Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II (34 page)
Read Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II Online
Authors: Belton Y. Cooper
Tags: #World War II, #General, #Nonfiction, #Biography & Autobiography, #Military, #History
Infantrymen of the 3d armored division advance toward Cologne Cathedral.
Assistant driver of M26 sitting on Panther turret. Assistant gunner loader John Dereggi, standing on the right holding rifle.
General Maurice Rose was killed in action on 30 March 1945 by a young German tank commander when the 3d Armor division enveloped the Ruhr Pocket. There were 380,000 German prisoners of war taken in this battle.
A Mark VI King Tiger shot in its rear engine back plate by an M4A1 Sherman. This tank was part of the group that emasculated our entire task force south of Paderborn on 30 March 1945. We believed that this was the tank that killed General Rose.
American 8th Infantry division infantryman examining the German Panther tank. Three of the German crew’s burned bodies were still in the tank.
This Mark VI Tiger tank ran out of gas and was captured in Central Germany.
A close-up of a shell that penetrated the back side of the face plate of a German Mark V Panther.
Three M4 Sherman tanks that were destroyed in street fighting in Paderborn, Germany.
Twenty-seven-year-old Lt. Belton Y. Cooper in Cologne, Germany, near the end of the war.
1
A lot of the gas wound up on the French black market in Paris.
2
Such was the awesome power of the Tiger against the vastly inferior M4 Sherman.
A Presidio Press Book
Published by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group
Copyright © 1998 by Belton Y. Cooper
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published by Presidio Press, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 1998.
Presidio Press and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
All photographs courtesy of the U.S. Army Signal Corps.
First Mass Market Edition: May 2003
eISBN: 978-0-307-41500-4
v3.0