>> Narrator: During
World War II, American tank crews duked it out with Nazi
Panzers in a high explosive duel to the death.
Crammed inside 30 tons of rolling steel, the GIs went up
against a better armed and more experienced enemy.
All too often, the tank became a steel coffin.
It was a war where survival demanded a good crew, a lot of
guts, and a lot of luck. Meet the Tank Crews next
on<i> Suicide Missions.</i> <font color="#FFFF00">[Captioning sponsored by
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS]</font> >> Narrator: The tank that put
the teeth into an American armored division in World War II
was known officially as Medium Tank, M-4, but to the
five GIs that manned each of these steel monsters, it's
better remembered as the General Sherman.
The crews hoped that their Sherman would live up to its
Civil War namesake, cut a path through hostile territory, and
leave in its wake a defeated enemy.
The Sherman was conceived not too many years earlier-- before
America was even at war-- as a weapon intended to help the
infantry out of a tight spot. It was supposed to roll in and
blast away at machine gun nests, enemy troops, and other
"soft targets." But on the battlefields of
Europe, the Sherman was forced to take on a much deadlier job:
shooting it out, point blank, with enemy tanks.
>> Walter Stitt: Everybody was frightened.
Everybody was scared. But it got built into you, you
know, that this is what you were going to do, and you were going
to see it through, one way or another.
>> Chuck Miller: What are you going to do?
Are you going to rebel and try and just refuse to get back in?
You, you just... You just didn't do it.
>> Harley Swenson: Every day you-you would just say,
"Man, if I can just make it through today, I got it made."
But that came up everyday. >> Bert Close: Every time we got
into a tank, it was suicide in a sense that we could have
been killed at anytime and we knew it, but at the same time,
I think we all felt that we were still somewhat invincible.
>> Narrator: During the war, the American Army fielded
16 different armored divisions. They were outfitted with a mix
of two types of tanks: a small tank named the General Stuart,
and the heavier Sherman tank. Only two of those 16 divisions,
the Second and the Third, were designated as "heavy" armored
divisions-- meaning that their regiments were equipped
primarily with Shermans. A heavy armored division was
made up of three regiments. Two armored regiments and a
regiment of mechanized infantry, plus field artillery,
medical staff, supply people, signals people, reconnaissance
units, combat engineers, and a maintenance battalion-- all
together nearly 14,000 men. Placed bumper to bumper, their
vehicles would stretch for almost ten miles.
But a heavy armored division's combat power-- its reason for
being-- was its 232 Sherman tanks.
The Third Armored Division had been formed back in the Spring
of 1941. In camps across the United
States, the men spent almost two years learning the technology
and the tactics of armored warfare, and how to work
together as a team. Once in England, they trained
for ten more months and prepared themselves for the invasion of
Europe. They came ashore at Omaha Beach
in Normandy, France in late June, 1944, three weeks after
D-Day. And on the morning of June 29th,
the men of the Third Armored Division got their baptism of
fire. They attacked the Germans dug in
around Villers-Fossard, a small village in the French hedgerow
country. In the dense tangle of trees,
and narrow roads, the American tankers came face to face with
the big German tanks with guns, described by one GI, "the size
of telephone poles." The German Mark Four, and the 53
ton Mark V Panther tanks, with their high velocity 75
millimeter guns made mince meat of the Shermans.
The German armor-piercing shells punched through one side of the
Sherman and straight out the other.
In the maelstrom of close combat, tanks were quickly
knocked out, blown to pieces, or set ablaze, incinerating the
trapped men. An intense artillery barrage
forced the German defenders into retreat, and the Americans won
the battle. But the tankers had suffered a
terrific beating. Belton Cooper was a 25-year-old
Ordnance Officer in the Third Armored Division, tasked
with recovering and replacing the battle-damaged tanks.
>> Belton Cooper: All morning long, they started bringing
in these tanks with these broken and twisted bodies inside, and
I was absolutely devastated. I thought, "Cooper, how in the
hell are we going to win this war?
These Germans are shooting the hell out of these tanks."
I mean, that's the first time I seriously doubted if we could
win this war. The Germans were just
devastating us. They were just slaughtering us
right and left. >> Narrator: At the end of
its first day of the war, the Third Armored Division had lost
351 men and 31 tanks. The relentless power of the
German tanks had caught the American crews off guard.
