Clarence Smoyer’s Pershing Killed a Panther in Cologne

Name: Clarence Smoyer’s Pershing Killed a Panther in Cologne
Uploaded: 2026-09-10T14:06:15+00:00
Duration: 44 min 58 s
Channel: WW2 Dispatch

00:00March 6, 1945, 2 o'clock in the afternoon, on a street called Marzellinstrasse, in the burnt-out

00:07center of Cologne. A 21-year-old gunner named Clarence Smoyer is sitting in the dark with his

00:12forehead pressed against a rubber eyepiece, and he has just been handed an order that contradicts

00:18almost everything the United States Army spent two years teaching him. Somewhere ahead, around

00:24a corner he cannot see past, a German panther is sitting in the open ground in front of Cologne

00:29Cathedral, with its gun already laid on an intersection. Minutes ago, that gun killed

00:35three Americans. Their tank is still burning in the street. And the order Smoyer has been given is the

00:42kind of simple that gets crews killed. Go into that intersection and shoot first. Now here's the thing

00:50to hold on to, because the entire story turns on it. Everything Smoyer had been taught said a tank

00:56stops to shoot. You roll, you halt, the hull settles, the gunner lays his sight, and then you fire.

01:04That was not a preference or a habit. That was doctrine, drilled into every American gunner from

01:10Fort Knox to the hedgerows. And there was a hard reason behind it. A moving tank is a moving gun

01:17platform, and a moving gun platform misses. But a tank that stops in front of a panther is not a

01:24tank anymore.

01:24It is a target holding still, at close range, in front of a gun that has already proved that afternoon

01:31that it does not miss. So this crew had about a minute to choose which rule they were going to

01:37break.

01:38Keep both options in your head, because you are going to watch a man decide between them in real time,

01:43with the clock running. Before we go further, if you want stories about the American tank crews

01:50of 1945 told properly, take a second to like this video and subscribe, and it keeps these stories alive.

01:58Back to Smoyer. There is a second thing about that afternoon, and it is the reason the German crew

02:03across the square was about to get the worst surprise of its war. They did not know the tank rolling

02:10toward

02:10them existed. Not because they were careless. Because almost nobody did.

02:16The machine idling on Martellenstrasse was not a Sherman. It was new. It had been in Europe roughly six weeks,

02:24and on the entire Western Front, from the North Sea to Switzerland, there were exactly twenty of them.

02:30Ten issued to one division. Ten to another. That was the whole inventory in the theater.

02:37Twenty tanks. On a front where the Allies fielded thousands. Remember that number.

02:43It comes back at the end of this story in a way you will not expect, and it explains something

02:49about

02:49the American army in 1945 that most people have completely backwards. Now, Cologne. Because you

02:57cannot judge what these men did without knowing what they were driving into. And the honest answer is,

03:02almost nothing. Cologne had been one of the great cities of Germany, roughly 800,000 people before

03:10the war. By the first week of March 1945, it had absorbed 262 separate air raids. The last of them

03:18came on March 2nd, four days before our story. What was left was a landscape of standing facades with

03:25nothing behind them. Streets that were more brick-piled than street. And somewhere around 20,000 civilians

03:32still alive underground. In cellars, in bunkers, in the crypts of churches. 800,000 down to 20,000.

03:41Sit with that ratio for a second, because the men rolling in did not have that figure. As far as

03:47they

03:47knew, every one of those hollow windows had somebody behind it. And above all of it, almost untouched,

03:54the twin spires of the cathedral. Bombs had come down all around it, and it was still standing.

04:00Every American in the column used it as a landmark that day. So did every German gunner in the city.

04:06The men doing the driving belonged to the 3rd Armored Division, the outfit that went by spearhead,

04:11and they had earned the name the hard way. Normandy, the breakout, Malls, the German border,

04:18the Hurtgen Forest, the Ardennes in December. Now they were being asked to take the largest German

04:23city yet captured in the west, and to take it fast, because a few miles east of the cathedral,

04:30there was a bridge over the Rhine. Every man from the corporals up understood what an intact bridge

04:36over the Rhine was worth. So speed was the whole plan, and speed is a decision with a price attached.

04:44Move fast and you take the city before the defenders can organize. Move fast and you also

04:49drive tank columns down streets nobody has cleared, past cellars nobody has checked, into fields of

04:56fire nobody has mapped. The Americans knew the price. They chose speed anyway, because the alternative

05:03was giving a beaten garrison time to become an organized one. For most of that morning, it worked.

