Hi, I'm the History Guy. I have a degree in history,
I love history, if you love history too this is the channel for you.
Today we're going to talk about an event that was described in an after-action battle report in
December 18th of 1944, where a US light armored car engaged and destroyed a German heavy tank
in combat, which is something so unlikely that you might not even think it was true,
except that there were multiple witnesses in an official army report. And while it really is an
interesting and exciting story worth telling it is also an interesting microcosm of the world
shattering events that were going on in the winter of 1944, and an interesting life lesson as well.
But before we talk about this duel let's talk about the events that led up to it.
The Germans launched their last major offensive in the Second World War, December 16 1944. They
were attacking a heavily forested section of Belgium called the Ardenne that was lightly
defended by the Allies because they believed the terrain was so inhospitable that there couldn't
be an offensive there. The goal was to drive all the way through to the Belgian port of Antwerp,
that would split the Western Allies in half, isolate entire army groups, and Hitler hoped,
inflict such a defeat on the Western Allies that they would have to sue for peace allowing him to
concentrate on the war with the Soviet Union. It was a massive attack, it included 206,000 troops,
1,200 tanks, 4,000 artillery pieces. The goal was to use surprise and speed,
to move so quickly that the Allies would not be able to mount a defense or a counter-attack.
And that required a very aggressive timetable, where they needed to take certain towns that had
crossroads necessary for moving these kinds of troops. One of those was the town of Bastogne,
and the defense of Bastogne is pretty well known, but another one that's not discussed
nearly as much is the defense of the tiny Belgian town St. Vith.
December 17th was chaos in the tiny town of St. Vith. The German assault the night
before word had caught the Americans completely off-guard. Thousands of American troops were in
headlong retreat, two entire regiments had been surrounded and forced to surrender. But the
Americans knew the importance of the crossroads in St. Vith, and so they were desperately trying
to throw up a defense, creating ad hoc units from the retreating troops and through the traffic jam,
trying to bring up reinforcements from the 7th and 9th armored division. But on the other side
things were almost as bad. The Americans had held in the north, cutting off one of the major roads
that the Germans had intended to use, and that meant that the entire fifth Panzer Army was stuck
on one road, and that road went straight through St. Vith. The traffic jam was so bad that one of
the German commanders, Field Marshal Model, was standing on the road trying to direct traffic.
And that's how things end on December 17th, the Americans in a traffic jam desperately
trying to create a defense of St. Vith, the Germans in a traffic jam desperately
trying to take St. Vith, before the Americans can mount that defense.
And that brings us to December 18th, the date of our duel between the M8 and the Tiger Tank
in the high stakes defense of the town of St. Vith. So let's talk about those two
vehicles that met that day. The M8 armored car is a reconnaissance vehicle, in this case with troop
B of the 87th Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron. The job of a reconnaissance squadron is to make
and keep contact with the enemy so that you know the enemy's strength and intention. Their vehicles
are built around speed and agility, not arms and armament. The M8, made by Ford, is lightly armed
with a 37 millimeter cannon. That's not enough to say, hurt the front armor on a large tank,
but it could take on an enemy reconnaissance vehicle or a soft vehicle, like a truck or
an artillery piece. The M8 was armored but only enough to protect it from say machine gun fire,
not a cannon, like on a tank. And although its off-road capability was disappointing, the M8 was
very fast on roads, capable of maintaining speeds up to 55 miles per hour. On the other side of the
battlefield the Germans brought with them some of the most powerful armored fighting vehicles
of the Second World War. Not only did they have the formidable Panzer 4 and Panther medium tanks,
but they brought along the Master of the Battlefield, the mighty Tiger Tank. Made
by the Hentschel corporation, a tiger weighed in at more than 60 tons, that's more than eight
times the weight of an M8. Its frontal armor was a hundred and twenty millimeters thick, which was
virtually invulnerable to the 37 millimeter cannon on an M8, and it's own cannon was at a mighty 88,
an 8 point, 8 centimeter gun meant to destroy the best armor that the Allies could bring to the
battlefield. Against an 88, an M8 might as well have been armored with paper. The only weakness
for a Tiger was the armor in the rear, because tanks are built to be attacked from the front.
But even there, a Tiger had 80 millimeters of armor, which meant that for an M8 to hurt a Tiger,
it would essentially have to shoot into the back of the Tiger at point-blank range.
But of course that is exactly what happened on December 18th. Witnessed by an infantry captain
and in an after-action report. The M8, concealed to the bush, was surprised when a Tiger Tank
rumbled by, right in front of it. The commander realized that the Tiger Tank was on a sunken
road and so wouldn't be able to maneuver, and he saw an opportunity. So he rolled out his M8,
hoping to charge the rear of the Tiger Tank without even being seen. Well it didn't work
out! The commander on the Tiger Tank saw them, and so it became a desperate race! The M8 racing to
get close enough to use its 37 millimeter cannon, the Tiger Tank desperately trying to traverse its
turret so it could shoot at the M8! At just 25 yards, a hundred and fifty feet, the M8 fired
three shots straight into the rear of the Tiger Tank! The huge beast shuddered, rumbled to a stop
and exploded into flames, the crew abandoning the tank. And then, in my favorite piece of the
after-action report, they mildly note, having just scored perhaps the most extraordinary
kill in the entire history of armoured warfare...that the M8, returned to its position.
Sure it's an exciting story, but what does it really teach us? Well I think one of the most
interesting parts is that this attack was not an act of desperation, it was an act
of calculation. The sergeant commanding the M8 knew the strength of his own vehicle, knew the
weakness of his enemy, saw an opportunity and took it. And isn't that a great life lesson? If
you understand your strengths and recognize your opportunities, you can defeat even overwhelming
odds. But it's also a great illustration of the plucky American defense of the town of St. Vith,
Like the M8, the Americans in St. Vith were facing overwhelming odds in a chaotic situation. And yet
they put up a defense greater than anyone might have imagined. The Germans expected that their
overwhelming numbers would easily take St. Vith on December 18th, and yet the Americans held out for
an entire week. It wasn't until December 24th that they finally withdrew to new positions.
By the time the Germans finally took the town it was really just too late. While their offensive,
better known as the Battle of the Bulge, would rage on for another month, in practice they had
no chance of achieving their goals after they lost the initiative in the first few
days against plucky defenses like St. Vith. In the end, the Germans lost more than a hundred thousand
casualties in the battle, killed or captured, and virtually all the equipment that they took
was lost as well. It exhausted the German army, they never mounted another major offensive in
the Second World War, an astounding victory for the allies, maybe best illustrated when
that little M8 armored car defeated that Goliath of the Battlefield, on a lonely road in Belgium.
I'm the History Guy. Thanks for watching my series, five minutes of history snippets have
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