Cobra King is the name of a shell-scarred, stout, armored forty-ton
Sherman tank. With a first lieutenant from Texas in the turret the
Cobra sliced through the German circle about Bastogne the afternoon of
December 26, 1944. Other men and tanks of the Fourth Armored fought as
hard to relieve Bastogne, but the Cobra got there first--at 4:45 p.
m. the day after Christmas.
The tank commander was Lieutenant Charles P. Boggess, Jr., who played
high school football at Greenville, Ill., before moving to Austin,
Texas.
At the tank’s 75-millimeter gun was Corporal Milton B. Dickerman, of
Newark, who made bomb racks in a Kearny, N. J., factory before he
became a tanker three years ago.
The loader, Private James G. Murphy, hails from a small farm near
Bryan, Texas, and was attending Sam Houston State Teachers College at
Huntsville, Texas, until he got in the Army two years ago.
The bow gunner was Private Harold Hafner, of Arlington, Wash., who was
graduated from Arlington High School in 1943 right into the Army.
A Georgia tractor farmer, Private Hubert J. J. Smith, of Cartersville,
drove the tank. His initials stand for James Jackson, but he has no
idea why he has two middle names.
By noon of December 26 Cobra King squatted on a ridge south of the
Belgian hamlet of Clochimont. Its heavy-barreled snout pointed
north-east toward Bastogne three miles away.
One of the great tank fighters of this war, Colonel Creighton W.
Abrams, of West Newton, Mass., commander of the 37th Tank Battalion of
the 4th Armored, swept his arm forward in the signal to advance. Cobra
King snorted into the attack at the head of a column of tanks and
armored infantry halftracks. The armored vehicles charged up the
snow-covered road like a gray file of trumpeting elephants.
Incidentally, we saw a real elephant on this road one day, passing
tanks going the other way and making an odd contrast, but it was a
circus elephant entertaining children.
Lieutenant Boggess, commanding nine mediums in the tank push that
relieved Bastogne, had warned his men that it wasn’t going to be a
picnic. The men haven’t been on a picnic since the Fourth Armored
left the States a year ago, so that was all right with them.
A veteran of thirty-three years, Lieutenant Boggess described the
situation:
“The Germans had these two little towns of Clochimont and Assenois
on this secondary road we were using to get to Bastogne. Beyond
Assenois the road ran up a ridge through heavy woods. There were lots
of Germans there too.”
“We were going through fast, all guns firing, straight up that road
to bust through before they had time to get set. I thought of a lot of
things as we took off. I thought of whether the road would be mined;
whether the bridge in Assenois would be blown, whether they would be
ready at their anti-tank guns.”
“Then we charged, and I didn’t have any time to wonder.”
Spraying machine-gun and cannon fire, the tanks charged with throttles
open.
“I used the 75 like a machine-gun,” Gunner Dickerman said.
“Murphy was plenty busy throwing in the shells. We shot twenty-one
rounds in a few minutes and I don’t know how much machine-gun
stuff.”
“As we got to Assenois an anti-tank gun in a halftrack fired at us.
The shell hit the road in front of the tank and threw dirt all over. I
got the halftrack in my sights and hit it with high explosive. It blew
up.”
Dirt from the enemy shell burst had smeared the driver’s periscope.
“I made out okay, although I couldn’t see very good,” Driver
Smith drawled. “I sorta guessed at the road. Had a little trouble
when my left brake locked and the tank turned up a road we didn’t
want to go. So I just stopped her, backed her up and went on again.”
Unlucky Assenois was blowing to bits under artillery barrages laid
down by American guns. Through the smoke, dust, flying debris and
shell splinters the armor drove on. Our artillery kept the enemy down
and cut short his defensive fire.
“Bastogne was the next town down the road, but we still had those
woods to go through,” Lieutenant Boggess recalled.
Kafner kept his bow machine gun playing around the fir trees and the
road ahead. Dark enemy figures ran and fell in the dusk. In the forest
darkness a square concrete blockhouse painted green loomed ahead.
Dickerman sent three shells smashing into it. Later the infantry found
twelve Germans there.
Lieutenant Boggess pulled the galloping Cobra down to a canter.
Colored parachutes clotting the countryside; some of them caught in
the tall trees, indicated where ammo, food and penicillin had been
dropped to the American paratroops and tankers besieged in Bastogne
and its defense perimeter. The question now was whether the Cobra King
was among friend or foe.
“I spotted some foxholes filled with men in G. I. uniforms,”
Boggess continued. “I yelled for them to come out, because we
thought the Germans might have men in our uniforms around Bastogne
ready to knock us off. Nobody moved, so I called again.
“After they heard me say that it was okay and we were the 4th
Armored, a lieutenant from the engineers climbed out of his hole and
said he was glad to see us. They had me covered, too, I found out.”
“You know,” commented New Jersey’s Dickerman, “We never really
got to see that town of Bastogne after all. Wasn’t the M. P.’s
fault, either--no off limits business. Soon as we got to the perimeter
defenses we turned right around to guard the road on the edge of
town.”
4th Armored Moved
Suddenly and Fast
Sgt. Joe McCarthy, YANK Staff Correspondent, reporting the seemingly
impossible swing of Third Army units toward Bastogne at the height of
Von Rundstedt’s breakthrough, in the January 21, 1945 issue of YANK,
included the following:
The most spectacular role in the move was that played by the Fourth
Armored Division which dashed to the aid of the besieged 101st
Airborne Division at Bastogne. The story of what happened during the
same time to the 26th Division, which moved up on the Fourth
Armored’s right flank and tackled the tough job of crossing the Sure
River to the east of Bastogne without getting much of a play in the
newspapers, is less dramatic but more typical. It gives you some idea
of what it was like for the average infantry outfit that was in on
this deal during the joyous Christmas season of 1944.
Nobody in the 26th Division can get over the way their part of the
Third Army made its move north from Metz. Probably no military
movement of such a large scale was ever carried out with more speed
and less red tape. The book was thrown out of the window and all the
OCS rules about road discipline were forgotten. Each outfit simply
tried to get its vehicles on the road as soon as possible and, after
they were on the road, to keep moving.
“And them roads were jammed,” one of the truck drivers said. “Us
and the Fourth Armored and God only knows how many other divisions. We
were bumper to bumper all the way. Good thing it was a cloudy day. If
the Germans ever had air out, they would have slaughtered us.”
What YANK Magazine of January 21, 1945
said about the 4th Armored’s part in the
historic Bastogne fight