05:10The columns pushed in from three directions and found what everyone expected to find in a dying city.

05:17Surrender. Empty positions. Men in uniform walking out with their hands up. Which is exactly what made the

05:24early afternoon so dangerous. By one o'clock, the American advance had started to believe the city was

05:30already finished. At a quarter to two, two Shermans of Company F turned east onto a street called

05:37Komodienstrasse and put their engines up. Ninety seconds later, the advance stopped dead. Because

05:45one German officer in that city had done the one thing none of the others bothered to do.

05:51Komodienstrasse, 1.45 in the afternoon. A narrow street of five-story facades, with the guts blown out

05:58of them, running east toward the cathedral. In the turret of the lead Sherman stands a man the rest of

06:05the column would have followed anywhere. And I want you to know him before the next 90 seconds,

06:11because after them, there is nothing left to know. Second Lieutenant Carl Kellner of Sheboygan,

06:18Wisconsin. He had been an enlisted man until very recently. His commission was a battlefield

06:24promotion, the kind the army hands out when the officers are gone and somebody has to lead.

06:30He had been wounded twice. He had a silver star from Normandy. He was, in other words,

06:38exactly the man you would want at the front of a column entering a city nobody had mapped.

06:44And he was riding with his head out of the hatch because that is the only way a tank commander

06:49sees

06:49anything in a street fight. Behind him, four men. Julian Patrick driving. A man named Spear as

06:58assistant gunner. John Gioluca on the main gun. Oliver Griffin in the bow. 340 meters ahead of them,

07:06in the shadow of an underpass near a street called Trankgasse, the German Panther had its gun laid and

07:12its crew silent. Now hold those two numbers side by side, because they are the whole engagement.

07:20340 meters of open, rubble-choked street, and a German 75-millimeter gun that could put a round through

07:28the front of a Sherman at more than twice that distance. The Americans had one thing going for them.

07:35The Panther could only fire down that one axis. Which meant Kellner's tanks were safe until the

07:41exact instant they crossed into its field of view. And then not safe at all. They crossed.

07:48The first round hit the lead Sherman in the turret. If you have never understood what that sentence

07:54means physically, here it is. An armor-piercing shot arriving at nearly half a mile per second does

08:00not explode the tank. It punches through the steel and turns everything inside, the armor it displaces,

08:06the round itself, the ammunition, into a spray moving at rifle speed inside a space the size of a closet.

08:14Julian Patrick and the man named Spear were killed where they sat.

08:18Gioluca took shrapnel and lived. Griffin got out. And Kellner got out too. He came out of the hatch and

08:26down the side of the tank. And a witness who watched it happen said the round had taken part

08:31of his lower leg away. He died in the street beside his own tank, a few blocks short of the

08:37cathedral,

08:38in a city he had never seen before that morning. The second round hit the tank behind him and blew

08:44its

08:44track apart. Two shots. Two Shermans finished. Three Americans dead. And the German gunner had not

08:54moved his tank an inch. I want to be very direct with you here, because this channel does not pretend

09:01the war was a highlight reel. That was a defeat. In under two minutes, one German crew that had refused

09:09to

09:09run when most of the garrison was already running, had shut a street of the American advance completely

09:14down. And that is exactly why what happens next matters. You cannot understand the size of the

09:21answer until you have watched the problem work. Now, the officer in that Panther, his name was

09:27Wilhelm Bartelborth, an Oberlieutenant of Panzer Brigade 106, a unit carrying the name Feldherrenhala.

09:34And by March of 1945, he belonged to a category of German soldier that was becoming rare,

09:39the one still fighting a lost battle competently. Most of the Cologne garrison had already gone east

09:45over the river. He had stayed, picked a firing position with a single narrow window onto a single

09:51street, and made it pay within minutes of the Americans arriving. He would fire again that afternoon,

09:57and when he did, it would be at something he had no name for. Because word of the two burning

10:02Shermans went back down the column by radio, and the men receiving it faced the dilemma that every

10:07armored unit in Europe had been chewing on since Normandy. Option 1. Pull back, call artillery or

10:15infantry, take an hour, take two, and let the Germans use that hour to set the next ambush deeper in.

10:22Option 2. Send another tank forward into the same street and lose it the same way.

10:28Both options were bad. The Americans took a third one, and the third one only existed because of

10:35an accident of supply. One street to the north, on Marzellenstrasse, there happened to be parked

10:41a tank that did not officially belong in this war yet. Its crew called it Eagle 7. It weighed 20

10:48tons

10:48more than a Sherman. It carried a 90-millimeter gun that had been designed to kill things the Sherman could

10:54not scratch, and it had reached the front line through a program so small and so hurried that

11:00the men who brought it over from the United States had come with it in person, in uniform, to see

11:05whether the thing worked.

