September 15, 2025 • 38 mins
On this episode of Our American Stories, Clarence Smoyer, a gunner in the U.S. Army’s 3rd Armored Division—“Spearhead”—became one of World War II’s most unlikely heroes. In Cologne, his Pershing tank faced Gustav Schaefer’s Panzer in a duel captured on film, now one of history’s most famous armored battles. Best-selling author Adam Makos shares Smoyer’s story of courage, loss, and reconciliation, showing why remembering WWII tank heroes remains vital.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And today we're sitting down with Adam Makos, author of
(00:30):
great military history books such as I Hire a Call,
Devotion and his latest book, and what we're talking about
now spearhead Adam, I'm interested in how you got interested
in World War Two and who Clarence Smoyer was.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
My grandfather has got me interested, Lee, I was a
kid and they used to take me to air shows
and museums. They both fought in World War Two and
they didn't see combat, and so for them, World War
two is fascinating. They were fascinated by the heroes who
had won the war by the time they got into it,
so they were able to talk about it. They were
(01:06):
able to show me and my brother their photo albums,
and they lit the spark in us that we thought
World War II was cool and we thought the men
who fought it were the best Americans. And what we
did to show our appreciation. We started a little homemade newsletter,
and it eventually became a little magazine called Valor Magazine,
and we would interview veterans at first our grandfathers, next
(01:28):
the guy next door, and then guys in our city,
and before you know what, we were kids in high
school and then later in college publishing a magazine to
honor people who were four times our age. In this case,
a friend in college had told me about this local
hero in his hometown. The guy was living in Allentown,
and my buddy said, listen, there's a hero there from
(01:49):
World War Two who had fought as a tank gunner.
He was one of our most decorated gunners, and he's
living there in a row house in Allentown. Nobody knows
he's there, not his family. They don't know what he
did in the war, or his neighbors don't. I didn't
know much about armored warfare, but I knew there was
something special about this guy because he had supposedly fought
this duel in World War Two that was said to
(02:11):
be the most famous tank duel of the war. So
one day I just went knocking and Clarence Schmoyer opened
the door and invited me into his kitchen, table. His
family grew up in deep poverty. His father was a
way working for the CCC. His mother was a housekeeper.
They lived in a house so you might say dilapidated.
You could hear the neighbors on the other side of
the wall.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
So he grew up poor.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And Clarence when he would come home from high school,
whereas other kids would go to football practice or they
would go hang out at the movie theater, Clarence came
home and he one of his classmates her father was
in the candy business. So he went to that man
and he said, I'd like to sell candy, And so
Clarence would take a box of chocolate bars, Hershey's and
(02:53):
all those and just like a ballpark vendor, he would
go door to door at night. Again, he's fourteen years
old kid selling candy bars to try to help his family.
And that's where he developed that protective nature. And he
also developed a little bit of a selfish nature in
one sense, and that he believed that no one was
going to help him, no one was going to look
(03:13):
out for him, and he had to take care of
his family because no one's going to help us. Clarence
Smoyer was a member of this Spearhead Division. Now, he
was a twenty one year old gunner at the time.
He's a tall, lanky kid with blonde hair.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Wyat.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I always said he was a gentle giant, and I
was always amazed that he was a great tank gunner.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
But one of the.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Reasons he lived in obscurity was partially because he chose that,
and partially because he was in an obscure unit, the
Spearhead Division.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
During World War Two. It's very little known.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It's called a Third Armored Division, and a lot of
people confuse it with Patten's Third Army.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Third Army is a big unit.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
The war reporters are tagging along and they're sending back
the dispatches. Patton is charging out of France. Patton is
doing this, patent slapped the guy.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The whole unit is being tracked. Third Army Division was
a unit known for breaking through the enemy lines and
then running in radio silence, just like a submarine behind
the lines, sowing chaos. And so the reporters weren't sending
back dispatches. This unit was just creating mayhem. It lost
the most tanks of World War Two of any American unit.
(04:18):
It lost more men killed in action than the one
hundred and first Airborne or the eighty second Airborne, and
nobody knows its name.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Talk about tanks before we go anywhere else. Who are
these men? Is it a volunteer mission to be inside
these tanks like it is for subs. How does it
all work?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
You know, in the early days it was, but then
after a while they started putting guys in it, whether
they liked it or not. Especially in the late war.
You almost had to be forced into a tank. The
thing is, the Sherman tank is such a beautiful machine.
We always think it's invincible, but you're right. It's like
a submarine that can't hide. And in the early war
our Shermans were a fine tank. When they went into
(04:56):
the African campaign. The British were using them before us,
and they reported great results. You've got five men in
that machine, a gunner, a loader, a bow gunner, a commander.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
And a driver.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
So it's a tightly packed unit, a band of brothers
in an American tank. The trouble was, by nineteen forty
four or forty five, we took those same Sherman tanks
that had been fighting in Africa and we sent them
into Normandy, and there they encountered this German tank called
the Panther, and this thing had a bigger gun, and
it had had a massive armor, and by nineteen forty
(05:28):
four forty five, there was almost a rule you need
seven or eight Shermans to tackle one Panther or tiger
tank of the enemy. Well, Clarence was at first a
loader in the tank and he loved it because he
didn't want to hurt anybody, wanted to get through World
War II without taking a life. Never even like to
hunt rabbits as a.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Kid, because he'd have to kill him.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
And so he was happy to just shovel the shells
into the gun and let somebody else pull the trigger.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Now, when the unit was training.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Up on the English seacoast, they said, now what happens
if our gunners get knocked out? The loaders need to
know how to shoot. So Clarence and the other loaders
were all put in the gunner seat. They were given
a competition. You have to shoot out a target one
thousand yards away up on the coastal bluffs, and we're
going to see who's the best loader turned gunner, and
Clarence nailed this thing eight times and his crew received
(06:14):
a big magnum of Scotch as a reward, and they
all drank that night and they said, someday you are
going to be our gunner, because like it or not,
you have a talent. And so after the heavy losses
in France, when they were charging through Belgium again gunning
for the German border, Clarence was put in the gunner
seat and this reluctant warrior is suddenly given the most
(06:35):
responsibility on the tank because if you miss, that means
your enemy gets to hit you. And statistically, when a
Sherman tank was hit, one man was going to come
out dead, another was going to come out wounded. So Clarence,
the reason he was such a great gunner wasn't because
he hated the enemy. It was because he loved the
men inside that tank, his family, he called them, and
(06:56):
he knew if he missed one of them were going
to come out dead, another wound.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to Adam Makos and he's talking about
the life of Clarence Moyer, which is captured in his
Book's Spearhead. And when we come back, we'll learn more
about this tank er gunner and his fellow soldiers' lives
in that tank, and so much more here on our
American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories
(07:32):
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Speaker 3 (07:48):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our Americanstories dot Com. And we returned to Our
(08:10):
American Stories in Adam Akos, author of the New York
Times bestseller Spearhead. Adam tell me how old Clarence was
when he was sent to the European theater of World
War Two and what his first taste of combat was like.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
He was twenty when he went on that ship over
to England. He came in about three weeks after D
Day entered the Hedgerow fighting led the break through out
of France. It was a harrowing job. I mean when
we talk about selflessness every time his commander would come
back from the briefing. He had a pipe, and the
pipe in his mouth would be bouncing up and down
(08:44):
because his teeth were chattering so badly. Every time these
guys got in these tanks to go charge forward toward
the Germans, they were terrified. But guys like Clarence they
embraced that. Well, there's that that biblical verse which says
who will go forth for us? And then the answer
is send me. Clarence embodied that it was that idea that, well,
(09:06):
somebody has to so send me. Somebody has to protect
the guys behind us in the column. Somebody has to
go first, leading the way, being the first tank over
the hill, the first tank around the bend. When leading
is oftentimes a death sentence. For Clarence, his first taste
of responsibility was at Mons, Belgium. We had broken out
(09:27):
of France and we found out there's this German army
running back to Germany. So the Spearhead Division was given
orders turn on a dime, go north and lay an
ambush for them. So they did, and they beat the
German army there. And you've got a one hundred thousand
or more Germans coming toward you. And we parked our
tanks around the various roadblocks. Clarence's tank that night was
(09:50):
coiled up. They would park five tanks in a fan
and a German tank that night blundered into their position
in the dark, and it parked right next to He's
in the gunner seat. He's got a German tank idling
next to him in the dark. And his commander, a
young man named Paul Faircloth, came up. They were all
trying to catch some shut eye, and Paul said, okay,
we've got to shoot. And Clarence threw this fit because
(10:13):
he didn't want to shoot in the dark when this
enemy tank, even though he could hear it, even though
he could almost touch it, he knew if he missed,
he was going to hit the tank on the other
side of him. And the tank on the other side
of that German was American. And so the German tank
shuts down its engine and we have to wait till daylight. Now,
so Clarence is in that sardine can for hours and hours,
(10:35):
and the hours are ticking by, and it's just this
nerve wracking thing where you have the enemy tank next
to you and it probably knows you're there.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And it's probably waiting to shoot you too.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And then when daylight comes, he finally has the courage
to pull that trigger and he kills the first tank
of World War II that he would kill. But the
amazing thing was he was afraid to look inside. All
the guys in the tank said, we've got to look
inside and see did the German crew get out in
the night?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Did we just kill him all? And Clarence wouldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
He refused to get out, He refused to ever look
inside the hatch. Instead, his commander went and did it
for him, And Paul looked inside and he shut the hatch,
and he never told Clarence what he saw in there.
