What happens next will haunt Clarence into modern day, drawing him back to Cologne to do the unthinkable: to face his enemy, one last time.Ĭologne journalist Hermann Rheindorf first discovered the identity of Kathi Esser and introduced Clarence to Gustav Schaefer and Kathi's family.
As Clarence and Gustav trade fire down a long boulevard, they are taken by surprise by a tragic mistake of war.
And he will square off with Gustav Schaefer, a teenager behind the trigger in a Panzer IV tank, whose crew has been sent on a suicide mission to stop the Americans. Battling through the ruins, Clarence will engage the fearsome Panther in a duel immortalized by an army cameraman. Army into its largest urban battle of the European war, the fight for Cologne, the “Fortress City” of Germany. That’s how Clarence, the corporal from coal country, finds himself leading the U.S. But with it came a harrowing new responsibility: Now they will spearhead every attack. After Clarence sees his friends cut down breaching the West Wall and holding the line in the Battle of the Bulge, he and his crew are given a weapon with the power to avenge their fallen brothers: the Pershing, a state-of-the-art “super tank,” one of twenty in the European theater. Soon a pattern emerged: The lead tank always gets hit. Then they met the German Panther, with a gun so murderous it could shoot through one Sherman and into the next. At first, Clarence and his fellow crews in the legendary 3rd Armored Division-“Spearhead”-thought their tanks were invincible. When Clarence Smoyer is assigned to the gunner’s seat of his Sherman tank, his crewmates discover that the gentle giant from Pennsylvania has a hidden talent: He’s a natural born shooter.
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