Panzer Lehr Broke the American Line at Dawn, Then Met the 899th’s 3-Inch Guns

Before dawn on the 11th of July 1944, General Fritz Baine stood in the dark near a Norman village called Le Desert and sent the finest armored division in the German army forward into the hedge. He had done this before against the British in the desert and the Soviets on the step. He knew exactly how the morning was supposed to go.

His tanks would open a hole. His grenaders would ride through it. By afternoon, the American beach head would be split in two. That is not the order he gave by the end of the day. The order he gave at the end of the 11th of July was one he had never once expected to give in Normandy. A battalion of American troops most people have never heard of forced it out of him, riding a vehicle the army had almost given up on.

You will hear that order in his own words before this is over taken from the account he wrote after the war for the United States Army. First, you need to understand why a man like Berine was so certain and why his certainty is the whole point of this story. This is the story of the 11th of July 1944 at le Sanjand day north of the town of Sanlow.

It is the story of Panza lair, the best equipped Panza division Germany ever fielded, meeting the 899th tank destroyer battalion of the United States Army. By the end, you will know what Baline decided when the smoke cleared and you will know it from the record he left behind, not from legend. The judge in this story was German and that is what makes his [music] verdict worth hearing.

Fritz Baline was not a staff officer who had read about war in a school. He had commanded tanks in the field under two of the most famous soldiers of the century. He had served as chief of staff to Hines Cadderion, the man who wrote the book on armored warfare during the drive into France and the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Then he went to North Africa and became chief of staff to Irwin RML in the Africa corpse. He had watched the British beaten again and again in the open [music] desert where a tank could see for miles, and a good gunner could reach out and touch an enemy before that enemy knew he was there. That open country, with its long sightelines and room to maneuver, was the war he had mastered.

In the winter of 1944, he was given a division built to match his experience. Panza lair was assembled from the demonstration and instructor units of the German armored [music] training school. Its men were not raw conscript. Many of them were the soldiers who taught other soldiers how to fight in tanks. It was fully mechanized.

Every grenadier carried in an armored halftrack rather than marching on foot, which almost no other German division could claim by that stage of the war. On paper, it was the most powerful single division the Germans had in the west. Boline knew all of this. That is what made him dangerous and it is also what set the trap. A commander who has won in the desert trusts the desert.

He trusts open ground, long sightelines, and the speed of mass tanks. Normandy was about to take all three away from him, and he did not yet believe it could. On the 8th of July, his division was ordered west across the Via River to restore a situation that was slipping out of German hands north of Sanlow. The American First Army was pushing south off the invasion beaches and threatening to break into open country.

Berlin’s job was to stop the breakthrough and if he could to throw the Americans back toward the sea. He drew up a plan worthy of the desert. Two regiments of armored infantry would attack side by side before first light, converging on the crossroads at Sanjon the day. His tanks would seize the crossing sites over the river and canal and cut off the American units that had pushed across.

He spoke of infantry riding on the tanks straight to the objective. It was the plan of a man who expected to break a line and then run. The men he sent to do it were led by officers as experienced as he was. Panza Grenadier Regiment 901 was commanded by Colonel Gale Schulzer. Lieutenant Colonel Willie Welsh led its sister regiment 9002.

The forward battle groups were led by hard veterans, among them a Captain Carl Phillips. These were not men who frightened easily. They had all seen far worse than a few weeks against green American troops fresh off the boat. Now cross the hedge to the other side to the unit that would decide what baine wrote in his report.

The 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion was a regular army outfit that had been fighting Germans since long before the Normandy landings. It first drew German blood in Chunisia. On the 23rd of March 1943 at a place called Elgetta, the 10th Panza Division came down on the American line at full strength, eager to repeat the beating it had handed out at Casarine Pass a month before.

In the early morning, the German armor rolled forward and overran two artillery battalions and part of the infantry. Then the tide turned. The American gunners and the tank destroyers of the 899th and a sister battalion stood their ground and fought back and the 10th Panza division reeled backward and left 30 burning tanks on the field.

The Germans came again in the afternoon and were blasted off a second time. That was the outfit’s baptism and it matters here. When baine’s veterans met the 899th in the hedge, they met men who had already stopped a Panza division cold once before in the open, where German armor was supposed to be unbeatable.