11:08Here is what nobody on Marzellenstrasse said out loud that afternoon, and what the crew of Eagle 7 knew

11:14better than anyone in the division. Eight days earlier, one of these tanks had already been

11:20destroyed by the Germans. Two of the five men inside were killed in under 10 seconds. And the man who

11:26had

11:26watched it burn was sitting in Eagle 7's gunner's seat right now. February 26, 1945. Eight days before

11:34Cologne, in a village called Elsdorf, about 20 miles west of the Rhine. It is dark. It is freezing. And

11:42one of

11:42the 20 is sitting in the street over watching a roadblock. Behind it, a building is burning. That detail is

11:49going to kill two Americans in the next few seconds. And I want you to understand why. Because it is

11:54the same physics that

11:55will decide everything at the cathedral. A tank at night is invisible, until something puts light

12:01behind it. The fire in that building put light behind this one. To the Americans inside, nothing

12:08had changed. They were watching a road through periscopes, seeing what they had been seeing for

12:13an hour. To anyone looking from the German side, the tank had just become a black shape cut out of

12:18an

12:18orange background, at a range where you do not need to be a good gunner. There was a tiger in

12:24that village.

12:25Nobody in the American tank knew it. The range was about 100 yards, which in tank terms is not a

12:31duel. It is an execution. The first German round came through the front of the turret and went in

12:37through the opening for the machine gun and the mantlet. That is a hole a few inches across and a

12:42face of steel a foot thick. And the shot found it. The gunner and the loader were killed instantly.

12:49The second round struck the gun barrel itself and detonated the shell that was sitting in the chamber,

12:54which bent the barrel into something no gunner would ever fire again. The third came in against

13:00the side of the turret, skidded off the armor, and tore the hatch off the top of the cupola.

13:06Three shots. Ten seconds, give or take.

13:09The newest, heaviest, best protected tank in the American army in Europe, finished by a German crew

13:16that saw it first. That tank had a name painted on it. The crew called it Fireball. So here is

13:24the

13:24lesson that went around the division that week, and it was not the lesson the newspapers would print a

13:29month later. The new tank did not make you safe. Being seen first still killed you, exactly as fast

13:38as before, and the thicker armor bought you almost nothing when the range collapsed to a city block.

13:45But there is a second half to that day, and it is the half that made the whole argument complicated.

13:52Elsewhere at Elsdorf, in daylight, another of the twenty went to work, and reportedly destroyed a

13:58Tiger and two German tanks at something like a thousand yards. Not close. Not lucky. From a distance

14:06where an American Sherman crew would have been looking for a way to get to somebody's flank,

14:10or looking for a way to leave. Put those two events side by side, because they happened within

14:17hours of each other, and they say opposite things. At a thousand yards, this thing could kill anything

14:23Germany had. At a hundred yards, it died like everything else. Which meant the entire value of

14:30the new tank depended on one variable. Who fires first? Remember that, because in eight days a man is

14:38going to be ordered into an intersection at roughly 120 yards. Now, why were there only 20? Not because

14:45America could not build tanks. America could build anything. The short version is that these had been

14:51rushed to Europe as an experiment, so hurriedly that a group of ordnance men came across the Atlantic with

14:57them, in uniform, to watch. They trained crews on the new machine, then followed those crews toward the

15:03front to see what broke, what worked, what needed changing. That is not how you deploy a weapon.

15:09That is how you run a test. So understand what that means for the men in this story.

15:14They were not driving a war winner. They were driving a prototype, with a serial number and a

15:20set of observers taking notes, into the largest German city anyone had tried to capture. One of those 20

15:26tanks went to Company E of the 32nd Armored Regiment, and its crew called it Eagle 7.

15:32Five men, together since September of 1944. Bob Early commanding, a quiet man, not a shouter,

15:40the type who kept the hatch open when it would have been sensible to close it.

15:44Bill McVeigh driving, Homer Davis in the bow, John DeRigge loading, which meant lifting a 90mm round

15:52weighing more than a bag of cement into a breach in a space where a man cannot fully straighten up.

15:58And in the gunner's seat, Clarence Smoyer, 21 years old, out of Lehighton, Pennsylvania,

16:05a coal country kid who, before the war, had worked at a cement plant and who had never in his

16:10life

16:11planned to be a soldier. That crew had a record, and it is worth stating plainly.

