Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (18 page)

When I went back to maintenance battalion headquarters, I reported to Major Arrington that we had lost forty-eight tanks in twenty-six minutes in the minefield. We had recovered all but eight, which were badly burned and still in the minefield. He asked me how many I thought we could repair, and I told him I didn’t know but we had a lot of work to do. He said he was going to dispatch a detachment from B Company to assist Captain Grindatti from C Company with this extra work. Arrington immediately called Captain Sembera and instructed him to get more tanks on the way, because he did not know how many we would need.

Captain Tommy Sembera went back to army ordnance with the “W” numbers of all the tanks burned in the minefield, plus the numbers of others that had already been cannibalized. This should have been enough to get replacements started. Tommy, however, had one major disadvantage in dealing with the people in army ordnance. He was the only armored division ordnance property officer who was a captain. The table of organization for an armored division called for the ordnance property officer to be a lieutenant colonel. In another one of his screw-ups, Colonel Cowhey had deviously given this position to one of his personal friends and had Tommy actually perform the duties. Although Tommy had been the ordnance property officer for at least two years back in the States and in England and had done an excellent job, he had remained a captain because no other vacancy was available. Because the 3d Armored Division had sustained the highest tank losses of any other armored division to date, he was forced to compete with other officers of higher rank for new tanks. It was only due to the fact that Tommy had an excellent record and had done a superior job of liaison with army ordnance that he was able to perform his duties effectively. He apparently had established a high degree of credibility with the First Army ordnance people, because he was usually able to get us the tanks we required.

Once all the damaged vehicles were brought to the VCP, the maintenance people worked around the clock. Of the forty-eight tanks initially knocked out, we were able to repair all but thirteen. This was done in three days, faster than the G1 could bring up the necessary replacement personnel. This was a perfect example of the tremendous effect that a well-coordinated maintenance operation could have on an armored division’s combat effectiveness.

As the infantry came up and consolidated positions around Werth, Hastenrath, and Scherpenseel, CCA was committed with elements of the 1st Infantry Division toward Langerwehe, a heavily fortified objective north and east of Eschweiler. Here again the tanks were unable to negotiate the extremely muddy fields. In one task force, twelve out of thirteen tanks became stuck in the mud. Had it not been for the support of the infantry, the task force would have suffered many more losses. The infantry pushed on through the stalled tanks and advanced forward without the direct fire support of the tank guns. Although the infantry had excellent artillery support, they undoubtedly suffered much higher casualties without the tanks. After heavy fighting, Langerwehe fell and CCA returned to division control.

Next, CCR was committed with elements of the 9th Infantry Division. The objective was to straighten out the line and bring it up to Düren on the Roer River. The line of advance was from Langerwehe through Obergeich and Geich to Echtz.

The tanks again encountered the terrible combination of mud and minefields. This slowed them considerably, and they were unable to give the infantry adequate support. At one point, one of the task forces encountered six antitank guns dug in on one flank supported by three mobile German tanks. Although CCR theoretically had many more tank guns available, the higher velocity of the German antitank guns plus the superior guns, armor, and maneuverability of the German tanks put them at a decided disadvantage.

The capture of Hoven allowed VII Corps to complete this particular phase of the operation and bring the line up to the west bank of the Roer River. By December 15, the entire 3d Armored Division had been pulled out of the line and put back in a rear area for a well-deserved rest and maintenance period.

The Failure of the November Offensive

Although the American First and Ninth Armies had penetrated the Siegfried line, the assault that began on November 16 had been a grave failure. The Ninth Army to the north had the mission of making the main effort in an attempt to break through the last vestiges of the Siegfried line, cross the Roer River, and fan out onto the Cologne Plain. VII Corps was to protect the Ninth Army’s right flank and capture Cologne, the largest industrial city in the Rhineland and an important rail and road communication center. The final objective was to secure bridgeheads on the Rhine River and attempt to trap the main elements of the German army on the west bank.