The 899th rode a machine called the M10. Built on the chassis of the Sherman tank, it was designed to hunt enemy armor and destroy it from cover. Its main weapon was a 3-in gun, a high velocity piece with a flat, hard-hitting trajectory that could punch through the front of most German armor at combat rain. The turret was open at the top with no roof, which made the crew light and fast and gave them a wide view of the ground around them at the price of leaving them exposed to shell fragments and anything dropped from above.

The army built more than 6,400 of them over the course of the war. The idea behind the vehicle came from a doctrine the American army had argued about for years. The tank destroyer was a hunter. It moved fast, found the enemy armor, reached a firing position, and destroyed it with a gun heavier than anything a tank of similar weight could carry.

Speed and the gun were the whole concept. The men trained to shoot first from a place the enemy had not thought to check. The branch itself was young and controversial. The United States had built the tank destroyer force in a hurry after watching German panzas overrun France in 1940.

Meaning to answer masked armor with fast, hard-hitting guns rather than with tanks of its own. got its own school and its own crews under a blunt motto, seek, strike, destroy. By the summer of 1944, the whole concept was under fire from inside the army. Critics argued that the toad guns were death traps and the self-propelled destroyers were too thin skinned to survive and there was serious talk of breaking the branch up altogether.

The men of the 899th did not know or care about the argument going on behind them. What happened at Leazair was whether anyone in the rear admitted it or not. The doctrine working exactly as it had been written. By the 11th of July, the battalion was attached to the 9inth Infantry Division and its companies were spread out supporting the infantry regiments holding the ground west of the Vire.

Company A and Company C were forward backing up the 39th and 47th Infantry Regiment. They were sitting in the one kind of country that turned every rule Fritz Baline had learned in the desert upside down. The country was the Bokeage. To understand what happened at Leedza, you have to understand the ground because the ground fought on the American side that morning.

The Norman hedge row was an ancient earthen bank, sometimes chest high or higher, thrown up over centuries to divide one small field from the next, and grown thick on top with trees and brush and roots packed hard into the soil. Each field was a small box walled on every side by these banks. A tank could not see across more than one or two fields.

Climbing a bank meant lifting its nose to the sky and showing its thin belly armor to anyone waiting. The lanes between the fields were narrow, sunken, and easy to block. Everything Bearine trusted, the longot, the mast charge, the speed was strangled by this landscape. In the bow cage, a single gun waiting behind one hedge could kill a tank.

Before the tank crew ever saw where the round came from, Baaline knew the ground was bad. He chose to attack in the dark, partly to get around it, jumping off before first light so that the American artillery spotter aircraft could not see his columns and call fire down on them. The attack was set for a/4 to 2 in the morning.

American armor stirring in the dark delayed it slightly and the assault went in just before dawn near 2:00 in the morning on the 11th of July. The German side of that first hour was near blind. If you were a grenadier riding a half track up one of those sunken lanes in the black before dawn, you could see almost nothing.

The hedros closed in on both sides. The tanks ahead of you filled the lane wall to wall so that if the lead tank stopped, everything behind it stopped. You had been told this was a beaten enemy a few weeks off the beaches and that by breakfast you would be at the river. You went forward into the dark, trusting the plan.

The plan began to come apart almost at once. In the narrow lanes, the Panther tanks, longbarreled and heavy, could barely turn their gun. A panther that wedged itself between two banks could not traverse to either side and became a steel box waiting to be hit. The two German thrusts went in too far apart to help each other.

The darkness that hid the German columns from American aircraft also blinded the German crews to the guns waiting in the fields ahead. And in those fields, hurled down behind the banks, sat the open topped M10s of the 899th, guns already laid on the gaps where a tank would have to appear. The fighting that followed was done at ranges a desert veteran would have called suicidal.

A few hundred ft, sometimes less, one hedge to the next. This is where the doctrine paid off. The tank destroyers did not charge. They sat still, let the German armor come to them through the gaps, and fired first. One of those crews belonged to Sergeant Hershel Briles of the 899th. The Panther came at his position so well hidden that his crew almost missed it.