16:16From Normandy, through the border fighting, through the Ardennes, into Germany, five men,

16:23and their tank had never been knocked out. In an armored division in 1944, that was not normal.

16:30Crews turned over. Tanks burned and got replaced and burned again. They had stayed alive by following

16:36the rules. Exactly. Every time. And that is the part of this story nobody tells you.

16:43The reason Clarence Smoyer hesitated at that intersection was not fear. It was that the

16:48rule he was about to break was the same rule that had kept all five of them breathing for six

16:54months.

16:55So what exactly had that rule taught him to do? And what did it cost him already, four days earlier,

17:02in a town most Americans have never heard of? Late February 1945. A village called Blatzheim,

17:09out on the flat farm country west of Cologne. The kind of place with a church, a few farm complexes,

17:15and a tree line. Nothing about it is famous. It is on the road, and the road goes to Cologne,

17:22so it has to be taken. Company E attacked it three times. Read that again, because it is a sentence

17:29that

17:30gets skipped in most tellings of this war. Three times. Which means twice they went in,

17:36and twice they came back out. And coming back out of an attack is not a tidy business. It is

17:42done under

17:42fire, in reverse, with men on the ground trying to keep up with the tanks. Somewhere in that tree

17:48line, the Germans had guns they could not locate. And here is where Smoyer, in the gunner's seat of

17:54the new tank, did the thing his training had built him for. He could not see a target. What he

18:01could see

18:01was a stretch of trees where most of the muzzle flashes seemed to be coming from. So he put white

18:07phosphorus shells into it, not armor piercing. Phosphorus. Smoke and burning white fragments.

18:15A round that does not need a precise target, because it makes a whole area impossible to stay in.

18:22If you are a German gun crew in that tree line, you are not aiming anymore. You are moving. Or

18:30you are on

18:31the ground with your face in the dirt. The fire slackened. The town was taken on the third try.

18:38I bring this up for one reason. Every single thing Smoyer did at Blotzheim, he did from a tank that

18:46was

18:46standing still. Halted. Hull settled. Gun laid. Correction. Fire. Observe. Correct again.

18:57That is the trade the doctrine offered. You accept being a stationary object for a few seconds

19:03in exchange for actually hitting what you shoot at. Blotzheim is what that trade looks like when it works.

19:12Now let me tell you how the man in that seat got there, because it is not what you would

19:17guess.

19:18August 1944, after the Fallets Gap, when the German army in Normandy came apart. In Smoyer's crew,

19:26the loader, a man named James Mallott, was moved up, and on his way out, he told the crew who

19:32should

19:32take over the gun. He recommended Clarence Smoyer. Smoyer did not want it, and his reason,

19:39in his own words, was this. I had sighted and fired a Sherman maybe eight times between stateside and

19:46England training. Eight. I want you to hold that against what you already know is coming. Eight

19:53practice shots. Not 800 rounds through a gunnery course. Not months on a range. Eight times total

20:02between the United States and England. And now he owned the main gun of a tank in a division driving

20:09into Germany. So understand what the doctrine actually was for a man like that. It was not a

20:16suggestion from headquarters that experienced gunners could ignore. It was the entire reason a

20:22kid with eight practice shots could hit anything at all. Stop the tank and the sight picture stops moving.

20:29Stop the tank and the crosshair sits where you put it. Take that away and everything he knows how to

20:35do

20:36stops working. Six months of war later, in a tank that had never been knocked out,

20:42that habit had become something closer to a religion. Now, one more thing about those weeks before Cologne,

20:49and this one is almost funny until you think about it for two seconds. The new tank kept getting mistaken

20:55for a German one. By Americans. By their own side. The silhouette was wrong. The long gun, the sloped

21:04front, the wide-sprung suspension. A shape nobody in the infantry had been trained to recognize,

21:10because there had been nothing to train on. American soldiers, seeing it come down a road,

21:15took it for a captured German vehicle. Or worse, for a German vehicle that had not been captured at all.

21:21Think about what that means for the crew. Every road march carried a risk that some tired American

21:27with a bazooka would make a very reasonable mistake. So think about the flip side, which is where this

21:34whole story is heading. If men on your own side, who had been briefed, who knew what direction the enemy

21:41was in, could not identify this tank at a hundred yards. What exactly was a German crew going to make

21:48of it? That question stopped being theoretical on March 5th, when the 3rd Armored Division came off

21:55the plain and into the outskirts of Cologne, and the war changed shape entirely. Out on the farmland,

22:02a tank fights at 800, 1,000, 1,200 yards. In a city, the ranges collapse. Streets are corridors.