But Clarence was so reluctant, so fearful, that it wouldn't
be for many months that he found the courage to
even own up to what his job was.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
And let's talk about the key moments in his development
as a warrior. Talk about a few of him. Tell
a few stories about Clarence's progression to this leader and
this fighter.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So Clarence's commander, Paul, who we were talking about, the
next day, they're getting shelled and Paul is going out
of his tank to help some wounded men, and Paul
got blasted by a mortar, his leg torn off, and
he died right in front of Clarence's eyes, thrown up
on a bank in Belgium. So Clarence watches his friend die.
The American army grinds its way into Germany through the
(11:59):
west ward. They have to blast their way through these pillboxes,
and they first meet these Germans who refused to surrender,
so the Sherman tanks had to literally go around it
and shoot in through the back door. So he had
to see that. He had to battle his way through
the west wall, so he was in this downward spiral,
and then they get called into the Battle of the Bulge.
That's where they really came toe to toe with the
(12:20):
German panther tanks because Hitler threw everything he had left
into this battle. And Clarence gets to watch as the
American tanks in many cases have to hide from the
enemy because we just couldn't handle them. So there are
times where he's hiding in the night and a German
column of tanks is driving just outside, just beyond him
in the forest, and he has to hold his fire.
(12:43):
So he goes through this crucible of things that would
break a lot of people today. And coming out of
the Battle of the Bulge, the Army realized they had
to change something, and that change was the Pershing. It
was the super tank that was supposed to end the
Third Reich. Well, Clarence is given one of the twenty
Pershings that come to the European Theater and it's untested.
(13:04):
He pulls it up to a hill overlooking a German valley,
the Rhineland, and it's flooded down there and all the
houses are abandoned, and half the third Armored Division gathers
around him, including his general, General Maurice Rose, who was
actually the highest ranking Jewish American in the European Theater.
General Rose is a two star and he's standing next
(13:25):
to Clarence's tank, and he's going to watch a firing demonstration.
So Clarence climbs in and he's nervous as can be,
and he sets his sights on the chimneys of these
houses a thousand, two thousand yards away, and he blasts
the easiest one and the chimney explodes, and his crew
started laughing because outside of the tank, nobody had seen
(13:45):
this Pershings ninety milimeters gun fire before and it had
such a blast that came out of the sides as
well as the front that it bowled General Rose over
into the mud and his entourage and they all are
getting up and they're soaking wet, but they watched chimney
explode and they're happy. The men are cheering because these
were guys who who used to say, give us a
(14:07):
panther and we'll take on the enemy. They used to say,
our tanks are only good for driving around the countryside.
We want tanks to fight with, not look good in parades.
So this is a unit that has been depressed. They
were actually taking their Sherman tanks and they were up
armoring them, just like our hum v's in Iraq. They
were taking armour off of German tanks that had been
knocked out and welding it to the front of our Shermans.
(14:28):
They had been taking sandbags and putting them on the Shermans.
They had been taking concrete and making concrete armor on
the Shermans. That's how terrified they were. Suddenly they're watching
this Pershing tank, the only thing that can go toe
to toe with the German tank, and they know there's hope.
And the third Armored Division set its sights on a
city called Cologne. And the significance of Cologne was that
(14:50):
we had to get a bridge across the Rhine. We
had to get into the heart of Germany and end
this thing, and the Rhine was like this natural barrier.
So the third Armored Division sets out fighting through the
little Rhineland towns, approaching Germany's third largest city, and Coloone
was known as the fortress city because Hitler had ordered
it defended to the last, and we knew we had
(15:11):
to conquer this block by block and it was going
to be the biggest urban battle of the European War.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
This is where Clarence.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Really stepped up, because he's got the pershing and he's
put in the front.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
That was the downside to the new tank.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It meant that you were going to lead every attack,
and he assumed that responsibility. When they lined up at
the gates of the city, his commander said, gentlemen, I
give you Cologne. Let's knock the hell out of it.
And he comes into Colone and he's leading them block
by block. The armored infantry is moving up alongside of them.
The danger in Cologne was you had to watch out for,
not just your left, not just your right. You had
(15:45):
to watch out above and below because you have German
soldiers on the rooftops with Molotov cocktails. You had German
eighty eight millimeter guns, cannons dug into the basement level,
enemy soldiers using the basements as tunnels, so they would
knock down the walls and they could move an entire
block unseen. You also had that fear of a German
soldier with a Panzer Faust, which is glorified bazuka, who
(16:08):
could just step out of any doorway and put that
thing right through your tank. And then on top of it,
the biggest fear and the most uncommon thing for urban
warfare German tanks.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
They were spotted in the city.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
There were several of them that had crossed the bridge
to make a last stand. And you could turn any corner,
and that's what Clarence worried about. You could turn any corner,
you could come to any intersection, and you could drive
right into the crosshairs of a German tank.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
And he did.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And you're listening to Adam Akos telling the story of
Clarence Smoyer and by the way, to give you a
context for this battle, because you've heard the words battle
of the Bulge before, but just to get an idea.
Seven hundred and five thousand soldiers this is just on
our side, twenty four hundred tanks, nineteen hundred tank destroyers,
seventy seven hundred other armored vehicles, and my goodness of troops.
(17:00):
It's staggering. We lost nineteen thousand in this one battle,
eighty nine five hundred casualties. The price we paid, and
my goodness, the price the German people paid for this
was staggering too. Who shall I send and who will
go for us? Here? I am send me. That's from
(17:21):
Isaiah and Clarence Smyer. Well he answered that call. He
lived that verse. When we come back, more of Adam
Akos telling the story of Clarence Smyer here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories into
(18:11):
the story of Clarence Smoyer as told by Adam Makos,
by the way, by his fantastic book Spearhead. Go to Amazon,
go wherever you can and read it. You won't put
it down and you won't regret it. When we last
left off, Clarence was about to be sent into battle
at Cologne, Germany. Adam what happened in Cologne? And who
(18:32):
was Gustaf Schaeffer.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
First time he met Gustaf Schaffer was through the gun site.
Clarence had pulled up to an intersection, a massive four way,
and he's scanning across the way, and Gustav Schaeffer's Panzer
four tank nosed into the opposite street and it saw
Clarence's tank and it backed up really quickly, so before
Clarence could even put his gun on it, it backed up.
Gustav was one of three German tanks sent over the
(18:56):
morning of this battle, and they were sent on a
suicide mission. Three tanks against an American army. I mean
it was nonsense, but Gustav never had a choice in this.
He was a simple farm kid from northern Germany. Grew
up on the windswept fields. His family used to harvest
their crops sun up till sundown. Sometimes they work by
the light of the moon. He had no radio, no electricity.
(19:20):
His hobby was to go and pedal his bicycle to
the nearby railroad tracks to watch trains go by on
the Hamburg to Bremen line. He wanted to be a
locomotive conductor. But Gustav he saw a human even in
his enemy. And seventeen years old, when he's drafted, they
took one look at this little German. He was barely
five foot, blonde hair, and they said, you're going into
(19:43):
the panzers. You're the perfect size for them. There was
no saying no, no, There was no saying, I don't
think so, I think I'll abstain from this. I object
to this war. He knew nothing about this Hitler guy.
