About that time, I heard our tank coming up. I was just a little impatient and I got out and I think the German tank … saw me, because he started to turn his turret around. I sat there and it seemed like forever and a day for them to get started, but of course they had to get all of the mathematics and everything set just exactly right so they knew exactly what they were going to do at the very second they stopped that tank. Just 21 years old at the time, Smoyer would fire the three shots immortalized on the critical 48 seconds of film Bates shot that day.Īfter his brief scouting missing with Earley, Bates took his small 16mm camera to the mezzanine level of a building on a corner that would give him a clear shot of the action to come. In order to compete in battle, the Americans had to invent new tactics-outposting, and maneuvering to hit the Germans in their weaker side and rear armor.The events of March 6 are painstakingly documented in Adam Makos’ remarkable 2019 book, Spearhead, which follows the tank gunner Clarence Smoyer through the war. Though undergunned and underarmored, the Sherman had some advantages in terms of mobility, reliability, and advanced features such as servo-controlled turret and a gyro-stabilized cannon. The American answer was to produce and ship to Europe some 50,000 M4 Sherman tanks. The tank thus had a powerful demoralizing effect upon infantry. Between the wars the Germans perfected the tank as a fast, well-armored shock weapon, and showed the world in 1939 the power of a highly mobile, new kind of combined arms warfare called “Blitzkrieg.” Machine gun bullets bounced off its armor, and any dug-in troops would simply be crushed by these monsters. However, the first generation of tanks were slow, lacking in firepower, and awkward to operate, with little ability for the crew and the infantry to communicate. The goal was to break the stalemate of trench and gas warfare. The armored tank, a British invention, came into its own towards the end of WWI. What is the best WWII tank movie of all time?
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