The American Guns That Kept Pace With the Tanks, and What German Crews Radioed Back

Push your Mark IV tank up the sunken road south of Ronsey in the last dark hour before dawn on the 29th of July, 1944. You already count yourself lucky to still have a running engine. You are a crewman of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, and for 2 days the pocket around you has been closing. Somewhere ahead in the dark is an American roadblock, and you have been told it is thin, a handful of infantry and a scout car or two.

The men in front of that roadblock are not infantry. They are gunners, and their guns rolled up this front on tracks at the speed of the tanks they were sent to protect. By the end of that summer, the soldiers of your army had settled on a plain verdict about American artillery, and they wrote it into their interrogation files and their war diary.

This is the machine that put a face on that verdict. It is called the Priest, and this is the story of the American gun that kept pace with the armor, and what German crews reported after they met it. The honest part comes first here because the record deserves it. The surviving German documents never name the Priest by name.

What the German soldier feared and wrote down was American artillery as a whole, the weight of it, and above all the speed of it. Priest is the concrete object at the center of that fear. The machine that gave American gunfire its legs and let it stay glued to the spearhead instead of falling a day behind. Both of those facts your hand as this goes on.

The verdict is real and it comes straight from the record. That claim, a German crew keying a radio to report the words M7, was invented later and you will not hear it dressed as fact here. This object is simple and the idea behind it is the harder half. The full name was the 105-mm Howitzer Motor Carriage M7.

Strip away the paperwork and it was a field howitzer, the standard divisional gun, bolted onto the chassis of an American medium tank and driven out into the open. On the right front of the fighting compartment sat a ring mount for a .50 caliber machine gun, raised up in a little armored tub that looked, to some soldier with a long memory of church, like a pulpit.

The name Priest stuck to it from there. The British Eighth Army was first to take it into battle at the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942 and it was British crews who looked at that raised mount and gave it the name. Early vehicles were built on the tall, riveted hull of the M3 medium tank the American Army was already replacing and later production moved onto the Sherman’s hull.

That lineage mattered in the field because the gun rode on running gear. The tank crews around it already knew how to keep alive. The gun threw a shell out past 11,000 yd, better than 6 mi. The vehicle carried 69 rounds inside its own hull, and it took a crew of seven to fight. Up front sat a commander and a driver with a gunner to lay the piece.

The remaining four men did nothing but haul shells and feed the breech. The number that matters most is the one you cannot see in a photograph. Road speed. The Priest shared its running gear with the Sherman tank, the same engine family, the same tracks, and it moved at the same pace, around 25 mph on a decent road.

That pace was the entire reason the Priest existed at all. An armored division in 1944 could tear a hole in a line and drive 20 or 30 miles into open country in a day. Its towed artillery could not follow. The prime movers hauling the old howitzers bogged in the same mud the tanks crossed, and every time the guns had to unhook, set up, and hook up again, they fell further behind.

Towed battery going into action had to halt, unlimber each gun from its tractor, dig in the trails, and lay the sights before it could shoot. And when the advance moved on, it had to reverse every step of that before it could roll. Each of those halts cost the better part of an hour. A self-propelled battery halted, laid, and fired in minutes, and when the order came to move, it simply drove, the guns and the crews and the ready ammunition all together in one steel box.

A tank that outruns its artillery is a tank fighting without a pun. The Priest closed that gap by refusing to be left behind. It drove where the tanks drove, and it was ready to fire minutes after it stopped. America built them in the thousands. Roughly 3,500 of the standard M7 came off the lines, and another 826 of a later variant built on a different tank hull.

They filled out the armored field artillery battalions, and the way those battalions were organized is worth a sentence of its own because it tells you how the American army thought about gunfire. A battalion held three firing batteries. Each battery ran six Priests. That is 18 self-propelled howitzers in a single battalion.

And it was 50% more tubes than the four-gun battery the infantry divisions used. More barrels meant more shells in the air at once from the same order, and the whole American artillery method rested on getting a great many shells to one place at one instant. That fire came at a price. A 105-mm round with its charge is a heavy, awkward thing to lift, and the four ammunition handlers on a Priest spent a fire mission hauling shells, cutting charges, and feeding the breech while the gunner laid and relayed the piece.

A well-drilled crew could put out several aimed rounds a minute and hold a slower rate for as long as the ammunition lasted and the barrel could take it. The rounds carried inside the hull went fast at that pace, which is why behind every firing battery run the trucks of the ammunition train, themselves keeping up with the advance, because a gun with no shells is only a heavy truck.

