Captain Fred Parkin, the intelligence officer of the 813th Tank Destroyer Battalion (attached to the 79th Infantry Division), drove ahead, left the edge of his last map, got lost, and with his jeep driver liberated Roubaix, a city of 175,000 souls.72 During the 1st Infantry Division’s advance on Juvigny on 13–15 August, the otherwise underemployed 635th Tank Destroyer Battalion (towed) ferried the doughs forward in its halftracks.73
French and American forces from First Army captured Paris on 25 August. Ike had hoped to bypass the city, but a Resistance uprising got into trouble, and—subject to strong pressure from Charles De Gaulle—Eisenhower had to order troops into Paris.
The 4th Armored Division assaulted Troyes on the River Seine the next day with the goal of forcing a crossing. The armor advanced in sweeping “desert formation”—with tank destroyers following in a secondary line—expecting the mere five hundred defenders reported by reconnaissance. Instead, they encountered two thousand determined SS soldiers.74
Artillery pounded the city while the tanks, armored infantry, and M18s of the 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion advanced. The SS waited until the attackers were almost upon them before they opened fire from basements and buildings. Heavy return artillery fire struck the Americans until Capt Thomas Evans maneuvered one of his M18s into position and knocked out the German OP in a church steeple.
One of Evans’s M18s was hit as the SS mounted a counterattack. The captain leapt to the deck of the crippled vehicle and raked the oncoming storm troopers with the .50-caliber machine gun until the M18 was hammered by another devastating blow.75 But the charge had been repulsed. The 4th Armored Division slugged its way through the city.
By early the next day, the division owned the ruins of Troyes. The last river crossings along the Seine were denied to the Germans on 29 August.
The M10s of the 702d Tank Destroyer Battalion soon left the Seine and Somme rivers behind, and the men adopted “One More River to Cross” as a favorite unit song.76 There would be no other organized defensive line in northern France.
The enemy had lost all but about one hundred of the twenty-three hundred tanks and assault guns he had deployed in Normandy.77 Perhaps half that number had been destroyed in the American sector by a combination of TDs, tanks, artillery, fighter-bombers, antitank guns, and bazookas. TDs had accounted for roughly one hundred fifty panzers in fairly sizable engagements, and probably that many again in numerous scattered encounters. The tank killers were carrying their share of the load.
Operation Dragoon
On 15 August, MajGen Lucian Truscott’s VI Corps, Seventh Army, made an assault landing at St. Tropez in the French Riviera. As before the Anzio operation, the Americans and British had disagreed over the wisdom of the project. Churchill judged that it would fatally weaken the Italian campaign by drawing off too many divisions. The Americans were thinking in terms of logistics and wanted to capture the ports of Toulon and Marseilles. Indeed, once the northern and southern fronts linked up, these ports were to satisfy one-third of the logistical needs in northern France until Antwerp was opened in December.
The 3d, 45th, and 36th Infantry divisions stormed ashore (west-to-east, respectively) at 0800 hours supported by air strikes, naval bombardment, DD tanks, and parachute drops inland from the beaches. They encountered virtually no initial resistance because only two German infantry regiments from separate divisions stood in their way.78 With a self-propelled TD battalion attached in addition to the usual separate tank battalion, the truck-rich American infantry divisions were equivalent to full-strength panzergrenadier divisions.79
The men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion added one more D-day to their list and hit the beach with the 3d Infantry Division. As far as the 601st was concerned, the operation was less trouble than the practice landings at Naples had been. Recon sent platoons in several directions, and another rat race across France began.80
The line companies of 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion landed with the 45th Infantry Division. The M8s and M20s of Reconnaissance Company landed the next day and moved ahead of the advancing infantry, who in some cases rode on the battalion’s M10s. Battalion destroyers linked up with the paratroopers and helped capture Le Muy on D+1.81
Three platoons of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion landed on Green Beach with the 36th Infantry Division at H+40 minutes. The 1st Platoon of Company B drove to Drammont to assist the doughs against strongpoints and pillboxes, while the 2d Platoon of Company C established a roadblock to protect the left flank of the 141st RCT. The 1st Platoon of Company B helped clear Yellow Beach and captured forty-five POWs.82
The Italian campaign veterans, already clued in to the importance of combined arms operations, comfortably formed up into task forces to drive inland. The 36th Infantry Division, for example, established three such commands. One of them, Task Force Butler, included elements of the 141st RCT, 753d Tank Battalion, 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion, a cavalry squadron, and a SP artillery battalion. Division ordered Reconnaissance Company to race ahead of the columns and establish contact with Allied paratroopers. By 19 August, TF Butler had reached the Digne-Sisteron area some sixty miles from the coast and encountered no organized resistance along the way.83
The 3d and 45th Infantry divisions raced west and then hooked north up the Rhone Valley east of the river—between Germany and most of the German troops in southern France. Behind them, four French divisions began to come ashore and turned initially to the task of taking Marseilles and Toulon. The Maquis emerged to assist the American advance and the French assaults on the major port cities.
Stripped almost bare to feed the attrition machine in Normandy, the German Nineteenth Army had only one mobile formation left in southern France, the 11th Panzer Division. One mountain and seven understrength infantry divisions would be nothing but stuffing for the POW cages if they could not escape what, in effect, was a massive encirclement.84
On 16 August, Berlin accepted the inevitable and ordered a general withdrawal from southern France, but Hitler ordered that garrisons be left behind in Marseilles, Toulon, and a few other ports to deny their use by the Allies.85 The two main cities nevertheless fell to the French by 28 August.
Alarmed at the speed of the American advance, the Germans moved the 11th Panzer Division to Montelimar, where it tangled with the 36th Infantry Division for over a week. The clash built in scope and energy as the two divisions brought their full strengths to bear over the first several days, culminating in a series of indecisive battles on 25–26 August.
The crews of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion saw only limited action in the course of five German attacks on 25 August. That night, however, Generalmajor Wend von Wietersheim, commanding the 11th Panzer Division, ordered his panzergrenadier regiment, reinforced by artillery and ten tanks, to attack American positions threatening his escape route north of Montelimar. About 0100 hours on 26 August, the German force struck a roadblock near La Concourde manned by two infantry companies and two platoons of B/636th. German infantry infiltrated the position and located the M10s, and a German panzer company commander then fired flares that illuminated the armor for his tanks standing off in the dark. Five M10s quickly burst into flames and a sixth was hit. Following a two-hour exchange of fire, the Americans retreated to the MLR fifteen hundred yards to the rear. The Germans had also lost heavily among the panzergrenadiers.
The 11th Panzer Division during the day received orders to join the withdrawal to Lyon. By evening, TF Butler had so many targets in its sights that it had to call for extra artillery observers to help dispatch the retreating German columns.86
Mostly, these were good times for the tank killers.
During their first two weeks in France, TDs from the 645th encountered scattered German armor, claiming two Tigers, one Panther, one Mark IV, one Mark III, and one SP gun for the loss of ten casualties (most from
