Task force hogan, p.1
Task Force Hogan, page 1
Map: The Route of Task Force Hogan
Map by Nick Springer. Copyright © 2023 Springer Cartographics.
Note
The majority of the dialogue and conversations in this narrative nonfiction book are not meant to be a word-for-word transcript. Rather, the author leaned on recollections of conversations with his father and knowledge of his personality, values, and manner of speech to re-create what dialogue that occurred over eighty years ago might have sounded like. In this, he also used his more than twenty years of experience in the US Army to re-create what is the common language of soldiers. Of course, with most of the eyewitnesses long deceased, the author relied on varying levels of conjecture to fill in the remaining gaps. Every effort was made to make the book as factually accurate as possible, including diligent research, personal interviews, and the inclusion of information from the personal records of the people involved in the story.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the US government, and the public release clearance of this publication by the Department of Defense does not imply Department of Defense endorsement.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Map: The Route of Task Force Hogan
Note
1. First Blood on Hill 91
2. Preparing to Unleash Hell
3. Operation Cobra: Breakout from Normandy
4. Through France Like Butter
5. Into Belgium
6. Attacking the West Wall
7. Not a Quiet Christmas
8. Never Surrender
9. The Scotch Bet and the Rose Pocket
10. Ninety Miles to Berlin
Epilogue
The Men of Task Force Hogan
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
First Blood on Hill 91
JULY 10–15, 1944
Sam Hogan wiped the sweat off his brow. His leather tanker’s-helmet liner was saturated, and the perspiration stung his blue eyes. Racing in all directions, his mind was a frenzy of thoughts and recollections. He tried to check off in his head some of the myriad “must-dos” learned over countless classes and field exercises preparing for this very day. Use the folds in the terrain to protect your tanks and men from hidden enemy cannon. He squinted to fight the burning and to narrow his vision in the vain hope of sighting the hidden enemy. An enemy waiting in ambush will likely see you before you see them.
More words of the Armored Force Field Manual, the bible of US tankers, echoed in his head: Painstaking and meticulous attention to detail may mean the difference between success and failure of an operation and life and death of the individual.
Time slowed to a crawl. Adrenaline put his body on high alert and made him aware of everything. His hands were slippery as he clenched field glasses to his chest. Churning acid flooded his stomach. A loud rhythmic beating, his heartbeat, amplified by the snug-fitting football-style crash helmet, pounded in his eardrums. He took a deep, slow breath in an attempt to slow his heart rate and calm his nerves.
Standing with his head and shoulders outside the hatch of his command tank, the twenty-eight-year-old army lieutenant colonel took one last look through his field glasses and swallowed hard. Somewhere across the fertile patchwork of chocolate-brown fields and loam-green hedgerows were the German positions—heavy tanks, antitank guns, and dug-in infantry waiting to repel the recently arrived invaders. Sam could smell his own sweat mixed with fuel fumes—hot, smoggy air escaping up through the commander’s hatch into the relatively cooler summer air.
Ahead in the rolling Norman fields stood the forward elements of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s Army Group B. Led by veterans of the Russian front, fitted with state-of-the-art equipment—camouflage uniforms, Mark V Panther tanks, and handheld antitank rockets, forerunners of the modern rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) and Javelin missiles.
Initial reports from the other US battalion commanders were that even the Sherman medium tank was hopelessly underarmored and undergunned compared to the German Panzerkampfwagen tanks—or “panzers.” As a result, Sam’s light tanks were only good for reconnaissance missions, to guard command posts, and to screen his battalion’s flanks. This dismal fact effectively cut his offensive armor strength by a third before a shot was even fired.
As his Third Battalion cautiously treaded forward, he spotted the burnt-out, collapsed hulk of a US light tank, destroyed during the previous day’s assault by the Thirty-second Armored Regiment—a sister unit to his own Thirty-third Armored Regiment within the Third Armored Division. Some infantry and US tanks had taken the hill ahead before being driven back, with heavy casualties. The dark, ashy patch was mute testimony to a white-hot inferno of fuel and tank ammunition.
