Task force hogan, p.8
Task Force Hogan, page 8
It was late afternoon. Artillery rounds boomed ahead with a POP POP POP as they left their tubes. Although he couldn’t see them, Sam guessed they were probably coming from positions on the other side of Mortain. Sam felt that cold moisture on the back of his neck again, but this time his pulse remained steady.
Artillery fire crept in on the advancing formation. Shouts of Incoming! surged over the radio as the tankers buttoned up and the infantrymen grabbed their helmets and curled up into a ball, making their bodies as small as possible. They looked around to ditches abutting the road, selecting where they would jump off to if the need arose. This was no harassment fire—this was heavy, organized incoming artillery.
The first handful of rounds came in with a whine that grew louder, like a freight train. From Wray and Cramer’s tanks, infantry spilled off Shermans as they jumped, rolled, and sought cover in the nearest ditch or hedge. From there, everything went to hell in just a few quick seconds. Instead of occasional POP POPs separated by minutes, a wave of blasts and dirt hit the advancing tanks. BOOM BOOM BOOM as clouds of dust mixed with fiery blasts, sending hot metallic shards zipping through the dirty air. Thankfully, the shards pinged harmlessly off the Shermans’ armor.
Infantry hugged the ground close—the action had just gotten heavy. More rounds came in with eardrum-shattering explosions, some ahead of the tanks and some in between. Panicked shouts of “I’m hit!” and “Medic!” began to ring out.
Platoon and company leaders knew to keep moving in the face of artillery barrages. The last thing you want to do is sit still unless you have prepared positions to shelter in and are on the defensive. Over the internal radios and out to the infantry walkie-talkies crackled the commands: “All elements! Keep pressing forward, twelve o’clock, 150 meters!”
In between the volleys of enemy artillery, the foot soldiers crouched up, shuffling quickly forward from cover to cover until the next shouts of “Incoming!” drove them back down as low as possible on the sodden ground.
The lead tanks of both companies arrived at the first line of hedgerows and punched through them with a loud roar of the engine and a ripping crunch of sunbaked mud mixed with dry, twisted vines and tree branches. The dozer tank backed up, and the formation funneled in, led by Shermans. Infantry poured through the newly created gap after them, through a haze of smoke and dust.
One, two, three—the tanks moved through, machine guns blazing at the corners of the field they had just entered. The tanks, hatches buttoned up, kept moving, with their turrets and bow-mounted machine guns scanning for targets in the far-off hedgerows.
Inside his command tank, Ed Wray spotted a camouflaged PAK-40 (Panzer Abwehr Kanone, an antitank cannon) and crew, wide-eyed and panicking as they struggled to turn their unwieldy piece around to fire at the Americans who had just unexpectedly surged up on their back.
“Gunner! Antitank gun ten o’clock, in the corner of the hedgerow!” The Sherman’s hydraulic turret whizzed around to the left as the gunner began spraying .30-caliber machine gun fire from the coaxial gun fitted next to his cannon barrel. “On the way!” was the call as the gunner let fly. Clouds of dust, torn camouflage fabric, and crimson blood splatters filled their periscopes’ field of vision as the German crew and cannon were ripped to shreds. The tank turret scanned around looking for the next target. There was none. “This field is cleared,” reported Ed as the follow-on US infantry surged through the gap behind him.
On the left wing, G Company pushed through another hedgerow with its own tank dozer and deployed on the far side of the field to cover the road intersection five hundred yards ahead. Inside tank G-16 Ground Gainer sat tank gunner Wilson Whitehead. His tank commander, Staff Sergeant James V. Curry, called out to him, “Wilson, keep your gunsights on the crossroads ahead. We have to wait until H Company comes on line.”
“Roger, Sarge,” came the reply.
Whitehead leaned in to look through the gunsight reticle, then turned the turret with a push of a button to align it on target. Even inside the closed-up tank, he could hear heavy artillery and mortars exploding to their back and to their left. At least it’s not landing on us, he thought.
There was still nothing but empty road through his gunsight. Hedgerows sprang out to both sides of the intersection, so his field of vision through the gunsights was only about the diameter of a Coke-bottle bottom.
