
Nathaniel R. Helms |
Review of Michael Green, War Stories of the
Tankers: American Armored Combat, 1918 to Today. St. Paul:
Zenith Press, 2008. Pp. 320. ISBN 978-0-7603-3297-9. |
Vietnam grunts called tanks
"mortar magnets" for their propensity to draw enemy fire.
Unappreciative grunts complained they were big, loud, and stunk like
a fleet of city buses. Infantrymen walking behind a 50-ton M-48
Patton tank breaking brush in 110 degrees thought it gave the term
"breathtaking" a whole new meaning. So did its 90mm main gun, firing
"beehive" into an occupied enemy bunker line. You never heard a
grunt complaining about that. The tiny, dart-shaped flechettes that
filled the vicious anti-personnel rounds gave "getting nailed" a
whole new meaning as well. Grunts loved tanks when they ran into the
enemy. It certainly made surviving such an encounter considerably
more likely.
Michael Green lets the men who
take tanks to war tell all about it in War Stories of the Tankers. The author of several popular examinations of specific tank models,[1]
Green offers aficionados and combat action junkies an anecdotal
history of American armored warfare through all of its major
evolutions. He introduces the participants and their stories,
starting with the Great War, the first "war to end war." Soldiers
who in 1917 didn't know a tank from a threshing machine six months
before tell what it was like to drive an 11-ton British heavy tank
or a "light" 8-ton French Renault that looks like a cartoon
caricature of tanks to come. They convey the realties and romance of
driving a clumsy, nearly blind thresher of men that would as soon
asphyxiate the crew with exhaust fumes as kill the enemy.
Beads of perspiration stand on your forehead. Hot work this. The
combination of powder and gasoline fumes, the smell of hot oil and
the exhaust begins to daze you, but you pull yourself together and
rumble on. The infantry swings along behind, bombing dugouts and
"mopping up" assisted by your running mate, a female tank armed with
machine guns only [Army 2nd Lt. Paul Haimbaugh] (14).
The author quietly uses
participants' narratives to examine American doctrine and tactics
that forward thinking officers began developing almost as soon as
the British coined the name "tank," to hide the existence of the
first tracked behemoth. He lets his witnesses explain how the
vehicle was created to pulverize the enemy with mobile, overwhelming
firepower. With the finesse of a writer who knows his subject, Green
has selected his players carefully, so that their stories intermesh
to take readers beyond the mere visceral thrills of combat
sequences.
For instance, Green introduces
us to Army Corporal Clarence Smoyer, in 1945 an untested gunner on
the untested M-26 Pershing heavy tank, America's much belated
counter to the Germans' deadly Panthers and Tigers. Until
development of the Pershing, the Panzers decimated both the
ubiquitous American 32-ton M-4 Sherman medium tank armed with a puny
75mm gun and their more heavily armed British cousins. Frustrated
gunners reported that their rounds literally bounced off the frontal
armor of German tanks.
The Army brass wanted to see
what the 42-ton Pershing could do before pushing it into combat at
Cologne, Germany. Smoyer was ordered to show his stuff with his new
90mm main gun, reputedly as powerful as the Tiger's fearsome 88mm.
Once we began hitting the houses with our 90mm gun, they made it
even harder for us by telling us to shoot at the chimneys on the
distant houses. The chimneys soon began disappearing in a series of
explosions. They kept increasing the target distance on us to test
our skill. And for the final one they chose a house 1,500 yards away
with two chimneys (76).
Fifteen hundred yards was
almost three times the effective tank-killing range of the M-4's
gun. In effect Smoyer is testifying that American armor technology
had finally caught up with German ingenuity, something that was not
broadcast till after World War II.
I remember announcing that I was going to attempt to get the first
chimney on the right side of the house. I fired, and the chimney
went up in pieces. The one on the other side was a red brick
chimney, and just the top of it stuck over the roof. We set up and
fired, and the red brick flew all over the place ... (76).
By the time Green's warriors
fight their way through Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War, the
narratives become more technical as the tank evolves from a
simplistic, optically sighted, human-operated gun platform to a
multi-function weapon system directed by sensor arrays and
digitalized command and control mechanisms. Noticeable, too, is a
higher level of sophistication in the descriptions of the weapons
systems and the ranks of the narrators explaining them. By Iraqi
Freedom, the common soldier has lost his say except as a bit player.
Thus, Army Maj. Clay Lyle writes as follows of a combat encounter
with Saddam Fedayeen:
It was tight terrain and everything is occurring in close
proximity of the town. I began using my FBCB2 (a wireless tactical
Internet system) to request artillery right at the edge of town on
likely dismounted infiltration routes. From that moment forward
Lieutenant Wade and I would process almost constant indirect fire
missions to my mortars and the artillery battery throughout the
remainder of the night" (259).
Despite Green's care and
ingenuity in picking his stories, the book will disappoint the
persnickety historian who want "just the facts, ma'am, just the
facts." But American soldiers and marines, whatever their age or
rank, cannot be held accountable for their flights of fancy and
failure to pinpoint who was where when and why. The fog of war, no
doubt magnified by the isolation of tanker crews inside a hot steel
box, was often impenetrable. Other impediments to objectivity are
pride of service, parochialism, and pressure to succeed in the
twenty-first century, zero-defect environment of techno-war. Green
never intervenes to correct that.
Mitigating this inadequacy is a
fine selection of pictures, including a complete suite of tank
images, starting with the British heavy tank and the French Renault
and reaching to the super futuristic M1A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank,
arguably the most effective of the present generation of tanks. Too
bad there are no color plates to enhance and highlight the changing
times.
All in all, War Stories of
the Tankers, like the tanks and tankers it features, has its ups
and downs, but it certainly deserves a home on the bookshelves of
devotees of combat narration.
St. Charles, MO
natshouse1@charter.net
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[1] See the following, all published by Zenith Press: Panzers at War (2005), with Gladys
Green; M1 Abrams at War (2005), with Greg Stewart;
M2/M3
Bradley at War (2007), M4 Sherman at War (2007), and
Tiger
Tanks at War (2008), with James D. Brown.
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