The 3d Armored Division attacked in strength as it broke out of the bridgehead on the morning of February 26. Although air support from medium and heavy bombers was limited by the low-hanging clouds and drizzling rain, we had massive artillery support and good close support from P47 dive-bombers. After the bitter disappointment of seeing our November offensive ground to a halt, thanks to our narrow-tracked Shermans’ immobility in open country, we were now starting all over again.
The division passed through the bridgehead in five columns. The first objective was to penetrate ten to twelve miles to the Erft Canal and secure bridgeheads across it. The Germans had adequate time to prepare an extremely well-fortified defense in depth. We had hoped that, once we got through the dragons’ teeth and pillboxes of the Siegfried line, the going would be much easier; however, this was not the case.
Although the Germans fought tenaciously, they were resisting our superb firepower and the full strength of a heavy American armored division in assault on a narrow front. The German infantry suffered heavy casualties, and the roadsides were littered with their dead. I was shocked to see a young German soldier sitting fully erect in his foxhole, holding his rifle. He had been struck by a single projectile, and I could see daylight through a two-inch hole in both sides of his helmet and his head. He hadn’t fallen over; he just sat there passively staring out into eternity.
As Task Force Welborn on our extreme left approached the edge of the Hambach Forest to the north, it began to draw heavy small-arms and mortar fire from the woods. An infantry company dispatched toward the woods was soon pinned down. Fortunately, it had a forward observer directing fire from an 8-inch howitzer battalion on the west bank of the river. Having experience with the proximity fuse in the Ardennes, he called for the first round of HE with the fuse to mark the target. The round exploded some hundred feet in the air above the tops of the trees right at the edge of the woods. He adjusted the fire a hundred yards to the north for the second round. The proximity fuse set off the second round about two hundred feet in the air at about forty-five degrees, creating a pattern of deadly shell fragments about three hundred feet in diameter on the ground.
The effect of these shells bursting in the air decimated the German infantry on the ground, and the German commander offered to surrender. The American company commander called for a cease-fire, and the remnants of a German infantry battalion, about three hundred men, came out of the woods with their hands behind their heads. The German commander said that he had left many killed and wounded back in the woods.
Several of our task forces began to converge on Elsdorf, which they found heavily defended with log roadblocks, antitank mines, antitank guns, and assault guns, plus German infantry armed with the deadly panzerfaust s. The Germans would try to pin down our task forces with heavy fire, then launch a counterattack with armor on the flanks. The counterattack came soon, spearheaded by four Mark VI King Tigers and two Mark IV tanks.
Fortunately, Task Force Lovelady’s brand-new M26 had a good firing position on the flank and caught the Germans by surprise. It knocked out two Tigers and one Mark IV tank at a range of a thousand yards. The Germans had no idea that we had a tank that could knock out the Mark VI at this range.
To my knowledge, this was the first time that one of our M26 Pershings actually engaged the King Tiger in combat. Had the Tigers made a frontal assault, it is doubtful that the M26 could have knocked them out, because our M36 tank destroyers with the same 90mm gun had difficulty penetrating the Mark V Panther tank on the faceplate.
On the southern flank of the division, CCA ran into heavy resistance in the vicinity of Blatzheim and Kerpen. Task Force Doan alone lost four tanks in Blatzheim. The Germans fought desperately on the approaches to the canal, the last major obstacle before the flat, open Cologne Plain. The division had now penetrated ten to twelve miles from its jump-off point and had encountered almost every type of resistance. Combat Command A and CCB had gone all out and sustained considerable casualties. General Rose decided to commit CCR to establish a bridgehead across the canal, and soon the entire division was across.
In this area, between the canal and Cologne and extending north and south for several miles, was a series of large, open-pit coal mines. These “vobridge” pits were irregularly shaped, about a mile to a mile and a half across, and six hundred to seven hundred feet deep. Roads spiraled around the edges of the pits down to the bottom for access by dump trucks and power shovels. Beneath three to six feet of topsoil lay tremendous veins of brown coal (lignite) that extended downward six hundred feet or more. The power shovels would load the lignite into dump trucks, which in turn would take it to a long belt conveyor that carried it up the side of the pit to a large power plant.
These vobridge mines together with the adjacent power plants extended many miles north. The plants supplied a major part of the electric power not only for Cologne and other cities but also for the industrial Ruhr, the heart of the German steel industry. Combat Command A captured the Fortuna power plant at Bergheim. Purported to be the largest steam-generating plant in Europe, it had been relatively unscathed by any previous bombing action and was still in operation when we approached it on March 1, 1945.
The plant had several large cooling towers—reinforced concrete cylinders some 250 feet in diameter and 300 feet high. From these towers German observers were directing artillery fire. A few shots from our tanks knocked large, gaping holes in the top of the towers and eliminated these observation posts. Other than this, the plant sustained little damage. The operators had banked the furnaces and shut down the turbines when we approached.
The Fortuna power plant was equipped with American Westinghouse turbo generators. The boilers and most of the auxiliary equipment reportedly were also of American manufacture.