22:11Every intersection is a doorway that you cannot see through until you are standing in it. And by then,

22:18whoever is waiting on the other side has already had his gun laid there for an hour.

22:22The men going in knew that. The division had fought through towns before. What none of them knew,

22:28not the tank crews, not the officers, not the Germans still in the city, was that the American

22:35advance into Cologne would be filmed. Not reconstructed afterward. Not drawn in a magazine.

22:41Filmed, on movie film, from a window, by a man with a camera on his shoulder who had exactly 48

22:48seconds

22:48of usable footage in him that day. And when those 48 seconds reached the United States, they would settle

22:54an argument the American army had been losing, quietly and expensively, since Normandy.

23:00Go back to that afternoon and widen the frame. Because while two Shermans were burning on Komodienstrasse,

23:07two other people were moving toward the same square. Neither of them was in a tank. Neither of them

23:13was armed. And both of them are the reason we can still see this story at all. And the reason

23:20it never

23:21let one of these men sleep properly again. The first was a sergeant named Jim Bates.

23:28Before the war, he was a cameraman for a film company in Colorado Springs, which is a perfectly

23:34ordinary job. And in 1945, it made him one of the most valuable men in the First Army.

23:40Bates was a Signal Corps photographer attached to the 3rd Armored Division. His weapon was a 16mm movie

23:47camera. His job was to be in the place where the shooting was, pointing a lens at it while holding

23:54still. I want you to sit with that for a second, because we throw around the word combat footage

24:00as though the pictures make themselves. On the afternoon of March 6th, Bates went into a bombed

24:06out office building near the Cathedral Square, climbed to a mezzanine level, and set up at a window

24:11roughly a hundred yards from a German Panther that had just killed three Americans. A hundred yards.

24:18Inside the range where that tank's machine guns could take the whole floor apart.

24:22He was not shooting from cover in any meaningful sense. He was shooting from a hole in a wall,

24:28on his feet, with a camera up, in the field of view of the gun he was filming.

24:33And a movie camera in 1945 did not zoom or autofocus. To make a picture worth anything,

24:40you had to be close. Every foot of film Bates exposed that day, he bought by standing somewhere

24:46no rational man stands. He had one more constraint. And this is the detail that tells you what kind of

24:53professional he was. Film was finite. You do not roll continuously and hope. You wait, holding a running

25:00camera's worth of nerve, and you start it when you believe something is about to happen. That is the

25:06man at the window. Now the second person. Her name was Katharina Esser. She was 26 years old,

25:14a young woman from a city that had been dying by installments for three years. And on March 6th,

25:20she was doing the same arithmetic that thousands of people in Cologne were doing that day.

25:25Remember what the city was by then. 800,000 before the war. Perhaps 20,000 still there. Most of them

25:32below ground. Those people had a decision to make. And it was not a political one. The Americans were

25:39coming in from the west. The Germans were pulling back east across the Rhine. The last usable bridge

25:45over the river was still standing. And once it went, whichever side of the water you were on was the

25:51side you stayed on. Katharina Esser decided to run for the bridge. She went with her employer,

25:58a man named Michael Delling, in a car. Now think about what a car looked like in Cologne on March

26:036th,

26:041945. There was no civilian traffic. There was no fuel for civilians. The only vehicles moving in that

26:12city were military. And every American tank crew in the advance had been told, correctly, that German

26:18troops were still in the city, that vehicles were still moving them, and that a shape coming fast

26:23across an intersection was a threat until proven otherwise. The car came into the fire-swept

26:29ground near the cathedral. Machine gun fire tore through it. Thin sheet metal offers nothing against

26:36rifle caliber rounds. The shots went through the body of the car and through the people inside it.

26:43Katerina Esser was mortally wounded. She died in the middle of a battle she had been trying to drive

26:49out of. And here is what I need you to file away, because it comes back at the very end

26:55of this story

26:55in a way you will not see coming. Nobody could say for certain which gun did it. There were multiple

27:02American tanks in position with a view of that ground, and machine guns do not leave signatures.

27:08Several crews had fired. One of the men in one of those tanks would spend the next 68 years of

27:14his

27:14life not knowing whether his gun was the one, and would eventually go back to Germany as an old man

27:20to try to find out. That is the human weather in that square at a few minutes past two in

27:27the afternoon.