The only Jewish person Gustav who growing up was a
neighboring farmer. And this neighboring farmer had once lended his
family a cow to help them through a tough time
(20:04):
and never ask for anything in return. So that was
his worldview of the Jewish people. They're generous, they help
my family. Why are they Hitler's enemy. Well, these two
guys are trading machine gun fire now searching for one another,
trying to see a ricochet, trying to see the tracers
hit something, and Clarence is getting frustrated because he's unable
to hit Gustav's tank. So he does something really clever.
(20:26):
He loads up an armor piercing round. He starts shooting
through the building where Gustav's tank is hiding, shoots one shot, two,
and he's seeing bricks the building which has been damaged
by air raids. Because the whole city had been hit
by two hundred plus air raids, the whole city was
rubble largely, and this building starts to cave in, and
Clarence shoots it again and again, and he eventually brings
(20:47):
down the building onto Gustav's tank. It knocks Gustav's turret
out of whack, and Gustav eventually has to get out
of that tank, and he decides I've had enough of
fighting for Germany, and he runs away and hides, and
then this one moment of what you might say is
free thinking, deciding I'm done with this, I'm done risking
my life for the Third Reich. So he runs away
(21:07):
and he's later survives thanks to what Clarence did. Clarence
fights a second tank, though what happened was he was
held up battling Gustav, so the army sent two Sherman
tanks forward toward Cologne's cathedral, massive Gothic cathedral built over
six hundred years. It's one of the wonders of the world.
And it was still standing. It was blackened and it
was battered, but it was still there. And behind the
(21:30):
cathedral was the Rhine River. Now the Germans had blown
the bridge over the Rhine, so we knew we weren't
getting across today. But we still had to win the battle,
and we knew once we reached the cathedral, you've reached
the Rhine Cologne as ours. And these two Shermans are
about to seize victory when suddenly the right one gets
hit and the left one gets hit by an unseen
German tank. There was a panther tank hiding in a
(21:52):
tunnel and it ambushed both of them. You see, the
commander of one of these tanks, Carl Kellner, comes out.
He's a young man for Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He's got glasses,
he had just gotten a battlefield commission a few weeks earlier.
He had a fiance waiting for him back home. And
he rolls over the turret with his leg missing, and
he bleeds to death right in front of their eyes.
(22:14):
So in the last hour of the battle, there's a
tank out there still killing Americans, and Clarence's crew is
given the call. They hear the call come out on
the radio. Can anybody deal with this panther tank? Because
it pulled up and it parked in front of the cathedral,
the ultimate metaphor. Really, you have this place of faith
and worship, and then you had this enemy who was
(22:36):
parked in front of it, saying we're going to keep
you from this, and we're going to fight to the
last round. They were fanatics. A lot of German soldiers
were now swimming the rhine. They were surrendering in droves,
and these guys decided to fight to the end. And
Clarence's crew came up in their pershing and they fought
this incredible duel with this German panther. Clarence's pershing starts
(22:56):
coming up a parallel street, ready to breach the inner
and come face to face with his panther. The panther's
gun turns and is facing the empty intersection where Clarence's
tank is coming. The German commander inside that panther had
gotten restless. He saw no more Americans coming where he
knocked out those Shermans, so he said, they're gonna come
at me from another direction, and so he aimed at
(23:17):
this empty intersection. Clarence had a plan, which was when
we get there, we're going to go into the intersection,
we're gonna shoot him once, and we're going to back up,
because he had been schooled in the idea that it
takes more than one hit to kill a German tank.
But when his tank pulled into that intersection, the driver
saw the panther and he saw that he was looking
(23:37):
down that black muzzle of this German gun that could
snuff his life, and the driver panicked. He floored the
throttle and he threw the pershing out into the middle
of the intersection. So now you have two tanks broadside,
both with their guns facing each other. It's like two battleships.
Clarence was quicker on the trigger than even the German
gunner who was waiting for him. So he fired and
(23:59):
he didn't aim. He just fired anywhere he could into
this German tank, and he shook the tank and he
rattled it, and the concussion shook the men inside and
it started to smoke, and one German crewman decided to leave,
and then a second decided, and they start pouring out
of the hatches, and that German gunner did not squeeze
his trigger, so Clarence now knows he has another problem.
(24:19):
There's five men in that German tank and any one
of them can reach over pull the trigger, and the
pershing is going to go up in flames. So he
shoots it a second time, and he moves his fire forward.
He fires it through the crew compartment, and then he
calls for a reload, and he fires a third time.
They radioed back any further and will be swimming. Cologne
is secured. They had literally stared death in the face,
(24:40):
and the other tankers were so thankful that they had
gone and done this and knocked out this panther because
other men had been sent in lesser tanks and they
were told, you're going to have to go after the
panther next if this pershing fails. So these guys would
come up and they'd bring them bottles of champagne that
they had just looted. One crew came up and they said,
you saved our lives, and Clarence said, well, I really
(25:01):
saved my life and yours was just along for the ride.
He was kind of self effacing like that, but he
became a twenty one year old corporal from coal country Pennsylvania,
who conquered a German city like Napoleon. And next thing
you know, it's in the newsreels around the country, and
Clarence's family was called to the movie theater because they'd
(25:22):
always play the newsreel right before the main picture. And
sure enough, his mother and father for the first time
in their lives, they were so poor, they had never
been to the movies before. They sat in the theater
and they saw the desperate fighting in Cologne, and they
heard the newscaster, and then they saw their son come
up out of the turret and they said, my god,
he's alive.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
After vanquishing the panther, Clarence was hailed as the hero
of Cologne and nominated for the Bronze Star. Tell us
how he lost that award.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Bob Burley, who commanded the tank at that time, he
got the bronze Start. Two days later, Clarence was wandering
the streets and there was a bunch of German kids there.
There were still forty thousand people living the city, forty
thousand civilians, and these German kids saw an American coming,
and the fear had been gone by then, and these
kids came up to Clarence, this gentle giant, and they
(26:11):
started begging for bubblegum. And Clarence was standing there and
their mother was sitting on the steps of their ruined house,
and he saw these three or four kids and he
gets down. He says, guys, I don't have any gum.
I don't have any gum. And finally he's showing them
over to their mother. He's got his hand on their
back and he pushing them to their mother. When the
MPs come around the corner and there jeep and they
pull up the jeep and they say, we got you.
(26:32):
You're fraternizing with a young woman and three or four kids.
You're talking to the enemy. A couple days later, Clarence's
commanding officer comes in. He says, I was so proud
of how you knocked out that panther tank, and now
you go and do this, And it was absolute, utter nonsense.
It was that sort of elitism that you see sometimes.
(26:52):
And Clarence lost the Bronze Star that day, all over
a stick of gum.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
And you're listening to Adam Akos and he's telling this
story of Clarence Moyer. The book is Spearhead. Go to
Amazon dot com and get it. You won't regret it.
More of this great story, this great World War two
story here on our American stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and the story of Clarence Smoyer as
told by Adam Makos and his wonderful books Spearhead. When
we last left off, Clarence had won the Battle of
Cologne and received and lost his Bronze Star. Adam, I'm
interested in what happens next the battle at what was
called the Nazi Fort knox Well.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The Third Armored Division again had been leading the way
since France. Eisenhower and the brass are trying to figure
out how do we end the war. What's the heart
of Germany. Is it Berlin where Hitler's hiding out, or
is it the Ruhr Valley where Germany's producing all their
munitions and their coal and their steel. And they decided
to leave the symbolic victory to the Russians. Let them
take Berlin. We're going to take the Ruh they said.
(28:23):
We're going to encircle the Ruhr pocket. Hell on wheels
is going to come around from the north, We're going
to come up from the south, and we're going to
pincer them and we're going to steal the Ruer and
we're going to end the war. To do so, though,
the Third Armoured Division had to make an epic drive.
They went one hundred miles in twenty four hours behind
enemy lines. We're saying through German villages, through German auto bonds.
(28:45):
The German soldiers on the side of the road would
just look up and drop their rifles because they'd see
this American armored column just racing at full speed right
past them.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It was awe inspiring.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So after running radio silent for twenty four hours, the
Spearhead Division reaches this city called Padderborne. Padderborn was the
gateway to the rh It was the city that all
the communication and rails rail lines flowed through to reach
the Ruar. So we had to take this place. The
downside was it was the home of the German armor schools.
It was the Nazi Fort Knox as they called it.
(29:18):
The SS trained their tankers there, the Wehrmacht trained their tankers,
They tested their new tanks, and those men would be
coming out to fight. And in a sad twist of fate,
General Rose, who was leading Clarence's division there he was
always out in front like Patten, and he got ambushed
the night before the big battle for the Nazi Fort Knox.