Whitehead blinked. There was movement. A long, camouflaged barrel rolled into his sights from the right. It came slowly into focus until the large angular hull also appeared.
The G Company net came alive: “Panther tank, eleven o’clock, four hundred meters!” The word “Panther” or “Tiger” struck terror in an American tanker’s heart. It meant that a vastly superior tank to your own had spotted you before you had spotted it. This meant that one of your fellow Shermans, or maybe your own, was about to be impaled by a high velocity 75- or 88-mm shell that could pass through both ends of your Sherman’s armor, vaporizing everything in its path.
Whitehead hardly noticed that he had just sent out the alert over the radio. He now waited for Staff Sergeant Curry’s command. A 75-mm armor-piercing shell was already in the breech. Wilson breathed heavily as he waited for the Panther to come up broadside into the center of his gunsight. It felt like an eternity until he heard Curry’s accented order, “Faarrr when ready.” With a grunt and a hard tap on the floor-mounted trigger, the round shot out. “On the way!”
The breech flew back, rocking the tank and sending cordite fumes into the crew compartment. Whitehead kept his eye on the target. In just a few seconds, the Sherman’s cannon round struck home . . . then shot up to the sky as it deflected off the enemy tank’s thick armor. An anticipated hit turned into curses of disappointment as the round failed to make a dent in the dreaded Panther, which ignored the Sherman’s attack like a horse dismissing a gnat and crossed the road to disappear behind a row of hedges.3
Suddenly, seconds after Wilson Whitehead opened fire, the front exploded with two large muzzle flashes and machine gun fire. The two green tracers found their mark upon two Shermans, producing a shower of sparks and rising smoke that immediately stopped the tanks dead in their tracks. The crews jumped and rolled, finding any available cover from the lines of machine gun tracers sweeping the field. The German MG42 machine guns, with their incredibly fast rate of fire of twelve hundred rounds per minute, sounded like a giant zipper ripped violently apart.
Meanwhile, large artillery fragments began peppering Ground Gainer as it scanned for more targets while suppressing the hedgerows with machine gun fire. The rattle of shrapnel bouncing off the slope armor swelled into head-jarring explosions as several heavy-caliber artillery rounds detonated within feet of the tank.
The Germans were bringing in divisional and corps artillery to bear: 150-mm behemoths and even 100-mm cannon captured from the French army in 1940.4 Staff Sergeant Curry moved quickly to close his turret hatch as a shell detonated in a violent and accurate airburst right above it, knocking him back in a violent shock wave of superheated air and pieces of glowing-hot metal.
Wilson Whitehead—sitting below and in front of Curry’s seat—was slammed against the turret wall, knocking the wind out of him and severely bruising his clavicle and arm. The Sherman filled up with dust and smoke.
Whitehead shook away the ear-ringing and head fog to find Curry slumped partly over him and partly over his small back support. He was bleeding heavily onto Whitehead’s right shoulder.
The sight of his tank commander made him grimace: Curry was almost decapitated, his tanker’s helmet half covering his face and grievous wounds on his jaw and neck. There was no doubt he was dead. Whitehead, loader Private First Class John Gunther, and driver Tech 4 Pedro Vasques stayed put inside the tank as they tried to wait out the artillery barrage that had killed their commander.
Taking advantage of a short lull, the three survivors bailed out of the stricken tank. They crawled sixty yards to a parallel hedgerow, occupied by a gaggle of GIs. Wilson saw a young infantry lieutenant pacing nervously, ranting to himself incoherently, the wild look of shell shock in his eyes.
Their medic rushed over to Whitehead and began pulling off his coveralls.
“What are you doing, mac? I’m not wounded.” Whitehead grunted.
“You’re covered in blood,” replied the medic.
“It’s not my blood, dammit!”5
Back on the line, Shermans lobbed desperate return fire with main gun rounds as they struggled to make out any enemy muzzle flashes to target, and bow gunners opened up with .30-caliber machine gun rounds. Shouts of “Where are they at?!” and “Take out those AT guns!” saturated the company radio nets. The German guns were camouflaged to the point of near invisibility. They were using flashless gunpowder that was almost impossible to sight in on.
