated the armour, covered with scores where shells gouged out the steel as a spoon gouges out cheese.… The interiors of the tanks were for the most part masses of twisted steel, shattered and blackened by fire. But others, unburned, were filled with flies, scraps of bloody clothing, spilled oil and pieces of flesh. Dark blood splashes marred the cool white painted interiors. Telephones, bullets, half eaten food, pathetic rubbish. I read a fragment of a letter I picked up. It was from a girl to the now meaningless thing which lay in the wreckage. A pitiful document it was, full of love and hope. I used to glory in war: now I am beginning to understand.129

  David Ling, a young troop leader of A Squadron, Forty-Fourth Royal Tank Regiment, had his tank hit. It was like falling down the well in Alice in Wonderland, he remembered:

  I wondered if there was a bottom and whether I would be brought up with a jolt but this did not happen. Probably I would be gently slowed up. After all, to be stopped instantaneously after such a fall must kill one and that was ludicrous because one cannot be killed twice and I was already dead. Of that there was no doubt in my mind and it was the only lucid truth I knew.… I was dead and I didn’t seem to mind.…

  I lay still, as clarity, sanity and reality came back. I was comfortable and in no pain. I knew that I was huddled on the floor of my tank, that we were not moving, that the engine had stopped and that my last clear memory was an urgent call on the radio that some big gun was trying to hit me. Obviously it had. It was black inside and the turret and the air was full of black smoke. With difficulty I peered across the two feet of space separating me from the face of Corporal Hill.… “Are you all right, Hill?” “I’m all right, Sir—are you all right?” “Yes, I’m all right.” I didn’t ask the same of Trooper Bucket, my expert and lovable gunner.… Now slumped across his little adjustable seat he sprawled backwards and downwards. His head, split in twain, was poised over my chest while his hot blood poured over and through me, a black glistening stream from the back of his crushed skull. His suntanned face turned half sideways was closed and white with death, shining clearly in that black murk. I remember I struggled to get up and Hill struggled also. We were entangled and I had to move Bucket. I remember I stretched up my arm to push him forward and away—and that two of my fingers went through the hole in his skull, into the warm softness within. I wiped my hand on my blood-drenched clothes.130

  Rootedness was the essential vulnerability of both fortress and knight. Obviously, the fortress could not avoid the devastating effects of overwhelming firepower and the mounted knight, carrying on his back the simulacrum of the fortress, could suffer the same fate if brought to a halt. The success of German armor in the early years of the war was predicated on its speed. Movement was the tank’s hope of salvation. To stop was to court disaster, as Field Marshal Erich von Manstein, the architect of German armored strategy, emphasized: “The safety of a tank formation operating in the enemy’s rear largely depends on its ability to keep moving. Once it comes to a halt it will immediately be assailed from all sides by the enemy’s reserves.”131 Jock Watt, a British tank commander at the battle for the airfield at Sidi Rezegh, Libya, in November 1941, learned the lesson the hard way:

  Down on the airfield, as the view became clearer it revealed a scene even more chaotic and depressing. My god, what a mess we had got ourselves into! Bodies lay everywhere and obstruction by debris slowed our progress to a crawl, just at a time when speed was vital to get to our target. But where the hell was our target? Vehicles were milling about all over the area, with troops of tanks suddenly appearing out of the smoke and dust. It was an impossible situation, open fire on one of these vague, fleeting targets and you could be blasting your own CO to hell.

  We stopped to assess the situation but that was a mistake; fire descended upon us from all directions and the noise of screaming shells, explosions, the chatter of machine guns, and the whistle of fragments flying through the air was unbearable. I kept my body as low as possible in the turret and the urgent need to think and act suppressed the fear rising within me.…

  A violent explosion rocked the tank and a large crater appeared alongside, big enough to hide the tank in. What in the hell was that? Another missile was screaming through the air and landed just in front of us. Added to the usual artillery, anti-tank and machine gun fire, we were now being targeted by 210mm shells. Someone decided that that was enough and gave the order to “get the hell out of here!” … Guiding my driver in this almost blind environment requi
red all my concentration and consequently I failed to detect the smell of burning until the operator screamed, “We are on fire!”132

