The 3d Infantry Division and the rest of VI Corps pushed through the High Vosges and joined XV Corps on the Rhine River. The M10s from the 601st acted as assault guns during the 3d Infantry Division’s breakthrough and fired on strongpoints. No German armor was encountered. A platoon of Recon Company led the advance into Strasbourg to relieve the French on 27 November.37
The 636th Tank Destroyer Battalion also battled through the Vosges with the 36th Infantry Division. One night, Sgt Tom Sherman had to drive a new lieutenant forward to one of the gun platoons. Crawling up a winding mountain trail with no lights, Sherman just made out a hand waving him to a stop. The sergeant recognized one of the outfit’s old campaigners, a veteran of every fight since Salerno. The soldier motioned Sherman and the lieutenant to silence. “See those lights over there?” he whispered in a voice tight with fear. “That’s a German tank.”
“Why don’t you go get it?” queried the lieutenant quietly.
“I don’t want it,” replied the soldier.38
Not far to the north, Patton’s dashing Third Army spent most of November deep in mud as it prosecuted the almost medieval reduction of the fortifications at and around Metz. The tank destroyers played the role of modern-day siege engines. Twentieth Corps had the mission to capture the city and three infantry (the 5th, 90th, and 95th) and one armored (the 10th) divisions—supported by seven tank destroyer battalions—with which to do so.39
The first assaults on the nearly impervious fortresses had begun as early as 27 September, when the 818th Tank Destroyer Battalion participated in a costly and ultimately unsuccessful 5th Infantry Division bid to take Fort Driant, one of the outer defenses around Metz. The TD fire proved completely ineffective against the works—but no great shame, because heavy artillery and air strikes failed as well.40
By November, XX Corps planners had decided to invest the fortifications the corps could not storm and to isolate and capture Metz itself. The entire Third Army launched an offensive on 8 November in weather so atrocious that the attack caught the Germans by surprise. The TDs provided direct fire support to the attacking doughs when they could, but between the rushing Moselle River and the mud, the vehicles often had trouble reaching the forward positions. Two platoons from B/773d Tank Destroyer Battalion helped beat off a vigorous German tank-infantry counterattack launched against the 90th Infantry Division’s 358th Infantry Regiment at Distroff on 15 November. Two gun sections of Company B were overrun. When the TDers withdrew, one M10 overturned, and three crewmen were wounded by enemy fire. The German attack carried into Distroff, where the remaining M10s engaged several German SP guns, with both sides losing one vehicle. The street fighting was so close and the issue in such doubt that the American commander called artillery down on his own positions. The panzergrenadiers eventually pulled back.41
Patton’s pincers clamped shut around Metz on 18 November. Two days later, elements of the 5th and 95th Infantry divisions (with the towed 774th and 607th Tank Destroyer battalions attached, respectively) had fought their way into the city. Resistance ceased two days after that.42
Elsewhere in the Third Army’s sector, ground conditions were so poor that even when the 4th Armored Division and 704th Tank Destroyer Battalion clashed with the Panzer Lehr Division near Baerendorf in mid- November, both sides, road-bound armor could only act as artillery support for the armored infantry and panzergrenadiers.43
The Fifth Panzer Army mysteriously slipped away from the front by 20 November, but the German infantry holding the West Wall defenses remained to trouble the tank killers.44 Where the doughs tried to clear the pillboxes, the tank destroyers provided fire support.
Much of the Siegfried Line around Saarlautern incorporated the local towns, which forced the TD crews to remember everything they had been taught about street fighting. The 607th Tank Destroyer Battalion—which had been re-equipped with M36s during the battle for Metz—supported the doughs of the 379th Infantry Regiment, 95th Infantry Division, in the capture of Saarlautern. The assault across the Saar River began the night of 2–3 December, and early the next morning, Lt Richard Reynolds led his TD platoon across a captured bridge still wired for demolition. (The 607th’s informal history attributes the action at the bridge to Lt Calvin Stone, but the official U.S. Army history cites a DSC award in attributing command to Reynolds.) The Germans counterattacked with tanks and infantry supported by heavy artillery fire. Reynold’s M36s helped repulse wave after wave of assaults— including a night-time attempt to run tanks loaded with explosives onto the bridge that the TD crews stopped only two hundred yards short—and destroyed four panzers for the loss of one destroyer.