(29:39):
A bunch of German tanks had hidden in a field
and they ambushed his column, and they wiped out this
American column. And when General Rose tried to surrender to
one of the German tankers, when he tried to lower
the pistol belt from his hips, and the German in
the tank, who was holding a Schmeiser machine gun, thought
Rose was going for his gun, and he pumped them
full of thirty bullets entire magazine into General Rows. So
(30:02):
General Rose became the highest ranking Jewish American killed in Europe,
highest ranking officer. And this is on the eve of
the battle for the Nazi Fort Knox. This takes place
on April first, nineteen forty five. It was Easter morning,
and it was almost a scene right out of I
think of like Braveheart, where William Wallace is about to
rally his troops for that first battle and he gives
(30:24):
that speech about freedom, and in this case this was real.
The tanks lined up on this hillside overlooking Padderborn and
the sun is rising behind them, and a chaplain is
going from tank to tank giving a blessing, and the
men are taking off their hats, they're coming out of
the turrets. Some are coming down to the ground and
kneeling in the soggy ground, and he blesses each of the.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Tanks down the row.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
And that's where Clarence looks at all these guys, and
that's where he kind of came to that final epiphany,
and that is, they're all my family. And he's going
to lead with the biggest gun, with the biggest tank,
and he knows he's going to be the biggest target.
And so they charge across this field into the teeth
of the German tanks who were guarding what was called
the Powderburn railyard. And it's this amazing battle where Germans
(31:12):
were hiding in the shell holes and these are ss men.
These are a lot of the most fanatical Germans. They
were the only ones who'd still be fighting at this point.
And Clarence is getting fire from the rail yard itself.
The German tanks are picking them off as they're charging
across the field. Clarence is un to start with fifteen tanks.
Guess how many got in there? Three three reached the
(31:34):
Powderburne railyard and Clarence's tank is there and amazingly they
get hit.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
First time in the war. Clarence gets hit.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
He gets hit on the muzzle of his gun, and
at first the smoke came into the tank and the
crew thought their tank was on fire. So we actually
see Clarence's crew in the pitched battle the last battle,
abandoned tank and they go hide in a ditch and
the bullets are cutting over their heads, are swarming the railyard.
There's German tanks moving around them, and Clarence is now
(32:05):
hiding in a ditch and the other two Sherman tanks
that are with them, one gets hit.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
It's chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
There's now one Sherman tank trying to hold its own
against all of these enemies converging on them.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
And that's when Clarence had this bright idea.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
He looked at the muzzle of the pershing and he said,
it hit us, but I think it hit the muzzle
casing it didn't hit the gun tube itself. And they
knew this was going to be a gamble. He said,
we can get back in that we can still fire
this gun. The downside was if he was wrong if
there was an obstruction, you fire that gun through a
broken barrel. That backblast is coming into the turret and
(32:38):
you are dead. And so they ran back into that
tank while the enemy is shooting at them. Some of
Clarence's crew had to go under the tank and in
through the escape hatch. The bullets were so many. They
get in the tank and Clarence decides, all right, we're
going to keep fighting. And then he gets a tap
on the shoulder. His commander, Bobberly says, tank him on
(33:00):
the right shoulder, and he says, five o'clock. Five o'clock.
That's behind you. That's over your right shoulder. A German
tank had snuck behind them no more than seconds after
they got back in the tank. And Clarence turns the gun.
There's one problem. He's got a round load in the
gun that's not made for taking out tanks. It's a
high explosive round. It's meant for fighting all those troops
(33:21):
that are swarming them. It's going to bounce right off
of that tank. And worse, it's a panther. And he
can just feel his commander now gripping his shoulder. Clarence
does something amazing and again. I always say he's our
best gunner of World War Two. He swings that gun
over and he knows the time it takes to take
that shell out and change it for an armor piercing
is going to get them killed. So when his gun
(33:42):
is turning toward the panther, right when it appears in
front of the panther, he shoots that armor piercing that
high explosive shell into the soil, and the soil throws
up this massive cloud in front of the panther. It
blinds the enemy gunner. Clarence calls for a reload his loader.
An armor piercing shell in locks the breach. Clarence fires
(34:05):
right through the panther through its thickest armor, and the
armor piercing shell goes in and knocks out the enemy tank.
The Germans assaulting the Railyard all see this, and the
Germans lose heart and run away and the battle is saved.
The rest of the American forces make it into the Raiyard.
They take Padderborne, they take the Nazi Fort Knox, and
(34:25):
that day Clarence for the first time he looked inside
the tank that he had destroyed, and for the first
time he owned up to the fact that he was
an American tank gunner.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Talk about coming home, what was that like, talk about
his life after the war.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Clarence came home and he had planned on relaxing a
little bit, but then one of his buddies said, hey,
all the boys are coming back. You're never going to
find a job if you don't grab one now. So
five days later, after he's home, he goes and gets
a job. Within a year, he marries and he locks
away all of the never saw his own news real film.
Decades pass finally the nineties and somebody finds that film
(35:06):
and they send it to him on a VHS. And
he's living in a mobile home park up in Palmerton, Pennsylvania,
and one quiet afternoon he puts that VHS in and
he watches himself and suddenly all the bad memories from
World War Two. For some reason, it triggered the bad memories.
He goes through the years just kind of suffering through trauma. Finally,
(35:28):
twenty thirteen arrives and he's been urged to talk about it.
Everybody says, talk about your story. Go to the VA,
talk to the veterans there. And he goes to the
VA and he realizes these kids are all from Iraq,
they're all from Afghanistan. They don't want to hear from
an old man of World War Two with white hair.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
So he finally comes to.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
A conclusion, there's only one person I can talk to,
one person really know what I went through. Because his
whole tank crew was dead. By then, they had all passed.
There's only one man left he could talk to, and
that was the German he'd fought against. And so they
tracked down Gustav Schaeffer and they found out he was
still living, and Gustav was willing to meet. March twenty thirteen,
(36:09):
he steps in front of the Cologne Cathedral, looking around,
seeing every crowd passing by, looking for his enemy, and
Gustav Schaeffer appeared, and the two men approached, both very
hesitant because neither knew how the other would accept him.
And then finally they stuck out their hands and they
started shaking. They didn't stop shaking. They wrapped their arms
around each other and they started hugging, and Clarence leaned
(36:32):
over to Gustav and said the war is over. We
can be friends now, and Gustav said, yah, yeah, gut,
and they went back to the hotel. Gustav remembered some
English from his days as a pow, and I got
to watch these guys sit on a couch at the
Hilton Cologne, each with a Kolsch beer in hand, and
they started swapping stories. They started talking about the action
(36:54):
they had seen, the battle they had fought, and they
even told jokes. Clarence said, our tank had a refrigerator
in it, did yours? And Gustov said, yeah, yeah, only
in winter time. These guys hit it off and the
next day they went to the place where they had fought.
They stood on the same street and Gusta said, this
is where I was parked, This is where I was
when I was shooting at you. Claren said this is
where I was, and Gusov said, you know, I'm kind
(37:15):
of thankful you shot that building over on us. Otherwise
one of us would have died that day. And they
walked away as friends. They would exchange Christmas cards, they
were pen pals. They even talked on Skype. If you
can imagine that two men in their nineties sitting down
five thousand miles apart, Clarence on a laptop, Gustav on
his desktop, and they talked face to face. How is
(37:39):
your day, It's good to see you again.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
What is new?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
And you've been listening to Adam Makos telling the story
of Clarence Smoyer, and my goodness, there's just so much there,
and in front of that same cathedral where they had
met so many decades before, they embraced and became friends.
A beautiful, beautiful story. It's Moyer's story in a way,
(38:02):
Gustav Schaeffer's story too. Here on our American stories
This is Lee Habib and this is our American Stories,
and we tell stories about everything here on this show,
from the arts to sports, and from business to history
and everything in between, including your story. Send them to
our American Stories dot com. There's some of our favorites.