On the other side of the next field, more volleys hit two more H Company Shermans. One was put immediately out of action, while the front wheel sprocket of the other was destroyed, sending fifty-pound pieces of the heavy metal track flying through the air in a lazy spinning arc. The stricken tank ground what was left of its track into the loose soil as it began sharply turning toward its still-functioning right track, exposing the tank’s thinner side armor.
From behind high-grade optics, the German cannoneers turned a crank, shifting their long-barreled cannon steadily toward the crippled Sherman. They didn’t want their prey to escape. “Feuer!” was the shrieked command that sent a second volley blazing toward the Americans. In an instant, the Sherman burst into a giant torch. Two of its crew, Privates John H. Flavell and Earl Wyatt, didn’t make it out.
H Company pulled back. Cramer’s Sherman, driven by Tech 4 Luis Alamea and gunner Corporal Frank Plezia, backed up behind some covering terrain and dismounted to check on the Sherman commanded by their platoon sergeant, Wayne Axel Kron. Alamea crawled as close as he could to the disabled Sherman, where Kron lay writhing in pain on the oily ground.
Both of his feet were gone from an armor-piercing round that had penetrated his tank. Still twenty yards away from him, Alamea stopped as bullets tore up the ground between him and Kron.
“Don’t let me die!” pleaded Kron. Alamea yelled over the gunfire to hold on and they would get him back to the aid station. Alamea’s tank, still serviceable, was about to be overrun. He crawled back and got in through the bottom escape hatch. The fire was too heavy to get to Kron—he would have to hold on until nightfall.6
Though G Company shielded itself somewhat using the folds in the terrain, Carl Cramer’s command lost a tank to another well-camouflaged antitank gun. Lost was tank G-3; its platoon leader, First Lieutenant Thomas Cooper, was wounded. Cooper had commented on his way up to the line that maybe he could get the “million-dollar wound” and head home.
Looking at the flesh wound, Doc Spigelman retorted, “LT, I think it’s more like a two-hundred dollar wound,” with no return home ticket tied to it. “You were lucky, Tom—you still need to come off the line.” Cooper did not like the idea of being away from his platoon.7
Captain Cramer continued rallying his tankers and infantry. His command tank was a flurry of signal flags, radio calls, and occasionally visuals as the tall, spindly captain supplemented his radio commands with karate chops of the hand into the air indicating where he wanted forward movement.
“Let’s go! Up and at ’em!” Cramer added drawling exhortations to the grunts within earshot, as he pressed his platoons forward from his tank turret. The high-strung OCS graduate pressed on in the center of the action, ignoring the pings and whizzes of bullets and shrapnel striking the turret below him.
Despite their élan, the infantry on both wings of that attack were unable to advance in the face of the accurate incoming artillery and heavy volume of machine gun fire. One platoon of E/119th Infantry was caught entirely in the open, and most of its members were wounded or killed. The attack stalled out. It was a little after 5:00 P.M. when Sam called a halt as the tanks and infantry barely occupied the first line of hedgerows they had reached.
The Germans followed their standard defense-in-depth tactic. They inflicted casualties on the first wave of attackers, then pulled back to a secondary line if the attackers persisted. Then, from that second line, they could counterattack as the attackers consolidated on their first line attained.
The two Panther tanks that fired earlier had pulled back. Sam radioed his tank commanders Carl Cramer and Ed Wray as well as his attached infantry companies, so understrength that they amounted to one company (about one hundred soldiers), under Lieutenants Warren Fox and Ed Arn, telling them to hold positions, dig in, and prepare for a German counterattack.
During the battle, Travis Brown’s operations staff had set up the task force command post in the field just short of the railroad underpass and ahead of Sam’s reserve, C Company. Sam and his command tank moved one hundred meters toward the rustic CP.
