Saturday, June 13, 2020

The 13th of June, 1944 - D + 7, One Week Ashore

Loading 17-pounder APCBC¹ rounds into a Firefly

"Driver, halt!" Sergeant James Fitzhugh barked at Lance Corporal Thomas Ginns over the tank's intercom system. Turning to the wiry Scots corporal on the tank's rear deck, he simply nodded. The infantryman knew his business, he'd been doing it since Jerry had chased them out of France back in '40. Well, they were back now!

Corporal Billy Wallace slid down off the big Sherman with two of his squaddies, the others remained in place. He could smell the unmistakable aroma of burned vehicle in the air. Slowly, and crouching very low, the three Lowland Scots infantrymen eased into the brush beside the road. While he doubted that a German tank would take potshots at three squaddies, he wasn't taking any chances.

Down the road Wallace could see the burned out wreckage of a number of Bren gun carriers. He wondered what sodding idiot had sent those chaps swanning down this road in broad daylight. From what he'd heard, the chaps had suffered three dead and five wounded in that little brush.

He trained his field glasses along the tree line, which was about 600 meters away. Scan, pause, then scan some more, he caught a hint of something, so he stopped his scan. There! That's a bloody tank! Stowing his field glasses, he and the others scurried back to the Shermans waiting on the road, just below a wee rise in the ground.

"Sarn't, there's Jerry tanks up in that tree line, I saw one, but where there's one..."

Sergeant Fitzhugh completed the man's sentence, "There's bound to be more..."

"Right lads, off the tanks, deploy along the verge while we try and get some air to come take a peek."

(Source)

Squadron Leader Miles Tremayne acknowledged the call from the RAF liaison on the ground, seems some of the boys on the ground had spotted Jerry tanks hiding in a wood. "Red Two, we've got some trade, follow me down, watch my arse won't you?"

The two big Hawker Typhoons eased over and headed towards the coordinates given to them over the radio. "Max speed Two, don't want to give these blighters a target, now do we?"

Pushing the throttle forward, the big aircraft headed down the road that their chaps were following. He spotted them, then he spotted the tree line. As the two aircraft flashed overhead, Two called, "Red Leader, I see them, at least three Jerry tanks just inside the tree line."

"Copy Red Two, let's go around and light them up. We'll come in from the opposite direction this time."

Schwerer Panzerspähwagen (heavy armoured scout car) Sd.Kfz. 234/4 with 7.5 cm Pak 40.
(Source)

As the two Allied Jabos flashed overhead, Scharführer Otto Grünze ducked involuntarily, it was a reflex action, it seemed that the Amis and the Tommies had aircraft up from sunrise to sundown. They'd nearly been caught in the open two days ago. Looking down the road towards the beaches, he wondered at the Tiger unit that had been here that morning. Seventh Army had shifted them further west to make room for his unit, the 12th SS Panzer Division, Hitlerjugend². 

Time to shift again, as he signaled his two lighter armored cars to pull out, he heard, then felt the hiss of aerial rockets coming in. One of his cars was hit and blew up in spectacular fashion, the other rockets were near misses. With that, his car and the lone survivor of the two lighter cars pulled out and sped to the other side of the road.



"Red Leader, did you see that secondary? Rather like Guy Fawkes day, what?"

"Rather, Red Two. No more chatter, let's rejoin the cab rank, shall we?"

As the two British aircraft went to rejoin their comrades in the "cab rank" (aircraft circling in a particular area awaiting targets), Squadron Leader Tremayne saw what had to be Shermans below. I guess I should inform them that their "tanks" are gone, looked like armored cars to me. Which is what he radioed to the RAF ground liaison.



When they received the report of the Tiffies³ having flushed a Jerry reconnaissance element, Sergeant Fitzhugh had his infantry climb aboard. They would push on ahead to the next road junction and perhaps have a spot of tea there. It was getting rather late in the day, he felt peckish, he was certain the lads were as well.

As the Shermans began to move, Fitzhugh kept low in the commander's cupola, one of his mates had been killed by a sniper the day before. While he didn't want to button up completely, couldn't see a damned thing that way, he could keep a lower profile this way.

As the drivers of the Shermans shifted to the side of the road which wasn't littered with destroyed Bren gun carriers, his gunner, Corporal Cecil Chapman announced that he had a target to his right front.