And today we're sitting down with Adam Makos, author of
(00:30):
great military history books such as I Hire a Call,
Devotion and his latest book, and what we're talking about
now spearhead Adam, I'm interested in how you got interested
in World War Two and who Clarence Smoyer was.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
My grandfather has got me interested, Lee, I was a
kid and they used to take me to air shows
and museums. They both fought in World War Two and
they didn't see combat, and so for them, World War
two is fascinating. They were fascinated by the heroes who
had won the war by the time they got into it,
so they were able to talk about it. They were
(01:06):
able to show me and my brother their photo albums,
and they lit the spark in us that we thought
World War II was cool and we thought the men
who fought it were the best Americans. And what we
did to show our appreciation. We started a little homemade newsletter,
and it eventually became a little magazine called Valor Magazine,
and we would interview veterans at first our grandfathers, next
(01:28):
the guy next door, and then guys in our city,
and before you know what, we were kids in high
school and then later in college publishing a magazine to
honor people who were four times our age. In this case,
a friend in college had told me about this local
hero in his hometown. The guy was living in Allentown,
and my buddy said, listen, there's a hero there from
(01:49):
World War Two who had fought as a tank gunner.
He was one of our most decorated gunners, and he's
living there in a row house in Allentown. Nobody knows
he's there, not his family. They don't know what he
did in the war, or his neighbors don't. I didn't
know much about armored warfare, but I knew there was
something special about this guy because he had supposedly fought
this duel in World War Two that was said to
(02:11):
be the most famous tank duel of the war. So
one day I just went knocking and Clarence Schmoyer opened
the door and invited me into his kitchen, table. His
family grew up in deep poverty. His father was a
way working for the CCC. His mother was a housekeeper.
They lived in a house so you might say dilapidated.
You could hear the neighbors on the other side of
the wall.
Speaker 3 (02:31):
So he grew up poor.
Speaker 2 (02:32):
And Clarence when he would come home from high school,
whereas other kids would go to football practice or they
would go hang out at the movie theater, Clarence came
home and he one of his classmates her father was
in the candy business. So he went to that man
and he said, I'd like to sell candy, And so
Clarence would take a box of chocolate bars, Hershey's and
(02:53):
all those and just like a ballpark vendor, he would
go door to door at night. Again, he's fourteen years
old kid selling candy bars to try to help his family.
And that's where he developed that protective nature. And he
also developed a little bit of a selfish nature in
one sense, and that he believed that no one was
going to help him, no one was going to look
(03:13):
out for him, and he had to take care of
his family because no one's going to help us. Clarence
Smoyer was a member of this Spearhead Division. Now, he
was a twenty one year old gunner at the time.
He's a tall, lanky kid with blonde hair.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Wyat.
Speaker 2 (03:26):
I always said he was a gentle giant, and I
was always amazed that he was a great tank gunner.
Speaker 3 (03:31):
But one of the.
Speaker 2 (03:31):
Reasons he lived in obscurity was partially because he chose that,
and partially because he was in an obscure unit, the
Spearhead Division.
Speaker 3 (03:39):
During World War Two. It's very little known.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It's called a Third Armored Division, and a lot of
people confuse it with Patten's Third Army.
Speaker 3 (03:47):
Third Army is a big unit.
Speaker 2 (03:49):
The war reporters are tagging along and they're sending back
the dispatches. Patton is charging out of France. Patton is
doing this, patent slapped the guy.
Speaker 3 (03:57):
You know.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
The whole unit is being tracked. Third Army Division was
a unit known for breaking through the enemy lines and
then running in radio silence, just like a submarine behind
the lines, sowing chaos. And so the reporters weren't sending
back dispatches. This unit was just creating mayhem. It lost
the most tanks of World War Two of any American unit.
(04:18):
It lost more men killed in action than the one
hundred and first Airborne or the eighty second Airborne, and
nobody knows its name.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
Talk about tanks before we go anywhere else. Who are
these men? Is it a volunteer mission to be inside
these tanks like it is for subs. How does it
all work?
Speaker 2 (04:34):
You know, in the early days it was, but then
after a while they started putting guys in it, whether
they liked it or not. Especially in the late war.
You almost had to be forced into a tank. The
thing is, the Sherman tank is such a beautiful machine.
We always think it's invincible, but you're right. It's like
a submarine that can't hide. And in the early war
our Shermans were a fine tank. When they went into
(04:56):
the African campaign. The British were using them before us,
and they reported great results. You've got five men in
that machine, a gunner, a loader, a bow gunner, a commander.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
And a driver.
Speaker 2 (05:07):
So it's a tightly packed unit, a band of brothers
in an American tank. The trouble was, by nineteen forty
four or forty five, we took those same Sherman tanks
that had been fighting in Africa and we sent them
into Normandy, and there they encountered this German tank called
the Panther, and this thing had a bigger gun, and
it had had a massive armor, and by nineteen forty
(05:28):
four forty five, there was almost a rule you need
seven or eight Shermans to tackle one Panther or tiger
tank of the enemy. Well, Clarence was at first a
loader in the tank and he loved it because he
didn't want to hurt anybody, wanted to get through World
War II without taking a life. Never even like to
hunt rabbits as a.
Speaker 3 (05:45):
Kid, because he'd have to kill him.
Speaker 2 (05:47):
And so he was happy to just shovel the shells
into the gun and let somebody else pull the trigger.
Speaker 3 (05:51):
Now, when the unit was training.
Speaker 2 (05:53):
Up on the English seacoast, they said, now what happens
if our gunners get knocked out? The loaders need to
know how to shoot. So Clarence and the other loaders
were all put in the gunner seat. They were given
a competition. You have to shoot out a target one
thousand yards away up on the coastal bluffs, and we're
going to see who's the best loader turned gunner, and
Clarence nailed this thing eight times and his crew received
(06:14):
a big magnum of Scotch as a reward, and they
all drank that night and they said, someday you are
going to be our gunner, because like it or not,
you have a talent. And so after the heavy losses
in France, when they were charging through Belgium again gunning
for the German border, Clarence was put in the gunner
seat and this reluctant warrior is suddenly given the most
(06:35):
responsibility on the tank because if you miss, that means
your enemy gets to hit you. And statistically, when a
Sherman tank was hit, one man was going to come
out dead, another was going to come out wounded. So Clarence,
the reason he was such a great gunner wasn't because
he hated the enemy. It was because he loved the
men inside that tank, his family, he called them, and
(06:56):
he knew if he missed one of them were going
to come out dead, another wound.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
And you're listening to Adam Makos and he's talking about
the life of Clarence Moyer, which is captured in his
Book's Spearhead. And when we come back, we'll learn more
about this tank er gunner and his fellow soldiers' lives
in that tank, and so much more here on our
American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories
(07:32):
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Speaker 3 (07:48):
Go to our.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
American Stories dot com now and go to the donate
button and help us keep the great American stories coming.
That's our Americanstories dot Com. And we returned to Our
(08:10):
American Stories in Adam Akos, author of the New York
Times bestseller Spearhead. Adam tell me how old Clarence was
when he was sent to the European theater of World
War Two and what his first taste of combat was like.
Speaker 2 (08:24):
He was twenty when he went on that ship over
to England. He came in about three weeks after D
Day entered the Hedgerow fighting led the break through out
of France. It was a harrowing job. I mean when
we talk about selflessness every time his commander would come
back from the briefing. He had a pipe, and the
pipe in his mouth would be bouncing up and down
(08:44):
because his teeth were chattering so badly. Every time these
guys got in these tanks to go charge forward toward
the Germans, they were terrified. But guys like Clarence they
embraced that. Well, there's that that biblical verse which says
who will go forth for us? And then the answer
is send me. Clarence embodied that it was that idea that, well,
(09:06):
somebody has to so send me. Somebody has to protect
the guys behind us in the column. Somebody has to
go first, leading the way, being the first tank over
the hill, the first tank around the bend. When leading
is oftentimes a death sentence. For Clarence, his first taste
of responsibility was at Mons, Belgium. We had broken out
(09:27):
of France and we found out there's this German army
running back to Germany. So the Spearhead Division was given
orders turn on a dime, go north and lay an
ambush for them. So they did, and they beat the
German army there. And you've got a one hundred thousand
or more Germans coming toward you. And we parked our
tanks around the various roadblocks. Clarence's tank that night was
(09:50):
coiled up. They would park five tanks in a fan
and a German tank that night blundered into their position
in the dark, and it parked right next to He's
in the gunner seat. He's got a German tank idling
next to him in the dark. And his commander, a
young man named Paul Faircloth, came up. They were all
trying to catch some shut eye, and Paul said, okay,
we've got to shoot. And Clarence threw this fit because
(10:13):
he didn't want to shoot in the dark when this
enemy tank, even though he could hear it, even though
he could almost touch it, he knew if he missed,
he was going to hit the tank on the other
side of him. And the tank on the other side
of that German was American. And so the German tank
shuts down its engine and we have to wait till daylight. Now,
so Clarence is in that sardine can for hours and hours,
(10:35):
and the hours are ticking by, and it's just this
nerve wracking thing where you have the enemy tank next
to you and it probably knows you're there.