  Other points of vulnerability of the mounted knight mirrored in the tank were the chinks in the armor: the joints where armor plates needed to move, or the slits necessary for observation, gun ports, or tracks. Sergeant Edgar Gurney of the British Seventh Parachute Brigade witnessed infantry killing a panzer in Normandy with extraordinary coolness and skill:

  Private McGee, who was near the main road, picked up his Bren gun [roughly the equivalent to the US Browning Automatic Rifle], then started to walk up the middle of the road towards the tanks, firing the Bren gun from his hip. As one magazine became empty, he replaced it with a new one.… We could hear the bullets ricocheting off the armour steel plating of the leading tank that immediately closed down his visor, thus making him blind to things in front! Corporal Tommy Kileen realized what was happening and ran up the side of the road, taking two Gammon bombs [heavy-duty grenades that exploded on impact] from his pouches. He threw the first bomb which hit the leading tank where the turret and body meets which nearly blew the turret off. He threw the second bomb against the tank’s track, which was promptly blown off. The tank now tried to escape but only having one good track it went round in circles, so the crew baled out and tried to escape. They were shot by McGee.133

  Where the knight was extremely vulnerable as he leaned forward on his horse in order to engage an enemy to his front, thus exposing his unarmored nether regions, so too was the tank at its rear. Its armament tended to point forward, and its heaviest armor plate was deployed on front and sides. This was why tanks, like knights, needed to work with foot soldiers as protection. Without that screen of friendly defenders, enemy infantry had several options to kill them. They could strike with bazooka-type arms, going for the swivel joint of the turret, the fuel tanks, or the tracks, or they could swarm it, as did medieval foot soldiers the stationary knight. The latter was a highly risky option for the infantryman and one mainly employed by the Soviets (in the early stages of the war) and Japanese, who, through lack of antitank guns, were spurred on by the courage of the desperate and inspired by the invention of the determined. Robert C. Dick, a tanker on Leyte, was at the receiving end of one such charge:

  One event stands out in my memory, and thinking of it, even now, makes me wonder at the foolishness, and yes, bravery, we all saw during our days of combat. Our platoon was on a narrow road, and by a miracle it wasn’t too muddy. We came to a clearing, and as we drove through it I noticed that very deep ditches had been dug on each side. So deep and wide, in fact, a tank could not cross them. There were four tanks in our platoon that day, and we were number three in the column.

  As the first tank got to the far edge of the clearing, the Japanese rushed us. They came out of the jungle on all sides, carrying mines attached to long bamboo poles. Before any of us could react, the tracks had been blown off the lead tank and also off the last tank. We were stuck right here, and while I couldn’t speak for anyone else, I was stunned. I just couldn’t believe that real Japanese soldiers, guys who were intent on killing us right now, were in plain view and swarming all over our tanks. As a driver there was nothing I could do except watch this unbelievable attack.…

  There seemed to be an endless number of them, but we later estimated their strength at around twenty or so. We all started shooting them off each other’s tanks by using our .30-caliber coax [machine] guns.… Right in the middle of things, a Japanese officer jumped up onto the back of Couch’s tank, and as the turret began to traverse in our direction (in order to shoot the Japs off our tank), the officer began hacking away at the machine gun barrel with his two-handed sword! After about three or four whacks he got it turned a bit sideways, but the blade snapped off about a foot below the hilt. That’s when my gunner, Anderson, shot him off Couch’s tank.134

  Where the knight’s face visor was a potential weakness, because the slits through which he needed to see were also inviting for a dagger thrust, so too was the tank turret hatch. US infantryman Roscoe C. Blunt Jr. describes how a tank could be killed through its “visor”:

  The tank turned its attention to the infantry squad with us who were laying down heavy rifle and machine gun fire in their direction. But .30-caliber bullets against a steel-enforced Tiger tank were almost as troublesome as fleas to an elephant. We were in exposed positions and unable to move forward or backward. The lieutenant motioned for me to follow him in a flanking attempt around one of the buildings shielding the Kraut tank, while our driver crawled forward to the riflemen and told them we needed diversionary fire.…

  Communicating by hand signals and eye language, we quietly swung ourselves on top of the tank. When the lieutenant pulled the tank’s hatch cover [in the distraction of combat inadvertently left unlocked] partly open, we heard yelling inside and saw a pair of hands grab at the cover in a tug of war with the lieutenant. I pulled the pin on a fragmentation grenade and shoved it under the heavy, round hatch cover just as the lieutenant released his grip. I saw the grenade was wedged between the hatch cover and the hatch rim, keeping the cover from being slammed shut.