There had been no time or thought of setting up a nice tent, folding chairs, and map boards in between the two tracks—the artillery barrage had made that impossible. Instead, soldiers dug large holes underneath so that their vehicles provided overhead cover. Under the battalion commander’s half-track, driver Charlie Gast was busily digging the trench deeper under the chassis. With nothing but a canvas top over the cab, under the half-track was the safest place to be. From this CP they would plan the next attack while coordinating a defensive perimeter for the night. A sunken road nearby served as the casualty collection point, where medics could give initial treatment to casualties before they moved them back to field hospitals in the rear.
Doc Spigelman and his intrepid medics were doing God’s work. After digging themselves in under their own half-tracks, they prepared the aid station. The dreaded call “Medic!” came far too often.
Doc sweat bullets in the makeshift aid station, applying bandages, tourniquets, and intravenous drips to the first casualties among the infantry. Medics rushed toward one of the smoking H Company tanks.
Doc’s medical aides, Sergeant Raymond Kuderka and Corporals Derrick Filkins and John Skuly, plus one of the infantry medics, crept forward, crouched low with their olive-drab stretcher and medic bags slung on their chests. Panting, they crossed the busted-up hedgerow toward the line of battle.
“Come on. We’re almost there,” Kuderka exhorted.
There, in the shade of the hedge, was a tanker, face burned crimson, his body showing burns under the ashy shreds of his coveralls. Machine gun fire cracked overhead. Two infantry soldiers crouched over the tanker, giving him sips of water from a metal canteen.
The tanker’s eyes were fading.
“Come on guys, help us load him up,” Kuderka said. “Easy now.” The burned soldier gasped in pain as the infantry and medics gently rolled him onto the stretcher.
Kuderka administered a shot of morphine from a little glass syrette in his medic bag. “Okay, let’s go! Prepare to lift.” Each soldier grabbed his corner pole of the stretcher. “Lift!” The four moved out at a low crouch, bouncing up and down over the uneven ground and back through the hole in the hedgerow. They were still in enemy artillery range, so they hugged the next hedgerow, then stopped at the remains of another low hedge.
There they took a knee as two medics climbed over, then passed the moaning soldier over the low wall to the others. The two front stretcher bearers then waited for the remaining two to climb over to help with their share of the 170-pound soldier’s weight.
One final clearing to cross and they would be home free under Doc’s care. If only the tanker could hang on—shock was setting in. “Hey, soldier! Stay with me.”
Two enemy mortar rounds burst behind them. They got down again and began crawling with the soldier, stretcher poles on the ends tucked over their elbows. One heave of the arms—“All together now . . . heave!”—then a push forward with their legs on the loose dirt. The final fifty yards they stood up and ran.
Doc was on his feet, holding an IV bag, as another soldier was loaded on an M3 armored half-track ambulance for the trip back to the regimental aid station. Finishing that, he went over to the burned tanker. He made a quick assessment and began to cover the worst of the burns with clean bandages soaked in distilled water.
“You’re going to make it, trooper.” Doc stood up and directed the team loading up the ambulance. “This one needs to go to the field hospital.” He gently covered him to prevent hypothermia, then patted his litter bearers on the back to move out.
This process continued as the task force licked its wounds. Whoever Doc couldn’t treat was stabilized, then transported on a half-track to the regimental aid station. After that, they would move to a First Army field hospital, then back home—if they made it. If doctors expected a complete recovery, the wounded soldier stayed on the continent to rejoin his unit somewhere down the line.
For Doc’s unarmed medics, it was dangerous and stressful work, especially since enemy units oftentimes used the red cross painted on the sides of half-tracks as convenient targets for their guns.
Sam got on the radio to his immediate commander, Colonel Truman Boudinot—one of the original Third Armored Division senior officers—to inform him of the halt and send the initial casualty report.
Boudinot’s response over the radio was angry: “Take your casualties and keep driving on to the crossroads.”8 Sam clenched his jaw but held his tongue, irritated that someone kilometers to the rear in the safety of a regimental CP was so cavalier about the lives of his men.
Instead of getting into a back-and-forth, Sam informed him that the casualty report was being prepared and that his unit needed fuel, water, and ammunition moved up immediately before any new attack. He signed off “Blue Six, out,” then ordered Lieutenant Tom Magness to bring up his assault gun platoon and set up an observation post (OP) at the most forward position he could find ahead of the task force.