Try as he might, Sam couldn’t spot the guns that had destroyed the American tanks the day before. Every clump of twisted, bombed-out shrubbery, every earthen wall, every gnarled tree root could be hiding a well-camouflaged antitank cannon. One position, a darker shade of brown than its surroundings, an angled shape in the shadows, suggested a half-hidden man-made silhouette, perhaps a PAK-43 antitank gun—a low-to-the-ground, long-tubed, high-velocity cannon with killer optics.
Inside Hogan’s M4 Sherman command tank, four other soldiers shared the cramped interior with their commander. The gunner, Technician 5 Clement Pierre “Clem” Elissondo—a hard-charging émigré to California from the Basque region of France—and the loader, Corporal Edward Ball, sat next to Sam’s legs as he stood peering through the commander’s hatch. Below and in front of them in the tank’s hull was Corporal Addison Darbison. Amid this deadly landscape, Addison worried that his younger brother William might soon follow his example and enlist in the tank corps instead of a safer, “rear echelon” specialty. He scanned the field through a tiny periscope in the stuffy confines of his hull position and spotted the same burnt-out tank husk Sam had seen a moment ago. He prayed his brother would remain safely back from the front lines in a support outfit.
On Darbison’s right, separated by the loud metallic gearbox, was the assistant driver and bow gunner, Private Robert Begany.1 The men sat at their stations, focused and still but for the beads of sweat running profusely over brow and cheek. Some muttered soft prayers. Some ran through the mental checklist of what they’d need to do if their tank was hit.
The armored fist of Sam’s command deployed around him in a giant arc almost two kilometers across. He couldn’t see them all—they sat in the middle of Normandy’s bocage-hedgerow country. Solid walls of packed earth and dense trees enclosed each farmer’s field. This was broken terrain and couldn’t have been more perfectly designed as a scourge for advancing tanks.
To his left and right, two companies of Sherman medium tanks—G and H, each composed of fifteen tanks with five crewmen per tank—were in attack formation with the River Vire protecting their left flank. Infantrymen—foot soldiers—rode on the backs of the rearmost tanks, ready to jump off and attack any German tank-hunter teams. Missing was the C Company of light M3 Stuart tanks—they were a few kilometers back guarding a flank.
Behind Sam in the assembly area—the spot from which they had first prepared for the attack, well out of enemy artillery range—were his support elements. Supply troops waited to bring up ammunition and fuel, medics anxiously prepared for an influx of their comrades suffering from grievous wounds, and staff officers tracked every detail of the upcoming battle. Between the tanks and the supply units were Sam’s indirect-fire assets: mortars, five-foot-tall tubes mounted in the back of open-topped, front-wheeled, rear-tracked, lightly armored M3 half-tracks. These, along with the snub-nosed M8 assault guns, were poised to unleash hell in the form of explosive rounds that could rain down in high arcs upon the enemy.
On July 10, after a series of nighttime marches under radio silence and through traffic jams in the narrow and muddy country roads, amid a constant haranguing from higher brass to “get forward” and “get bloodied,” Sam found his battalion in its current predicament. These orders from the higher-ups went against Sam’s ethos of “fight smart, not hard.” Sam feared needlessly wasting lives in frontal attacks. But it was well-nigh impossible to find an open flank on an enemy that was to his front and sides with his back to the English Channel.
The battalion’s mission was to capture Hill 91, so named for its elevation in meters on a military map. To the locals, the hill was Hauts Vents—“High Winds.” Hauts Vents overlooked a small village, Pont-Hébert, named for its bridge, where—God willing—a forced crossing of the River Vire would place the allies on the road to Saint-Lô and off the Normandy perimeter. The quaint little town, with its stone bridge and idyllic two-story, redbrick, half-timbered homes, straddled both sides of the river.
Thankfully, French villagers had evacuated to nearby salt mines before US artillery destroyed the imposing Gothic brick church steeple that’d been used by the Germans to call in artillery strikes on the approaching Americans. The stone bridge was heavily damaged as well. And now, more metal and fire were headed to the hapless little town.
