761st Tank Battalion

I recall talking with a former BAR man in, if I recall, the 35th Infantry Division. In just a general conversation about his combat experiences, he was quick to praise the 761st. He said that those African-American tankers were more aggressive than their counterparts. He and those tankers had a working relationship: they would give him belt sections of .30 cal. tracer ammo that he kept clean by washing in gasoline. He would then load the rounds into his BAR clips. When approaching French villages, that the Germans were in the process of evacuating, the tank commander would pop his head out of the turret, and say, "Give me a target!" The BAR man would fire his tracer rounds at the German vehicles, and the tankers would use his tracer stream to site their targets. He said the tankers of the 761st always went in blasting, and they didn't care much about conserving ammo. I repeated this story to a veteran of my father's unit, also a BAR man, and he was quite skeptical, especially the part about using tracer ammo, as tracers could be a double edged sword for locating targets. But the original story teller was so specific about the tactics, and so complementary toward the tankers of the 761st, why would he make that up?

Greg C.

 

By mid 44 most US tank units in the ETO would shoot first and worry about other stuff later. Typically in 3rd Army the process was the tankers would blow the steeples off the church(s) in a town followed by shooting up every suspect location with their .50 machineguns (often mounted coaxially in a field mod). Many units would grab the local burgermeister at gunpoint and have him call down the road to the next town. He was told that if they didn't want to get shot up they were to hang white bed sheets out the windows.... OR ELSE!

In urban attacks the infantry usually used the tank for cover and fired rifle grenades or a 60mm mortar bomb clipped to the grenade launcher through windows of hold out houses. The tanks would only advance once the building was thoroughly shot up and every window got high explosive attention.

 

761st had some tough tankers. If memory serves, its original battalion commander, Paul Bates, had some previous experience of Patton in his training. Bates trained his tankers like how Patton did it, that is, to shoot "every gawd-damned thing" in order to neutralize ambushers and to intimidate the enemy. This was how the 2d, 4th and 6th Armored rolled and partly accounted their success in exploitation and pursuit missions.

This tank version of marching fire was not practiced by units in other Armies in the beginning but at the latter stages of the war it was almost universally practiced. I remember from reading a US veteran memoir that they would surround a town, put a steel ring of tanks around it, tell the residents to leave within 30 minutes with loudspeakers, then proceed to blow everything up. Even the infantry would bang away with their Garands and BARs, until there was zero return fire. Then they'd enter the town and methodically search it block by block.

One must volunteer to be a 761 tanker. It should be remembered that it was a highly aggressive unit, dedicated to victory, of very high morale and good training. It was the only American tank battalion that I have heard to literally overrun a German straggling column with its tracks.

 

Checked out the website - very interesting. NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar authored a book on the battalion: Brothers In Arms: The Epic Story of the 761st Tank Battalion, WWII's Forgotten Heroes. I'm going to get a copy through Amazon UK.

Thanks for the 'Heads Up' on the battalion.

Steve W.

 

I concur. When I first noticed it was written by an NBA player I had serious reservations about it. It turned out to be well written and well researched.

 

Thanks, both. It's ordered.

BTW, I also noticed that Morgan Freeman had taken out an option on a movie.

Steve W.

 

I've never seen a quote in print, but one reason my father was not fond of Patton, was because Patton did not allow his tanks into towns and cities. As you stated, the armor would surround the town, blocking all roads in and out. Then the infantry would be sent in to clear the town (my father was in an infantry unit assigned to Third Army during August and September 1944). In defense of Patton, he was right in that he realized how vulnerable tanks were in towns to hand-held anti-tank weapons, and how the confines of city streets could easily get a tank trapped in a dead end. But my father believed that Patton was the only general who did this. My father's unit was attached to 3rd Armored Division in Cologne, and the Ruhr Pocket, so he had some comparisons.

Greg C.