Posted on 09/19/2020 8:21:21 AM PDT by artichokegrower
Private First Class Irving Bromberg saw a huge puff of smoke erupt from the German tank’s cannon muzzle as it headed straight for his M4 Sherman tank. The round streaked past and missed.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalinterest.org ...
My father was in the 3rd Armored Division, the Spearhead. I have that book.
He never would talk about the war. Occasionally there would be a reunion somewhere, and he’d go to it. What little I actually know and as I understand it, he drove a truck shuttling wounded back and supplies forward. In his effects when he died I found a bronze star.
My mother said the war changed him. He was a lighthearted youth, but a stoic man. He was a good man, but in many ways I never knew him.
Having spent 7 years of the Cold War in Germany and assigned to the 3d Armored Division (Spearhead) I was somewhat offended that the director had the 2d Armored Division patch (Hell on Wheels) on the tanker’s uniform and tank bumper markings.
That is exactly right. He was short as well which was also a bonus for fitting into tanks from that time period.
My wife and I bought a 41 Cadillac in Indianapolis around 15 years ago. We stopped at a rest stop just across the border in Illinois that afternoon. The car was a beauty and drew a crowd. An older man came over to talk to us. My wife told him that her dad was from the area. He asked her his name and where he had lived. She told him Coles County which was about 20 miles away. The man said he was from Coles County as well. When she told him his last name was Swinford, the man immediately lit up. He said that all the Swinfords he knew were all bald short farm boys and he thought that he had known her dad. Her dad was from a family of 13 so it was a little hard for him to say for sure. Some of my wife's uncles were tankers as well and not all of them survived WWII
So we went on a search for traces of her family the next morning but didn't have enough time to find anything other than a farm house or two and noone who had a clue about the people who had lived there in the distant past. We always meant to do more research and return but never did. We just felt very lucky to have run into one person who knew something about her family.
It helps to open the door if you are familiar with the war so they don’t have to explain everything. I find if I ask ask a couple of fairly detailed questions specific to their branch of the service it can open the door. If you are a guy you can always ask about what they thought about their short arm inspection.
Great article about SGT Lafayette Pool! Thanks for that and your comments.
The Cold War joke about the Red Army was something like anyone under 5’-6” is a tanker, any one over 5’-7” is in the infantry, any in between is a clerk or quartermaster.
There’s probably some truth to that. Soviet tanks are *tight*.
Excellent article. Thanks for sharing.
For those interested here are two lectures on U.S. armor development in WWII. Bottom line, for all its faults, the M4 tank series outshown German and Russian armor in two critical areas: ease of maintenance and interior ergonomics. We could keep tanks in the fight and crews had a much easier time bother getting into/out of their vehicles and fighting them.
The two lectures below discuss this in much more detail, they are presented by a National Guard armor officer who works in the gaming industry as an tank and weapons expert.
Not one single pop-up using Brave with its default settings.
They must have been imagined. Maybe I was just having flashbacks?
Before my wife’s dad retired from the army, he had become one of the heads of the kitchen at Fort Lewis here in Washington. He retired when they turned over the kitchens to civilians. Before she started school, he sometimes took her out to the base with him when her mom was working. He worked near a spot where they had a bunch of mothballed old tanks, and he would sometimes leave her, a sandwhich, her dollies and picture books in one of the old tanks and tell her would be back in a while. So old tanks served as her playpens before she went to kindergarten.
She said the dim light and the lemon yellow paint were very soothing and she would fall asleep rocking back and forth in the driver’s seat which had some movement and looked like a tractor seat. She said she loved it.
Yup. In so many ways. It was a dumb movie and I’m sorry I wasted money to see it.
Then why were Americans in a British Firefly variant/
Similar, imo. Russians tend to very over dramatic, almost buffoonish. Russians are noble, handsome, valiant super heros and the Germans look like creatures off a WW2 Russian propaganda poster.
I never understood why WWII vets (at least some of them) would never talk about their exploits and adventures.
But then I lost my wife, after a horrendous hospital ordeal (actually, three of them, each worse than the previous) and I deliberately, consciously, refused to remember what “we” went through. When I review some of the memories I hear screaming in my head ... and it’s my voice screaming.
I hate to see these spectacular WWII memories lost, some of them about events we STILL don’t know anything about. (We only learned about the intelligence ”coup” that led to the Midway victory in 1985!) But I understand.
The Germans only produced around 1,350 Tiger Mk 6 tanks. The thing was labor intensive to produce (300,000 man hours for one tank) and expensive, it was a gas guzzler and prone to break downs.
Most of the Tigers produced went to Waffen SS units and were sent to the Russian front. In reality only about 1 in 10 German tanks Allied tanks went up against on the Western Front were Tigers.
We bought the DVD - then donated it to the local senior center. It was so awful it was hysterical.
Thank you Mr. Armchair tank enthusiast. Maybe it was because they had to use what was available to them to make the movie???
We and friends have lent pieces from our collections to help with movie productions. General rule of thumb after many bad experiences... Don’t do it under any circumstances! Ever! Ever! Ever!
The only way that it works is if you sell them peices that you have replacements for. They will rip authentic items to pieces, burn them, run over them and destroy them in every way that you can imagine.
from within
A good film.
Check out Wolf’s Call and stick with natural language and subtitles.
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