Prepare To Be Amazed How Pershings Star Wars Changed the Way We Look at SciFi

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Clarence Smoyer, the unhelmeted soldier atop this T26E3 Pershing tank, was filmed by an Army newsreel photographer on March 6, 1945. (Courtesy of Ballantine Books)

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On a late February day in 1945, on a hilltop near the town of Stolberg, Germany, a nervous, curly-haired Army corporal prepared to put on an exhibition of artillery marksmanship for a group of senior officers.

Gen. Maurice Rose, the Denver-raised leader of the 3rd Armored Division, stood among the anxious observers about to see a demonstration of the newest American weapon, a 46-ton behemoth called a T26E3 Pershing tank. They hoped its bulked-up armor and massive 90mm cannon could counter the Germans’ devastating Tiger and Panther tanks, hasten the advance across the Rhine River and bring World War II’s European conflict to a merciful conclusion.

The young gunner, 21-year-old Clarence Smoyer, fidgeted. Barely more than a kid from a Pennsylvania steel town, he had never fired the new tank’s cannon, and here he was about to perform before a general whose legend grew by the day. Smoyer felt lucky to serve under such a fearless and beloved commander in the outfit Rose had dubbed “Spearhead” — so named for its habit of leading the American assault.

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Clarence Smoyer as a young soldier in the U.S. Army. He became a tank gunner in the famous “Spearhead” Division. (Courtesy of Clarence Smoyer)

Smoyer used the tank’s sighting mechanism to draw a bead on an abandoned farmhouse in a village more than a half-mile away. He heard his sergeant call the range and specify a target — “The chimney!” — that seemed hopelessly precise for his first live fire in a just-off-the-assembly-line tank.

But his uncanny eye, honed as a kid during nighttime escapades hunting for frogs with his BB gun, didn’t fail him now. With an ear-splitting bang, the shell demolished the chimney, while an unexpected sideways blast of gasses from a newly configured firing system sent the assembled officers, including Rose, tumbling to the muddy ground.

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Smoyer picked off a second chimney, then a third — a mile-distant speck in his scope — as the crowd that gathered cheered both his skill and the tank’s awesome capabilities. Rose liked what he saw, and felt the new hardware tipped the firepower scales in the Americans’ favor.

That brief experience, eight miles behind enemy lines, marked the closest thing to a personal encounter between the two men. In a matter of weeks, Smoyer’s resourcefulness under fire would help Spearhead take the German stronghold of Cologne and continue the countdown to war’s end.

And shortly after that, Rose, racing ahead of an American column caught in the crossfire of an enemy ambush, would be shot — murdered, the Denver Post headlines proclaimed — after a German tank cornered his vehicle and he attempted to surrender. He became the highest-ranking American officer to be killed by enemy fire in the European theater.

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Rose’s legend and legacy would live on. The son of a Polish rabbi who emigrated to the United States, he was memorialized when Denver’s Jewish community built the hospital that still bears his name.

Smoyer, perhaps against all odds, survived the war and returned to Allentown, Pennsylvania. His love and respect for his fallen general never dissipated.

Cpl. Clarence Smoyer, center, gets settled into a tank as volunteer re-enactors prepared to roll through LoDo in front of Union Station on March 30, 2019 as part of a ceremony honoring Smoyer, who served with Denver’s Gen. Maurice Rose in World War II. (Eric Lubbers, The Colorado Sun)

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On Saturday, exactly 74 years to the day since Gen. Maurice Rose was gunned down by a German tank commander, Clarence Smoyer rumbled down Wynkoop Street in Denver’s lower downtown perched in the turret of a vintage M3 Stuart tank, offered by its Loveland owner to deliver him in appropriate style to an event at Union Station.

This time it was ceremony that found him, at 95, once again rolling in an armored vehicle. While perhaps a couple hundred people, from toddlers to gray-haired veterans, waved miniature flags and cheered, Smoyer descended from the tank. Aided by a cane, he made his way from the street through a throng of well-wishers and World War II-era uniformed soldiers, who snapped to attention and saluted as he passed.