In the account preserved afterward, one of the men described it plainly. It looked, he said, like a piece of the hedge row as it moved forward, camouflage all over it. Brush and branches worked into the hull until the machine and the field were nearly the same thing. Briles and his crew held their nerve, picked the tank out of the hedge, and destroyed it.

Before the action was over, his single M10 accounted for more than one of Baaline’s Panthers. Briles would go on to earn the Medal of Honor later that year in the Herken Forest for climbing onto burning tank destroyers under fire to pull wounded men out. But that was still months away. On this morning, he was one gun commander among many, doing the exact job the vehicle was built [music] to do.

The 3-in gun on the M10 was good, and it was not magic, [music] and the crews knew its limits better than anyone. Against the thick sloped front plate of a Panther, an armor-piercing round would skip off unless it struck square and close. And American firing tests found the gun could not reliably beat the Panthers front places, even at 200 yd.

The answer to that problem was position. A destroyer hidden behind a hedge did not have to defeat the Panther’s frontal armor at all. It waited until the tank pushed past into the open field or turned to climb a bank and then it fired into the thinner side or the rear [music] where the high velocity shot went straight through.

That was the whole value of sitting still and letting the enemy come. In the open desert, a panther would have seen the M10 first and killed it at long range. In the bow cage, the panther came around the hedge [music] blind at little more than 100 yards and gave the American gunner the one clean shot he needed.

All along the line, it went the same way. German tanks pushed into the gaps [music] and were hit at close range, sometimes needing several armor-piercing rounds through the thick frontal plate. But the M10s kept firing and the Panthers kept stopping. The confusion in the dark cut both ways at then daylight came.

The commander of the American 9inth Division, General Manton Eddie, used the returning light to pull his defense together into something coordinated. The official United States Army history, Martin Bloommenson’s volume, Breakout and Pursuit, records it in dry words. After daylight brought some easing of the confusion, it says General Eddie got a coordinated defense into action.

Once that happened, Baine’s two shallow penetrations near the desert had nowhere to go. Baaline had tried to buy his main attack some room with a trick. The second parachute core put in a diversionary push north of Sanlong meant to pull American attention away from the real thrust at Leazair. Changed nothing.

His two genuine penetrations had gone in too far apart to reach each other. And once daylight let the American gunners see the ground, the weight of fire that came down on the stalled German columns was more than any courage could carry forward. This was the thing Baaline came back to for the rest of his life.

beat him was the sheer volume of fire, the guns waiting behind every hedge, and the artillery ranging in from behind them, pouring out of a landscape that gave his own armor nothing to shoot at and no room to turn. The number of American tanks never mattered much. The fire did. A grenadier pinned in a sunken lane could not tell where any of it was coming from.

He could only feel that every field in front of him was defended and that the plan to be at the river by breakfast had died somewhere back in the dark. Now count the cost because the numbers are the verdict before Bayine ever spoke it. By the time the smoke cleared on the 11th of July, the 899th had accounted for 14 German tanks and one self-propelled gun.

That figure comes from the battalion’s own record, the citation later awarded for the day. The official army history is slightly more careful in what it credits directly to the tank destroyers, [music] listing at least one MarkV and a dozen of the Mark 5, the Panther knocked out by the tank destroyer guns. Either way, the meaning is the same.

In a single morning in country a few hedge rows deep, American tank destroyer crews had gutted the armored spearhead of the best equipped division in the German army. The wider bill for Panza lair was worse than the tank counter alone. Bloommenson records one German task force that had gone in with 244 men and 10 tanks.

It came back out with seven non-commissioned officers and 23 men. The division as a whole lost roughly a quarter of its fighting strength in that one attack. Across the day, estimates of Panzer’s losses run to somewhere between 500 and 700 men, several of them battalion commanders and more than 30 tanks. For a division that had been the pride of the German armored force, it was a shattering morning, and it was handed to them not by an overwhelming mass, but by infantry, artillery, and a scattering of open topped gun carriers waiting behind

the banks. It is worth killing a myth that always attaches itself to this kind of story. It is often said that Allied fighter bombers were the great tank killers of Normandy, that they broke the German armor from the air. The aircraft were real and overhead, and at least one Panther that day was destroyed by a direct bomb hit, but the record does not support handing them the credit for this action.