The operation failed for a number of reasons. The American armies had advanced extremely rapidly after the Saint-Lô breakthrough. The Germans had done an excellent job of demolishing the docks and harbors along the English Channel. The only usable port at that time was Cherbourg, and the distance by truck was almost six hundred miles through France and Belgium and into Germany. To make things worse, the chalklike ground of western and northwestern France became saturated after two months of almost continuous rain. This was particularly true around Reims, one of the main central supply hubs of the entire western front. The ground and roadbeds would no longer support heavy traffic, and under the constant pounding of tanks, trucks, and other vehicles the roadbed in many areas completely collapsed.

To offset these problems, the army organized what later became known as the Red Ball Express. The communication zone (COMZ) troops had thousands of two-and-a-half-ton GMC trucks running bumper to bumper twenty-four hours a day. Because the air force completely dominated the skies with the new Black Widow night fighter, contrary to all training the trucks ran with their headlights on as fast as they could go.

The army had long since lost confidence in the use of GHQ tank battalions working with infantry to achieve a major breakthrough, so they had used the armored divisions to perform this function. This was completely contrary to Armored Force Doctrine, and it dissipated the armored divisions’ strength.

With no heavy assault tank with wide tracks to negotiate the muddy fields, the attack on November 16 resulted in disastrous losses. In addition to CCB’s loss of forty-eight out of sixty-four tanks in twenty-six minutes, two combat commands from the 2d Armored Division lost approximately a hundred tanks under the same conditions in the Jülich area as they approached the Roer River. These losses were unacceptable, and the two divisions could not maintain their combat effectiveness under such conditions.

Few, if any, military historians have ever understood the importance of our not having the M26 heavy tank in time for the November offensive. Many combat soldiers felt that the initial assault on November 16 would have succeeded if we had had the Pershing, with its better protection and better mobility in muddy terrain. It would have been possible to break through the Cologne Plain and capture the bridgeheads on the Rhine River. Major elements of the German army would have been annihilated on the west bank of the Rhine, and the Ardennes attack might have been preempted. By that time, we would have been behind the German panzer units building up for the offensive. The Battle of the Bulge may have never taken place, some 182,000 German and American casualties might have been averted, and the war could have ended five months earlier.

This of course is pure speculation; however, it is based on the tragic experience of many armored and infantry troops. After the tankers saw their buddies slaughtered in our M4 tanks when they tried to engage the heavier German tanks, they could not help but agree.

Status of the Division Prior to the German Attack

For the wheeled vehicles of the 3d Armored Division, the rest and maintenance period meant replacing tires and changing engines, particularly in many of the GMC trucks. Although the heavy-tread tires did not wear out, they had to be replaced primarily because they were either shot up or severely damaged by the mortar shell fragments on the roadways. When an HE shell explodes on a roadway, it generally breaks up into many small slivers with sharp points on both ends. Unlike a nail, which lies flat on the road, a sliver often has one point facing upward. The rolling action of a heavy-tread tire forces one of the points through the wall of the tire. Instead of causing a simple puncture, a fragment usually tears a large gap in the casing, so the tire has to be replaced.

In the 3d Armored Division, with all of its attached units, there were approximately 1,800 combat vehicles and 2,300 wheeled vehicles. To perform maintenance on all the diverse types of vehicles required a major commitment of personnel. In addition to the maintenance battalion, which had more than 1,000 men, there were another 1,000 men in the maintenance companies of the armored regiments plus the platoons and maintenance sections of other units, giving us a total of 2,000 men directly involved in maintenance. Add to this another 8,200 drivers and assistant drivers, who performed first echelon maintenance on their own vehicles, including tire changes, track changes, and minor repairs, and you can get some idea of the tremendous number of people required to keep a reinforced heavy armored division rolling.

