by Harry Yeide
Finally, the second tank advanced. Knowing full well that firing would reveal their position, Neel and three volunteers destroyed the panzer. The overwatching German tank fired as well, and the blast ejected the men from their position. Neel led his men toward the rear, carrying their wounded with them. The day had cost the company forty-two enlisted men and one officer, most of them presumed captured.50
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The 3-inchers of Lt Tom Springfield’s 1st Platoon, A/823d Tank Destroyer Battalion, were meanwhile deployed at a roadblock on the Abbaye–Blanche road with a platoon of doughs from Company F, 120th Infantry Regiment; an AT platoon; and a section each of machine guns and mortars. At 0500 hours on 7 August, one of the 57mm AT guns destroyed a reconnaissance halftrack with a 75mm gun that was heading toward the roadblock. A following halftrack loaded with ammo exploded.
Artillery fire soon rained down on the roadblock. Twice during the day, rare Luftwaffe air strikes hit the tiny command. Unfortunately, so did one flight of British Typhoons, which wounded two of the TD men.
The Germans tried to rush the roadblock with tanks. Firing calmly at a range of two thousand yards, the TDs picked off at least a dozen armored vehicles, including three tanks, four armored cars, and four halftracks. The crews and infantry believed more vehicles had been hit but retrieved by the Germans.51
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Lieutenant Francis Conners’s 2d Platoon of A/823d Tank Destroyer Battalion, was emplaced between two companies of the 120th Infantry Regiment on Hill 285 overlooking the Le Neufborg road. At 0500 hours, the TD crews spotted a German tank moving through the fog from behind a house in a nearby field. A bazooka team, accompanied by an infantry lieutenant, went after the panzer, but after five hundred yards the lieutenant decided they had gone far enough. Sergeant Ames Broussard asked permission to carry on alone and pushed on until he spotted the Mark IV. Broussard knocked the tank out, but German infantry had infiltrated past him, and he was cut off for fourteen hours.
The Germans attacked the line on Hill 285 at 0900. Number-two gun destroyed two Mark IVs at a range of only one hundred fifty yards. Number-one gun later hit another panzer from fifty yards; this panzer limped away smoking and was later found abandoned. Second Platoon added two SP guns and an armored car to its total by the end of the day.
The main threat to the crews came from the Allies. Typhoons struck the position and killed one TD man. Later, friendly artillery and infantry took the men under fire. “We didn’t have a friend in the world that day,” commented Lieutenant Conners.52
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By the end of the day, von Kluge was convinced that the offensive had failed, but he pressed ahead at the insistence of the Führer.53
The 823d Tank Destroyer Battalion fought beside the doughs for the duration of the bitter struggle, but no subsequent day saw the wild engagements against panzers witnessed on the first. The men at the Abbaye–Blanche roadblock would fend off more German attacks until 12 August and be credited by Col Hammond Birks, CO of the 120th Infantry Regiment, with being one of the most important factors in his outfit’s successful stand against the German offensive. Conners held his hill against repeated assaults with his crews, a recon section, and a few infantry stragglers until ordered off on 9 August. Fewer than nineteen men were killed, wounded, or missing.54
The men of the 823d had demonstrated the strength and weakness of General McNair’s vision of the steady shore battery engaging enemy ships. The towed 3-inch guns had, indeed, proved a lethal weapon in their first real test against a large armor force. But the overrunning of two platoons and other losses demonstrated the vulnerability of guns that could not move after they had revealed their firing positions nor when confronted with the choice to withdraw or die.
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The 2d Panzer Division accomplished a minor penetration but was stopped by air strikes—particularly by rocket-firing British Typhoons—and by reserve tanks from the 3d Armored Division. The panzer division lost 60 percent of its committed strength on 7 and 8 August.55 The 2d SS Panzer Division, meanwhile, captured Mortain but could not push the 30th Infantry Division off high ground west and northwest of town. Allied fighters intercepted Luftwaffe ground-support missions before they could reach the battle zone, and few German planes arrived.56
The M10s of the 629th Tank Destroyer Battalion rolled in to support the hard-pressed 30th Infantry Division on 8 August. And several other TD battalions—including the 899th and 629th—arrived as other American divisions converged to snuff out the counteroffensive. LtCol W. Martz, CO of the 654th Tank Destroyer Battalion, was captured near Mortain on 8 August while operating with the 35th Infantry Division.57
Battered by Allied fighter-bombers and facing stiff resistance, the German armored columns ground to a halt, and the attack broke down within five days, having advanced to a depth of between three and seven miles.58
Pocketing the German Seventh Army
While the fighting flared at Mortain, Bradley on 8 August proposed to Montgomery that he send Patton’s Third Army in a sweeping envelopment of the German Seventh Army. The objective would be to link up with Canadian troops pushing south toward Falaise. Monty agreed.