Speaker 3 (10:41):
And it's probably waiting to shoot you too.
Speaker 2 (10:43):
And then when daylight comes, he finally has the courage
to pull that trigger and he kills the first tank
of World War II that he would kill. But the
amazing thing was he was afraid to look inside. All
the guys in the tank said, we've got to look
inside and see did the German crew get out in
the night?
Speaker 3 (11:00):
Did we just kill him all? And Clarence wouldn't do it.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
He refused to get out, He refused to ever look
inside the hatch. Instead, his commander went and did it
for him, And Paul looked inside and he shut the hatch,
and he never told Clarence what he saw in there.
But Clarence was so reluctant, so fearful, that it wouldn't
be for many months that he found the courage to
even own up to what his job was.
Speaker 1 (11:25):
And let's talk about the key moments in his development
as a warrior. Talk about a few of him. Tell
a few stories about Clarence's progression to this leader and
this fighter.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
So Clarence's commander, Paul, who we were talking about, the
next day, they're getting shelled and Paul is going out
of his tank to help some wounded men, and Paul
got blasted by a mortar, his leg torn off, and
he died right in front of Clarence's eyes, thrown up
on a bank in Belgium. So Clarence watches his friend die.
The American army grinds its way into Germany through the
(11:59):
west ward. They have to blast their way through these pillboxes,
and they first meet these Germans who refused to surrender,
so the Sherman tanks had to literally go around it
and shoot in through the back door. So he had
to see that. He had to battle his way through
the west wall, so he was in this downward spiral,
and then they get called into the Battle of the Bulge.
That's where they really came toe to toe with the
(12:20):
German panther tanks because Hitler threw everything he had left
into this battle. And Clarence gets to watch as the
American tanks in many cases have to hide from the
enemy because we just couldn't handle them. So there are
times where he's hiding in the night and a German
column of tanks is driving just outside, just beyond him
in the forest, and he has to hold his fire.
(12:43):
So he goes through this crucible of things that would
break a lot of people today. And coming out of
the Battle of the Bulge, the Army realized they had
to change something, and that change was the Pershing. It
was the super tank that was supposed to end the
Third Reich. Well, Clarence is given one of the twenty
Pershings that come to the European Theater and it's untested.
(13:04):
He pulls it up to a hill overlooking a German valley,
the Rhineland, and it's flooded down there and all the
houses are abandoned, and half the third Armored Division gathers
around him, including his general, General Maurice Rose, who was
actually the highest ranking Jewish American in the European Theater.
General Rose is a two star and he's standing next
(13:25):
to Clarence's tank, and he's going to watch a firing demonstration.
So Clarence climbs in and he's nervous as can be,
and he sets his sights on the chimneys of these
houses a thousand, two thousand yards away, and he blasts
the easiest one and the chimney explodes, and his crew
started laughing because outside of the tank, nobody had seen
(13:45):
this Pershings ninety milimeters gun fire before and it had
such a blast that came out of the sides as
well as the front that it bowled General Rose over
into the mud and his entourage and they all are
getting up and they're soaking wet, but they watched chimney
explode and they're happy. The men are cheering because these
were guys who who used to say, give us a
(14:07):
panther and we'll take on the enemy. They used to say,
our tanks are only good for driving around the countryside.
We want tanks to fight with, not look good in parades.
So this is a unit that has been depressed. They
were actually taking their Sherman tanks and they were up
armoring them, just like our hum v's in Iraq. They
were taking armour off of German tanks that had been
knocked out and welding it to the front of our Shermans.
(14:28):
They had been taking sandbags and putting them on the Shermans.
They had been taking concrete and making concrete armor on
the Shermans. That's how terrified they were. Suddenly they're watching
this Pershing tank, the only thing that can go toe
to toe with the German tank, and they know there's hope.
And the third Armored Division set its sights on a
city called Cologne. And the significance of Cologne was that
(14:50):
we had to get a bridge across the Rhine. We
had to get into the heart of Germany and end
this thing, and the Rhine was like this natural barrier.
So the third Armored Division sets out fighting through the
little Rhineland towns, approaching Germany's third largest city, and Coloone
was known as the fortress city because Hitler had ordered
it defended to the last, and we knew we had
(15:11):
to conquer this block by block and it was going
to be the biggest urban battle of the European War.
Speaker 3 (15:16):
This is where Clarence.
Speaker 2 (15:17):
Really stepped up, because he's got the pershing and he's
put in the front.
Speaker 3 (15:22):
That was the downside to the new tank.
Speaker 2 (15:24):
It meant that you were going to lead every attack,
and he assumed that responsibility. When they lined up at
the gates of the city, his commander said, gentlemen, I
give you Cologne. Let's knock the hell out of it.
And he comes into Colone and he's leading them block
by block. The armored infantry is moving up alongside of them.
The danger in Cologne was you had to watch out for,
not just your left, not just your right. You had
(15:45):
to watch out above and below because you have German
soldiers on the rooftops with Molotov cocktails. You had German
eighty eight millimeter guns, cannons dug into the basement level,
enemy soldiers using the basements as tunnels, so they would
knock down the walls and they could move an entire
block unseen. You also had that fear of a German
soldier with a Panzer Faust, which is glorified bazuka, who
(16:08):
could just step out of any doorway and put that
thing right through your tank. And then on top of it,
the biggest fear and the most uncommon thing for urban
warfare German tanks.
Speaker 3 (16:19):
They were spotted in the city.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
There were several of them that had crossed the bridge
to make a last stand. And you could turn any corner,
and that's what Clarence worried about. You could turn any corner,
you could come to any intersection, and you could drive
right into the crosshairs of a German tank.
Speaker 3 (16:33):
And he did.
Speaker 1 (16:34):
And you're listening to Adam Akos telling the story of
Clarence Smoyer and by the way, to give you a
context for this battle, because you've heard the words battle
of the Bulge before, but just to get an idea.
Seven hundred and five thousand soldiers this is just on
our side, twenty four hundred tanks, nineteen hundred tank destroyers,
seventy seven hundred other armored vehicles, and my goodness of troops.
(17:00):
It's staggering. We lost nineteen thousand in this one battle,
eighty nine five hundred casualties. The price we paid, and
my goodness, the price the German people paid for this
was staggering too. Who shall I send and who will
go for us? Here? I am send me. That's from
(17:21):
Isaiah and Clarence Smyer. Well he answered that call. He
lived that verse. When we come back, more of Adam
Akos telling the story of Clarence Smyer here on our
American stories, and we continue with our American stories into
(18:11):
the story of Clarence Smoyer as told by Adam Makos,
by the way, by his fantastic book Spearhead. Go to Amazon,
go wherever you can and read it. You won't put
it down and you won't regret it. When we last
left off, Clarence was about to be sent into battle
at Cologne, Germany. Adam what happened in Cologne? And who
(18:32):
was Gustaf Schaeffer.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
First time he met Gustaf Schaffer was through the gun site.
Clarence had pulled up to an intersection, a massive four way,
and he's scanning across the way, and Gustav Schaeffer's Panzer
four tank nosed into the opposite street and it saw
Clarence's tank and it backed up really quickly, so before
Clarence could even put his gun on it, it backed up.
Gustav was one of three German tanks sent over the
(18:56):
morning of this battle, and they were sent on a
suicide mission. Three tanks against an American army. I mean
it was nonsense, but Gustav never had a choice in this.
He was a simple farm kid from northern Germany. Grew
up on the windswept fields. His family used to harvest
their crops sun up till sundown. Sometimes they work by
the light of the moon. He had no radio, no electricity.
(19:20):
His hobby was to go and pedal his bicycle to
the nearby railroad tracks to watch trains go by on
the Hamburg to Bremen line. He wanted to be a
locomotive conductor. But Gustav he saw a human even in
his enemy. And seventeen years old, when he's drafted, they
took one look at this little German. He was barely
five foot, blonde hair, and they said, you're going into
(19:43):
the panzers. You're the perfect size for them. There was
no saying no, no, There was no saying, I don't
think so, I think I'll abstain from this. I object
to this war. He knew nothing about this Hitler guy.