"Jerry armored car Fitzie, range 450 yards. Kill it?"

"Engage that bastard Cecil."

The Sherman Firefly's 17-pounder gun barked and sent its projectile towards the Germans, who apparently thought they were safe in their new position.


Scharführer Grünze didn't feel a thing when the tank round penetrated the gun shield in front of him. Metal from his destroyed 7.5 cm cannon killed him and one of his other crewman. The driver managed to get out, but the fourth man died in the resulting explosion of the vehicle's onboard ammunition.

His other car almost escaped, but another round from one of the British Shermans hit the rear engine compartment. That Tommy had had a high explosive round loaded. While not really useful against a tank, the high explosive round shredded the rear end of the SdKfz 222 and killed all three crewmen.

It would be another day before the advancing SS troops knew what was in front of them.

(Source)

Another history bit, liked it so much, I bought his book!







¹ APCBC = Armor Piercing Capped Ballistic Capped, a type of anti-tank munition
² Hitler Youth Division, average age of the soldiers was 18 to 19 in Normandy.
³ Tiffy, nickname for the Hawker Typhoon.

34 comments:

  1. Another excellent episode. The James Holland video is a superb analysis, and fits into your story line perfectly at this point.
    Thanks for YOUR writing, and also for the incredible amount of effort behind the scenes pulling together the contemporary images, plus videos like this to provide context. This is teaching history as it should be!
    John Blackshoe

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    1. Thanks John.

      I recently read his book Big Week, after seeing this video, I immediately ordered Normandy '44: D-Day and the Epic 77-Day Battle for France. I like his writing, a lot!

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  2. For those of you out there who don't know what APCBC is, well, see, just a regular AP (armor piercing round) could shatter as it attempted to penetrate armor, which would then cause the round to not penetrate said armor. Solution, other than using depleted uranium (which made into a big friggin dart, works superbly well) is to make a sacrificial cap that would start the penetration and sacrifice itself to allow the rest of the round to penetrate.

    It wasn't the Brit's most penetrating round, which was APDS (armor piercing discarding sabot - take a big friggin dart made from really hard metal (like tungsten or.. depleted uranium) that's smaller in diameter than the gun you're firing it out of and put a metal or plastic 'shoe' around it (kind of like a shotgun wad, but better) that fits the bore of the gun. Fire the APDS, the sabot (shoe) allows the round to make a gas seal, thus gets pushed to the maximum potential down the barrel. Once leaving the barrel, the sabot falls away (usually into 3-4 pieces, and hopefully no friendly troops are in front of you as the shoe pieces are going rather fast) and due to the miracle of physics, the big frigging dart is now traveling at a much faster speed than any conventional AP or APCBC round can achieve and thus, through the miracle of physics (again) with F=MV (Force = mass times velocity) and E=MV(squared) (Energy = mass times velocity squared) the big friggin dart will cut through armor much better than a larger round going slower. Of course, your bfd has to be made out of material that can handle the increased force and energy transfer, rather than shattering all over the place (depleted uranium does it by the outer layers of the point of the dart just shed off, leaving a sharp point behind, continually doing it, with the extra added bonus that the depleted uranium that sheds off then catches on fire, and if you remember Major Moran's videos on fire in a tank, well, it's much like fire aboard ship or in an electric vehicle when the batteries brew up and isn't considered a good thing.)

    Yay. Isn't science FUN?

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    1. Oh Lord, the tank is on fire.

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    2. one of few advantages of the open-topped vehicles like M-18 hellcat and M-10 Wolverine was ease of jumping out of turret...
      (disadvantage being no top cover from shrapnel and small arms)
      and when molten jet or superheated penetrator meets ammo rack...
      "off with his head!"

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    3. What about the driver and the assistant driver.

      Not much of an advantage for them, is it?

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    4. The tungsten penetrator of the 17-pdr APDS round wasn't actually a dart. It was basically a bullet stabilized by spin. The APFSDS round of modern smoothbore cannons are fin-stabilized darts. Here endeth the Pedantry of the Day. Sigh. I can't help myself some days.