They were clearly outgunned by the Panzers of Hitler's Third
Reich. >> Belton Cooper: I was
frightened. I was terrified.
Sometimes I cried. Sometimes I prayed.
It really got to me. I was mad, too.
I-I just... I couldn't see how in the world the
American Army could put our soldiers in the field of battle
with a grossly inferior tank. And I just didn't know how we
were going to get through the war.
>> Bert Close: I was angry at people that I didn't know who
they were, but it was people who I had expected would, with the
ability of the American resources, build the best tank
in the world. >> Narrator: The American
tankers had learned an unexpected lesson.
Their Sherman was not the best tank as they had been lead to
believe. The first confrontation with
Nazi tanks in Normandy, France in June 1944 proved to the
tankers of the American Armored Force that their M4 Sherman was
no match for the enemy tanks. Too many Shermans-- and too many
trained crewmen-- had been lost in the fight.
>> John Purdy: It was really a policy that was adopted at the
beginning of the war that caused the loss of these soldiers.
It was a matter of the American government chose production over
research and development... and made production paramount.
>> Narrator: Research and development of new tanks became
a low priority for the US Army at the end of World War I.
In 1920, Congress passed the National Defense Act, which re-
organized the post-war Army and abolished the fledgling Tank
Corps. Innovation virtually came to a
standstill. The only new ideas came from an
eccentric inventor named Walter Christie.
In this 1931 film, a radical Christie design is put through
its paces for the Army brass. Christie's secret was a unique
suspension that transformed the tank into something like a
sports car with a cannon. But the Army's response was less
than enthusiastic. >> Purdy: The Army had a lot of
problem dealing with him, because he was eccentric and
insisted on everything being his way and the army couldn't modify
or change it. And eventually they just gave up
dealing with him. >> Narrator: Frustrated by the
Army's indifference, Christie took his ideas to Europe.
Ironically, many of the German tanks that the US Army would
come up against in World War II sported a Christie-style
suspension. Left without a Tank Corps to
supervise the development of armored fighting vehicles, the
Infantry and the Cavalry branches designed their own
tanks. The Infantry looked at tanks as
weapons that should support riflemen on the assault.
They needed to be maneuverable and pack a lot of firepower.
In 1939, the Infantry settled on a tank called the M2 Medium.
It had a crew of six, no less than eight 30 caliber machine
guns, and a short barreled 37 millimeter cannon in a top
turret. The Cavalry, on the other hand,
had considered its traditional roles in scouting and pursuit,
and put its money in lighter, faster tanks.
They were armed with either machine guns, or in later
models, a 37 mm cannon. The light tanks required just
four crewmen. Harley Swenson drove a light
tank. >> Harley Swenson: At the time,
we had just shoe signals on our shoulders and stuff, you know.
You didn't have a radio contact. It was mostly manual contacts
for driving and backing up, right or left.
When they wanted you to stop they give you one good rap, you
know. You know you were supposed to
stop. >> Narrator: On September 1,
1939, the Germans surprised the world with the power of their
Blitzkrieg attack on Poland. Compared to the German Panzers
sweeping across Europe, the American tanks back home looked
like toys. On July 10, 1940, the Army
created the Armored Force and immediately began to play "catch
up." Army planners needed a new tank,
and fast. Tank builders at Chrysler wanted
to replace the small 37 millimeter of the M2 Medium with
a larger 75 millimeter cannon already in the inventory.
But they hadn't yet figured out how to mount that big gun in a
rotating turret. So they kept the 37 millimeter
gun in the top turret and mounted the larger 75 in a
sponson on the side of the tank. Called the M3 Medium, the new
tank made its spectacular public debut in April 1941 at
Chrysler's giant Detroit Tank Arsenal.
The M3 went to war with the British and US Armies fighting
the Germans in North Africa. They found that, since the 75
millimeter gun had a very limited traverse, it was
difficult to aim. The whole vehicle had to be
moved to align the gun on a target, and that cost precious
time in the heat of battle. But the M3 was only a stopgap.
Before it was even in combat, the Army Ordinance Department
was working on a new tank with the 75 mm gun in a top turret, a
turret that could traverse 360 degrees.
