The 51st Armored Infantry Battalion commanded by Maj. Dan C. Alanis, at 0700, December, left bivouac areas in the vicinity of Schmittviller to meet the tanks for the jump-off at 0800. The plan, as far as it concerned Team B, was to advance in column of alternating tanks and infantry carriers up to the outskirts of Bining.
Jumbo Map 3 (extremely slow: 411K)
But the soaked ground even on the hills proved too sticky for the half-tracks, and they were left in the bivouac area with their drivers while the riflemen rode the rear decks of the tanks. When they mounted at 0835 (Lieutenant Belden looked at his watch and was worried because they were late in starting), the plan still called for Team B to attack Bining.
They were then just west of the Roman Way, still in the immediate vicinity of the battalion assembly area, 3,000 yards from Singling. Company A of the 37th Tank Battalion at the head of the column was a mile to the north, and had been topped by direct and indirect fire from Singling as heavy as that of the day before. At 0830, Batteries B and C of the 94th Armored Field Artillery Battalion began firing smoke concentrations north and east of Singling. On 6 contiguous target areas they fired 131 rounds, but, although a gentle southwesterly breeze drifted the smoke perfectly across Singling, enemy fire continued heavy, and for the next hour or so the column made no attempt to advance. Company A, 37th Tank Battalion fired into the town, although targets were seldom visible. Company B of the same battalion shot occasionally at targets of opportunity at extreme range and without observed effect. Of the enemy ahead in Singling, Company B observed two tanks in the orchards west and east and, a gun firing from the center of town. This turned out to be a self-propelled gun which later engaged the attention of the assaulting companies most of the day.
Convinced that enemy guns in Singling could not be neutralized by a fire fight, Colonel Abrams decided on his own initiative to attack the town and attempt to hold it with one tank company and infantry, while the remainder of his force turned east into Bining. He assigned the mission of taking the town to Team B (Map No. 3), which had no time to make detailed plans.
Captain Leach was given the order to attack; he informed Lieutenant Belden but, as the infantry was already mounted, Lieutenant Belden could not pass the word on even to his platoon leaders. (One of them thought until that night that he had been in Bining. The tank commanders were so sure of it that they mistook Welschoff Farm north of Singling for the barracks they had expected to find at Bining.) Captain Leach deployed his tanks, putting the 2d Platoon under 2d Lt. James N. Farese on the left; the 1st Platoon, commanded by 1st Lt. William F. Goble, on the right; and the 3d Platoon, under 1st Lt. Robert M. Cook, in support.
The command tank moved between the 2d and 1st Platoons in front of the 3d. As the 2d Platoon tanks carried no infantry, the three infantry platoons were mounted on the remaining 11 tanks (5 in the 1st Platoon, 4 in the 3d, the commanding officer's tank, and the artillery observees). The infantry platoons were widely dispersed; the 11 men of the 2d rode on four tanks. Before the attack at 1015, Batteries A and B of the 94th Field Artillery Battalion put 107 rounds of HE on Singling, of which 3 rounds were time-fuzed, the rest impact. The assault guns of the 37th Tank Battalion took up the smoke mission and continued to fire north of the town until the tanks got on their objective. Company A of the battalion turned east and throughout the day fired on the Singling-Bining road and to the north. One platoon of tank destroyers, in position to support the attack, actually did little effective firing during the day because heavy enemy artillery forced the guns back. The other platoon remained in assembly area and was moved into Bining the next day.
Company B tanks advanced rapidly toward Singling, immediately after the artillery preparation, and fired as they moved. But the planned formation was soon broken. Sgt. Joseph Hauptman's tank (2d Platoon) developed engine trouble, ran only in first gear, and so lagged behind; S/Sgt. Max V. Morphew's (3d Platoon) radio failed and he did not bring his tank up at all. The other three tanks of the 3d Platoon crowded the first two until their firing endangered the lead tanks, and they were ordered to stop shooting. As far as the tankers noticed, there was no appreciable return fire from the enemy. As the company approached the town, the 1st and 2d Platoons swung east and west respectively, and the 3d Platoon moved in through the gap to come up substantially on a line. The effect then was of an advancing line of 13 tanks on a front a little less than the length of Singling, or about 600 to 700 yards. Only Lieutenant Farese's tank was notably in advance.
Leading the tanks of S/Sgt. Bernard K. Sowers and Sgt. John H. Parks by about 50 yards, Lieutenant Farese moved up the hillside south of Singling and turned left into an orchard (Map No. 4). As his tank topped the crest of a slight rise just south of a stone farmyard wall, it was hit three times by armorpiercing shells and immediately was set on fire. Lieutenant Farese and his loader, Pfc. William J. Bradley, were killed. The gunner, Cpl. Hulmer C. Miller, was slightly wounded. The rest of the crew got out. Sowers and Parks backed their tanks in defilade behind the rise and radioed Hauptman not to come up.
The shells that hit Lieutenant Farese were probably from a Mark V tank which was parked beside a stone barn, though they may have come from a towed 75-mm antitank gun in the same general vicinity. In any case, what Lieutenant Farese had run into was a nest of enemy armor and defensive emplacements--a perfect defensive position which the enemy used to the fullest and against which Team B fought and plotted all day without even minor success.
Here, just south of the main road and 75 yards from the thickly settled part of town, are a substantial two-story stone house and stone barn and two Maginot pillboxes. One large-domed pillbox, constructed to house an antitank gun defending to the north, is just to the west of the barn. Two concrete buttresses fanned out to the northeast and southeast to form a good field emplacement for an antitank gun defending southeast. The towed antitank gun may have been emplaced there. The orchard southeast is thin, the slope of the hill gentle, so that the turrets of tanks attacking from that direction are enfiladed from the pillbox position at 150 yards.
The other pillbox is much smaller, designed probably as a machine gun outpost to cover the main road. It juts out into the road and, together with the high walls of the farm buildings to the east, provides cover from the town square for a tank parked behind it on the south side of the road. The main street of town makes a broad S-curve which serves to conceal guns on the south side from observation of an attacking force entering the center of town from the south, yet still permits those guns to command the full length of the street to the main square.
In this area at least three Mark V tanks, two SP guns, one towed antitank, and one machine gun (German .42 or possibly an American .50-cal.) successfully blocked every attempt at direct assault or envelopment, and during the day fired at will at all movements across or along the main street and to the south and southeast. Sergeant Sowers and Sergeant Parks found that if they moved their tanks only so far up the slope as to bare their antennae masts they drew armor-piercing fire.
For some time, however, Parks and Sowers were the only ones who suspected the strength of this thicket of enemy defensive armor. They knew that they could not advance, but they had seen only one tank and one gun. The destruction of Lieutenant Farese's tank was, of course, reported to Captain Leach, but Captain Leach at the moment was preoccupied by another more immediately pressing problem, an enemy SP 50 feet in front of him.
More France: 4th Armored Division at Singling Part I
France: 4th Armored Division at Singling Part II
Back to Table of Contents -- Combat Simulation Vol 1 No. 3
Back to Combat Simulation List of Issues
Back to MagWeb Magazine List
© Copyright 1995 by Mike Vogell and Phoenix Military Simulations.
This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web.
Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com