Although this may appear to be an unusually large commitment, the combat maintenance problems of an armored division in the field were staggering. There is no comparable commercial enterprise. For the wheeled vehicles, the maintenance problems were exacerbated by their being driven many miles in muddy and rough fields in four-wheel drive. When they came up on the highway for a short period, their drivers would often fail to disconnect the four-wheel drive. Because there was no slip mechanism in the final drive to accommodate the difference in front- and rear-tire wear, this put a severe overload on the entire engine and power train.

All the wheeled vehicles were heavily overloaded, particularly the GMC truck. Although it was rated at two and a half tons, it normally carried from four to ten tons, even in off-road conditions. Under these loads, truck engines had to be replaced every ten thousand miles, and it didn’t take long to put on that many miles. With 850 two-and-a-half-ton GMC trucks in the division, this in itself was a major maintenance problem.

For the combat vehicles, the overwhelming maintenance problem was by far the repair and replacement of battle-damaged vehicles. On the M4 tanks, with the Wright R975 radial engine, we had the persistent problem of spark-plug fouling, when the tanks idle their engines while standing still. Many of the older tanks had been knocked out by this time and had been replaced with the newer M4A1 tank with a Ford V8 water-cooled engine.

One problem we had thought might be major never materialized, the replacement of the tank tracks. One of the best features about our tank design was the track system. Back in the States, during garrison training and maneuvers, we were able to get approximately twenty-five hundred miles on a set of M4 tracks. The tracks were reversible and could be run on one side, then reversed and run on the other side. The tanks that we received in England, before going into Normandy, had heavy rubber grousers imbedded on one side of the track and they could no longer be reversed; however, the extra rubber still gave us good mileage. This was an excellent track design and far superior to anything that the Germans had. Their tracks used hardened steel blocks and hardened pins, which resulted in greater friction and wear. However, few of our tanks lasted in combat long enough to use up a set of tracks.

Each tank had a set of steel grousers that could be put on the track blocks over the holes in the track pins, which were spaced about every five or six blocks. These grousers did help somewhat in mud, however, on snow and ice, they would break through to the road and cause a large reverse bump between the track blocks. This would strain the rubber doughnuts in the opposite direction and tend to cause the track to wear out prematurely at these bumps. It also created an extremely rough ride and was hard on the bogey wheels and suspension system. The tank crews had been instructed to use these grousers only in off-road conditions, but this was obviously impractical because tanks constantly went on and off the road. An alternate solution used one-half-inch square steel blocks, about two inches long, welded to the bottom of the wedge screw on the track connector. This welded pin extended down about one-quarter inch to three-eighths inch below the bottom of the track surface. It did appear to penetrate ice and hard-packed snow to a certain degree and seemed to help quite a bit as the snow and ice on the roads began to build up. It was not completely effective, but it was the best we had to offer at the time.

The 3d Armored Division’s unusually large maintenance organization had other, unanticipated benefits. When the combat commands went forward to exploit a breakthrough, each had its own ordnance maintenance company, in addition to the maintenance company of the armored regiment and the maintenance sections of each separate battalion and company. A large percentage of the officers and men in this maintenance group knew one another and had worked together as a team in maneuvers and training for three years back in the States and in England.

Major Dick Johnson, commanding officer of the maintenance company in the 33d Armored Regiment, was the ranking maintenance officer in Combat Command B. It was my responsibility to coordinate the maintenance effort between Major Johnson’s group, the ordnance maintenance company attached to the combat command, and the ordnance battalion in the division trains to the rear.

As the combat command moved forward, it often had motorized infantry battalions from the infantry divisions and separate artillery battalions and other corps-level combat units attached to it. The combat command often moved thirty to forty miles a day, and it might take the main elements of the infantry divisions several days to come forward. The infantry division’s maintenance sections followed behind the main body, which left the elements attached to the combat command without adequate heavy maintenance support. We soon learned from experience that it was necessary for the combat command maintenance group to assist the attached units in addition to doing the work for the combat command’s organic units.

During the campaign from Paris to the Siegfried line, the 3d Armored Division’s maintenance group supplied the major maintenance for the entire forward elements of the corps. This commitment was a major contributing factor in the continued success of the corps during such extended operations. Without this, the corps’ progress would have soon ground to a halt.