In October 1941, this design was standardized as Medium Tank M4,
and would become known as the Sherman.
The first Sherman rolled off the assembly line in February 1942.
Soon, tanks would be coming off the line at a rate of 2,000 a
month. Chrysler's Detroit Tank Arsenal
was the major builder of the tank, but other manufacturers
like the American Locomotive Company, Ford, and the Pullman
Car Company, also built Shermans.
The Sherman had a five-man crew: The driver, and an assistant
driver worked in the hull. The loader, the gunner, and the
commander worked in the turret. For them, the tank's real beauty
was its simplicity. >> Fred Ropkey: The Sherman tank
was manned by farm boys that had been used to working with
tractors, and, and that sort of thing.
When they sat down in the, the seat where we are right now,
they weren't, they weren't at a loss, because mechanics had been
a major part of their life. The problem in a tank is this:
There's so much equipment jammed inside of this hull, that what
you find in it is a super-tight, confined quarters that get very
hot and very dirty very fast. And at full power, particularly
if this tank was buttoned up-- that is the hatch is down-- the
noise would be so much that you could barely hear yourself
scream. >> Narrator: The first Shermans
out of the factory were shipped overseas to outfit British
armored units fighting the Germans in North Africa.
In their first combat, in September 1942, the British
knocked out some enemy tanks, and lost a couple of Shermans.
The fight ended, more or less, in a draw.
The first Shermans in US hands met the enemy in Tunisia on
December 6, 1942. A company of five tanks from the
Second Armored Division attacked German tanks and anti-tank gun
positions. All five Shermans were
destroyed. By the time the US Army was
fighting the Germans in Sicily and Italy, it was clear the M4
Sherman was outclassed. Its 75 mm cannon had a low
muzzle velocity. The speed at which the shell
left the barrel was too slow to punch a hole in the thick German
armor. The men shared stories of
watching their shells harmlessly bounce off of Nazi tanks.
The German guns, however, with their higher muzzle velocity,
easily riddled the Shermans. With a weak gun, and thin armor,
the Sherman was a deathtrap. "Tank Crews" will be back in
The unavoidable compromise that builders of the US M4 Sherman
had to make between firepower, protection, and mobility, would
become even more obvious as the Allied forces came ashore in
Normandy, France. During the summer of 1944, the
Sherman crews would suffer considerably.
The French farm country-- just inland from the D-Day invasion
beaches-- was a patchwork of small fields bordered by dense
mounds of dirt, roots, and trees.
These so-called hedgerows made perfect hiding places for the
German defenders. Their weapon of choice was the
Panzerfaust. This German invention fired a
warhead called a shaped charge. When it hit, the energy of the
explosion would focus to a point and the hot jet would melt
through the armor in a split second.
In this German training film, the weapon penetrates nearly
five inches of steel-- twice the thickness of the Sherman's
frontal armor. >> Chuck Miller: You wouldn't
think with a little hole as small as that where it went
through, that it could do all the damage it did inside of a
tank. But when it blew out inside, it
just tore up everything. >> Narrator: The Panzerfaust was
similar, but far superior to the American bazooka.
It didn't have the range of the bazooka, but that didn't matter
in the hedgerow country. But the most lethal anti-tank
weapons in Normandy were the German Panther tanks, with their
high velocity 75 millimeter guns, and the bigger Tiger
tanks, with 88s. >> Ropkey: The Germans, with
their 88s could pierce the front armor here, if it hit at the
right angle, travel through the compartment, and right out the
back. >> Narrator: July 11, 1944 was
one of the most critical days in the Battle of Normandy.
The Germans launched a massive counterattack near the town of
Saint Lo. Sherman tanks from the Third
Armored Division moved forward to repel the onslaught.
The American tankers soon found themselves overwhelmed.
Walter Stitt was 20 years old, and a gunner.
>> Walter Stitt: A Lieutenant came over, ordered the tank
commander to get out of the tank, said he was going to take
over. And found out later, the
Lieutenant had already lost two tanks that day, and this was his
third tank. And so he got in, and we were
sitting still, and, all of a sudden, the Platoon Sergeant
started yelling over the phone. Said, "Lieutenant, they're
shooting at you, back up, back up."
