Patton’s Spearheaders
Battalion History
This unit ranked high among the most decorated separate tank battalions fighting in Europe during World War II. It received the Presidential Unit Citation from Harry Truman, and the Croix de Guerre with Silver Star from the French Government, for its action at Mortain France during August 10 – 13, 1944 — and 22 commendations from higher headquarters for excellent performance in other battles.
“737” participated in all of the five major battles (Normandy, Northern France, Ardennes-Alsace, Rhineland, and Central Europe). During 299 days of actual combat members of the unit were awarded 2 Distinguished Service Crosses, 22 Silver Stars, 188 Bronze Stars, more than 400 purple hearts, and two Croix de Guerre’s. Three enlisted men received battlefield commissions.
The unit landed at Omaha Beach on July 12 and 13, 1944, assigned to the First Army. After the capture of Saint Lo in France, “737” was transferred to the Third Army on August 6, 1944. Although it fought most of the war with the Third Army, our battalion was briefly loaned to the First Army again in April 1945 to help clean up the Ruhr Pocket that contained 317,000 German soldiers. This campaign started at Brilon and ended in Menden on the Ruhr River.
In five days “737” cleared 42 towns. One of our reconnaissance patrols killed Lieutenant General Joachim Von Kortzfleisch, second in command to Field Marshal Walter Model, when he tried to escape.
At times the battalion was badly mauled by some of the best soldiers in the German Army. The Krauts destroyed 66 medium and 8 light tanks. (A tank battalion has an initial strength of 59 medium tanks, 17 light tanks, and 751 men.)
Combat took a heavy toll in manpower. Our unit had 6 officers and 58 enlisted men killed in action. One officer and 20 enlisted men were reported missing. The names of one officer and two enlisted men are listed on the wall in the Luxembourg Cemetery as soldiers “who sleep in unknown graves”.
These losses were not without glory. When General Patton was observing our troops at the Moselle River crossing he said “that’s the way tanks should fight.”
General Patton sent a letter on 17 Nov 45 to the officers and men of the 5th Infantry Division, to whom we were attached. He wrote “To my mind history does not record incidents of greater valor than your assault crossings of the Sauer and the Rhine. You crossed so many rivers I am persuaded many of you have web feet …”
“737” was the first tank battalion of the Third Army to cross the Moselle and Meurthe Rivers, the first armored unit in XII Corps to touch German soil, and the first armored unit of the Third Army to cross the Rhine River and enter Frankfurt. It ended the war in Czechoslovakia (Sudetenland) after capturing Houzina, Volary and Winterberg.
One platoon of Company “C”, commanded by your webmaster, liberated 118 Jewish girls in Volary on May 5, 1945. These young ladies, with an average weight of 82 pounds, survived the 700 – kilometer Death March that began in Poland on January 29 and lasted 97 days. The Death March story has been dramatized on national television.
Another historical incident occurred in Volary — the last official casualty in the ETO. A Czech-American citizen, Pfc Charles Havlat of the 803rd Tank Destroyer Battalion, was killed when elements of the 11th Panzer Division ambushed his reconnaissance platoon 4 km northeast of the town. This event took place at 0820 hours on May 7, about 10 minutes before the “cease-fire” orders became effective. Your webmaster was at the scene.
German occupation in Kreis Vilshofen was soon interrupted by a reorganization into the 737th Amphibian Tractor Battalion. Our unit moved to Camp Lucky Strike, France, and sailed from La Havre on the liberty ship Timothy H. Dwight. Operation Olympic (invasion of the island of Kyushu) was scrapped by the A-bomb, but the 737 went to Ford Ord, California, and trained until deactivated on 15 Nov 1945.
Our Battalion was attached to three hard-fighting outfits during and after the war:
France
35th Infantry Division
Luxembourg, Germany, Czechoslovakia 5th Infantry Division German Occupation 83rd Infantry Division
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M1 Garand Disassembly in 1Minute!
The state of the art in modern special operations, frankly, is remarkable. In 2011, a group of elite Navy SEALs inserted via stealth helicopters deep inside hostile territory to kill the most wanted terrorist on Planet Earth.
They successfully accomplished this daring mission for the loss of a single aircraft. Friendly forces exfilled unharmed, and the world stood amazed. However, that didn’t just happen.
Operation Neptune Spear, the mission to kill Osama bin Laden, was the end result of decades of tactical evolution. The Son Tay Raid in Vietnam, the Israeli raid on Entebbe, and Operation Nimrod, wherein the British SAS took down Prince’s Gate in London — each of these bold missions was more audacious than the last. But where did all that start?
Origins
Modern special operations really had their genesis in World War II. The British 22nd Special Air Service and the American OSS led the charge. For the Axis, however, special operations really orbited around a single man. That pioneering German commando was SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Johann Anton Skorzeny.