Fifteenth Corps advanced from its positions around Le Mans on 9 August. The U.S. 5th and French 2d Armored divisions spearheaded the attack. The Germans tried to stop them at the Sarthe River, but XV Corps smashed through at a cost of thirty-nine tanks. Starting their long partnership with the 5th Armored Division, the crews of the 628th Tank Destroyer Battalion began to kill panzers. Staff Sergeant Flynn claimed the battalion’s first armored victim on 11 August when he destroyed a Mark IV at five hundred yards near Le Mesle. Two days later, Corporal Kee—the battalion’s only gunner from Chinatown in New York City—knocked out two Mark IVs at twelve hundred yards.59
The tanks turned due north and headed for Argentan. The columns reached that city on 13 August, but Bradley stopped them because he feared they would collide with the Canadians. The Canadians, however, were behind schedule and did not reach Falaise until four days later, a delay that allowed many thousands of German troops to escape.60
Hitler on 16 August reluctantly approved von Kluge’s recommendation that Seventh Army extricate itself from the almost complete encirclement. He also sacked von Kluge, who committed suicide.61
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The 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion on 15 August deployed its towed 3-inch guns with the 90th Infantry Division to relieve the 5th Armored Division in the Le Bourg St. Leonard-Chambois area northeast of Argentan at the eastern end of the pocket. Companies B and C of the 607th settled in with the doughs of the 359th Infantry Regiment at the point where it was expected the Germans would try to break free.
German infantry attacked the line at 0800 on 16 August but was thrown back by noon. A second assault supported by panzers briefly drove the Americans out of their positions. During the fighting, 607th CO LtCol Harald Sundt personally manned a Company C 3-inch gun directly in the path of the attack. Sundt, Sgt Harold Scott, and Cpl Orlin Shirley were decorated for playing a crucial role in stopping the onslaught.
The next day, the M10s of the 773d Tank Destroyer Battalion arrived from the Argentan area, where the men had just seen their first action. Artillery fire struck around the vehicles of Company A as they maneuvered into position south of Le Bourg St. Leonard about 1400 hours, and one M10 struck a mine. At 1600 hours, two platoons of TDs pounded the buildings of the town, after which the doughs of Company E, 1st/359th Infantry Regiment, advanced into the streets supported by the TDs of 3d Platoon. Corporal Carlston and Corporal Holmes from 3d Platoon each destroyed two Mark IV tanks during the action, while Corporal Hamilton in 2d Platoon accounted for one more. Two men died and twelve were wounded.
Company C, meanwhile, advanced on Le Bourg St. Leonard at 1930 hours with the riflemen of Company A, 2d/359th Infantry Regiment. 3d Platoon got into a fire fight, during which it destroyed a Mark IV but lost one M10.
The doughs and TD crews cleared the town, and th
e SP outfit turned its positions over to towed guns from the 607th on the morning of 18 August. The crews of the 773d then pressed on toward Chambois in support of the 90th Infantry Division’s bid to seal one of the last holes in the wall of the pocket. When the doughs and TDs linked up with Polish troops (under Canadian command) at Chambois at 1600 hours on 19 August, the Falaise Pocket was closed! The two days of combat netted the 773d another dozen panzer kills.