Sam stood with his knees bent, chest-deep inside the turret of his command tank, and fumbled briefly for the switch to the throat microphone connected to his tanker’s helmet. Sam was hyperalert—his eyes darted around the tunnel vision of focus. He was conscious of the summer heat, and the stench of tank exhaust stung his nostrils, suddenly more pungent, but a slight breeze picked up from the English Channel and blew cool against the moisture on his exposed neck. He looked at his watch—11:15 A.M.—said a quick, silent prayer to himself, and gave the order to advance.
“Guidons, guidons, this is Blue Six—MOVE OUT!”
The transmission crackled and hissed over radios down to the company commanders and then to their respective tank and infantry platoons. In a haze of gasoline exhaust, with shimmering heat rising off the top rear decks as their Detroit engines churned, the Sherman tanks lunged forward. Sam watched the two tank companies move as enormous masses of steel, lumbering up the green fields and spreading wide swatches of mud. The tank treads left impressions in the soft earth that pointed like arrows toward the uncertainty of the German line.
SAM HOGAN WAS ONE OF the youngest lieutenant colonels in the US Army. He was a lean six feet tall, with an aquiline nose, strong chin, and piercing blue eyes. A West Pointer, he was firm in personality and convictions; but to armchair generals and colonels pressuring him to move his people forward from the safety of a command post ten kilometers behind him, he could be irreverent and understatedly sarcastic. On the way into this first battle, in response to hectoring from the one-star general over the radio to “get up there” through a sea of muddy road and backed-up traffic, Sam responded, “You’re coming in broken, over,” then squelched him off.
But Hogan’s “war face”—all business, steely-eyed, with thin, downward-sloping lips—could and did relax into an easy, disarming, dimpled grin that betrayed his sense of humor and his kindness to others. He was buoyant and optimistic in spirit yet strong and unyielding in principles.
Back in the United States during training, he was always there to welcome the new draftees off the train with a smile and a firm handshake. “Welcome! We’re glad to have you on the team.” Whether they were former bankers or poor sharecroppers from the Rio Grande Valley, he treated everyone with equality, dignity, and respect.
At gunnery practice in England, he pressed his tank crew hard until their tasks became second nature. Unlike the majority of the other tank crews, his needed to be even sharper, because Sam had to focus on leading the entire unit as well as his own command tank. “Gunner! Enemy tank, eleven o clock, eight hundred meters!” There were multiple targets to engage. Gunner Clem Elissondo quickly turned the powered turret but overshot it in his haste. He returned to the spot and put the optics on the cutout target. “Sir, I see him!” The loader meanwhile made the 75-mm cannon ready with a high-explosive (HE) round, replying, “HE up!” The command went out to fire as Clem stomped on the trigger pad below him, shouting, “On the way!” as everyone made sure they avoided the violent recoil of the cannon.
A hit! But the initial overshoot had cost them valuable time, and the stopwatch had run out. “We missed the last target” was all Sam had to say. His soldiers hated to disappoint him. Afterward, the usually über-confident Elissondo was glum. Sam reassured him: “Keep at it, Clem. Next time you’ll hit the bull’s-eye.”
Throughout their training, Sam, and his commanders by his example, never skipped out on sharing a hardship or task that the soldiers endured. That caring leadership earned him the love of his soldiers from the beginning.
Now the young lieutenant colonel from rural Texas found himself responsible for the lives, welfare, and mission accomplishment of five hundred soldiers moving swiftly on fifty-four tanks and dozens of wheeled vehicles toward the front line.
Off the landing beaches, they had removed waterproof covers on their tank’s hatches and armament, received extra ammunition from division, and sent out small patrols to probe the line and ease some of the green troops’ jitters. It was time to find out what he and his men were made of.
The beautiful early-afternoon sun cast a soft, peach-tinted glow on the pastoral landscape of rolling hills that sloped up to the ridge overlooking Pont-Hébert. Around them were fields of green apple orchards framed by thick hedgerows and tall firs. The formation straddled a sunken road. Golden dandelions and purple wildflowers lined the country path, sprinkled here and there on the green grass like fallen stars from a twilight sky.
