up at Lippstadt with Ninth Army’s 2d Armored Division—which had swung around the Ruhr industrial basin on the north. The Ruhr was cut off from the rest of Germany, trapping more than three hundred thousand German troops.
The 644th Tank Destroyer Battalion, operating with its old partners in the 8th Infantry Division, supported the First Army push from the south to eliminate the pocket. The outfit’s informal history recorded, “At first the going was as rough as any we’d had. The TDs operated as tanks, assault guns, personnel carriers, recon vehicles, and anything else that occurred to those minds at higher headquarters. Recon Company showed the division how cavalry troops ought to do it, capturing towns, leading the infantry, poking up side roads to tell the doughs if there were enemy SPs waiting for them, operating twenty-four hours a day.” The TDs worked closely in combat teams with the 740th Tank Battalion.31
Ninth Army troops, meanwhile, compressed the pocket from the north. On 17 April while the jaws closed tight, the 8th Infantry Division took a record 50,192 prisoners, and organized resistance collapsed. Four days later, Generalfeldmarshall Walter Model, alone but for his intelligence chief, shot himself rather than surrender.32
While the battle to reduce the Ruhr Pocket raged, columns fanned deeper into Germany all along the front. The history of the 817th Tank Destroyer Battalion—recently re-equipped with M18s and now supporting the 104th Infantry Division—recorded:
The Germans were disorganized and scattered. Constant pressure had to be put on them to keep them from being able to reorganize. Daily, the battalion advanced from twenty-five to forty miles, and the supply sections of Headquarters Company were working twenty-four hours a day to fill the seemingly limitless thirst of the Hellcats for gasoline. The Weser had been crossed, and then there was a mad dash for Warburg; then the Leine River and Gottingen. The Leine River crossed, we pushed onward, ever eastward into the heart of the black Reich.
Along the highways of battle, the townspeople and farmers gaped in amazement out of the windows of their white-flag-bedecked houses at the equipment and material of this great American Army. They forgot the advances of their own blitz of ’39 and ’40 and marveled at ours. They were being conquered and overrun, and they knew it.
Each day, every installation of the battalion moved. The name of last night’s town was soon forgotten, and all eyes turned eastward. “Onward! Onward!” was the cry, and the 817th rolled onward, sometimes carrying the doughboys with them. Soon, perhaps, it would be “finis la guerre.”33
Odd situations cropped up as operations sometimes looked more and more like a somewhat violent installation of a military government than a war. On 5 April, for example, the CP group of 823d Tank Destroyer Battalion—which was sweeping toward Magdeburg on the Elbe River with the 30th Infantry and 2d Armored divisions—entered Lage about noon. The men discovered a state of anarchy, with Russian slave laborers battling the locals in fierce rioting. The Americans spent the rest of the day restoring order. The 823d’s AAR noted caustically, “The entire battalion’s heart bleeds for the German storekeepers who were so thoroughly looted.”
A week later, CP personnel had to disperse slave laborers and Germans who were looting a sugar warehouse at the outfit’s temporary home in Braunschweig. The next day, the CP had just set up in Farsleben when it was swarmed by refugees from a train that had been hauling nearly three thousand people to a concentration camp. They were in bad shape and had not eaten in four days, and some had died of starvation. Battalion CO LtCol Stanley Dettmar ordered the burgermeister to get the bakeries operating and feed the people. Meanwhile, rioting broke out back at the sugar warehouse.34
The Germans resisted fiercely in a few cities where they could scrape together some infantry, a few tanks, and 88mm antiaircraft guns. The 3d and 45th Infantry divisions on 16 April encountered one such frustrating situation at Nurnberg, the scene of so many Nazi pageants but now a heap of ruins. The men of the 601st Tank Destroyer Battalion fought their way into a city with the doughs, their first experience with urban fighting. The outfit’s informal history reports, “The enemy was in the cellars and on the rooftops and in every window and on all sides. The battalion took some casualties, but it inflicted tenfold and more upon the Kraut. Those ‘90s’ were everywhere, and in several instances the tubes were literally inside the windows of the Kraut strongpoints.”35
On 17 April, SSgt Bill Harper, who had battled panzers since the swirling dust at El Guettar, dismounted from his M36 and hunted down a troublesome sniper with his pistol.
Nurnberg fell on 20 April, Hitler’s birthday.
As always, TD recon men were in the van. The 355th Infantry Regiment, 89th Infantry Division, and C/602d Tank Destroyer Battalion attacked Zwickau on 17 April, because the city had refused to surrender. Lieutenant Kilbourn’s reconnaissance platoon, with the help of an escaped British prisoner of war, made a bold dash through the streets in a bid to seize a bridge across the Mulde River. German riflemen and bazooka teams commanded the approach, but the platoon raced past the surprised defenders. The men dismounted and began cutting demolition wires under a hail of rifle and machine-gun fire. One man fell dead, and another was wounded. The platoon saved the bridge.36
Queried by 12th Army Group about reports that the long-serving M10s were in bad shape and breaking down in combat, the hard-charging Third Army reported that all of its M10s were in such bad shape they should be replaced by M18s or M36s. First Army indicated that one-third of its M10s were sidelined. Ninth Army, however, said it could squeeze another half year out of its equipment.37
The Fat Lady Sings
Way down south in Italy, the crews of the 804th Tank Destroyer Battalion pulled into firing positions behind the doughs of the 88th Infantry Division in early April 1945. Major General Geoffrey Keyes and other brass visited the battalion on 15 April, and Keyes fired the battalion’s 200,000th round at the enemy from a Company B M10.
The next day, the American line surged into motion. After cracking through the initial crust of resistance, American forces swept into the Po River Valley and crossed the river itself within ten days. There was resistance here and there, but German troops began to surrender en masse.38
The integration of TDs and tanks was nearly complete by now. The 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion was attached to the 10th Mountain Division, for example, as was the 751st Tank Battalion. Force Madden fell under the control of the 751st Tank Battalion and included the TDs of B/701st. Headquarters, 701st Tank Destroyer Battalion, commanded Force Redding, which included Companies B, C, and D of the 751st Tank Battalion. Furthermore, each tank destroyer company swapped one platoon with its correspondingly lettered tank company. Company A of the tank battalion, for example, had two tank platoons and one TD platoon, while the ratio was reversed in the tank destroyer company. The units also exchanged radios and aligned crystals to ensure perfect communications. The mixed companies combined the armor-piercing fire power of the 3-inch guns and the better HE and automatic weapons capabilities of the Sherman.
One mixed company supported each of the six assault infantry battalions. The TDs provided a base of fire while the tanks advanced in direct support of the doughs. Despite the installation of SCR-300 radios in many infantry support tanks in northwestern Europe, the armor and infantry components in Italy still could not communicate by radio at the tactical level.39
Life was still plenty dangerous. John Hudson recalled:
On or about April 13, 1945, C/701st was the first to cut the northwest highway going out of Bologna…. Out in front of my TDs, I was suddenly hit and knocked to the ground as I heard a German machine gun fire. The blow was as if somebody hit me with a baseball bat…. I took off my helmet (which I almost never wore) to discover