For all its speed, the Priest was a lightly protected machine. Its armor was thin, meant to turn shell splinters and rifle rounds and no more, and the fighting compartment was open to the sky. That open top kept the crew cool and fast at the gun, and it left them exposed to air bursts and to anything that could shoot down into them.

The .50 caliber machine gun up in the pulpit was there for low-flying aircraft and for close-in trouble on the ground. In the role the Priest was built for, firing from well behind the front, none of that exposure mattered much. On the night it had to fight at the length of a village street, all of it mattered at once.

That method is the second half of the story, and the Germans understood it better than most Americans did. The engine of it was a room, not a gun. The Americans called it the fire direction center. When a forward observer somewhere up front called back a target, >> [music] >> he did not ring one battery and ask it to shoot.

He rang the center, and the men there did the mathematics for every battalion in range at once. [music] They worked out how long each gun’s shells would spend in the air, and timed the pieces so that all of them fired at different moments and every shell landed together. The Americans called that a time on target and the phrase is exact.

Battalions miles apart, guns that never saw each other, and one crash of fire arriving on the enemy with no walking rounds ahead of it to serve as a warning. The man who made it work was the forward observer, an artillery officer who went up front with the infantry or the tanks carrying a radio and a map. He did not command the guns.

He described what he saw, sent back a location, and asked for fire. And the fire direction center turned his sentence into firing data for every battalion that could reach the spot. One observer, one radio call, could bring the guns of a whole division or more onto a single field. He would adjust a ranging round or two and then say the words the German soldier learned to dread, fire for effect, and the whole weight came down at once.

A battalion that had been silent could put its first rounds on target within a couple of minutes of the call, and a good center could stack battalion on battalion faster than a German column could clear a road. General J. Lawton Collins, commanding the American 7th Corps, pressed this hard in Normandy and made it the signature of his corps.

During the breakout that summer, his artillery could bring 258 guns onto a single sector, and for the attack, his corps was allotted something on the order of 140,000 rounds. Set that against German experience of gunfire, which was skilled but came battery by battery, and you understand the shock. A German officer who had traded fire with the Russians for 2 years could read an artillery duel.

What he could not read was a sky that was empty one second and full of steel the next from guns he had not located, several battalions at once. The best small picture of it came at Hill 192, the high ground over Saint-Lô that the Germans had used all through June and early July to watch the American lines. On the 11th of July, the second infantry division went for it, and before the infantry stepped off, eight battalions of artillery hammered the crest for 20 minutes.

Once the hill was taken, the Germans lost their eyes, and the Americans gained a grandstand of their own from which their observers could range anything that moved below. That is the piece people forget when they talk about American shellfire. That reach lived as much in the men on the high ground with a radio as in the guns themselves.

And after Hill 192, those men could see for miles. You can measure what that did to the enemy by how the German soldier changed the way he lived. He stopped moving in daylight. A column on a road in the sun drew fighter-bombers from above and observed artillery from the high ground, so supply ran at night, relief came at night, and tanks shifted position at night.

An army that can only move in the dark is an army with a broken clock, always late, always improvising. When German prisoners were interrogated in France, the thing they returned to again and again was the sheer volume of American fire. The finding is set down in the historian Boyd Dastrup’s comparison of American and German field artillery, written for the army’s own historical foundation, and drawn from the interrogation reports themselves.

The Germans, who respected artillery as a craft, told their captors that the Americans had turned it into a flood. The United States Army’s own official history of the breakout, written by the historian Martin Blumenson, lays out a German command in Normandy forced to fight a daytime battle with an army that could only move at night.

Reserves arrived late and worn from marching in the dark. Counterattacks had to form up under observed fire before they could even start. An army that must hide from the sun does not get to choose when it fights, and in Normandy the Americans chose for it. German gunners knew their craft, and their guns were good.

What they lacked was the wiring behind them. Their fire was controlled low down, battery by battery, with fewer radios and less of the central mathematics that led the Americans throw everything onto one point in one instant. A German battery commander could shoot accurately with his own guns, but reaching for every other battery in the core at 30 seconds notice was beyond his system, and routine for an American observer.

When the Germans lost the high ground at places like Hill 192, their own guns lost the eyes that aimed them, while the Americans kept theirs and took over the enemies. The gap lived in the wiring, and the wiring is the hardest thing on a battlefield to copy in a hurry. The priests had been in Normandy since the first weeks, landed with the armored divisions, and firing through the hedgerow country where every field was a walled box and a man could see only a few hundred yards.