The only Jewish person Gustav who growing up was a
neighboring farmer. And this neighboring farmer had once lended his
family a cow to help them through a tough time
(20:04):
and never ask for anything in return. So that was
his worldview of the Jewish people. They're generous, they help
my family. Why are they Hitler's enemy. Well, these two
guys are trading machine gun fire now searching for one another,
trying to see a ricochet, trying to see the tracers
hit something, and Clarence is getting frustrated because he's unable
to hit Gustav's tank. So he does something really clever.
(20:26):
He loads up an armor piercing round. He starts shooting
through the building where Gustav's tank is hiding, shoots one shot, two,
and he's seeing bricks the building which has been damaged
by air raids. Because the whole city had been hit
by two hundred plus air raids, the whole city was
rubble largely, and this building starts to cave in, and
Clarence shoots it again and again, and he eventually brings
(20:47):
down the building onto Gustav's tank. It knocks Gustav's turret
out of whack, and Gustav eventually has to get out
of that tank, and he decides I've had enough of
fighting for Germany, and he runs away and hides, and
then this one moment of what you might say is
free thinking, deciding I'm done with this, I'm done risking
my life for the Third Reich. So he runs away
(21:07):
and he's later survives thanks to what Clarence did. Clarence
fights a second tank, though what happened was he was
held up battling Gustav, so the army sent two Sherman
tanks forward toward Cologne's cathedral, massive Gothic cathedral built over
six hundred years. It's one of the wonders of the world.
And it was still standing. It was blackened and it
was battered, but it was still there. And behind the
(21:30):
cathedral was the Rhine River. Now the Germans had blown
the bridge over the Rhine, so we knew we weren't
getting across today. But we still had to win the battle,
and we knew once we reached the cathedral, you've reached
the Rhine Cologne as ours. And these two Shermans are
about to seize victory when suddenly the right one gets
hit and the left one gets hit by an unseen
German tank. There was a panther tank hiding in a
(21:52):
tunnel and it ambushed both of them. You see, the
commander of one of these tanks, Carl Kellner, comes out.
He's a young man for Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He's got glasses,
he had just gotten a battlefield commission a few weeks earlier.
He had a fiance waiting for him back home. And
he rolls over the turret with his leg missing, and
he bleeds to death right in front of their eyes.
(22:14):
So in the last hour of the battle, there's a
tank out there still killing Americans, and Clarence's crew is
given the call. They hear the call come out on
the radio. Can anybody deal with this panther tank? Because
it pulled up and it parked in front of the cathedral,
the ultimate metaphor. Really, you have this place of faith
and worship, and then you had this enemy who was
(22:36):
parked in front of it, saying we're going to keep
you from this, and we're going to fight to the
last round. They were fanatics. A lot of German soldiers
were now swimming the rhine. They were surrendering in droves,
and these guys decided to fight to the end. And
Clarence's crew came up in their pershing and they fought
this incredible duel with this German panther. Clarence's pershing starts
(22:56):
coming up a parallel street, ready to breach the inner
and come face to face with his panther. The panther's
gun turns and is facing the empty intersection where Clarence's
tank is coming. The German commander inside that panther had
gotten restless. He saw no more Americans coming where he
knocked out those Shermans, so he said, they're gonna come
at me from another direction, and so he aimed at
(23:17):
this empty intersection. Clarence had a plan, which was when
we get there, we're going to go into the intersection,
we're gonna shoot him once, and we're going to back up,
because he had been schooled in the idea that it
takes more than one hit to kill a German tank.
But when his tank pulled into that intersection, the driver
saw the panther and he saw that he was looking
(23:37):
down that black muzzle of this German gun that could
snuff his life, and the driver panicked. He floored the
throttle and he threw the pershing out into the middle
of the intersection. So now you have two tanks broadside,
both with their guns facing each other. It's like two battleships.
Clarence was quicker on the trigger than even the German
gunner who was waiting for him. So he fired and
(23:59):
he didn't aim. He just fired anywhere he could into
this German tank, and he shook the tank and he
rattled it, and the concussion shook the men inside and
it started to smoke, and one German crewman decided to leave,
and then a second decided, and they start pouring out
of the hatches, and that German gunner did not squeeze
his trigger, so Clarence now knows he has another problem.
(24:19):
There's five men in that German tank and any one
of them can reach over pull the trigger, and the
pershing is going to go up in flames. So he
shoots it a second time, and he moves his fire forward.
He fires it through the crew compartment, and then he
calls for a reload, and he fires a third time.
They radioed back any further and will be swimming. Cologne
is secured. They had literally stared death in the face,
(24:40):
and the other tankers were so thankful that they had
gone and done this and knocked out this panther because
other men had been sent in lesser tanks and they
were told, you're going to have to go after the
panther next if this pershing fails. So these guys would
come up and they'd bring them bottles of champagne that
they had just looted. One crew came up and they said,
you saved our lives, and Clarence said, well, I really
(25:01):
saved my life and yours was just along for the ride.
He was kind of self effacing like that, but he
became a twenty one year old corporal from coal country Pennsylvania,
who conquered a German city like Napoleon. And next thing
you know, it's in the newsreels around the country, and
Clarence's family was called to the movie theater because they'd
(25:22):
always play the newsreel right before the main picture. And
sure enough, his mother and father for the first time
in their lives, they were so poor, they had never
been to the movies before. They sat in the theater
and they saw the desperate fighting in Cologne, and they
heard the newscaster, and then they saw their son come
up out of the turret and they said, my god,
he's alive.
Speaker 1 (25:41):
After vanquishing the panther, Clarence was hailed as the hero
of Cologne and nominated for the Bronze Star. Tell us
how he lost that award.
Speaker 2 (25:51):
Bob Burley, who commanded the tank at that time, he
got the bronze Start. Two days later, Clarence was wandering
the streets and there was a bunch of German kids there.
There were still forty thousand people living the city, forty
thousand civilians, and these German kids saw an American coming,
and the fear had been gone by then, and these
kids came up to Clarence, this gentle giant, and they
(26:11):
started begging for bubblegum. And Clarence was standing there and
their mother was sitting on the steps of their ruined house,
and he saw these three or four kids and he
gets down. He says, guys, I don't have any gum.
I don't have any gum. And finally he's showing them
over to their mother. He's got his hand on their
back and he pushing them to their mother. When the
MPs come around the corner and there jeep and they
pull up the jeep and they say, we got you.
(26:32):
You're fraternizing with a young woman and three or four kids.
You're talking to the enemy. A couple days later, Clarence's
commanding officer comes in. He says, I was so proud
of how you knocked out that panther tank, and now
you go and do this, And it was absolute, utter nonsense.
It was that sort of elitism that you see sometimes.
(26:52):
And Clarence lost the Bronze Star that day, all over
a stick of gum.
Speaker 1 (26:56):
And you're listening to Adam Akos and he's telling this
story of Clarence Moyer. The book is Spearhead. Go to
Amazon dot com and get it. You won't regret it.
More of this great story, this great World War two
story here on our American stories, and we continue with
(27:38):
our American stories and the story of Clarence Smoyer as
told by Adam Makos and his wonderful books Spearhead. When
we last left off, Clarence had won the Battle of
Cologne and received and lost his Bronze Star. Adam, I'm
interested in what happens next the battle at what was
called the Nazi Fort knox Well.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
The Third Armored Division again had been leading the way
since France. Eisenhower and the brass are trying to figure
out how do we end the war. What's the heart
of Germany. Is it Berlin where Hitler's hiding out, or
is it the Ruhr Valley where Germany's producing all their
munitions and their coal and their steel. And they decided
to leave the symbolic victory to the Russians. Let them
take Berlin. We're going to take the Ruh they said.
(28:23):
We're going to encircle the Ruhr pocket. Hell on wheels
is going to come around from the north, We're going
to come up from the south, and we're going to
pincer them and we're going to steal the Ruer and
we're going to end the war. To do so, though,
the Third Armoured Division had to make an epic drive.
They went one hundred miles in twenty four hours behind
enemy lines. We're saying through German villages, through German auto bonds.
(28:45):
The German soldiers on the side of the road would
just look up and drop their rifles because they'd see
this American armored column just racing at full speed right
past them.
Speaker 3 (28:54):
It was awe inspiring.
Speaker 2 (28:55):
So after running radio silent for twenty four hours, the
Spearhead Division reaches this city called Padderborne. Padderborn was the
gateway to the rh It was the city that all
the communication and rails rail lines flowed through to reach
the Ruar. So we had to take this place. The
downside was it was the home of the German armor schools.
It was the Nazi Fort Knox as they called it.
