That brief experience, eight miles behind enemy lines, marked the closest thing to a personal encounter between the two men. Rose liked what he saw, and felt the new hardware tipped the firepower scales in the Americans’ favor. Smoyer picked off a second chimney, then a third - a mile-distant speck in his scope - as the crowd that gathered cheered both his skill and the tank’s awesome capabilities. With an ear-splitting bang, the shell demolished the chimney, while an unexpected sideways blast of gasses from a newly configured firing system sent the assembled officers, including Rose, tumbling to the muddy ground. He heard his sergeant call the range and specify a target - “The chimney!” - that seemed hopelessly precise for his first live fire in a just-off-the-assembly-line tank.īut his uncanny eye, honed as a kid during nighttime escapades hunting for frogs with his BB gun, didn’t fail him now. Smoyer used the tank’s sighting mechanism to draw a bead on an abandoned farmhouse in a village more than a half-mile away. He became a tank gunner in the famous “Spearhead” Division. Smoyer felt lucky to serve under such a fearless and beloved commander in the outfit Rose had dubbed “Spearhead” - so named for its habit of leading the American assault.Ĭlarence Smoyer as a young soldier in the U.S. Barely more than a kid from a Pennsylvania steel town, he had never fired the new tank’s cannon, and here he was about to perform before a general whose legend grew by the day. The young gunner, 21-year-old Clarence Smoyer, fidgeted. They hoped its bulked-up armor and massive 90mm cannon could counter the Germans’ devastating Tiger and Panther tanks, hasten the advance across the Rhine River and bring World War II’s European conflict to a merciful conclusion. Maurice Rose, the Denver-raised leader of the 3rd Armored Division, stood among the anxious observers about to see a demonstration of the newest American weapon, a 46-ton behemoth called a T26E3 Pershing tank. On a late February day in 1945, on a hilltop near the town of Stolberg, Germany, a nervous, curly-haired Army corporal prepared to put on an exhibition of artillery marksmanship for a group of senior officers. A World War II tank gunner with a story to tell rolled into downtown Denver to pay respects to the general he revered - The Colorado Sun Close
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