The German Attack

On the morning of December 16, I walked from the maintenance battalion headquarters, located in the main office building of the Engleburt Rubber factory in Aachen, to our shop area across the street. I was careful to give a wide berth to two 500-pound American unexploded bombs (UXBs) lying about a hundred feet apart in the parking lot. These bombs were considered extremely dangerous and were avoided until the ordnance bomb disposal crews could get rid of them.

As I approached the shop building, I saw my buddy Lt. Ernie Nibbelink, liaison officer for CCA, coming toward me. He appeared excited about something.

“Cooper, have you heard the news? The Krauts have broken through south of us near Malmédy and are going like hell. Arrington just got word; it came down from division.”

My initial reaction was that this couldn’t be more than a local operation. We had the Germans pinned down on the Roer River and had been beating their butts off. But I was soon proven wrong. In a short time, the rumors were going like wildfire. The Germans had dropped paratroopers in isolated groups behind our lines. Groups of German SS troops, wearing American uniforms and riding in American Jeeps, had infiltrated our lines.

The reaction at CCB headquarters was confused, and the situation map was sketchy. Apparently, the Germans had launched a massive assault along a broad front ranging from the Losheim gap in the north, near Malmédy, as far south as Luxembourg, just north of Echternach. This distance of some sixty miles was covered by only three divisions. An average of twenty miles of front per division was far too much to be covered. Because this sector had been considered relatively quiet, it had been used to give new troops combat experience before they were exposed to heavy fighting.

The 106th Division, which had just been committed to combat for the first time, entered the line on December 14, the day before, to replace the 2d Infantry Division. The battle-hardened 2d Infantry Division had pulled out of the line to move north to attack the dams on the Roer River at Schmidt, long been considered a prime target. The 106th Division moved into the positions previously occupied by the 2d Division on the Schnee Eifel, a series of heavily wooded hills just inside the German border. The 2d Division had prepared elaborate bunkers, foxholes, and trenches, and the 106th Division occupied these same positions.

The 14th Cavalry Squadron screened the area just north of the Schnee Eifel. This was a relatively wide area, and in some cases the outposts were as much as a mile apart. SHAEF had sixty-four divisions covering six hundred miles from the English Channel to the Swiss border. With some divisions in reserve, the average division had ten miles or more of front to cover. When forces concentrated for an offensive, certain areas would be even more lightly protected.

The German Ardennes offensive had brilliant planning and extremely tight security. On the morning of December 16, the Germans launched a massive assault with three armies abreast. Although the weather was extremely overcast and bad for flying, the Germans committed a thousand Luftwaffe planes, the largest force we had seen since the early days of Normandy. They used this air force for reconnaissance, for dropping groups of paratroopers, and, as the weather cleared, for attacking the highways, particularly at night. They also committed fighters to oppose high-level American bombing.

The initial assault against our frontline troops was overwhelming. With widely dispersed units, the Germans infiltrated, cut off, and surrounded many of our forward elements. In spite of this, many units formed small groups that put up a courageous rear guard. Stubborn resistance by these American units disrupted the tight German timetable during the critical phases of the attack and enabled SHAEF to bring reserves into play.

Back at maintenance battalion headquarters in Aachen, everything was in a mad scramble. All available men made an all-out effort to get every tank, half-track, and armored vehicle back on the line. The division was put on full alert and prepared to move immediately. We were told that the 7th Armored Division, our sister division at Camp Polk, from XIX Corps had already moved toward Saint-Vith. We had many buddies in the 7th Armored Division and were shocked the next day to hear that the first combat command to arrive in Saint-Vith to team up with remnants of the 106th Division had been completely overrun and shattered by superior German armor.

Although the Germans had been delayed, it was soon obvious that they had made a broad and deep breakthrough. Combat veterans in American armored divisions had long known that it was futile to try to stand directly in front of a major German panzer attack; this understanding had finally seeped up the chain of command.