In that close ground, the guns fired short and fired often, breaking up German counterattacks in fields the infantry could barely see across. The work was grinding and unglamorous, and it built a habit that paid off later, with gun crews growing used to displacing forward the moment the line moved. So, when the line finally broke open at Cobra, the artillery was already trained to chase it.

The breakout brought the two halves of the story onto the same ground. Operation Cobra opened on the 25th of July, 1944, west of Saint-Lô, with the intention of blowing a hole in the German front and driving armor through it the enemy could close the wound. It began with heavy bombers, and the carpet they laid down fell partly on the Panzer Lehr Division, one of the best-equipped armored divisions Germany had.

Its commander was Fritz Bayerlein, and Bayerlein described the ground his division held after the bombers passed as a moonscape, a cratered dead country. That word was his, and it was for the bombs. That famous line gets borrowed and pinned onto artillery by people who want a neater story. Bayerlein said moonscape about the aircraft.

What Bayerlein said about the guns is quieter, and for this story worth more. When he accounted for what had happened to his division, he estimated that roughly half his losses came from the bombing, nearly a third from artillery, and the rest from everything else. Nearly a third. That is a German general commanding an elite armored division crediting American field guns with almost as many of his losses as the entire strategic bomber effort that made headlines around the world.

The artillery did not get the newsreel. It got the number in the report. And once the hole was open, the American armor poured south, and this time the guns went with it. The second armored division drove hard into the breach, and among its combat commands rolled the 78th armored field artillery battalion, around 520 men and 18 priests.

On previous fronts, artillery like this would have watched the tanks disappear over the horizon and spent the next day trying to catch up. In Cobra, the priests were part of the horizon. They kept the pace. They crossed the same broken ground, and they were in position to fire when the tanks needed them because they had never fallen out of the column.

Then came the night that shows what that mobility was actually worth. The night the gunners had to stop being gunners and become the front line themselves. By the 29th of July, the German forces west of the breakthrough were caught in what became known as the Roncey pocket. Thousands of men and vehicles pressed into a shrinking bag of hedgerow country with the Americans tightening around them.

The roads inside the bag filled with tanks, half-tracks, guns, and trucks jammed nose-to-tail. And one of the crossroads where they tried to funnel out earned a grim name in the American account, the death crossroads, for the wreckage that gathered there. Men who wanted only to get south were forced onto a handful of narrow lanes, and every one of those lanes ran into an American gun.

The 2nd Armored Division threw roadblocks across the escape roads to seal it, and one of those blocks sat near the village of Saint-Denis-le-Gast at a crossroads by a hamlet called La Chapelle-du-Pont-Flabar. Holding it that night, alongside the infantry and a scattering of armor, were the men and the priests of the 78th.

A self-propelled howitzer is built to shoot at things it cannot see, over hills and beyond woods, guided by a voice on the radio. It is not built to fight tanks at the length of a village street. On that night, it had no choice. Elements of Das Reich, the same SS Panzer Division whose crewmen we started with, came down the road in the dark trying to punch through the block and out of the pocket.

A reconnaissance officer of the 67th Armored Regiment, Lieutenant Veenstra, sent word back that he was being forced off his outpost and that the enemy was coming in full force. From that point, the fight belonged to whoever could put steel on the road fastest. The battalion commander was Lieutenant Colonel Hugh Exton, and early in the action, he was hit in the upper leg.

He kept directing the fight anyway. His executive officer, Major Harold Maynard, got on the radio to the combat command to report that the roadblock at Saint Denis had been compromised and that the situation was serious. The battalion intelligence officer, Captain Norbert Simard, had been in the middle of interrogating five German prisoners when the attack came down on them.

He took a position at a .50 caliber machine gun as the perimeter was overrun in the dark, was badly wounded there, and did not survive the night. Up at the sharp end, the American infantry were pinned and desperate, and the battalion operations officer, Captain John Hart, argued for cutting the howitzers loose in a line that says everything about the hour.

“Those boys are screaming and begging for fire up there,” he said. So, the priests fired, >> [music] >> and they fired flat. A battery took the lead vehicle of the German column head-on, a Mark IV tank towing an 88-mm gun, and put 37 rounds into stopping it. Battery swung its guns to the flank and fired broadside into the column as it bunched on the road.