27:28A German officer with a gun laid on an intersection, two American tanks burning and three Americans dead.

27:35A cameraman standing at a window with rolling film. A dead young woman in a car.

27:42And, one street north, five men in a tank that most of the American army had never heard of,

27:48being asked to go and end it. The plan they were given was specific, and it was built entirely on

27:55the doctrine we have been talking about for the last 20 minutes.

27:57Move into the intersection far enough to see the enemy's flank. Stop. Fire.

28:05Three steps. The middle one was going to take somewhere between two and three seconds.

28:11And two to three seconds, at 120 yards, is almost exactly how long a trained German gunner needs to

28:18traverse a turret onto a target that has just appeared in front of him. Here is the intersection,

28:23and here is the geometry, because everything now happens inside a space smaller than a football

28:29field. Eagle 7 is sitting on a side street with its nose short of the corner. Ahead and to the

28:36left,

28:37across open ground in front of the cathedral, the Panther is in position with its gun pointed down

28:42the street where the Shermans died. That is the key fact. The German gun is laid on a different street.

28:49To engage Eagle 7, the turret has to turn. The American plan uses exactly that. Come out far

28:58enough to see the Panther's flank. Stop, and put a round into the side of it before the turret can

29:04come around. On paper it is clean. On paper it is also the doctrine every one of these men had

29:11survived

29:11the war by obeying. Inside the tank, five men. Early in the commander's seat. Deriggi with his hand on the

29:19first round. Davis in the bow. McVeigh at the controls, with his eyes at a periscope the size of a

29:27mail slot.

29:27And Smoyer at the site, with a target he has not seen yet because there is a building in the

29:32way.

29:33Early gives the word. McVeigh lets the clutch out. And here is where the plan begins to die,

29:39in the best possible way. McVeigh does not creep. He comes into that intersection fast,

29:46and as the front of the tank clears the corner, he sees through his periscope the one thing nobody

29:51wanted to see. The Panther's gun is moving. The turret is coming around toward them.

29:59Understand what McVeigh is looking at. A tank turret turning toward you is not a threat in the abstract.

30:04It is a countdown you can watch. The muzzle sweeps across the buildings, and when it stops sweeping,

30:12it is because it has arrived at you. Now, the plan says stop. The plan says settle the hole so

30:20the gunner

30:20can shoot properly. McVeigh has perhaps a second to decide whether to obey it. He does not stop.

30:27In Smoyer's own words, describing what his driver did. McVeigh entered fairly fast and noticed through

30:36his periscope that the Panther's gun was turning to meet them. So McVeigh's instinct was to keep going,

30:42so they would not get hit. Instinct. Not an order. There was no time for an order. A private soldier

30:50at the

30:50controls of a tank made a tactical decision that reversed his division's gunnery doctrine,

30:56because from where he sat he could see something the plan had not accounted for. And that decision

31:02handed the entire problem to the 21-year-old at the site. Smoyer now has a moving site picture,

31:10the thing his whole training existed to prevent, and a target that has appeared in his field of view

31:16and is turning to kill him. In his own account of those seconds, there was no drama in it at

31:22all.

31:22He said he had no time to be nervous, that it was just intense, fast work. He fires while the

31:29tank is

31:30moving. The round crosses about 110 meters, roughly the length of a city block, and strikes the Panther

31:37low on the front of the turret, under the gun shield. It goes through. Now, why did that work,

31:44when everything he had been taught said it should not? Because the doctrine was built for a different

31:50war. Stopping to shoot buys you accuracy at 800, 1000, 1200 yards, where a fraction of a degree of

31:58error becomes 10 yards of miss. At 110 meters, that arithmetic collapses. The target is enormous in

32:06the site. The tank's own movement, over the fraction of a second the round is in flight,

32:12changes the aim by an amount that does not matter. Everything the halt was supposed to buy him had

32:18become worthless at that range, and everything the halt would have cost him, which was two or three

32:24seconds of sitting still in front of a turning gun, had become fatal. The doctrine was not wrong.

32:31It was written for the open ground his division had crossed to get here.

32:35In a street, it was an instruction to stand still and be shot. Then the tank does stop,

32:42and Smoyer puts in two more. Deriggi is loading as fast as a man can lift a 90mm round,

32:48in a space where he cannot stand upright. Smoyer's words afterward were simple. He fired two more shells

32:56to make sure they would not fire at his side. Not to finish a fight. To make sure.

