By Allan B. Kortz, MD, MHS
After having spent Thanksgiving 1944 within a large troop convoy in the North Atlantic, our division (the 66th Infantry, Black Panther) landed in southern England. As the Battle of the Bulge raged in Belgium, it became apparent that we would soon embark for France across the English Channel to join the fray sometime, somewhere.
As the year was coming to a close and Christmas was approaching, we loaded our equipment and personal gear onto vehicles of various sizes and descriptions for several consecutive late afternoon "dry-run" preparations prior to actually boarding several vessels for the short voyage to France on Christmas Eve.
As a member of an anti-tank crew, I along with our gun and its towing vehicle boarded an LST for the anticipated short and uneventful journey. Late that night, and with the lights of Cherbourg visible in the distance, word gradually spread throughout our armada that some devastating event had occurred.
The largest of our ships, the one carrying the most members of the 66th Division, had been torpedoed by a German U-boat and was sinking. By the time that rescue efforts had been concluded, approximately 1000 members of the Black Panther division had died; either from the initial blast of the torpedo or had drowned in the cold waters of the English Channel.
Interestingly, this event was never reported in the media! However, a former member of the 66th Division who witnessed the disaster, Jaiquin Sanders, described it in great detail in his book,
A Night Before Christmas.
In the spring of 1945, our Infantry division, the 66th Black Panther, and the anti-tank platoon of which I was a member, was posted to an area within which there was negligible German tank activity. Therefore, our platoon, that ordinarily manned three anti-tanks guns, was issued four 50-caliber machine guns (these guns, at least in 1945, were temperamental and would occasionally jam/misfire). To these weapons we affixed elevation and traverse mechanisms, thus allowing them to be used for indirect fire – that is, a firing capability without the target being in direct sight. Such an arrangement required a forward observer to phone back to the gun battery appropriate targeting orders and to correct, as necessary, the results of those orders.
To simplify the targeting requests, we had established benchmarks, specific points in the distance, upon which we had previously aimed all four machine guns accurately. These points could be referred to by our forward observer for subsequent firing orders.
On this particular day, our forward observer advised us that an enemy patrol was sighted in the middle of one of our benchmark areas. Each of our gun crews made the appropriate adjustments, as previously determined, to shower that benchmark with a hail of 50-caliber fire.
The firing order was given.
All four triggers were pulled.
All four guns jammed.
We immediately received a frantic order from our forward observer to cancel the firing order.
It was not an enemy patrol: it was American!