Two M36s from Company C, meanwhile, supported the infantry attack on southern Saarlautern and Linsdorf. The TDs were advancing carefully up a street to eliminate a roadblock when a window shutter opened and a German bazooka crew fired at the lead vehicle. The round struck the turret, but a bedroll and a turret lifting ring detonated the warhead and saved the destroyer. The covering M36 pounded the adjacent houses, and thirty- five German soldiers emerged to surrender.
The grinding advance continued toward the suburb of Fraulautern, with the TDs engaging pillboxes and other strongpoints in support of the infantry. Each advance was met by heavy artillery and mortar fire. Eighteen hundred rounds struck the 607th’s positions at Fraulautern in a single day. During the battle for the town, Pvt Eugene Esposito from Company C had to take charge of his M36 when his commander was killed by machine-gun fire. Esposito destroyed the MG and its crew. He then ordered his vehicle forward and spotted a bazooka crew hiding behind a stone wall, and he dispatched them as well. He next spotted a flamethrower team creeping toward him along the wall. This time, his 90mm fire dropped the wall on top of the Germans. And the fighting went on.45
To Patton’s north, Hodges’s First Army received the nod to undertake the main effort for the American 12th Army Group when Eisenhower, Monty, and Bradley conferred on 18 October. Hodges decided he had to try again to clear the Hurtgen Forest before he could push on to the Rhine River. General Omar Bradley years later conceded, “What followed … was some of the most brutal and difficult fighting of the war. The battle … was sheer butchery on both sides.”46
The Hurtgen was a dense fir forest covering a broken land of gorges and sharp ridges. The Germans had embedded a seemingly endless series of camouflaged defensive positions through the forest. A few narrow trails and fire breaks offered TDs and tanks the only routes for maneuvering forward, and these were often mined and covered by AT guns. Indeed, armor could offer help to the doughs only occasionally.
On 2 November, V Corps, 28th Infantry Division, which had recently replaced the exhausted 9th Infantry Division, kicked off an attack aimed at seizing control of the Monchau-Schmidt area. The 112th Infantry Regiment advanced up the narrow Kall Trail and took Schmidt by the next day. American commanders had failed to reckon with the fact that the Germans would view the operation as being aimed at the nearby Roer River dams, and the men were therefore surprised when a vigorous tank-supported counterattack exploded out of the trees. The doughs were driven out of Schmidt and fell back to a village called Kommerscheidt.
Three Shermans from the 707th Tank Battalion executed a daring advance up the Kall Trail on 4 November to support the doughs in Kommerscheidt, but the M4s were hard-pressed by the German panzers. The next day, six more Shermans and nine TDs from C/893d Tank Destroyer Battalion traversed the treacherous trail to bolster the defenses, but to no avail.
TD platoon commander Lt Turney Leonard earned a Medal of Honor for his part in the action, which his citation described in these terms: “During the fierce three-day engagement, [Leonard] repeatedly braved overwhelming enemy fire in advance of his platoon to direct the fire of his tank destroyer from exposed, dismounted positions. He went on lone reconnaissance missions to discover what opposition his men faced, and on one occasion, when fired upon by a hostile machine gun, advanced alone and eliminated the enemy emplacement with a hand grenade. When a strong German attack threatened to overrun friendly positions, he moved through withering artillery, mortar, and small arms fire, reorganized confused infantry units whose leaders had become casualties, and exhorted them to hold firm. Although wounded early in battle, he continued to direct fire from his advanced position until he was disabled by a high-explosive shell which shattered his arm, forcing him to withdraw. He was last seen at a medical aid station which was subsequently captured by the enemy. By his superb courage, inspiring leadership, and indomitable fighting spirit, 1st Lt Leonard enabled our forces to hold off the enemy attack and was personally responsible for the direction of fire which destroyed six German tanks.”