33:03This is a crew that had never been knocked out in six months, and their standard for finished was

33:09three penetrations. All three rounds went through. The Panther caught fire. Of the five men inside,

33:17four got out, including the officer who had commanded it, Wilhelm Bartelborth, the same man who had picked

33:24that firing position and killed three Americans with two shots 20 minutes earlier. The tank burned in

33:30front of the cathedral. Not for an hour. For days. With the spires standing behind it.

33:37And a hundred yards away, at a window in a bombed-out office building, Jim Bates had his camera running

33:43for the whole thing. 48 seconds of 16mm film. Three rounds leaving an American gun and arriving on a

33:52German tank. In daylight. In sequence. With the cathedral in the frame. Nobody in that square

34:00understood yet what those 48 seconds were about to do. Not to the Germans, but to an argument inside

34:07the American army that had been costing American crews their lives since Normandy. The advance did not

34:13pause to admire anything. Within minutes the column was moving again. Past the burning panther. Past two

34:21burnt-out Shermans. Past a car with two civilians in it. On toward the river. And the men driving east

34:28had one thought. Which was the bridge. They did not get it. The Hohenzollern bridge, the great rail crossing

34:36that ran right past the cathedral to the far bank, was already in the water. German engineers had dropped it

34:43into the Rhine before the Americans could reach it. By March 7th, everything in Cologne west of the

34:49river was in American hands. The largest German city yet taken. And the prize everyone had been

34:56racing for was gone. A mile of twisted steel lying in the current, with a cathedral standing over it.

35:05Now hold that date, March 7th. Because on the same day, 60 miles upstream, the number 20 comes back.

35:13Remember how those tanks were divided? 10 to the 3rd Armored Division, 10 to the 9th Armored Division.

35:20Cologne was the 3rd Armored's fight. On March 7th, the 9th Armored's men came down a road toward a town

35:26called Raymagen, and found something nobody in the Allied command expected still to exist. A railway bridge,

35:33over the Rhine. Damaged, wired for demolition, and standing. What followed was a scramble to take it,

35:41before it went into the river like the one at Cologne. And among the tanks brought up to cover

35:46that crossing were Pershings of that same small batch. Guns on the west bank firing across the

35:52water at the towers on the far side while American infantry ran the span. So inside 36 hours, both

35:59halves of that 20-tank experiment had been in the two most consequential armored actions on the Rhine.

36:0620 tanks. On a front where the Allies fielded thousands. That is a coincidence of scheduling,

36:13and it is also the reason this machine's reputation was built out of a handful of afternoons,

36:18rather than a campaign. Then the film went home. Jim Bates' 16mm of the Cathedral Square went back

36:26through the Signal Corps. And by spring, it was on movie screens in the United States. In newsreels.

36:32In front of audiences who had never seen a tank fight, and never would.

36:36An American tank in a German city. A German tank turning its turret. Three rounds. Fire.

36:45Here is what that footage walked into, and it is the argument I promised you.

36:50Since Normandy, American tank crews had known something the American public did not. And it was

36:56not a rumor, and it was not morale talk. Their standard tank could not reliably kill the best

37:03German tanks from the front. And the best German tanks could reliably kill it from anywhere.

37:10Crews had worked out their own answers. Get to the flank. Get numbers. Get artillery. Get aircraft.

37:16Spend Sherman's to buy a shot. And every one of those answers was paid for in men.

37:22By the winter of 1944 and 45, the story had reached American newspapers. And questions were being asked in

37:29public about why the army that outproduced the world had put its soldiers in tanks that were outgunned.

37:37Then, into that argument, arrives 48 seconds of film in which an American tank kills a panther

37:45in the middle of a German city and does not even get hit. You can see exactly why that footage

37:52traveled.

37:53It answered a national anxiety in a single image. But I want to be honest with you about what it

38:00did

38:00not mean. Because this is where most tellings of Cologne quietly cheat. It did not mean the American

38:08army had caught up. It meant 20 tanks had reached the front, one of them had won a fight that

38:14got filmed,

38:15and the rest of the American armored force, the thousands of Shermans still doing the actual work

38:21from the Rhine to the Elbe, was exactly as it had been the week before. Roughly 200 of the new

38:27tanks

38:28would reach Europe before the fighting ended, and only a fraction ever fired a shot in anger.

38:33The machine that settled the argument on film arrived with about nine weeks of European war left to

38:39fight. And the war kept charging, for those nine weeks, at the old price. Consider one number from

38:47that same division. On March 30th, three weeks after the cathedral, the commander of the 3rd Armored

38:53Division, Major General Maurice Rose, was killed at close range in a night action east of the Rhine,

39:00the highest-ranking American killed by enemy fire in the European theater.