Then the Sergeant got on again, and said, "Lieutenant, back up,
back up!" and I looked, and he, he just was paralyzed.
And he reached over and he grabbed his mike button, and
pushed the button, and said, "Driver, back up."
Bang! Just like that, was hit and the shell hit right in front
of the gunner, and killed the gunner and the Tank Commander
both. And, of course, then, survival
gets in, you say, "I've got to get out of here, and get out of
here fast, because if they hit me once, they'll get me again."
>> Narrator: Chuck Miller was also 20 and a loader.
This, too, was his first experience in combat.
His commander and gunner were killed by a direct hit-- almost
immediately. >> Miller: You shouldn't, but,
you, you, you just lose it all there.
For a minute there you just don't know what's going on, and,
and all you can think about is getting out of the tank.
>> Narrator: By July 16th, reinforcements had helped repel
the German offensive at Saint Lo.
By then, the Division had lost 87 tanks.
Bert Close was 19. His tank company lost 12 of its
16 tanks. >> Bert Close: The strategy of
sending tanks up roads one behind the other where there was
no maneuverability was, was terrible.
One way or the other, they were just sitting ducks.
>> Narrator: 23-year-old Clement Elissondo was a
gunner. >> Clement Elissondo: There were
several bad mistakes made: One, we went in with no infantry.
We had plenty of infantry units around, so I don't know what
happened but it was a pretty bad mistake.
>> Close: I was totally disgusted both with the Sherman
tank and with the people who were making the decisions on how
to use them. I thought, "What kind of fools
do they take us for?" >> Narrator: The Army had never
before experienced this kind of warfare in this kind of terrain.
Every day in the hedgerows, the armored warriors learned a
costly lesson. If they could break out of
Normandy, and the tangle of hedgerows, they would hit flat,
open country, better country for maneuvering tanks.
They tried by fitting a handful of Shermans with bulldozer
blades. The "tankdozer" would knock down
the hedgerow, and other tanks would rush into the breach.
But this had a serious drawback. The Germans soon learned that,
wherever the tankdozer was, that was where the breakthrough was
going to happen. The Germans then concentrated
their fire at those points with murderous effect.
A sergeant named Curtis Culin of the 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance
Squadron came up with a remarkable solution.
He took scrap iron girders and welded them to the front of a
tank's hull. On July 22, a tank commanded by
31-year-old Albert Jenest, was fitted with Culin's iron tusks
for a secret demonstration for the Army brass.
>> Albert Jenest: I was sent up there with my crew, and we'd get
in position, and we got the order to hit it.
And we hit it. Yeah, we went through, and went
back to the bivouac. That's about how long it lasted.
>> Narrator: Culin's device, called the hedge chopper, or the
rhino, became an instant hit. The Third Armored Division
Commander wanted 57 of his tanks fitted with the hedge choppers
by the next morning. The task of mass producing the
device fell to the division maintenance crews.
>> Cooper: Well, they had to make a different hedge chopper
for each tank because the parts were all different.
We just cut up parts and tried to put them together any way we
could, so the individual men had to improvise and design their
own hedge choppers. We would have one guy cutting up
the steel, one crew was fitting the steel together, another crew
would come and weld it down. >> Narrator: Maintenance men
worked around the clock cutting and fitting the hedge choppers.
They were racing to rig as many tanks as possible, in time for
Operation Cobra, the upcoming Allied attempt to break through
the German lines. The big attack was scheduled to
begin the next morning. >> Cooper: We found out it took
40 man-hours of labor to weld up a hedge chopper, and we only had
40 men with 107 miles to go, so we worked all night long.
We worked our butts off, but instead of 57 hedge choppers, we
had seven the next morning. That's all we had, but,
fortunately, the Good Lord looked after us, and they, the
storms and the rain, and, and the weather was so bad that the
Air Force had to delay their attack for three days.
Within three days, we about got about half of them on out, ready
to go. We never had the 57, but we got
about half of them, about 25 or so, and that was the thing that
really saved the day. >> Narrator: After the weather
cleared, on July 25, a combination of air power,
artillery, infantry, and armor broke the German lines.