  With only four seconds before detonation, I gave the grenade a hard sideways kick and it fell inside as the lieutenant and I dove head-first off the tank and rolled behind one of the buildings. With the muffled explosion and the screams from inside, the hatch cover flew open and white smoke billowed out. We clambered back onto the tank and emptied our pistols down the turret hatch to finish the job.135

  Just as the belly of a knight’s horse was horribly vulnerable to any soldier intrepid enough to get underneath and slash it, so too was the underside of the tank. Top surfaces were often treated to thwart magnetic mines, but the belly of the beast was a different matter. Getting to it, though, required extraordinary courage and skill that might often need to be supplemented by a heaping helping of luck. A Landser (German foot soldier) in Russia took on a main Soviet battle tank, the mighty T-34:

  Crouching low I started towards the monster pulling the detonation cord, and prepared to fix the [magnetic] charge. I had now five seconds before the grenade exploded and then I noticed, to my horror, that the outside of the tank was covered in concrete. My bomb would not stick on such a surface.… The tank suddenly spun on its right track, turned so that it pointed straight at me and moved forward as if to run over me.

  I flung myself backwards and fell straight into a partly dug trench and so shallow that I was just below the surface of the ground. Luckily I had fallen face upwards and was still holding tight in my hand the sizzling hand grenade. As the tank rolled over me there was a sudden and total blackness.… The shallow earth walls of the trench began to collapse. As the belly of the monster passed over me I reached up instinctively as if to push it away … [and] stuck the charge on the smooth, unpasted metal. Barely had the tank passed over me than there was a loud explosion … I was alive and the Russians were dead.136

  No tankers took a more fearful beating than the Soviets, both in the desperate defense of the initial German invasion and in the all-out attack of its repulse. More than 77 percent of Soviet tankers (310,000 out of 403,000) were killed.137 “ ‘Have you burned yet?’ was a question Russian tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time.”138 Burning to death was the greatest fear and the common fate of many tankers of whichever army. Cyril Joly, a British tank commander in North Africa in 1940, witnessed the fate of an Italian tank:

  Ryan was the first to get a kill. He hit an enemy tank which was turning on the slope before him fairly and squarely in the engine, shattering the petrol tanks and starting a fire which spread rapidly. Mixed with the flame, clouds of billowing black smoke rolled across the desert, blocking my view of the enemy entirely. With a dull roar the ammunition then exploded, throwing a mass of debris into the air. A moment later we were horrified to see a figure with face blackened and clothes alight stumbling through the smoke. He staggered for some yards, then fell
and in a frenzy of agony rolled frantically in the hard sand in a desperate effort to put out the flames. But to no avail. Gradually his flailing arms and legs moved more slowly, until at last, with a convulsive heave of his body, he lay still.139

  Churchills and Shermans, both gasoline-fueled, would invariably “brew up” when hit (the Germans called Churchills “Tommy cookers”; Americans called their Shermans “Ronson burners” after the cigarette lighter whose advertising claimed it always lit the first time). Nat Frankel, an American tanker, explained what happened when a Sherman was hit:

  A tank, you see, had four gas inlets, and each one was filled with high octane. If any of those four were hit, the whole machine would go up.… When that gas got hit, your options were, to say the least, limited. Oh, we had a fire extinguisher, but that was for overheated motors; it was useless for an exploded tank. Now, there were two ways to get out. One was via the turret; the other was through a trapdoor on the opposite side of the driver from the bow gun. Often the turret would be inaccessible to anyone inside the tank; if the machine was hit badly, particularly if it was knocked on its side, the trapdoor would jam as well. At best you would have ninety seconds to get out that door; if it jammed, you would need fifty of those seconds to push it open. That would leave forty seconds for three men to squeeze out. Tick, tick, tick, boom! And what would happen if both the turret and the trapdoor were inoperative? What would happen is, you’d die! It takes twenty minutes for a medium tank to incinerate; and the flames burn slowly, so figure it takes ten minutes for a hearty man within to perish. You wouldn’t even be able to struggle, for chances are both exits would be sheeted with flame and smoke. You would sit, read Good Housekeeping and die like a dog.140