Because of this German armor superiority, our task forces had to develop special tactics. As a combat command moved forward, the task forces would contact the German column and attempt to set up a roadblock reinforced with tanks, infantry, and self-propelled artillery. At the roadblock, the tanks could sometimes take a defiladed position for added protection against German firepower. Other tanks and infantry from the task force would attempt to move out on the flanks and, once the German column was stopped, subject it to heavy flanking fire, where our tank guns were most effective against the lighter German side armor.

Our task forces also used the M36 tank destroyer, when it was available. It had a 90mm gun with a muzzle velocity of 2,850 feet per second. This was still less powerful than the German PzKw VIb King Tiger’s 88mm gun and was not effective against the Tiger’s six-inch glacis faceplate. Sometimes, it would ricochet off the faceplate of a Panther. The M36 had only an inch and a half of armor on its front glacis plate and one inch on its sides. It also had an open-topped turret, which made it vulnerable to overhead airbursts from artillery.

The large gasoline dump at Stavelot was a prime objective of the German 6th SS Panzer Army. From there, they and the 5th SS Panzer Army would proceed northward past Liège, secure bridges across the Meuse River, and drive northward to Antwerp, cutting off the American First and Ninth Armies and the entire British 21st Army Group. Had this been successful, it would have been a military disaster for the Allies. The Germans were so short of gas at the beginning of this attack that the first parachute landing had to be delayed twenty-four hours because the paratroopers’ trucks ran out of gas trying to get to the airfield on time. The capture of the gasoline dump at Stavelot was absolutely essential to the Germans.

The Germans had trained a special brigade of English-speaking soldiers, scrounged from the entire German army on both fronts. They were equipped with American Jeeps and American uniforms and weapons even down to dog tags and GI long underwear. They also carried identification taken from dead American soldiers and prisoners. Their mission was to infiltrate rapidly through the American lines and, in conjunction with paratroopers, attempt to secure bridges across the Meuse River.

We used an identification method known as “password and parole.” When our sentries challenged an individual, they asked for the password. If he knew this, he was challenged a second time to give the parole. If he knew this, he would be allowed to pass. A new password and parole was issued every twenty-four hours.

Somehow these infiltrated Germans secured the correct password and parole, many of which began with the letter
W
. Because most Germans had difficulty pronouncing
W
, pronouncing
V
instead, we thought this might give them away. The Germans had apparently been cautioned about this and had overcome the problem. So we also asked simple questions that only an average American would know, such as who is L’il Abner? name five American candy bars, and who is Babe Ruth? Any German soldier who could name these was pretty sharp.

In an incident near Spa, a sentry in an ordnance heavy maintenance company stopped an American 99th Division Jeep carrying four well-dressed GIs. They knew the password and parole and seemed to pass all the other preliminary tests, so the sentry was getting ready to let them pass. About this time, a lieutenant came out and saw the four men in the Jeep. He asked where they were going. They said they had just come out of the line and were going for rest and recreation in Liège. The lieutenant figured that no GI came out of the line with clean clothes and a clean-shaven face. He also knew that all leaves had been canceled and that the 99th Division was fighting for its life.

He called the corporal of the guard, and the men were taken in, questioned, and strip-searched down to their bare skin. One of the young Germans apparently was an officer and had kept his German identification with him to get back inside the German lines. The unit commander immediately convened a general court-martial, and the German soldiers were tried in accordance with the Geneva Convention, which stated that any soldier caught behind enemy lines in enemy uniforms could be shot as a spy. The men were all convicted and, with First Army notification, were taken out and shot that night. Justice was swift and final in wartime.

At least these Germans had been given a fair trial, which was more than our soldiers received just east of Malmédy. A number of American soldiers were captured by a German SS armored column, marched out in a field, and shot in cold blood with machine guns. This became known as the Malmédy Massacre. After the word got out, American GIs had little sympathy for German POWs.