Otto Skorzeny was a physically imposing guy. At a time when the average corn-fed American draftee stood five foot eight, Skorzeny was six foot four. He also sported a prominent dueling scar across his left cheek. In 1939, Skorzeny tried to fly combat aircraft for the Luftwaffe but was considered both too big and, at age 31, too old. Instead, he entered the Waffen SS and embarked on a career as a shadow warrior.
Accomplishments
We will have to briefly suspend our justifiable revulsion at the SS and its dark association with genocide to fully appreciate Skorzeny’s contribution to modern spec-ops. Skorzeny fought for what was arguably the most depraved regime of the modern era. However, that does not diminish the man’s martial prowess.
Skorzeny freed the Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini from the mountaintop fortress at Gran Sasso in 1943. He kidnapped the son of Miklos Horthy, the Hungarian head of state, from under the noses of his troops. Hitler then used the younger Horthy as leverage to keep Hungary in the war on the Axis side.
Skorzeny also commanded the 150th SS Panzer Brigade, the English-speaking Germans who infiltrated behind American lines to sow chaos during the Battle of the Bulge. He was not captured and executed alongside his men because he was deemed both too large and too distinctive to pass himself off as an American soldier and be a part of that mission. Now, hold that thought…
The Gear
Modern special operators require specialized gear. Weapons employed by special forces are often smaller, lighter, stealthier, and more concealable than those used by their ground-pounding counterparts. A critical part of all that is crafting firearms that don’t make excessive noise.
Nowadays, you can’t eat at the cool kids’ table at the local range if you don’t have a sound suppressor threaded onto the snout of your favorite gat. However, back in the 1940s, such tech was in its infancy. The state of the art back then was the British Mk IIS Sten.
Designed by Major Reginald Shepherd and Harold Turpin while working at the Royal Small Arms Factory at Enfield, the name “Sten” is a portmanteau combining letters from each man’s name as well as the Enfield factory. More than four million copies were produced in at least seven different marks. The cheapest version costs $9 apiece. That would be about $150 today. This inexpensive 9mm submachine gun of WWII helped save the British nation during those dark days.
All Sten SMGs fed from the left via an execrable double-column, single-feed 32-round box magazine. The Mk II was the most common version. This variant featured a selective-fire action common to all Stens, as well as a rotating magazine well that could be rotated to seal the action against contaminants.
The Sten Mk II readily broke down into four components for transport or concealment. While the Sten gun was a marvel of modern manufacturing efficiency, the sound-suppressed Mk IIS was legitimately revolutionary.
Mk IIS — The Silent Wonder
9×19 mm Parabellum ammunition is naturally supersonic. A sound-suppressed firearm firing supersonic ammunition is going to make a lot of noise no matter what wondrous things you might do to mitigate its intrinsic racket.
The speed of sound in dry air is 1,125 feet per second. Standard 115-gr. 9mm from a Sten clocks in at around 1,200 fps. The Mk IIS employed a ported barrel that automatically dropped standard service ammunition into the subsonic range. This is not an uncommon solution to the supersonic problem today. It was groundbreaking back in 1943.
Nowadays, we use CNC mills and metal 3D printing to produce complex shapes that maximize the effectiveness of our sound suppressors. During WWII, the designers of the Mk IIS used a series of wire-mesh disks. Think window screen material. This worked shockingly well.
However, the suppressor got hot very quickly and didn’t last terribly long. The Mk IIS came equipped with a canvas cover to help protect the shooter’s hand, and troops were trained to fire the weapon on semi-auto to maximize its efficiency and lifespan.
Back to Otto Skorzeny
Skorzeny coveted a sound-suppressed, pistol-caliber SMG for his special operators in the worst way. There was some tepid research on both 9mm P.08 Luger pistols and 9mm MP40 submachine guns, but nothing of consequence emerged.
The few copies of the suppressed Mk IIS Sten that were captured by the Germans were redesignated the MP 751e. Skorzeny had an example for his personal use.
Otto Skorzeny tried to get Nazi logisticians to allocate precious resources to support his special operations troops. However, nobody would take him seriously when he requested a stealthy 9mm submachine gun. Firearms are noisy. There was clearly little to be done about that.
To prove his point, Skorzeny supposedly tucked his captured Mk IIS Sten gun underneath a long coat while out walking with a German official in downtown Berlin. On a crowded street, Hitler’s favorite commando then stepped behind his counterpart, produced the weapon, and emptied a magazine into the air without alarming either his companion or the other Berliners strolling about around them.
The SS officer made his point. However, by that phase of the conflict, submachine guns were not going to turn the tide. The Nazis were already doomed. Meanwhile, the Mk IIS Sten gun eventually led to the extraordinary sound-suppressed weapons in common use today.
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