Reconnaissance Company), two M10s, two M8s, and two M20s.87
By 31 August, the 3d and 45th Infantry divisions had pulled nearly abreast of Lyon. The French 1st Armored Division, meanwhile, led a Gallic sweep northward along the west side of the Rhone River.88
On 1 September, the 11th Panzer Division launched a spoiling attack against the 45th Infantry Division. A strong tank-infantry force struck Meximieux, which was defended by two reserve companies of the 179th Infantry Regiment and the regimental headquarters—including clerks and kitchen personnel—supported by 2d Platoon, A/645th Tank Destroyer Battalion.
Lieutenant Joseph Dixon was just moving two of his M10s into the village when the Germans attacked. The two TDs took up positions near the center of town, with the first about one hundred yards ahead of the second. The TD commanders, Sgt Robert Fitts and Sgt Wayne Menear, positioned their vehicles so that they were partially concealed by buildings.
Ten minutes later, a platoon of Panthers raced up the wide main street into Meximieux, firing their machine guns in all directions and crushing everything in their path. Fitts’s gunner, Cpl William McAuliffe, waited until the lead Mark V was only seventy-five yards away before he fired his 3-inch gun. The round penetrated the right front hull of the Panther, which burst into flames and coasted another twenty-five yards. McAuliffe nailed the next tank seconds later at one hundred yards. This tank also caught fire and drove into a building, setting the neighboring houses ablaze. The other three tanks flew by Fitts.
Menear’s gunner, Pvt James Waldron, hit the third Panther at a range of only twenty-five yards. For some reason, he used a round of HE. The shell did not penetrate the armor, but it shattered the driver’s periscope, and the Panther plowed into another building between the American TDs. American doughs killed or captured the crewmen as they bailed out.
One of the last two Panthers stopped about fifty yards beyond Menear’s TD and turned around. Waldron immobilized the Mark V with a shot to the right track. The infantry opened up on the tank with 81mm mortars and took care of the crew when it, too, bailed out. The last Panther fled.
The Americans beat off 11th Panzer Division attacks until dark. By day’s end, the defenders had killed or captured nearly one hundred thirty Germans and destroyed eight medium tanks, four light tanks, three assault guns, and seven other vehicles. Losses totaled about thirty men killed or wounded (and one hundred eighty five presumed captured) as well as two tank destroyers and about twenty-five other vehicles destroyed or damaged.89
Tank destroyer recon elements in jeeps and M8s ranged far ahead of the advancing columns with no contact other than radio communications. They fought innumerable tiny actions against small roadblocks and surprised German columns. Reconnaissance Company of the 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion entered Lyon at 1630 hours on 2 September and reported the city clear of the enemy but all the bridges blown. Recon later amended its report to say there was considerable sniper fire. A few days later, Battalion won approval to begin rotating the recon platoons so that men could get some rest and their vehicles receive critical maintenance.90
The advancing columns nipped at the heels of the retreating German forces. On 14 September, the M10s of A/636th were advancing with C/753d Tank Battalion and 36th Infantry Division doughs.91 The 753d’s AAR recorded, “First Section [of the 1st Platoon] … had run into numerous enemy withdrawing. In fact so close to the enemy and so many, [that] one tank moving down the road to St. Sauver from Allencourt was given a stop sign by an enemy MP to allow enemy vehicles to continue along the road perpendicular to the advance of the troops.”92
Sergeant Tom Sherman from the 636th was near the column’s point. He reported: “The destroyer driver who was just ahead of my jeep realized that the [German] bus driver didn’t intend to stop, so he slammed on his brakes and brought the destroyer to an abrupt stop. As the bus roared by, we could see that it was loaded with German soldiers. The driver of the destroyer in front of my jeep started to pull forward, so his gunner could get a better shot at the fleeing bus when another bus loaded with German soldiers following closely behind the other bus collided with the barrel of the destroyer’s gun [which stripped the mechanism].”93
The tanks and TDs shot up the enemy column.
The advance was so rapid that maintenance and supply problems posed the greatest challenge. Lack of fuel, supplies, and replacement parts gradually slowed the Seventh Army’s pace. At one point in September, almost half of the M10s in the 645th Tank Destroyer Battalion were deadlined, most because of worn-out tracks.94
The history of the 157th Infantry Regiment summed up the advance this way: “The men drank champagne, cognac, white wine, red wine, and eau de vie (White Lightning), flirted with the French girls, and chased the Germans. Said they, ‘This is the way to fight a war…. Chase them for six days, fight them for two…. We never had it so good.’”95
General Johannes Blaskowitz, CG of Germany’s Army Group G, might have summed the situation up differently. He had lost more than half the 150,000 troops who had been manning southern France on 15 August.96
End of the Rat Race
Near the extreme left of First Army’s advance, the 3d Armored Division reached the high ground west of Mons, Belgium, on 2 September. First Army CG LtGen Courtney Hodges, alerted by Ultra that the Germans were concentrating in that area, had sent VII Corps to spring a trap. The tanks and accompanying 703d Tank Destroyer Battalion TDs encountered an estimated thirty thousand German troops who were attempting to withdraw into the defenses of the West Wall. The Germans were now caught between VII Corps to the east, XIX Corps to the west, V Corps to the south, and the British to the north. The 3d Armored Division, joined by the 1st Infantry Division, proceeded to annihilate an entire corps. A platoon of TDs under the command of Capt Bill Smith destroyed twenty vehicles in six hours of fighting. Twenty-five thousand Germans surrendered to the American divisions.97
By 3 September, the British had liberated Brussels, and they took Antwerp the following day (although the Germans would block sea access through the Schelde Estuary for nearly two more months). Eisenhower told his senior commanders that resistance along the entire front showed signs of collapse.98 In the face of these grim developments, Hitler on 5 September reinstated von Rundstedt as overall commander of the western front. Hodges told his staff on 6 September that with ten more days of good weather the war would be over.99 On 11 September, patrols from Third and Seventh armies made first contact and the two fronts soon became one. But things were about to change.
For one thing, the supply situation was becoming terribly constricting across the entire front. Progress had far outstripped pre-invasion planning, and logisticians had to resort to ad hoc measures—including air deliveries and the famous Red Ball Express truck route—to get supplies from the beaches to the spearheads. Neither First nor Third armies by the end of August had meaningful ration or ammunition reserves, and fuel was used as quickly as it arrived. In Third Army, the 814th Tank Destroyer Battalion was rationing ammunition—nine rounds per day for each M10—and on 29 August CCB/7th Armored Division literally ran out of gas in the middle of the World War I battlefield at Verdun. (The attached TDs, which burned diesel, still had some reserves).100 The 610th Tank Destroyer Battalion kept moving only because the “gas noncom,” Corporal Bruff, was able to supply the entire outfit with captured German fuel.101
Likewise, Seventh Army dangled at the end of a 500-mile supply line that ran back to Marseilles and the other southern French ports.
Moreover, the Allied advance was reaching the outer glacis of Germany itself. There lay the defenses of the Siegfried Line, or West Wall as the Germans called it, and considerable stretches of inhospitable terrain.
First Army’s 3d Armored Division occupied Rotgen, Germany, on 12 September. Beginning under cover of darkness (and Hodges’s authorization for “reconnaissance in force” until sufficient fuel and ammo arrived), the
