eyes of the world are upon you…. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped, and battle-hardened. He will fight savagely…. I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty, and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full Victory!”
Just after midnight on 6 June 1944, men of the 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion, stationed at Tilshead, England, were disturbed by the deep, soul-shaking roar of hundreds of planes passing overhead on their way to France. The men knew that this was it.1
Soon, the parachutes of the British 6th Airborne Division caught the air in the dark sky northeast of Caen, while the men of the American 101st and 82d Airborne divisions leapt into the unknown near Ste. Mere-Eglise and Carentan. Their mission was to secure road junctions and exit routes from the invasion beaches on the coast of Normandy. When the sky brightened, gliders bearing more paratroopers landed in hedgerow-bounded fields, and Allied bombers and fighter-bombers began the first of the eleven thousand sorties they would fly that day against German emplacements, troop concentrations, and transportation nodes.2
At 0530 hours, those warships with fire missions among the seven hundred in the vast Allied armada off the choppy Norman coast turned their guns toward land and bombarded the beaches assigned to Commonwealth forces. Twenty minutes later, shells began to crash into the German defenses along the American beaches, codenamed Omaha and Utah.
At 0630, doughs of the 4th Infantry Division and amphibious Duplex Drive (DD) Sherman tanks from the 70th Tank Battalion hit the beach at Utah, the VII Corps landing area. Within three hours, they had overwhelmed the defenses and were moving inland to link up with the airborne, all at a cost of only one hundred ninety-seven ground-force casualties.
The V Corps landing at Omaha, conducted by elements of the 1st and 29th Infantry divisions and the 741st and 743d Tank battalions, encountered heavy seas and an extraordinarily difficult job. Most of the 741st’s DD tanks sank and, as General Eisenhower had predicted in his message to the invasion force, the Germans along the beach fought savagely. Nevertheless, by the afternoon the doughs and tanks clawed their way off the sand. They left twenty-five hundred casualties in their wake.3
The North Africa veterans of the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion, less Reconnaissance and B companies and the administrative elements, rolled off their landing craft at Utah Beach as part of the twenty-fifth wave on 6 June. About 2015 hours, the TDs—attached to 4th Infantry Division artillery—moved into positions just south of Audoville La Hubert to provide antitank defense to division and artillery headquarters. One platoon encountered sporadic light machine-gun and some small-arms fire.4
The Tank Destroyer Force had entered Hitler’s Fortress Europa.
The U.S. Army had allocated forty-eight tank destroyer battalions for the fight in Western Europe, plus four that were scheduled to transfer from Italy when Operation Anvil (later called Dragoon)—the invasion of southern France—commenced in August. In accordance with the wishes of higher headquarters, half of these battalions were towed. As of 4 June, nineteen self-propelled and eleven towed battalions were ready for battle in England.5
The important role played by TDs in Italy as supporting artillery had made an impression on Army planners. All TD battalions in England were issued fire direction sets, switchboards, telephones, wire, aiming circles, and the other accoutrements necessary to accomplish basic surveys and fire direction. The battalions all conducted indirect-fire training as time allowed.6
June 1944 was a portentous month for the Tank Destroyer Force, although there is little sign that anyone on the chain of command fully realized it.
Amphibious maneuvers before the invasion indicated that the towed battalions were extremely vulnerable when offloading on the beach and deploying for battle. As a result, the Army reduced the towed-gun element of the invasion force to a single battalion.7 At the same time, the only towed battalion in Italy was being converted to M18s. Clearly, the towed-gun concept was in trouble. The situation was somewhat reminiscent of the dispatch of the first TD battalions to North Africa with an obsolete organization and equipment.
The first M4 Shermans with 76mm main guns had arrived in England by D-Day. Although the new version did not enter combat immediately, the fire-power gap between tank and tank destroyer had been erased. Indeed, the new Sherman had thicker armor than a TD, boasted machine guns, and was about as fast as the M10. If a tank was as good or better than a TD in almost every respect, what was the point of having a separate TD arm?
On 16 May, Army Ground Forces had asked the ETO whether it wanted any of the new M36 tank destroyers under development by Ordnance. The M36 was essentially an M10 with a 90mm antiaircraft gun mounted in a redesigned, open-topped turret to perform the antitank mission. The ETO expressed no interest.8
The GIs and Tommies fell short of almost all of their D-Day objectives. Four days of hard fighting passed before the troops in the two American beachheads were able to link up.
The men of the 635th Tank Destroyer Battalion (towed) splashed ashore across Omaha Beach from LSTs and Rhino barges on D+2 and were initially attached to 1st Infantry Division artillery. By nightfall, the gun companies were parceled out to the infantry regiments and the gun platoons to the infantry battalions in what became standard operating procedure for the employment of towed TD battalions. As the outfit’s AAR noted, “[the gun platoons] were not under 635th Battalion control but were part of each [infantry] battalion and were used by the battalion commanders as antitank guns.”
This use reflected a recognition that the doughboys’ standard-issue 57mm antitank gun could not handle the threat posed by German tanks. Indeed, the Army command planned before the invasion to attach a towed TD battalion to each infantry division and to hold the SP battalions in corps and army reserves. By D-Day, it had already amended this decision by attaching one SP TD battalion to each armored division.9
The 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion landed at Omaha Beach on 11 June. The men expected to surge ashore in six feet of water with guns blazing so were pleasantly surprised to roll ashore almost dry and find military police directing traffic. The battalion moved that night to La Mine, where the stench convinced the men that they were surrounded by German corpses. Dawn revealed a dead bull in the center of the CP.10
After consolidating the beachheads, Allied forces built up with amazing speed. In less than four weeks, nearly one million men and 177,000 vehicles landed, along with more than 500,000 tons of supplies to keep them fighting.11 In the American sector, two more corps—VIII and XIX—became active during that time.
The Tank Destroyer Force kept pace. The 1st Tank Destroyer Group came ashore at Utah Beach on 12 June 1944, the M10s of the 803d Tank Destroyer Battalion rolled across Omaha Beach that same day, and more outfits followed. By the end of the month, the 801st, 612th, 607th, 823d, 821st, 813th, and 634th had arrived in a parade of clanking M10 and prime mover tracks.
The first major American objective inland was the port of Cherbourg, and by 18 June, MajGen J. Lawton Collins’s VII Corps had wheeled from Utah Beach and cut across the Cotentin Peninsula on which the city is located. The 1st Platoon of A/899th Tank Destroyer Battalion joined the task force that accomplished the mission the night of 17–18 June. Company A was strafed four times by American P-51 fighters on 22 June, and one TD was set on fire but saved.12
The remnants of five German divisions defended Cherbourg, and they had orders from Hitler to fight to the last.13 The M10s from the 899th pushed toward the port with the doughs of the 9th Infantry Division, and TDs engaged pillboxes and AT guns as the Americans approached the outskirts. On 22 June, one M10 crew from 2d Platoon of Company C—which was supporting the 47th Infantry Regiment—confronted a 77mm AT gun that commanded the road at Le Motel. Smoke was placed on the gun, and the M10 rolled onto the street and