Enemy containment collapsed, and the Allied armies hurtled into
the heart of France. The Third Armored Division moved
17 miles in two days and lost only two tanks.
>> Cooper: It was the best single innovation that I know of
that improved the capability of the Sherman tank, and in fact,
I think without the hedge chopper, I don't think we
would've gotten out of Normandy. I think we would've been bogged
down there. I don't think we could have
really broken out. >> Narrator: For his invention
of the hedge chopper, Sergeant Culin received the Legion of
Merit and the Sherman crews got a new lease on life.
"Tank Crews" will be back It was during the pitched
battles to break free of the French hedgerows that the crews
of the American M4 Sherman discovered its greatest
deficiencies. The 75 millimeter gun was too
weak, and at just two and a half inches, the armor was too thin.
The Sherman's hull was penetrated so easily, that both
the enemy and the crews, themselves, took to calling the
tank a "Ronson," an allusion to the American cigarette lighter
that was advertised as "always lighting the first time."
The tankers often added their own armor.
Steel plates, called applique armor, were welded over
vulnerable spots. Spare steel tracks, sandbags,
and even logs were slung on the tank, in an attempt to break up
the searing blast of the Panzerfaust.
By the summer of 1944, improved Shermans had begun to arrive in
quantity. Upgraded Shermans, like the
M4A3E8 or Easy 8, with its thicker armor, better
suspension, and a safer way to store ammunition, was a welcome
addition. But the most appreciated
improvement was the new 76 millimeter gun.
Although the shell was just a scant millimeter wider than the
75, the propellant capacity of the casing was about 50 percent
greater. That gave the shell a much
higher muzzle velocity and a better chance of penetrating
German armor. But the armored warriors had
improved their chances of survival not by just improving
the tank. They had also improved the way
they<i> used</i> the tank. Tankers learned to attack with
the support of, not just infantry, but with artillery and
air power. This new way of fighting as a
team came to be called "combined arms warfare."
Oftentimes, aviators from the Army Air Corps traveled with the
tanks to help coordinate the attack.
>> Miller: We had a liaison assigned to each company from
the Air Corps, and they had a special radio where they could
talk to their, their pilots. And, uh, he rode right along
with us and communicated with airplanes when, when we were
getting their, their support. And it was really good when you
could, when you'd see one of those P47's dive right ahead of
you. And you'd hear a big bomb, boom!
And you knew, rest assured, when you got out, there was gonna be
a tank laying on its side there. >> Narrator: The Allied armies,
with the Third Armored Division often in the van, used combined
arms to great advantage as they swept across northern France.
They had become a veteran fighting team, well-versed in
the art of armored warfare. >> Stitt: The hardest thing I
had to do was to shoot somebody. You know, that's just, entirely
foreign to the way you've been raised, is to shoot and kill
somebody. And so the first few times you
step on that trigger, knowing that you're really trying to
kill somebody, it was really difficult.
But after you've been in combat for awhile, you see other men
killed. Uh, it, you begin to get the
feeling, it's going to be me or them.
And if it's got to be that way, it's going to be them and not
me. >> Narrator: For all its
problems, the Sherman had one beloved asset: reliability.
The men who fought the tank appreciated its simple,
dependable, rugged design, and so did the men who fixed them.
A well-trained mechanic was worth his weight in gold to a
mechanized army on the move. Repairs were made as close to
the front as possible, to help maintain the momentum of the
offensive. >> Purdy: The ordinance units in
Europe were pushed farther forward than anyone thought was
possible, and these units were pushed right up behind the front
lines, and sometimes with shifting front lines they were,
they<i> were</i> the front lines. >> Narrator: Tanks knocked out
in combat were picked up by giant recovery trucks and
brought back to a secure rear area called a vehicle collection
point, or VCP. The first step in repairing a
tank often proved to be the most difficult: removing the mangled
bodies of the dead crewmen. >> Cooper: These tanks that were
coming to the VCP, they were just shot all to hell, I mean,
you couldn't believe it, and the bodies were still in there, and
we had to get the bodies out. If a guy gets hit in the head,
the head just explodes. The brains and everything just
go all over the tank. It's horrible.
The brains get all down the turret race, and in the
electrical wiring, and the harness, and you just have to
rip all that stuff out and clean it out thoroughly.