Even the headquarters battery got into it with its 50-caliber machine guns. A 105-mm howitzer was never meant to be aimed down a road at a moving tank by open sight, but a 105-mm shell does not care what it was meant for. The fire tore the head off the column and jammed the road, and the vehicles behind piled into the wreck with nowhere to go.

It went on most of the night. The 78th, with the neighboring 62nd armored field artillery battalion adding its weight, kept the road under fire until around half past 7:00 the next morning. When the light came up, the reconnaissance column of one of the most feared SS divisions in the German army had been destroyed at a crossroads by an artillery battalion fighting over open sight.

197 Germans were taken [music] prisoner there. The 78th had paid for it, five of its own men lost and six wounded, and a battalion commander who ran the fight on a wounded leg. Artillery is not supposed to win a stand-up fight against tank. That night it did because it was there, because it had rolled all the way forward with the armor instead of trailing a day behind.

Turn the night around and look at it from the other side of the road, from inside the pocket, because that is where the verdict lives. Fritz Langanke was a 25-year-old SS officer cadet in the Panzer Regiment of Das Reich, and he was in that trap trying to get his men out. He left a first-hand account of it. And it is not the account of a man who thought the Americans were weak.

He remembered the air attacks that hunted the column with a detail that has nothing heroic in it. The continuous rattle of the bullets on every side of the turret, he said, drove you out of your mind. He remembered command breaking down around him, orders that made no sense, a sense that the thing was coming apart.

He remembered paratroop non-commissioned officers near him watching their own senior officers and concluding flatly that the men supposed to be leading them did not plan anything and were going to surrender. Where his own small group did break through, he put it down to the Americans being caught off balance in the dark rather than to any German plan.

He got out in the last days of July and was decorated for it in August. His division’s reconnaissance column on the road at Saint-Denis did not. That is the shape of the verdict and here it is paid in full. The German soldier in Normandy did not fear American artillery because of any one machine and it would be a lie to tell you a German crew keyed a radio and named the priest.

What he feared was the system. Fire massed from many battalions at once with no ranging rounds ahead of it to warn him. It came from high ground he could not take back and it followed him faster than he could crawl away so that the only safe hour was the dark one. The prisoners said it plainly in the interrogation cages, the volume of American fire over and over until it filled the historian’s [music] comparison of the two armies.

Bayerlein wrote nearly a third of an elite division’s losses against it. And the priest is the reason the last part of that sentence, the part about speed, was even possible. Towed guns delivered the weight. [music] The priest delivered the weight at the pace of the breakout. All the way to a crossroads in the dark where it leveled its barrels and settled the argument at 50 yd.

You can see the same verdict in the last serious thing the Germans tried in Normandy. When they finally gathered their armor for a counterstroke at Mortain in the first week of August, they jumped off in darkness on the night of the 6th. They went in deliberately without a preparatory bombardment because to mass and move in daylight was to be seen and to be shelled.

They bought a few miles in the dark. By the time the light came up, the attack was under observation and under fire, and within a few days it had failed. The Germans understood exactly what daylight cost them, and they built their last gamble around avoiding it. After Mortain, the front in Normandy came apart for good, and the American armored divisions turned the collapse into a pursuit, driving east across France toward the Seine faster than the Germans could set a new line.

The priests went with them the whole way. A retreating army’s one real hope is to dig in somewhere and make the enemy pay to come at it. Every time the Germans tried that, they found American shellfire already ranging them because the guns had never fallen off the back of the advance. A gun that keeps pace does more than support the attack.

Denies the enemy the pause he needs to survive one. There is a habit when the Normandy breakout is told of giving the whole thing to the tanks and the bombers. The Sherman gets the photograph. The heavy bomber gets the map with the arrows. The gun crew standing in the open behind an M7 sweating a shell into the breech for the 20th hour is somewhere off the edge of the frame.

The record does not agree with the photograph. The record says the fire was the thing the enemy could not answer and the reason the fire never let up was [music] that the guns had learned to keep pace with the advance instead of watching it leave. Those men kept the fire moving forward and that is why the breakout did not stall.

If your father or your grandfather served in an armored field artillery battalion in the 78th or the 62nd or any of the others that rolled their priests up behind the spearheads in France, leave his name and his unit in the comments. Those battalions are named far less often than they earned. And if you have ever crewed a self-propelled gun or stood next to an M7 in a museum and looked up at that strange little pulpit, tell us what you saw.

The in the tanks got the glory. The men who kept the fire moving got the war won, one crossroads at a time.