At 0800 hours on 20 August, two platoons from Company A moved into firing positions near Chambois. When Lt Delbert Reck’s 1st Platoon spotted a mixed column of Germans, Reck ordered his destroyers to take up hasty firing positions along a hedgerow and waited while the enemy drove into his trap before opening fire. Reck and his platoon sergeant, SSgt Edward Land, moved from M10 to M10 to orchestrate the deadly barrage. When the smoke cleared, 3-inch gunfire had destroyed one Panther, seven Mark IVs, nineteen halftracks, twenty-nine trucks, nineteen command cars and Volkswagens, and assorted other vehicles and guns. Reck’s men also rounded up nine hundred prisoners. They had suffered only two men wounded.
The doughs of Company E, 359th Infantry Regiment, were being pressed hard by German tanks and grenadiers when two TDs from 2d Platoon clanked up. The first 3-inch salvos found no targets. Sergeant John Hawk was a machine gunner who had helped drive off one attack already and been wounded in the leg by shrapnel. He approached Lt John Snider to report that panzers were lurking in the woods. Snider traversed onto the general area but could not spot the tanks. Hawk told Snider to aim directly over his helmet and climbed a knoll under enemy fire to act as a human aiming stake. The first shot missed.
Realizing that his shouted fire directions could not be heard above the noise of battle, Hawk ran back to the destroyers through a concentration of bullets and shrapnel to correct the range. He returned to his exposed position, repeating this performance until two of the tanks were knocked out and a third driven off. Still at great risk, he continued to direct the destroyers’ fire into the Germans, wooded position until the enemy came out and surrendered. (Hawk was awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroics that day.)62
Company C’s 1st Platoon was in positions on Hill 129 north of Fougy with doughs from the 3d Battalion, 359th Infantry Regiment. During the night, the men engaged German vehicles trying to slip by in the darkness at ranges between two hundred and four hundred yards and stopped four tanks and a dozen other vehicles. At daybreak, the Americans discovered that the Germans had flanked them to the left, and a wild fire fight broke out, during which the platoon destroyed two Panthers, two Mark IVs, an 88mm SP gun, and assorted other vehicles. One M10 was lost in the exchange, and the remaining two guns—out of ammo—pulled back to the company CP. Before leaving, Private Conklin, although wounded, returned to his knocked-out M10 and fired its last four rounds of HE at advancing German infantry only one hundred yards away.
Company C’s 2d Platoon was located at Chambois proper when the wave of fleeing Germans troops crashed against the American line. The crews had a field day; they picked off eleven Mark IV panzers, three Panthers, five Mark III command tanks, three assault guns, and many other vehicles. Sergeant Schimpf’s number-four gun alone KO’d eight panzers and assault guns and twenty-six other vehicles, and his gunner fired three basic loads of ammunition during the action. The platoon reported approximately five hundred enemy dead and approximately one hundred prisoners.
The 3d platoon was deploying at Fougy about 1000 when it encountered the Germans eight hundred yards away. Over the next eight hours, the M10s destroyed eleven Mark IV panzers, three Panthers, two Mark III command tanks, and about thirty other vehicles.63
By 21 August, American troops were rounding up stragglers, most of whom wanted to surrender. The 776th had busted forty-six tanks and SP guns and another seventy-seven vehicles. As a unit citation concluded, “The battalion inflicted staggering losses upon the enemy, attacking them relentlessly wherever they were encountered, contemptuous of overwhelming odds.” The almost overlooked 607th’s guns had destroyed thirty-four tanks, twenty-three SP guns, nine halftracks, and sixty-four other vehicles during the fighting.64
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First Army, meanwhile, was compressing the pocket as it plowed north toward the British and Canadians. The 3d Armored Division hooked through Mayenne and then east and north after the fighting at Mortain, and the 703d’s M10s followed close on the heels of the lead Shermans. CCA ran into the remnants of the 1st and 9th SS Panzer divisions around Joue du Bois on 14 August. The fighting was so vicious that staff officers and cooks had to join the battle to beat off the German counterattacks. Company A of the 703d knocked out three tanks and drove off the accompanying grenadiers. On 15 August at Ranes-Fromentel, an SS combat patrol infiltrated Company A’s positions and captured a lieutenant, two security men, and two engineers. All but one engineer who escaped were later found shot to death.