But as the tanks climbed, the battle line came into view. The stench hit first, then the sight of bloated bodies. Dead cows littered the landscape, their legs sticking stiffly up in the air in grotesque rigor mortis. The black-and-white animals rotted in the summer heat. These bovines, famous for the delectable milk and cheese they produced during happier times, had fallen victim to artillery fire. As the tanks advanced farther, they encountered the first clumps of human bodies, some clad in German gray, others in US olive drab. A few of the ones in gray were flattened and ground into the earth by tank treads—picturesque French farmland soiled by Dantean horrors.
Sam’s left flank was supposed to be held by elements of the 119th Infantry Regiment of the US Thirtieth Infantry Division—composed of North Carolinians, its nickname was “Old Hickory” in tribute to Andrew Jackson, who was known for his toughness and willingness to suffer hardships next to his soldiers2—but that flank had been left unguarded.
There had been poor coordination between the two units, plus some bad blood over the giant traffic jams in the narrow country lanes as the Americans had tried to surge forward through what resembled a funnel of roadways that led to the enemy line. The day before, the Thirtieth Infantry Division commander, Major General Leland Hobbs, had berated Sam’s immediate commander, Brigadier General John J. Bohn, in the clear over the regimental radio net: “Get your tanks on Vents by 1700 or you’re fired!”3
That pressure rolled on down the chain of command. Every soldier felt it. The hill had been briefly occupied on the previous day by six tanks from Lieutenant Colonel Roswell “Rosie” King’s First Battalion, Thirty-third Armored Regiment, before being mistakenly bombed by US artillery. The greenhorn Americans had succumbed to the fog and friction of war, combined with the rookie jitters, and then were driven off by powerful forces of the German Panzer Lehr Division. The result was Hobbs’s making good on his promise to fire Bohn, with Rosie King’s tanks pulling back to lick their wounds. This left Sam’s battalion up to bat. The top of the ridge was within three hundred meters.
“Red Platoon is taking hits of shrapnel—over.” Radio silence, broken by unseasoned tank crews. That pinging, metal-on-metal sound on their Sherman hulls and turrets was not artillery fragments. It was only the spent metallic links that held together the long belts of machine gun ammunition aboard the American P-47 fighter-bomber aircraft. The links rained down like hail as they flew above the formation and fired on German targets close to the tankers’ front.
The sounds of real artillery and sniper fire grew closer and closer. A sharp crack here, the dull thud of a howitzer round leaving its tube there—the sounds of war closed in and rose in frequency. Then the cracks of rifle fire began, a sharp crescendo into sustained bursts punctuated by loud rips of machine gun fire as the front tanks made contact and returned fire.
Sam scanned the horizon, sweeping from left to right, then back toward the center. He decided it was time to button up—he popped down and closed the tank’s hatch above him. Artillery bursts were exploding ahead, and a sliver of flying metal to the forehead or neck would take a soldier out permanently.
The group of tanks moved southwest now; the steep terrain and hedgerows meant the sunken road was their only way up. The old roads were so narrow that the Shermans’ hulls avoided the muddy walls saddled with overgrowth by mere inches. It was impossible to turn the tanks around or retreat. It dawned on each tank crew member looking out: this terrain was an ambusher’s dream.
As the advance continued, the terrain ahead became steeper and steeper. Once onto the northern ridgeline of Hill 91, the plan was to stay off the little country roads as much as possible. But well-sighted German antitank cannons had badly mauled Rosie King’s tanks the day before. They must have been hiding in the hedgerows that overlooked the entire length of the road on its approach south.
Furthering their hardships, artillery fire covered all crossroads along the likely avenues of approach to Pont-Hébert. Days before, the Germans had painstakingly aimed—in artillery parlance, “registered”—their artillery cannons from ten kilometers back. The heavy rounds were now landing and exploding just where they wanted them to. Once registered, all the enemy artillery needed to do was adjust their guns’ elevation and direction toward the predesignated firing coordinates—day or night, rain or shine. Even without forward observers’ “eyes-on,” they could easily drop their deadly explosives on the advancing Americans.