After the war, operational researchers went over the battlefields where German armor had been lost. Only a small fraction of the wrecks, in some surveys, around seven out of more than 40 examined, showed any sign of having been hit by aircraft rockets at all. Most German tanks in Normandy were destroyed by guns on the ground.

At Le Desert, in the dark and in the close country of the Bage, the killing was done at a few hundred ft by 3-in guns, not from the sky. The men in the open turrets earned this one. Fritz Bayine still had one order left, and it was the one he did not expect to give. He had come west certain. He had the best division in the German army.

Veterans of the desert and the eastern front, fully mechanized, led by officers who had beaten every enemy they had met. He had a plan built on everything that had worked for him for 4 years. And by the end of a single day, in a stretch of Norman farmland, it was in ruins. The penetrations had stalled. The task forces had come back as remnant.

The crossroads at Sajjon day was still American. To the east, the American second infantry division had taken the high ground of hill 192, which meant the pressure towards Sanlow was only growing. So baine gave the order. He broke off the attack and pulled Panzer back. Within a day, the division that had been sent to split the American beach head went over to the defensive and stayed there.

The elite of the German armored force had been committed to its first great counterattack in Normandy, and it had been stopped and thrown back on the very first day. Baline wrote an account afterward for the United States Army, part of the series of studies German generals prepared in captivity. The sole accomplishment he could claim for all of it was that he had checked for a moment the American drive toward the high ground west of Salow.

That is the language of a beaten attacker, and he was too good a soldier not to know it. RML, his old chief, had already sensed how it would end. He believed the counterattack had gone in too late to matter, that the moment for it had passed before the tanks ever moved. The men of Panzelair had proved brave and skilled, and it had bought them nothing against the ground and the guns.

That is the verdict this story was built to reach. And it did not come from an American boast came from Baaline’s own hand, from the official army history and from the wreckage counted on the field. A commander who had beaten the British in the desert and fought the Soviets on the step met a battalion of American tank destroyers in the hedgerros and was forced to call off his best division dig in.

He did not concede it with a memorable line. He conceded it with an order to withdraw, which is the only concession that ever really counts. What Leazair bought the Americans was time and ground, and the payment came due almost at one. Two weeks later, on the 25th of July, the First Army launched Operation Cobra along the very road the fighting had been driving toward, the highway between Salo and Peries.

The 899th, still with the ninth division, was in the thick of it and helped spearhead the breakthrough that finally tore open the German front in the wet. Panzer had the misfortune to be sitting directly beneath the carpet of bombs that opened Cobra and the division baine had already watched blunted at least in a single morning of bombing.

The elite of the German armored force never recovered the strength it lost that July. The battalion that had helped stop it in the hedge rolled on through France across the Sen and into Belgium by early September. The Americans who forced it did not think of themselves as anything special. Company A and Company C of the 899th received the presidential unit citation for the 11th of July for the extraordinary heroism of ordinary crews doing a hard job in the dark.

By the end of the war, the battalion had left behind [music] it across North Africa and Europe the wrecks of 71 enemy tanks and a long list of other guns and vehicles and had taken more than 2,600 prisoners. It was one of dozens of such battalions, few of them famous, most of them forgotten. The vehicle they rode, the open topped M10, is remembered today mostly for its faults, its thin armor, and its roofless turret.

On one morning in the bage, it did exactly what it was designed to do, and it blunted the sharpest armored spearhead the Germans had. Fritz Bearine spent much of the rest of his life explaining in interviews and in writing what had gone wrong for Germany in the West. When he came to Normandy, he kept returning to the same hard truth.

It was the ground and it was the volume of fire that came out of that ground that beat him. The men who ran the guns at Leazette never got to hear him say it. They had already moved on south into the hedge towards Sanlow toward the breakout that was coming one field at a time. If your father or your grandfather served in the 899th Tank Destroyer Battalion or in the 9th Infantry Division or in any of the tank destroyer outfits that fought through the Bokeage, leave his name and his unit in the comment.

These crews left very little behind in the popular memory of the war and the record deserves to carry their names. And if you have ever crewed, fired, or restored an M10, tell us what the men who rode it into the hedgeros would have wanted people to understand about.