The Last Full Measure (44 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
FROM THEIR INTRODUCTION
by the British on the Western Front in 1915, tanks have been held in terror by infantrymen. During the initial encounters with German armor in the early phase of the invasion of the Soviet Union, the Russians found it almost impossible to stop men from panicking. Apart from the obvious danger of being shot by a tank’s machine guns or blasted by the main gun, tankers killed soldiers by running them down or crushing or burying them alive by wheeling and churning over their foxholes and slit trenches—“ironing,” it was called, with that black humor the infantry of all armies affect. The Russians attempted to inoculate their infantry against this viral fear by training them to dig deep and narrow slit trenches that would not collapse when ironed. To prove the point, Russian commanders then had their own tanks run over the trenches. A Soviet junior officer was able to write to his family in late 1942: “The most important thing is that there is no more ‘tank fright’ that we saw so much of at the beginning of the war. Every soldier … knowingly digs deeper into the earth.”
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Training or no training, enduring an ironing was a terrifying experience, and panic almost always got the soldier killed. Günter Koschorrek, a German machine gunner on the Russian front, went through it:
The T-34 [the principal Russian battle tank of World War II] turns its turret towards our position and comes at us, its engine roaring. I pull my machine gun into the trench and throw myself down. Grommel and Weichert dash into the bunker. Swina is already lying behind me in the trench.
A harsh metallic shot, and a tank shell explodes exactly where my machine gun once stood.… And there it is again—the rattle and the roaring as steel tank tracks grind
squealing on their rollers. A deathly noise! I press myself like a worm on to the ground. In the trench everything goes dark: the steel monster is parked directly on top of me, blocking out the daylight.
Now the sharp steel tracks are tearing up the edge of the trench. Frozen blocks of dirt fall on to my back and half cover me. Will the monster bury me alive? I remember soldiers telling me that tanks have turned on top of foxholes until the men below could no longer move and suffocated in the dirt. A hell of a way to die! …
The T-34 is now shooting at will in the connecting trenches. He rolls over them and turns round, churning up the frozen ground and filling them. Two soldiers, frightened and desperate, jump up and try to flee the trench, but seconds later they are cut down by the tank’s machine gun. Another soldier bravely throws a hand grenade against the tank’s turret. It smashes against it like a snowball on a wall.…
… 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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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 required all my concentration and consequently I failed to detect the smell of burning until the operator screamed, “We are on fire!”
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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.
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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.
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