And then after they do that, they replace the harness and
they paint the tank all over the inside.
And even after you paint it, there's that still, faint stench
of death that comes through that paint.
You're not sure but that's always there.
>> Narrator: Shot-up tanks could be fixed, but experienced
crewmen were lost for good. Once in combat, it became
virtually impossible to get trained replacement crews.
New crewmen were trained in a matter of days...
sometimes, not at all. >> Elissondo: I remember once
getting a replacement. I asked the guy his name, and
got that, and I said, uh, "What kind of training did you get?"
and he says, "infantry." I said, "Did you go to Fort
Knox?" "No."
I says, "Have you been in a tank before?"
And he said, "No." I says, "Oh, my God."
I says, "What are you doing here?"
Well, we were lining up to move out, and so I put the kid in the
assistant driver's seat, and the next thing you know, a few
shells came in. This kid gets hit, but not bad.
In fact, I don't even know how bad it was.
And he took off on me, because we hadn't gone far.
Took off running. I still, to this day, don't know
his name. I never saw him again.
And I never found out what happened.
But that was war. >> Cooper: Now, later on, we
began to lose so many men that we had to operate with a three
man crew. We had a driver and a tank
commander and a gunner. So, then they sent down two
truckloads of raw recruit infantry.
They brought them down and lined them all up, said, "How many of
you guys have ever operated a tank?"
None of them have ever been in a tank, some of them have never
seen a tank before, not close up.
So we got them out there, and so we took them and divided them
into crews, and so we took a tank driver and two men, put 'em
in a tank. We let each man fire three
rounds apiece, that's the only training they had on that gun,
that's all they had-- first time.
At about 5:00 that night, we released them, and...
We went out about 8:00 that night.
Three hours later, out of that 17 tanks, 15 were knocked out
alongside the road, and I don't know whether any of those young
guys survived or not. They had no idea what they were
getting into. And I thought, "How in the hell
can you send these kids?" but there was nobody else to send,
that was it. >> Narrator: By the end of
August, the Third Armored Division had moved out of
northern France and through the cities of Mons and Liege,
Belgium on their way to Germany. Major General Maurice Rose,
Third Armored Commander, had pushed his division farther and
faster than anyone thought possible.
The autumn rains had turned the European countryside into a
quagmire. The tracks had to be fitted with
special extended end connectors, called duck bills, to help the
tanks move through the mud. On September 12, a
reconnaissance platoon of the Third Armored had crossed from
Belgium into Germany and occupied a small border town.
For the first time since the Napoleonic Wars, a German town
had fallen to an invading army. The soldiers of the Third
Armored, the Second Armored, the Fourth Infantry, and a host of
other divisions, wasted no time in assaulting the Siegfried
Line, the complex network of German bunkers and defensive
fortifications. From now on, Hitler's soldiers
would be defending their home turf, and for them, no sacrifice
would be too great to blunt the spearhead of the armored
warriors. "Tank Crews" will be back
The American armored and infantry divisions cleared a
path through the vaunted Siegfreid Line by the fall of
1944. Even though German resistance
was stiff, it looked like the allies could end the war by
Christmas. But on December 16th, the German
army launched a massive counterattack and drove a deep
wedge between the allied forces. They hit with everything they
had. The American Air Force couldn't
fly in the lousy weather, and the tankers found themselves
fighting for their lives. >> Stitt: You know, you keep
wondering how much longer it can go on, or am I going to get it
tomorrow, or, you know, what's- what's going to happen?
>> Elissondo: You get to where it's a survival of the fittest,
and if you're lucky you make it. >> Close: I think there was a
time when I felt that I could have died, and that would have
been all right. I wrote to my folks once when I
thought maybe that time was coming.
But I did tell them that they should know that if I am killed,
that I got more German's, or more "Jerries," than would ever
even up by getting me. >> Narrator: The Ardennes
Offensive, the so-called "Battle of the Bulge" was without a
doubt the armored warriors' most desperate and miserable fight.
>> Cooper: He would lose a tank and see his crew shot all to
hell, and then get back in a tank and still fight and lose
that one and lose another one and he kept going.