39:05A division that had just taken Cologne with a filmed victory lost its commanding general within a month

39:11of it. There was also a smaller thing, invisible to everyone outside one tank. The crew that fired

39:18those three rounds, five men who had gone from Normandy to Cologne without ever having their tank knocked

39:25out, got no medal for the cathedral. Not immediately. Not for a long time. There was a piece of paperwork

39:32with

39:33a disciplinary note on it, of the small and stupid kind that armies generate constantly. And the man

39:39in the gunner's seat came home with a purple heart and campaign ribbons, and nothing that said what he

39:45had done on March 6th. He also came home with something else, and it had nothing to do with the

39:51Panther.

39:52He had watched a car with civilians in it get shot to pieces a few yards from his gun.

39:57He did not know whose rounds had done it. And for the next 68 years, he was going to keep

40:03not knowing.

40:04March 2013. The same square, 68 years later. The cathedral is still standing, cleaned now,

40:12with tourists on the steps. The buildings around it are new. And an 89-year-old man from Pennsylvania

40:19is standing on the spot where the intersection was, looking at the place where the Panther burned.

40:25Clarence Smoyer had gone back to Germany, and he had not gone back for the tank. Waiting for him in

40:32that city was a German named Gustav Schaefer, who in 1945 had been a young tank crewman in Cologne,

40:38on the other side of the fight. Two old men, one square, the same afternoon in their heads for most

40:46of

40:46a lifetime. They met without ceremony, and by every account of it, what they mostly talked about was

40:52not who shot what. Because Smoyer had come back with one question, and it was about the car. He had

40:59spent six decades not knowing whether his machine gun was among the ones that fired on the vehicle

41:04that came into the open ground that afternoon. Nobody could give him a clean answer.

41:09Several American tanks had a view of that ground. Several crews fired. That is the honest end of the

41:16inquiry. And no amount of research in 2013 was going to sort one stream of tracer from another in 1945.

41:24What he could do was find her. Her name was Katharina Esser. She was 26 years old, and she had

41:33a grave.

41:34The two old soldiers, the American gunner and the German tanker, went to it together and laid flowers

41:40on it. That is what the trip amounted to. Not an answer. A grave and two men standing at it,

41:47one of

41:48whom had carried her for 68 years without ever having known her name. Then he went home to

41:55Pennsylvania, and America finally caught up with him. On the 18th of September, 2019, in Washington,

42:02the crew of Eagle 7 received the Bronze Star. Clarence Smoyer was 95 years old and accepted his in

42:12person. The other four were awarded posthumously. Bob Early, Bill McVeigh, John DeRigge, Homer Davis.

42:21Seventy-four years late, to a crew that had mostly not lived to see it. Jim Bates had received his

42:28Bronze Star immediately in 1945 for the film. He earned it standing at that window. Carl Kellner never

42:37came home to Sheboygan, Wisconsin. He is one of the three men who died on Komodienstassa,

42:4320 minutes before the shot that made the newsreels. And if this story is about anything, it is about

42:49them as much as it is about the tank that answered for them. Clarence Smoyer died at home on the

42:5630th

42:56of September 2022. He was 99. So, the question this whole thing was built on. Why did breaking the rule

43:07work? Here is the simplest true answer. The rule was not wrong. It was written for a different distance.

43:17Stopping to shoot is what keeps you accurate across a thousand yards of open German farmland.

43:22And that habit had kept five men alive from Normandy to the Rhine. But at 110 meters, in a street,

43:30the halt buys you nothing you need and costs you the only thing that matters,

43:35the two or three seconds in which the other man's turret arrives on you.

43:40In a city, the doctrine reads as stand still and be killed. Nobody in a headquarters worked that out.

43:48A driver named Bill McVeigh worked it out through a periscope in about one second without being told

43:55and kept his foot down. And a 21-year-old who had fired a tank gun eight times in training

44:01before he

44:02ever fired one in anger put a round through the front of a panther while the ground was still moving

44:07under him. That is what those 48 seconds of film actually show. Not a wonder weapon. Five men who

44:16knew the rules well enough to know exactly when to drop one.

44:46I read them. And so do the people who come here. That is how a crew like Clarence Smoyers,

44:52and the American tank men who never got a camera pointed at them, doesn't disappear into silence.

Clarence Smoyer’s Pershing Killed a Panther in Cologne

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