(29:18):
The SS trained their tankers there, the Wehrmacht trained their tankers,
They tested their new tanks, and those men would be
coming out to fight. And in a sad twist of fate,
General Rose, who was leading Clarence's division there he was
always out in front like Patten, and he got ambushed
the night before the big battle for the Nazi Fort Knox.
(29:39):
A bunch of German tanks had hidden in a field
and they ambushed his column, and they wiped out this
American column. And when General Rose tried to surrender to
one of the German tankers, when he tried to lower
the pistol belt from his hips, and the German in
the tank, who was holding a Schmeiser machine gun, thought
Rose was going for his gun, and he pumped them
full of thirty bullets entire magazine into General Rows. So
(30:02):
General Rose became the highest ranking Jewish American killed in Europe,
highest ranking officer. And this is on the eve of
the battle for the Nazi Fort Knox. This takes place
on April first, nineteen forty five. It was Easter morning,
and it was almost a scene right out of I
think of like Braveheart, where William Wallace is about to
rally his troops for that first battle and he gives
(30:24):
that speech about freedom, and in this case this was real.
The tanks lined up on this hillside overlooking Padderborn and
the sun is rising behind them, and a chaplain is
going from tank to tank giving a blessing, and the
men are taking off their hats, they're coming out of
the turrets. Some are coming down to the ground and
kneeling in the soggy ground, and he blesses each of the.
Speaker 3 (30:47):
Tanks down the row.
Speaker 2 (30:48):
And that's where Clarence looks at all these guys, and
that's where he kind of came to that final epiphany,
and that is, they're all my family. And he's going
to lead with the biggest gun, with the biggest tank,
and he knows he's going to be the biggest target.
And so they charge across this field into the teeth
of the German tanks who were guarding what was called
the Powderburn railyard. And it's this amazing battle where Germans
(31:12):
were hiding in the shell holes and these are ss men.
These are a lot of the most fanatical Germans. They
were the only ones who'd still be fighting at this point.
And Clarence is getting fire from the rail yard itself.
The German tanks are picking them off as they're charging
across the field. Clarence is un to start with fifteen tanks.
Guess how many got in there? Three three reached the
(31:34):
Powderburne railyard and Clarence's tank is there and amazingly they
get hit.
Speaker 3 (31:40):
First time in the war. Clarence gets hit.
Speaker 2 (31:42):
He gets hit on the muzzle of his gun, and
at first the smoke came into the tank and the
crew thought their tank was on fire. So we actually
see Clarence's crew in the pitched battle the last battle,
abandoned tank and they go hide in a ditch and
the bullets are cutting over their heads, are swarming the railyard.
There's German tanks moving around them, and Clarence is now
(32:05):
hiding in a ditch and the other two Sherman tanks
that are with them, one gets hit.
Speaker 3 (32:09):
It's chaos.
Speaker 2 (32:10):
There's now one Sherman tank trying to hold its own
against all of these enemies converging on them.
Speaker 3 (32:15):
And that's when Clarence had this bright idea.
Speaker 2 (32:17):
He looked at the muzzle of the pershing and he said,
it hit us, but I think it hit the muzzle
casing it didn't hit the gun tube itself. And they
knew this was going to be a gamble. He said,
we can get back in that we can still fire
this gun. The downside was if he was wrong if
there was an obstruction, you fire that gun through a
broken barrel. That backblast is coming into the turret and
(32:38):
you are dead. And so they ran back into that
tank while the enemy is shooting at them. Some of
Clarence's crew had to go under the tank and in
through the escape hatch. The bullets were so many. They
get in the tank and Clarence decides, all right, we're
going to keep fighting. And then he gets a tap
on the shoulder. His commander, Bobberly says, tank him on
(33:00):
the right shoulder, and he says, five o'clock. Five o'clock.
That's behind you. That's over your right shoulder. A German
tank had snuck behind them no more than seconds after
they got back in the tank. And Clarence turns the gun.
There's one problem. He's got a round load in the
gun that's not made for taking out tanks. It's a
high explosive round. It's meant for fighting all those troops
(33:21):
that are swarming them. It's going to bounce right off
of that tank. And worse, it's a panther. And he
can just feel his commander now gripping his shoulder. Clarence
does something amazing and again. I always say he's our
best gunner of World War Two. He swings that gun
over and he knows the time it takes to take
that shell out and change it for an armor piercing
is going to get them killed. So when his gun
(33:42):
is turning toward the panther, right when it appears in
front of the panther, he shoots that armor piercing that
high explosive shell into the soil, and the soil throws
up this massive cloud in front of the panther. It
blinds the enemy gunner. Clarence calls for a reload his loader.
An armor piercing shell in locks the breach. Clarence fires
(34:05):
right through the panther through its thickest armor, and the
armor piercing shell goes in and knocks out the enemy tank.
The Germans assaulting the Railyard all see this, and the
Germans lose heart and run away and the battle is saved.
The rest of the American forces make it into the Raiyard.
They take Padderborne, they take the Nazi Fort Knox, and
(34:25):
that day Clarence for the first time he looked inside
the tank that he had destroyed, and for the first
time he owned up to the fact that he was
an American tank gunner.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
Talk about coming home, what was that like, talk about
his life after the war.
Speaker 2 (34:42):
Clarence came home and he had planned on relaxing a
little bit, but then one of his buddies said, hey,
all the boys are coming back. You're never going to
find a job if you don't grab one now. So
five days later, after he's home, he goes and gets
a job. Within a year, he marries and he locks
away all of the never saw his own news real film.
Decades pass finally the nineties and somebody finds that film
(35:06):
and they send it to him on a VHS. And
he's living in a mobile home park up in Palmerton, Pennsylvania,
and one quiet afternoon he puts that VHS in and
he watches himself and suddenly all the bad memories from
World War Two. For some reason, it triggered the bad memories.
He goes through the years just kind of suffering through trauma. Finally,
(35:28):
twenty thirteen arrives and he's been urged to talk about it.
Everybody says, talk about your story. Go to the VA,
talk to the veterans there. And he goes to the
VA and he realizes these kids are all from Iraq,
they're all from Afghanistan. They don't want to hear from
an old man of World War Two with white hair.
Speaker 3 (35:47):
So he finally comes to.
Speaker 2 (35:48):
A conclusion, there's only one person I can talk to,
one person really know what I went through. Because his
whole tank crew was dead. By then, they had all passed.
There's only one man left he could talk to, and
that was the German he'd fought against. And so they
tracked down Gustav Schaeffer and they found out he was
still living, and Gustav was willing to meet. March twenty thirteen,
(36:09):
he steps in front of the Cologne Cathedral, looking around,
seeing every crowd passing by, looking for his enemy, and
Gustav Schaeffer appeared, and the two men approached, both very
hesitant because neither knew how the other would accept him.
And then finally they stuck out their hands and they
started shaking. They didn't stop shaking. They wrapped their arms
around each other and they started hugging, and Clarence leaned
(36:32):
over to Gustav and said the war is over. We
can be friends now, and Gustav said, yah, yeah, gut,
and they went back to the hotel. Gustav remembered some
English from his days as a pow, and I got
to watch these guys sit on a couch at the
Hilton Cologne, each with a Kolsch beer in hand, and
they started swapping stories. They started talking about the action
(36:54):
they had seen, the battle they had fought, and they
even told jokes. Clarence said, our tank had a refrigerator
in it, did yours? And Gustov said, yeah, yeah, only
in winter time. These guys hit it off and the
next day they went to the place where they had fought.
They stood on the same street and Gusta said, this
is where I was parked, This is where I was
when I was shooting at you. Claren said this is
where I was, and Gusov said, you know, I'm kind
(37:15):
of thankful you shot that building over on us. Otherwise
one of us would have died that day. And they
walked away as friends. They would exchange Christmas cards, they
were pen pals. They even talked on Skype. If you
can imagine that two men in their nineties sitting down
five thousand miles apart, Clarence on a laptop, Gustav on
his desktop, and they talked face to face. How is
(37:39):
your day, It's good to see you again.
Speaker 3 (37:40):
What is new?
Speaker 1 (37:41):
And you've been listening to Adam Makos telling the story
of Clarence Smoyer, and my goodness, there's just so much there,
and in front of that same cathedral where they had
met so many decades before, they embraced and became friends.
A beautiful, beautiful story. It's Moyer's story in a way,
(38:02):
Gustav Schaeffer's story too. Here on our American stories
Host
Lee Habeeb
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