We've had some men lose three and four and five tanks and
still kept fighting. Those men were courageous, the
bravest men I ever saw. >> Narrator: They were
determined to hold their ground, and with the return of clear
skies, they once again enjoyed the full support of American
airpower. The allies attacked, and by
February 1945, the Third Armored Division had finally re-occupied
the area around the German towns of Aachen, Stolberg and
Miesbach-- the region it held before the Bulge.
In mid-February, the division tankers received an answer to
their prayers; the Army's first "heavy" tank.
Called the M26 Pershing, it was a radical new design, conceived
from the very start as a tank killer.
Built by the Detroit and Grand Blanc Tank Arsenals, it was
armed with an incredibly powerful 90mm gun.
It had a very low silhouette, with armor up to four and a half
inches thick, and a torsion-bar suspension system reminiscent of
what Walter Christie had tried to get the Army to adopt more
than a decade earlier. The M26 more than made up for
the deficiencies of the Sherman. By the end of February, 200
Pershings had been issued to the various armored units.
The Third Armored Division got ten, and wasted no time in
putting them to use. Within a week the new heavy
tanks were leading the division to its next objective in
Germany; the once grand city of Cologne.
Clarence Smoyer was a gunner leading the way in one of the
new Pershings. >> Clarence Smoyer: We finally
moved ahead more and I remember one of the lieutenants got on
the phone and he said, "Gentlemen, I give you Cologne.
Let's knock the hell out of it." >> Narrator: A Signal Corps
photographer, Tech Sergeant Jim Bates, tagged along with the
division as it rolled into Cologne.
His film footage captured the extremes of the armored war, the
vulnerability of the Sherman, and the power of the new
Pershing. His images are some of the most
dramatic and gut wrenching of the entire war.
In this shot, a Sherman has just been hit; a crewman, his foot
severed in the attack, falls and bleeds to death.
The Pershing crew spots the enemy tank, a Mark V Panther,
moving behind a building. The cameraman moves ahead and
continues filming as the M26 stalks its prey.
>> Smoyer: So we started to fire into that building at which he
was aside of. I thought maybe if we'd fire
armor-piercing shells, they would go through the building
and maybe still get him, you know.
But, evidently, he just kept on backing up and went all the way
down to the cathedral. >> Narrator: The German tank
moves into the plaza of the grand Cathedral.
The Pershing pursues. Smoyer spots his target, and
opens fire. >> Smoyer: I fired first one,
first shell on the run, hit him, and then we stopped and
fired another one. >> Narrator: The German driver
is killed. The commander and the gunner
bail out. Smoyer fires a third time.
The concussion from his gun rocks the camera.
Ammunition set off by the shell turns the Panther into a funeral
pyre. It sat and burned for three
days. >> Smoyer: I didn't go back and
look in that afterward because I knew some of them died in there,
and I spent a lot of times wondering if any of them
survived, you know? It still hurts, you know.
Even though they were the enemy, they're still humans.
>> Narrator: In two months, Germany would surrender and the
war in Europe would be over. Because of its zeal to lead the
way, the Third Armored Division was officially dubbed "The
Spearhead Division." But being the vanguard came with
a price. The Third Armored lost 648 of
its tanks in combat, and another 700 were damaged in action.
It also suffered more battle casualties than any other
armored division: 10,371 men killed, wounded, or missing--
including its commander, Major General Maurice Rose.
He was killed in action near Paderborn, Germany just weeks
after the assault on Cologne. During the war, Harley Swenson
escaped from three tanks, and so did Walter Stitt.
Bert Close bailed out of four, and Clement Elissondo had
survived the loss of five Shermans.
And thanks to his job of having to account for all the battle-
damaged tanks, Belton Cooper holds the distinction of seeing
more destroyed Shermans than any man alive.
>> Cooper: I said what a terrible thing war does to a
young man. It takes him in the prime of his
life, it demeans him, it humiliates him, uh, it destroys
the last vestige of human dignity.
You have no dignity in the army or the war at all.
And I said sometimes it kills him or horribly maims him and
those of us that survive are never-- are never quite the
same. <font color="#FFFF00">[Captioning sponsored by
A&E TELEVISION NETWORKS</font> Captioned by<font color="#FF0000">
The Caption Center</font> WGBH Educational Foundation]