A large petrochemical plant that processed the brown coal was served by conveyors that carried the coal into a series of large, vertical dryers. In this state, the coal looked like a kind of wet, dark, pulverized sand. After drying, part of the material went to the burners and boilers and part to the chemical processing plant. The chemical plant pressed the material into lignite bricks for German domestic consumption. The rest of it was converted into lubricants and low-grade fuel for the German army. A number of petrochemical tank cars filled with this fuel sat on railroad sidings, ready for shipment to German army depots.
All east-west access roads and railroads had to run through narrow strips between the coal mines, which the Germans heavily fortified with roadblocks. The terrain between the vobridges—flat and open, with little vegetation for cover— offered ideal fields of fire. Because we had had a considerable number of tanks knocked out in this area, we established a major VCP at the Fortuna power plant. If the first German shot could immoblize a tank by breaking a track, the Germans would continue to fire until they set the tank on fire.
One of the new M4A3E2 tanks was brought into the VCP by the wreckers. The E2 designation indicated that the tank was experimental. We had received several of these, a hurry-up version that attempted to overcome the inadequate armor of the M4. It had an extra inch of armor welded on the front of the glacis plate and one-inch slabs of armor welded on each side of the sponsons. This gave the glacis plate an effective armor of three and a half inches and the sponsons three inches.
Although this laminated armor was not as good as solid armor, it was a lot better than what we had. The new tanks also had a heavy cast steel turret and an inch more of armor all around. This gave the turret five inches of armor on the front, tapering to three inches and down to two inches on the sides and rear. In addition, there was a heavy three- to four-inch gun mantlet mounted on the gun tube itself. We had been told that these tanks would be used for frontal assaults, but they still had the old M2 short-barreled 75mm gun. It appeared inconceivable that the army would go to the trouble of beefing up the armor but leave the gun armament the same. This extra armor added three to four tons of weight, yet the tank still had the same narrow track as the or
iginal M4A3. This limited its use in soft, muddy terrain even more.
Even with all its extra armor, the tank was penetrated twice by high-velocity German antitank projectiles. The first penetration was in the upper-right-hand corner of the tank where the reinforced glacis plate, side sponson, and top deck came together. It entered the tank directly over the head of the assistant driver and glanced down into the interior of the main fighting compartment. The next penetration struck the gun mantlet on the right side near the gunner’s telescopic site. It penetrated the four-inch mantlet, then passed through five inches of armor near the gun trunnion and entered the turret. It was difficult to imagine how anyone could have survived.
The Super Pershing M26A1E2 Tank Arrives
A large steel-fabricating shop and machine shop next to the power plant apparently had made a great deal of the plant’s processing equipment. Company C maintenance took over these shops for their extensive paved areas and covered work space.
Major Arrington assigned me a special project. A graduate engineer, Arrington had run his own fabricating and machine shop business in Brookhaven, Mississippi, before entering the army. As I entered his shop trailer, he was sitting at his desk with his feet propped up. I could detect a glint in his eye. He kind of half winked at Sergeant Wacowski, then addressed me in a slow drawl.
“Cooper, you’ve been talking big and strong about what a naval architect you are and about how you calculate the center of gravity on ships. I know damn well you’re the only officer here with the audacity to keep a slide rule in your Jeep locker. Well, you’re gonna have a chance to show how sharp you are.”
Arrington had a perceptive mind, but he liked to generate a laid-back Southern attitude to show that he had just enough good ol’ boy in him to have a good sense of humor and at the same time snap back like a steel trap to make sure you stayed on the ball. He told me to sit down, and we got into some serious talking. He explained that we were to be issued a single new Super M26 Pershing, the only tank of this type to be shipped to the European theater. The tank had a new experimental 90mm T15E1 high-velocity gun, seventy calibers (the length divided by the diameter) long. The larger the caliber, the longer the barrel, which gives the propellant charge explosion more time to expand against the base of the projectile and results in a higher velocity. With new special ammunition, this gun could produce a muzzle velocity of 3,850 feet per second, some 600 feet per second greater than the 88mm KwK43 gun mounted on the German PzKw VIb King Tiger.
Army ordnance was interested in getting the new tank into combat, hoping to match it against the King Tiger. Having already lost several of the new M26s to high-velocity German antitank guns, we knew that its armor was still inferior to that of the Mark VI Tiger. My job was to design and install additional armor on the new tank.
The well-equipped German fabricating shop contained several large pieces of inch-and-a-half boiler plate. We decided to use a laminated design for the glacis plate. We cut two pieces of the boiler plate and fashioned a V shape to fit over the V shape of the glacis plate and the lower front plate. The top glacis plate was set at thirty-eight degrees from the horizontal, which gave fifty-two degrees from the vertical and was considered to be the critical angle to generate a ricochet. This gave an air gap of zero at the top and approximately three inches at the knuckle, where the bottom front plate came in contact.
A second boiler plate was cut in a similar fashion and set at a thirty-degree angle extending out over the first plate. Where it came in contact with the bottom plate, it left a gap of seven to eight inches. We wound up with four inches of cast armor on the original glacis plate and two inch-and-a-half pieces of boiler plate with an air gap in between. We thought that even though the boiler plate was softer, the lamination and the lowered angle of incidence would help German projectiles ricochet. The new armor added about five tons to the front of the tank. A ruler was used to measure how much this would deflect the forward torsion arm bogey wheels.
