Read Death Traps: The Survival of an American Armored Division in World War II for Free Online

the night before. We called the medics, who in turn called the graves registration people to take away the bodies.
    I set out to find Maj. Dick Johnson, who commanded the maintenance company for the 33d Armored Regiment. As the combat command’s senior maintenance officer, he was primarily responsible for the immediate recovery and evacuation of our vehicles. It was my job to coordinate the ordnance activities with him. The major was sturdily built, had a good sense of humor, and was well respected by his men for handling his job in a competent manner. As I walked around the bivouac area and called his name, I heard his voice come out from under a light tank: “Cooper, where are you?”
    I looked under the tank, and there was the major in his sleeping bag next to the tank crew.
    “What the hell are you doing under there, Major?”
    “Crawled under here to get rid of those damned airbursts last night. What do you think I’m doing here?”
    As I looked under the tank, I noticed a hundred pounds of TNT strapped to the glacis plate; it would be used to blow a breach in the hedgerows.
    “Do you realize there’s a hedgerow breaching charge strapped to the front of this tank?” I asked.
    “If this thing had been ticked off by an airburst, we would have all been blown to kingdom come,” the major said as he crawled out from under the tank. “Damn, if I’d known this thing was here, I wouldn’t have gotten near it.”
    We established our first vehicle collecting point (VCP) on the south side of the hill, on the main road coming through Airel toward the Saint Jean de Daye highway. The 33d Maintenance T2 recovery crews started bringing the first vehicles from the initial combat around 0900. The first casualty was an M4 medium tank with the body of one of the crew still inside. According to surviving crew members, they were hit on the highway. The German gun crew apparently held their fire until the tank was no more than fifty yards away, then let go with two rounds from a 75mm PAK41 ground-mount antitank gun. Because of its extremely low silhouette, the gun could not be seen until a tank was upon it. The first round severed the main drive shaft of the M4, incapacitating the tank. The second round struck the top of the turret with a glancing blow right over the tank gunner’s head, killing him.
    I got on top of the turret to examine the damage but deliberately didn’t look at the body that was still inside. The second round had struck the tank turret at the top of the long radius where the armor varied in thickness between two and a half to three and a half inches and the angle of incidence of the shell to the armor could have been no greater than fifteen degrees. In our ordnance training we had been told that thirty-eight degrees was the critical angle, below which a shell would normally ricochet. This was particularly true for an American shell from an M2 low-velocity tank gun.
    Upon examining the front of the tank, I found that the first shot had struck the final drive, which was a large, heavy-duty armored casting that contained the transmission and the differential, which drove the tank tracks. The projectile had struck the tip of the final drive casting in line with the radius of the casting at its thickest point, which was about four and a half inches. The projectile penetrated the armor, passed through about a foot of fifty-weight oil, severed a five-and-a-half -inch steel driveshaft, then passed through another eight to ten inches of oil and a one-inch armored back plate before entering the driver’s compartment. By this time the shell had spent itself and nested between the driver’s feet under his seat. Because it was an armor-piercing shot, no explosion took place. Even though the second round had ricocheted off the turret, its velocity was sufficient to penetrate the armor in a gash approximately three inches wide and ten inches long. The blast inside the tank killed the gunner; the shot had gone right