Chapter 1

Seven Good Germans

    In the minds of many young American soldiers in World War II, a good German was a dead German. Almost 50 years after the end of the war, Judd Wiley, who had been a sergeant in the 712th Tank Battalion, remembers the first seven soldiers who became "good Germans" with the assistance of his tank.

    The first -- although the exact order escaped him -- was hiding in a church steeple. Wiley recalls seeing a Frenchwoman walking in and out of the village of Pretot, in Normandy, and pausing at the base of the steeple. Moments later, shells would start dropping around his tank. He directed his loader, Eugene Tannler, of Scranton, Pa., to place a high-explosive shell in the breach and told his gunner, Harold Gentle, of the Manionk section of Philadelphia, to see if he could hit the steeple. Gentle had what Wiley calls a "dead eye," and needed only one shot to score a direct hit. Wiley says he considered killing the Frenchwoman as well, but that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. "We were supposed to be fighting against men," he says.

    The second was a sniper who took a shot at Wiley as he stood on the folding tank commander’s seat with the upper half of his 6-foot-3 body sticking out of the turret. Wiley could see pink tracer bullets arcing out of a tree, but was unable to react before he felt a hard smack in the face and slumped down into the tank

    When he recovered his senses, he asked Tannler if there was a hole in his forehead. Tannler assured him that there wasn’t, but did say there was blood all over his face.

    He had been nicked by a paint chip that flew up when a bullet struck the tank.

    The realization that someone was trying to kill him made Wiley mad. So mad that he climbed back up onto his seat, stood at the .50 caliber machine gun that was planted atop the turret for defense against enemy fighter planes, and began firing blindly into the upper branches of the tree. He kept on firing until he saw a figure fall out of the tree.

    In training, Wiley recalled, he was told that if he came to a bend in the road, he should rotate the turret of his tank so that the barrel of the 75-millimeter gun was pointing down the road when he turned. He did that in Normandy, and it not only saved his life but accounted for Nos. 3, 4 and 5 as well. As his tank made a turn, it was struck in the side by an armor-piercing shell that fortunately caromed off. Upon completing the turn he saw a German field piece in the middle of the road, and his gun was already lined up. Gentle fired a high-explosive shell, followed by two more in rapid succession.

    The Incinerator, about as tragically inappropriate a name as you could come up with for a tank, but that was what Wiley's crew had chosen -- was going down a sunken road with hedgerows on either side. A German soldier with a large white barracks bag was running ahead of the tank, looking desperately for a break in a hedgerow so he could get out of its path. Wiley recalled that that was the only time he ever saw Gentle make a mistake. Instead of firing the .30-caliber coaxial machine gun, he pressed the solenoid for the 75-millimeter cannon. Barracks bag and blood and body parts were splattered on the hedgerows on both sides of the road. Gentle told Wiley he meant to fire the machine gun, but in his excitement had hit the wrong button.

    No. 7 was another sniper, this one shooting at a group of infantrymen. There were dead GIs scattered on the ground, and one of them, a Mexican, was draped over a hedgerow. Wiley recalls thinking the French should give that acre of land to the Mexican GI’s mother because of her son’s dying trying to free it for them. It made his blood boil. Gentle made short work of the sniper, who had been holed up in a stone silo.

Contents                       Chapter 2

Order "They were all young kids" on Amazon.com.