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  3. Nice continuation of the story, Sarge. I've seen Prof. Holland before on some of the cable channels (History, Discovery, AHC) and always thought he did a good job. This video is spot on and agrees quite well with Maj. Moran's points about logistics, supply train, maintainability, availability and other 'non fighting' aspects of warfare, as well as how the Sherman performed much better than the myths surrounding it would indicate.

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  4. Of course, the other way to blow a hole in something is to set a shaped charge explosive just outside the hull, and allow the burning plasma of the explosion to burn a hole into the tank. This is called.. HEAT (high explosive anti-tank.) Works wonders on walls, too. Key thing is to get the explosion at just the perfect range that the jet of plasma is most effective. This is what is used on most anti-tank rocket launchers like the Bazooka or the RPG of Soviet fame, or the Panzerfaust (one shot Armored Fist) or Panzerschreck (Germany's bazooka, much more deadly than the American's bazooka) or the Brit's spring-powered PIAT (yes, spring powered, like some kid's toy, that you could shoot a tank with - meh, it worked.)

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    1. The PIAT worked, barely. Better than nothing I suppose!

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    2. In it's favor, there was no launch signature or backblast so it was the only anti-tank HEAT weapon that could be fired inside a crowded building or fired concealed and remain concealed.

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    3. It did have that going for it.

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    4. (Don McCollor)...the disadvantage of HEAT is that fairly thin standoff armor can be used to detonate it prematurely, dispersing the plasma jet. Makes a mess, but does not penetrate the main armor.

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    5. (Don McCollor)...Yet another British device was the Grenade Anti-Tank Model 74 containing 1.5 lb of 'stabilized nitroglycerin' in a glass sphere inside a cloth bag covered with an incredibly sticky coating. This was enclosed in a metal casing to prevent it sticking to everything else (and with a handle for throwing). The idea was the glass sphere would break, deform, and stick, molding itself to a tank hull. One pin released the casing, a second armed it. Deployed in the Western Desert, troops that with the first pin released and the grenade hung in a tent by the handle, it made excellent flypaper.

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    6. That's one reason a lot of German tanks and assault guns had side skirting, Schürzen to detonate incoming HEAT rounds.

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    7. Oh yes, the famous sticky bomb, not the one in Saving Private Ryan but the real deal.

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    8. British paras at Arnhem bridge made good use of PIATs...
      https://youtu.be/TI6PQDMFchs
      al;so some were paradropped for Warsaw uprising, giving resistance few much needed antitank weapons...

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    9. The PIAT was better than its predecessor, the Boys anti-tanks rifle.

      Kicked like a mule!

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  5. And yet another good story from our noble host. Good job.

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  6. Enjoyable Sarge. You have the gift.

    If you like these sorts of things in Science Fiction, I might recommend The Forlorn Hope (David Drake) to you. It is set in the future and a retelling of a sort of Xenophon's Anabasis but very enjoyable. Involves a mercenary unit which is double crossed and has to make their way off planet. Includes a lovely ambush of tanks.

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    Replies
    1. The Anabasis, a great story from antiquity!

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    2. (Don McCollor)...David Drake has a number of inspiring novels. Even better is the S.M. Stirling and David Drake 'The General' series (1991+)...

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    3. So many books, so little time!

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  7. In the top photo, that looks like a German helmet sitting on the tank.
    I know there's a story there.

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    1. It very much is a German helmet. No doubt a war trophy of some sort. Not as gruesome as some.

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    2. Marine tanks in the Pacific had some really gruesome hood ornaments, that FMFPAC really put their foot down over.

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    3. Which is what I was thinking of.

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    4. So did some of the Army tanks that fought their way south out of the Kunu-ri gauntlet.

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  8. Foot note 2 - "² Hitler Youth Division, average age of the soldiers was 18 to 19 in Normandy". I looked up "average age of d-day soldier", it's 20.
    Young people...

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    1. War is definitely fought by the young, and caused/mismanaged by the old.

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  9. Great segment of a continuing compelling story, Sarge!
    A gentle correction, with no offense intended; think of it as proofreading assistance, if you like:
    "The Sherman Firefly's 17-pounder gun barked and sent it's projectile towards the Germans...."
    No apostrophe needed there.
    --Tennessee Budd

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    1. You're absolutely right, I do that constantly, even though I know better!

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