We established our first vehicle collecting point (VCP) on the south side of the hill, on the main road coming through Airel toward the Saint Jean de Daye highway. The 33d Maintenance T2 recovery crews started bringing the first vehicles from the initial combat around 0900. The first casualty was an M4 medium tank with the body of one of the crew still inside. According to surviving crew members, they were hit on the highway. The German gun crew apparently held their fire until the tank was no more than fifty yards away, then let go with two rounds from a 75mm PAK41 ground-mount antitank gun. Because of its extremely low silhouette, the gun could not be seen until a tank was upon it. The first round severed the main drive shaft of the M4, incapacitating the tank. The second round struck the top of the turret with a glancing blow right over the tank gunner’s head, killing him.
I got on top of the turret to examine the damage but deliberately didn’t look at the body that was still inside.
The second round had struck the tank turret at the top of the long radius where the armor varied in thickness between two and a half to three and a half inches and the angle of incidence of the shell to the armor could have been no greater than fifteen degrees. In our ordnance training we had been told that thirty-eight degrees was the critical angle, below which a shell would normally ricochet. This was particularly true for an American shell from an M2 low-velocity tank gun.
Upon examining the front of the tank, I found that the first shot had struck the final drive, which was a large, heavy-duty armored casting that contained the transmission and the differential, which drove the tank tracks.
The projectile had struck the tip of the final drive casting in line with the radius of the casting at its thickest point, which was about four and a half inches. The projectile penetrated the armor, passed through about a foot of fifty-weight oil, severed a five-and-a-half-inch steel driveshaft, then passed through another eight to ten inches of oil and a one-inch armored back plate before entering the driver’s compartment. By this time the shell had spent itself and nested between the driver’s feet under his seat. Because it was an armor-piercing shot, no explosion took place. Even though the second round had ricocheted off the turret, its velocity was sufficient to penetrate the armor in a gash approximately three inches wide and ten inches long. The blast inside the tank killed the gunner; the shot had gone right through his periscope. I realized that we could not repair it in the field, because the mounting had to be machined. We had to evacuate the tank to the ordnance company.
Tragic Inferiority of the M4 Sherman Tank
By mis time, a number of tanks had entered the VCP with all manner of damage. Those evacuated from the column on the Saint Jean de Daye-Saint-Lô highway were mostly damaged by tank and antitank fire, whereas those coming from the Airel-Pont Hébert highway were mostly knocked out by panzerfausts. The German panzerfaust could penetrate our tanks with impunity, even through the extra armor we’d put in front of the driver and on the ammunition boxes on the side. These panzerfausts were obviously more powerful than our American bazookas.
As the tanks and other armored vehicles were brought into the VCP with broken and twisted bodies still inside, the horror of war began to settle into my being. When a tanker inside a tank received the full effect of a penetration, sometimes the body, particularly the head, exploded and scattered blood, gore, and brains throughout the entire compartment. It was a horrible sight. The maintenance crews had to get inside and clean up the remains. They tried to keep me body parts together in a shelter half and turn them over to graves registration people. With strong detergent, disinfectant, and water, they cleaned the interior of the tank as best they could so men could get inside and repair it.
Often when a tank was penetrated, the shower of fragments would sever the electrical cables. Even though the cables were protected by armored covers, the fragments would cause a short and could set the tank on fire. If the tank crew pulled the fire extinguisher switch before evacuating, the fire would be snuffed out and the interior of the tank would burn only partially. If the crew was unable to do this, the tank would burn up completely, and the tremendous heat would soften the armor and make the tank impossible to repair.
After the repairs were completed, the tank’s fighting compartment would be completely painted. In spite of this, the faint stench of death sometimes seeped through. A new crew might hesitate to take a tank assigned to them because they were superstitious about tanks in which their buddies had been killed.
Seeing our mounting tank losses made me realize that our armored forces had been victims of a great deceit, and we in ordnance had been part of that deceit. During my summer at Aberdeen Proving Ground in 1939, we were told that our total annual research and development budget for tanks was only $85,000. I had felt that the tremendous engineering and manufacturing capability of the United States had more than made up for this deficiency in the intervening five years. However, the isolationist Congress during the interwar period had completely decimated the army’s technical capability, particularly that of the armored forces. The few imaginative and innovative ordnance engineers who came up with new ideas were quickly discouraged due to budgetary restraints.
A brilliant young tank designer named J. Walter Christy had come up with an entirely new concept in hull and suspension design in the early thirties. The idea involved an ingenious torsion bar suspension system for the bogey wheels that supported the tracks. This suspension system had a greater amplitude of deflection, and thus provided a much easier ride over rough terrain, than did the helicoil system used on our M4 tanks. In addition, the tracks could be quickly removed, and the tanks could travel on the highway as wheeled vehicles at speeds up to sixty miles per hour. It was a radical concept at the time, and the ordnance engineers at Aberdeen were greatly restricted by their less innovative superiors, who did not choose to rock the boat.
Discouraged by lack of American interest, Christy took his invention to Russia, where engineers recognized the tremendous advantages of the system and adopted it. Many German tanks in World War II also used this system to great advantage. In addition to the high deflection of the Christy system, the bogey wheels could be overlapped, which allowed use of a wider track. The resulting greater track bearing area and lower ground bearing pressure per square inch allowed German tanks to negotiate muddy terrain with much greater ease than could American tanks. This shortcoming proved disastrous in several battles. Not until the war was almost over did we realize our error and start using Christy suspension on the new M24 and M26 and all other new tanks to follow.
In spite of the flaws of the M4, we were told that it was a good tank, comparable to the German tanks we would be meeting in northern Europe. Back in the States and also in England, we had received numerous ordnance evaluation reports on German equipment, most dealing with the German PzKw IV, which we usually called the Mark IV The original Mark IV had a short-barreled gun similar to the 75mm M2 on our M4s; its muzzle velocity was fifteen hundred feet per second. These had been replaced on the PzKw IV by a 75mm KwK41 gun with a much higher muzzle velocity (three thousand feet per second). The Mark IV was a smaller, low-profile tank that weighed only twenty-two tons compared to our M4’s thirty-seven and a half tons. It had four inches of armor on the vertical part of its glacis plate and a wider track than the M4, which enabled it to negotiate soft ground more easily than the M4 could.