All these years later, at a time when only an estimated 3% of World War II veterans are still living, Smoyer had occasion to visit Denver. A local author, Adam Makos of Broomfield, has added Smoyer’s story of battle and survival to his other published works recounting compelling tales from military history.

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But while Smoyer would greet the public and sign copies of the book — titled “Spearhead, ” echoing the name Rose gave the armored division — he also came to honor his general as well as other World War II comrades, living and dead.

“We had the greatest general of the war, ” Smoyer said of Rose. “Everybody liked him. He was right up front with us in battles. He always said he didn’t want to be back with the cooks and supply people, he wanted to be up front where the action was.”

The choice of Union Station as a focal point for Saturday’s event was no accident. Many soldiers passed through on their way to catch trains that shipped them off to war. Smoyer and Makos unveiled a painting they commissioned that depicts a tank rolling across a battlefield and will be displayed in the terminal with an explanatory plaque as a remembrance of Rose and his Spearhead division, which played a key role in bringing the war to a close.

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“Not a lot of people know that Union Station has that World War II history, ” Makos said. “We want to draw attention to the fact that some of Denver’s bravest men walked through those halls. And some of them never came home.”

Earlier, Smoyer and Makos chatted about the book project that took six years to complete, included trips to old battlefields and even reconnected Smoyer with the German soldier whose tank he faced in the brutal battle for the city of Cologne. Portions of that two-day conflict were filmed by renowned combat photographer Jim Bates, who grew up in Colorado Springs and eventually parachuted into France with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day and followed troops all the way to the fall of Berlin.

As the battle for Cologne loomed, Bates decided to follow one tank throughout the conflict. He picked the lead tank — Smoyer’s crew — and his footage captured their defeat of a German tank (one of two they would destroy) near the city’s famous cathedral, images that played in movie theater newsreels during the war and now exist in digital form.

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“It brings back a lot of memories, ” Smoyer said of watching his 21-year-old self in action. “Not all of them are good memories.”

World War II veteran Clarence Smoyer, in black cap, makes his way through a crowd at Denver’s Union Station, where well-wishers included re-enactors of soldiers dressed in period uniforms and women dressed as homefront icon Rosie the Riveter. Smoyer, 95, paid tribute to Gen. Maurice Rose, a Denver icon killed weeks before the end of the war, as well as other veterans. (Kevin Simpson, The Colorado Sun)

The Army rushed 20 Pershing tanks to Europe after disastrous losses at the Battle of the Bulge, when it resorted to borrowing Sherman tanks from the British. It had become obvious as the Allies punched through Normandy that the German hardware, the Panther and Tiger tanks, had them outmatched. So pressing was the need that the Pershings’ first real test came in battle.

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“Since his crew was considered one of Gen. Rose’s elite crews, they were given this Pershing tank, ” Makos said. “It had a 90mm gun, as big if not bigger than anything the Germans had. It also had automatic transmission, so if they ran into a dicey situation, they could quickly back up. They could truly go toe-to-toe with the Panther or Tiger.”

The German command ordered Cologne, the third-largest city in the country, to be defended to the last round. The urban warfare would be complicated by their use of tunnels — dubbed “mouse trails” — that let the city’s defenders slip from building to building unnoticed.

Smoyer remembers the threat of Molotov cocktails hurled from rooftops and the danger of bazooka-like anti-tank guns called Panzerfaust, which fired rockets that penetrated armor and blew molten metal inside a tank.

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But the battle also revealed a resourcefulness in Smoyer — in particular as he engaged a German Panther tank and ultimately prevailed, not with a direct hit but by collapsing a building and showering the tank with bricks and debris that disabled it.

Later, the account would be augmented by the German tank soldier, Gustav Schaefer, who escaped from the

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