Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives - Adam Makos

Clarence Smoyer, top center

I didn’t plan it this way, but I find it highly appropriate that I finished Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives by Adam Makos during Memorial Day weekend. Spearhead is perfect for this particular holiday because it is one of those rare World War II histories in which the reader learns as much about the individual soldiers doing battle as about the battles they waged.  

The 3^rdArmored Division, “Spearhead,” is legendary for being at the forefront of the final push into Germany that ended the war in Europe – and the tank crew that Makos focuses on was one of the very best in the division. That is largely because the crew was blessed to have Clarence Smoyer as its gunner.  Clarence may have missed out on the formal training given to tank gunners, but it turned out that he was a natural shooter who never missed.  More importantly, some of his shots were so unorthodox in nature that his crew came to feel that Clarence was sometimes the only thing between them and death on the battlefield.

Even Clarence, though, would probably not have been able to save them forever from the German Panthers that so clearly outgunned the American Sherman tanks. It is said that a Panther could take out two side-by-side Shermans with one shot, so Clarence and his crew felt that it was only a matter of time before they would fall prey to a Panther. But that changed one day when Clarence’s crew was given one of the twenty brand new “super tanks” that America rushed into Europe to help offset the superiority of the Panther.  That’s the good news; the bad news is that now Clarence and the boys in their new Pershing would be the lead tank in every offensive that the division was a part of.

Clarence Smoyer

The climax of Spearhead is a personal one involving a duel between Clarence’s Pershing and a Panther whose gunner is teenager Gustav Schaefer.  It is a battle in which only one of the tanks can survive and the victor will help decide in whose hands the city of Cologne is in at the end of the day’s fighting.  But something happens in the middle of their fight that neither gunner expected – something that Clarence will see in his nightmares for decades to come.  In March 2003, Clarence and Gustav got the chance to meet face-to-face again in Cologne to figure out exactly what happened all those years earlier.  

Adam Makos found so much material available to him and his researchers that reading Spearheadis almost like riding along with Clarence and the rest of the tank crew.  Researchers used archive materials from the U.S. and England, period interviews between the crew and war reporters, detailed weather reports, battle orders, and even the transcribed radio logs of tank commanders talking to each other and their crews during the battles.  But perhaps best of all, Makos was able to study the footage shot by Jim Bates in Cologne that day – film footage that even includes Clarence’s one-on-one duel with Gustav when they crossed paths at a Cologne intersection. 

Bottom Line: Spearhead is a remarkable reminder that World War II is not so long ago that we do not still have veterans on both sides suffering from the memories of what they experienced in battle.  (My own father who just turned 97 was member of an artillery battery involved in several of the battles described in Spearhead from Clarence’s point of view.)  Even if military history does not normally appeal to you, don’t miss this one. It is that good.

Book Number 3,398