We then cut a section from the faceplate of a knocked-out German Panther and trimmed it to three and a half inches thick by five feet long by two feet wide. We cut a large hole in the middle to accommodate the gun tube and two smaller holes on each side to accommodate the coaxial machine gun and the telescopic site. We slipped this plate over the gun barrel, brought it down against the mantlet, and welded it firmly all the way around. With its center of gravity fourteen inches forward of the centerline of the trunnion, this plate, which weighed fourteen hundred pounds, made the gun barrel considerably heavier on the front end.
The Super M26 Pershing already had overhead equilibrator springs attached to the turret and to the original gun mantlet, which were supposed to offset the extra length of the barrel. But the weight we had added overcame the strength of the equilibrator springs, and the gun barrel sagged forward. The mechanical gear reduction inside the turret, used to raise and lower the barrel, was insufficient to overcome this weight.
To compensate, we took two pieces of inch-and-a-half boiler plate and cut some odd-looking counterweights approximately three and a half feet long, starting one foot wide for about the first eighteen inches, then flaring to approximately two feet wide for the next twenty-four inches. We welded the narrow ends to the sides of the Panther mantlet and let them extend back horizontally and flare out slightly to miss the turret. This put the heavier section on the back side of the trunnion, thus giving a counterweight effect. These counterweights helped, although it was still difficult for the gunner to raise the gun with a mechanical elevating mechanism.
It was obvious that additional weight should be added to these counterweights, but the question was how much and where. From my limited knowledge of engineering mechanics, I knew that this would require a lengthy calculation, and the information and time were not available. This was what the major had in mind when he’d made the snide remark about my slide rule.
We decided to use an empirical method. We took some inch-and-a-half plates about one foot wide and two feet long and attached them to the rear of the large counterweights with C-clamps. By moving these weights back and forth, by trial and error we finally reached a balance point where the gun was easy to raise and lower manually. Then we welded the plates into position.
With the gun barrel rotated forward, the tank looked like a raging, charging bull elephant. The long gun stuck out like a trunk; the big, bulbous counterweights stood out like ears; and the holes in the gun mantlet for the telescopic site and the machine gun looked like eyes. We hoped it would make the same impression on the Germans.
The turret had already been modified with a counterweight on the back to compensate for the long gun. We added more counterweight to compensate. Otherwise, when the tank was on a slope, it would be difficult to traverse the turret even with a power traverse. We had noted this problem with the German Panther. If it was on a decided slope and the gun was swinging downhill, it took a long time for the German gunner to rotate the turret forward with its manual traverse.
We had now added seven tons to the tank. We checked our ground distances again and found that the bogey wheels were deflecting down an additional two inches. This caused the rear of the tank to cock up like a wild drake in heat. In spite of its odd appearance, and the fact that we had probably slowed it down about five miles an hour, the tank, with its 550-horsepower motor, still had plenty of power.
Next, we road-tested the tank, then drove it to the edge of the vobridge to test-fire the gun. We looked around for a suitable target and finally found a knocked-out German Jagdpanzer IV assault gun that had been hit by a single shot to the flank and had not burned. We hooked it up to one of our wreckers and dragged it to the other side of the vobridge, on the first level about fifty feet below the crest. The Jagdpanzer was positioned with the forward glacis plate facing us. The distance to our target was approximately a mile and a half.
The ammunition for the 90mm T15E1 gun was a standard 90mm round, but the cartridge case was longer to accommodate a larger propellant c
harge. Initially, we used two men to load the round into the tube. However, after a little more experience, one man could do it, albeit with some difficulty. There were bound to be some problems with an experimental tank.
Major Dick Johnson sent over the crew from the 33d Armored Regiment to operate this tank. We wound up instructing them at the same time we were learning ourselves. An artillery maintenance sergeant in charge of the firing had previously bore-sighted the gun, so we were ready to fire. I made sure that everybody stood back to the sides and rear of the tank to give the blast cone adequate clearance.
Anyone standing behind an M4 Sherman could see the projectile go out and curve down slightly as it sped toward the target. This new high-velocity gun was entirely different. When we fired the first round, we could barely see the projectile. It appeared to rise slightly as it struck the target. This was an optical illusion, but the effect was awesome. When it hit the target, sparks shot about sixty feet into the air, as though a giant grinding wheel had hit a piece of metal.
When we looked at the target, I was dumbfounded. The 90mm projectile penetrated four inches of armor; went through a five-inch final drive differential shaft, the fighting compartment, and the rear partition of the fighting compartment; penetrated the four-and-a-half-inch crankshaft of the Maybach engine and the one-inch rear armor plate; and dug itself into the ground so deep that we could not locate it. Although we had been told by the ordnance officers from Aberdeen that the tank gun could penetrate thirteen inches of armor at a hundred yards, it was still difficult to believe this awesome power. We all realized that we had a weapon that could blast the hell out of even the most powerful German Mark VI Tiger.
Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II Page 28
