been spotted, and the M10s crept forward and opened fire. One Mark IV began to smoke, and the other withdrew.
For all the reconnaissance and planning by the young lieutenant, the needs of the infantry commander took over once the shooting started. Several hours after the first engagement, Sergeant Ward pulled his M10 into a field. To his left, he could see three Sherman tanks working with the doughs. The infantry battalion commander ordered Ward to pull even with his forward line. As the M10 crossed the open area to the next hedgerow, a 75mm round penetrated the thin armor and set the vehicle on fire. Crewmen sprinted to safety in a ditch.
The infantry commander ordered another one of Ford’s TDs to fire on some houses. Sergeant Shicks pulled up but first shot five or six rounds into the next hedgerow to flush out the suspected antitank gun. Shicks’s gun jammed. About this time, another lieutenant arrived to relieve Ford, who was ordered to move over and take charge of 1st Platoon. The other lieutenant mounted Sergeant Lum’s M10, which swung past Shicks and advanced. Ten minutes later, the M10 was hit by a round that severely wounded the lieutenant and Sergeant Lums, and killed or wounded most of the crew. Ford’s transfer was off, and thanks to the arrival of a replacement M10, the platoon still had something with which to fight.
The 2d Platoon’s gunners destroyed two tanks, two SP guns, and one halftrack-mounted 75mm gun between 14 and 18 July, despite the trying conditions.
One German Panzer Lehr tanker captured by nearby Company C told interrogators that the he and his comrades were not all that worried by bombing, but they did not like the TDs (even though four 3-inch rounds had bounced off his Panther before it was KO’d!).39
The Problem with Towed Guns
Despite having their guns deployed with the front-line infantry, the towed battalions did almost no tank killing and expended most of their ammunition in indirect fire. While working with the 1st Infantry Division, for example, the 3-inch gun crews from the 635th during all of June saw precisely one German tank—which had evidently suffered mechanical failure—and they encountered none in July. The battalion could only claim to have killed at least six enemy soldiers during exchanges of machine-gun fire.40 The 801st, which landed on 13 June and supported the 4th Infantry Division, knocked out a single panzer (using a bazooka) in mid- July.41 Despite many false alarms, the 802d did not see any panzers during its first month of fighting in July.42
The difficulty in actually bringing the towed guns into play is also reflected in the extremely low casualties suffered by the battalions. The 635th in June lost six men killed and ten wounded, and another three and ten, respectively, in July.43 The 801st lost only one man seriously wounded in June and a handful more to mortar fire in July.44 Other battalions suffered somewhat higher levels of casualties, but none approached the losses in the self-propelled—much less the tank— battalions.
The towed commands learned quickly that they had to dig in—and sandbag their positions, if possible— because of German artillery and mortar fire. This tended to make gun positions quasi-permanent. Because the barrels were so close to the ground, the crews usually had to cut their own roads to firing positions and then cut down one or more hedgerows in front of them to create a field of fire. All this left the guns more vulnerable to observation and made extraction for quick redeployment against armored threats from a new direction exceedingly difficult.
The towed units also discovered that they could not fight effectively on the move. Driving was painfully slow for the M3 halftrack prime movers and guns down the narrow dirt roads of the bocage. Experiments carried out by the 821st Tank Destroyer Battalion suggested that towed guns moving into even reconnoitered but unprepared positions would not have enough time to get off the road to a place with a proper field of fire quickly enough to combat a tank attack. This meant guns would have to deploy in the road itself—a recipe for disaster.45
The invasion had hardly begun when infantry division commanders realized the drawbacks to towed TD units and demanded SP battalions. To the extent that a surplus of SP battalions was available beyond the needs of the armored divisions, they were assigned to the infantry. The Army also raised the priority for SP battalions in the shipping schedules.46
The towed battalions had a somewhat easier time establishing radio links with the infantry because mobility was not an issue. Each gun company in the 802d Tank Destroyer Battalion, for example, was ordered on 12 July to send one SCR-608 radio to their supported infantry regiment’s CP, while Battalion supplied one to 83d Infantry Division headquarters.47
A Sudden Feeling of Impotence
Early encounters with Panther tanks in the bocage demonstrated the alarming fact that the 3-inch/76mm gun could not penetrate the panzer’s frontal armor except at near point-blank ranges or the occasional lucky shot. (Later clashes with Tigers would produce the same results.) Ike lamented, “You mean our 76 won’t knock these Panthers out? I thought it was going to be the wonder gun of the war. Why is it I’m always the last to hear about this stuff? Ordnance told me this 76 would take care of anything the Germans had. Now I find you can’t knock out a damn thing with it.”48
On 6 July, the American European command cabled Army Ground Forces and requested that all M10 battalions be converted to the M36 and that no more M10 battalions be shipped to the ETO.49 By mid-July, TD officers were discussing whether they could integrate 90mm antiaircraft guns into their operations.50
The tank destroyer crews had faced Tigers and Panthers in Italy and come away supremely confident in their ability to defeat the enemy. Now there was a widespread feeling of inadequacy regarding the very same equipment. What had changed?
The irony was that important aspects of the tank destroyer doctrine had worked in North Africa and Italy— imperfectly, as most plans will in the real world, but they had worked! The only times that American troops had encountered panzers in large numbers, the Germans had been attacking. Yes, reality had thrown a curve ball by confronting the tank killers with combined-arms attacks, but in every case in which a tank destroyer battalion had been able to respond more or less as a whole, the tank killers had beaten the Panzertruppe. El Guettar, Salerno, Anzio, and even Le Desert in Normandy had worked out more or less as General Bruce and his brain trust had foreseen. The massed fire of many TDs from various angles had been so effective that even when the crews had watched rounds bounce of the thick armor on the front of the Marks V and VI, other shots had struck home. Indeed, the TDs had usually dished out lopsided losses to the enemy. Only at Kasserine Pass, where TD units were committed piecemeal, had the tank destroyers failed.
Tank destroyers working together could beat the heavy German armor when playing defense, with all the advantages that accrue to the defender.
The problem, again, was that the doctrine was incomplete. While offensive in spirit, it was defensive in nature and offered no real plan for TD crews participating in attacks against small panzer elements spread out among dug-in infantry. The fighting in North Africa and Italy had hinted at this problem, but the best German armor had been scarce in the former, and mountainous conditions in the latter had usually precluded the use of large numbers of TDs at any one time.
Now, the Germans would enjoy the advantages of the defender against American armor in most situations. The question was, would they come out and attack en masse again and allow the Tank Destroyer Force to return to its game plan?