Later that day, Cpl Joseph Juno from 2d Platoon, Company B, engaged two Panthers at a mere twenty-five yards. The 3-inch gunfire cracked the frontal armor on both panzers. Juno was killed by exploding ammunition when he dismounted to help the enemy wounded.65
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The collapse of the Falaise Pocket was a disaster for the German Army. It left behind fifty thousand prisoners, ten thousand dead, as many as five hundred tanks and assault guns destroyed or captured, and most of the transportation and artillery of those troops who got away.66
Even as the resistance crumbled, Eisenhower decided to pursue relentlessly rather than stop at the Seine River to build up supplies, and Bradley unleashed a tidal wave of American corps across northern France. First Army, on the left, would receive priority in supplies over Third Army to enable it to support Montgomery’s drive along the coast. Generalleutnant Heinz Guderian, father of Germany’s armored legions, lamented, “While our panzer units still existed, our leaders had chosen to fight a static battle in Normandy. Now that our motorized forces had been squandered and destroyed they were compelled to fight the mobile battle that they had hitherto refused to face.”67
River Hopping
The 3d Armored Division (with the 703d Tank Destroyer Battalion attached) recorded, “There was a quality of madness about the whole debacle of Germany’s forces in the West, something which was not easily explained. Isolated garrisons fought as viciously as before, but the central planning and coordination which must go into decisive action was missing…. [For the men,] days merged into one long stream of fatigue and weariness in the endless pursuit.”68
Lieutenant Jack Dillender, a platoon leader in the 814th Tank Destroyer Battalion, supporting the 7th Armored Division’s blitz across France, recalled, “The weather was hot and the fumes from vehicles and no rest began to take their toll on our faces. Our eyes were in bad condition and our faces cracked and blistered so badly we could hardly open our mouths.”69
The semi-official history of the 610th Tank Destroyer Battalion noted the wonderful side of the “rat race”: “The natives along the route cheered the columns all the way, and arms began to ache from returning the waves and salutations along the way. The briefest stop was the signal for much bartering for bread, cognac, and wine, and as the convoy moved the French enthusiastically tossed apples, tomatoes, etc., into the vehicles. A steel helmet was a necessity, for a hard apple thrown at a speeding vehicle can be a deadly missile.”70
As they had in North Africa, the tank killers sometimes formed the division’s spearhead. Lieutenant Jack Dillender encountered division CG MajGen Lindsay Silvester and XX Corps commander MajGen Walton Walker in a small village where the advance had stopped under German fire. Dillender recalled:
General Walker said, “What the hell is holding up my corps?” He received an explanation…. Then he said, “Put a TD unit in the lead and put me on the banks of the Seine by 3:00 PM. Where is the TD officer?”
I jumped down and reported to him. He said, “Lieutenant, can you read a map?”
I said, “Yes, sir,” and he said, “Show me where you are.”
He said, “Fine. Now, do you see this road taking off to the right at the crossroads? Do you see that it turns back to our attack direction? Lieutenant, I want you to take your platoon and lead us to the Seine at Melun. I want you to run your destroyers as fast as you can, and don’t deploy this column unless you run into armor and lots of it. Do you understand?”
I said, “Yes sir.”
He said, “Lieutenant, move out and good luck.”
I said, “Yes, sir,” saluted, and ran back to my destroyer, and off we went…. We were about thirty miles from the Seine, and we were really pushing those diesels. Along the way I saw a small German convoy (no tanks) to my left front headed for the same intersection. We were on a road lined with trees, and they had not seen us. I halted my platoon and brought all four guns broadside…. We fired the first round together and then it was at will after that. We finished off that convoy so that there wouldn’t be any traffic congestion at the intersection and then moved on. We reached the Seine at 3:10 PM.71
Captain Fred Parkin, the intelligence officer of the 813th Tank Destroyer Battalion (attached to the 79th Infantry Division), drove ahead, left the edge of his last map, got lost, and with his jeep driver liberated Roubaix, a city of 175,000 souls.72 During the 1st Infantry Division’s advance on Juvigny on 13–15 August, the otherwise underemployed 635th Tank Destroyer Battalion (towed) ferried the doughs forward in its halftracks.73
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French and American forces from First Army captured Paris on 25 August. Ike had hoped to bypass the city, but a Resistance uprising got into trouble, and—subject to strong pressure from Charles De Gaulle—Eisenhower had to order troops into Paris.
