The Last Full Measure (45 page)
Read The Last Full Measure Online
Authors: Michael Stephenson
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.
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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.
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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.
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“ ‘Have you burned yet?’ was a question Russian tank men often asked each other when they met for the first time.”
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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.
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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.
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Grayson La Mar of the US 712th Tank Battalion found out all about the hatch problem when his tank was hit in the rear and burst into flame: “It took three tries to get the hatch open. See, the hatch would hit the gun barrel. The gunner was killed and nobody could operate the gun to get the barrel out of the way. Finally, on the third try, I slipped by. If the gun was over a quarter-inch more I’d never had got out.”
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Many, of course, never did get out, as Gromov, a Russian antitank rifleman, explains: “I fired at [the tank] again. And I saw at once that I’d hit it. It took my breath away. A blue flame ran over the armour, quick like a spark. And I understood at once that my anti-tank shell had got inside and gave off this blue flame. And a little smoke rose. The Germans inside began to scream. I’d never heard people scream this way before, and then immediately there was a crackling inside. It crackled and crackled. The shells had started to explode. And then flames shot out, right into the sky. The tank was done for.”
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But perhaps the most terrible sound of a tanker’s death was a simple click (as the radio connection was severed by a hit):
A squadron of British tanks was coming up in support. The commander calmly directed the battle using cricket parlance: “Harry, I’d like you to go a little further out in the field in the hope of a long catch.… Charlie, would you move over to silly mid-off.” … and so it went on.
We might have been at Lord’s in London watching Test
cricket on a warm sunny afternoon and wondering whether the tea break was far away. Suddenly, across the squadron leader’s voice came a sharp ominous click. We’d heard it before. We couldn’t see the tank but we knew what the click meant. Charlie took over the radio network. The others obeyed his orders calmly, resolutely, as if it were the most natural thing in the world for their comrade to depart suddenly like that—with a click as adieu.
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AN INFANTRYMAN AT
the sharp end lives in a world where risk comes in two sizes: large and larger. There are many tactical “obligations” he is expected to carry out. In fact, almost everything he does in the combat zone (including, as the decorous phrase has it, “answering the call of nature”—in fact,
especially
while answering that urgent summons) puts him in harm’s way. But one task in particular represents the jumbo package of risk: the frontal attack across open ground against a prepared enemy—“the basic theme of combat in World War II.” It was an old way of dying in a modern war, “as old as warfare itself.”
Here are three soldiers, in three very different theaters of the war, recalling three attacks:
Russia, 19 December 1943:
Towards noon, we, the Panzergrenadiere, go into action. We have to cross open country without any cover. The enemy has been waiting for this, and he greets us with a furious bombardment using all his heavy weapons. All hell breaks loose around us, and a tumultuous inferno of violence
and unceasing destruction comes pouring down. A score of combat aircraft come screaming over our heads, raining bombs on us and our tanks. The tanks rapidly make smoke to avoid being seen. In the meantime, we are lying flat on the ground without any cover, wishing that we were moles so that we could crawl to safety.
The ground beneath us shakes with the impacts and explosions. All around us we hear painful cries from the wounded calling out for the medics. We run forward through the thundering hell, with only one thought in mind—to somehow find some sort of cover there in front of us. Even though we make it through the artillery crossfire, death waits for us a thousand times over. The Russian machine-gunners hammer away at us with all barrels and the enemy anti-tank weapons and divisional artillery fire at our every movement.
Bursts of hot bullets swish by me and tear up the thin snow cover around … I am reminded how many times over the last few weeks I have sped through the enemy’s rain of fire. Up till now I have been lucky and have, with God’s help, always come through. Will I manage it this time?
I do now what I have always done: I run, bent double, driven on by fear that I’ll be hit any moment. My body seems as if it’s electrically charged, and I feel hot waves running down my back.… Every now and then I throw myself flat on the ground and stick my head in between my shoulders like a tortoise. Thinking that a hit low down in my body could cost me my life, I prefer to cover the distance to the hedge crawling flat on my stomach, feet first.…
On the churned-up field behind us the wounded are whimpering, for they can no longer run. They lie among the many dead bodies and roll over in pools of blood, often in
their death throes. Less than ten paces behind me I can see Willi Krauze lying in a pool of blood. Willi is dead.
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Pelelieu, 16 September 1944:
The mortars had stopped. The first F Company [Fifth Marines] wave was advancing across the airstrip, running low with ranks scattered, breasting a withering machine gun fire that had begun to rake the runway. They were falling. It seemed unreal, it seemed a tableau, phantasmagorical, like a scene from a motion picture. It required an effort of mind to recall that these were flesh-and-blood marines, men whom I knew.… Still more was required in facing up to the fact that my turn was next. And here is the point in battle where one needs the rallying cry. Here where the banner must be unfurled or the song sung or the name of the cause flung at the enemy like a challenge. Here is mounted the charge, the thing as old as warfare itself, that either overwhelms the defense and wins the battle, or is broken and brings on defeat. How much less forbidding might have been that avenue of death that I was about to cross had there been some wholly irrational shout—like “Vive l’Empereur,” or “The Marine Corps Forever!”—rather than that educated voice which said in a sangfroid that was all at odds with the event, “Well, it’s our turn, now.” …
I began to run.… The heat rose in stifling waves.… The bullets whispered at times, at other times they were not audible.… I ran with my head low, my helmet bumping crazily to obscure my view … I was alone and running.… There were men to my left, still falling.… I ran and threw myself down, caught my breath, rose, and ran again.… Suddenly
I ran into a shell crater full of men and I stopped running.
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Normandy, 13 June 1944:
We had crawled on hands and knees to the edge of the hedgerow that the enemy was entrenched behind. We fixed bayonets and then, on command, charged headlong over the hedgerow into heavy enemy fire to do hand-to-hand battle with the Germans. We pushed forward into fierce enemy fire across grazed-over pastureland toward the next hedgerow—where the bulk of the enemy had withdrawn, leaving their dead behind. They cut us to ribbons as we ran over the open ground, charging after them. At least six enemy machine guns had us in a cross fire, and a mix of 81mm mortar, flat-trajectory 88mm cannon, and high-angle 75mm howitzer fire exploded in our midst, filling the air with searing shards of shrapnel.…
I made it over about seven hedgerows and fields, seeing a large number of my comrades wounded, maimed, and killed around me. Still we charged forward into the small-arms and artillery fire. I was slightly ahead of my squad when a German suddenly appeared out of a hedge a few feet away on my left front. He flipped a long-handled potato-masher grenade at me in a nonchalant manner before I could bring my rifle to bear, and then he disappeared back into the hedge.
The explosion knocked me out. My comrades left me where I lay, thinking I was dead.… You should never stop an attack to look out for the wounded or the dead—if you do, you most likely will become one of them.
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