July 1944
The convoy had climbed up from Normandy’s coastal plain and was wending its way west among the rolling hills, green pastures, and hedgerows of the Brittany Peninsula. It was a formidable display of American military might, stretching several miles along the roads of northern France’s bocage. It included tanks, self-propelled artillery, tank destroyers, half-tracks, and trucks carrying food, fuel and soldiers. Smack in the middle were M4 tractors towing powerful 155mm howitzers. Amos sat in the cab of one of those tractors as the convoy headed west to support an American armored division laying siege to Brest on the Atlantic Coast. The Allies hoped Brest’s capture would provide a deep-water port through which they could bring in supplies for the invasion force that had recently broken out of the Normandy beachheads.
In their dash to Brest, the armored division had bypassed German strongholds in places like St. Malo on the English Channel. Those bypassed Wehrmacht forces were now harrying supply lines to the Americans surrounding Brest. They needed to be cleaned out. American commanders sent in a task force, which included the 333rd Field Artillery Battalion, to do the job.
Looking north, out over the English Channel, Amos caught an occasional glance of Mont St. Michel, the tenth century abbey that became an island at high tide. The beauty of the abbey sitting like a polished stone amid the blue water and the bucolic landscape— gentle rolling hills, emerald pastures, stands of oak and beech trees— dazzled him.
Man, this is a beautiful country, he said to himself. When the war is over, I’m gonna bring Donna back here to see it.
They were traveling a dozen miles or so south of St. Malo, a medieval fortress town. As Amos’s portion of the convoy crested a hill, he noticed a road sign. “St. Père,” it said, pointing off to the right. Looking in that direction, Amos spotted a small village sitting atop a hill above a verdant valley, its church steeple glinting in the sunlight.
Yeah. I’m gonna bring Don—
His reverie was cut short by two sudden whooshing sounds. A red fireball suddenly enveloped a tractor two vehicles in front of him. The Sherman tank rocked over toward one side, flames leaping from open hatches. In the next moment, just ahead and off to his right, Amos heard what sounded like cloth being ripped. He then saw the canvas side of a troop-carrying truck shredded directly in front of his tractor. Above the racket, he could hear the screams of men dying inside it. “Turn left!” Amos shouted at his driver. “Get off the road!” The tractor careened onto a soft shoulder that was several inches below the grade of the road. As it did, the vehicle was struck by an exploding projectile shot from a Panzerfaust, a shoulder-fired bazooka- like weapon the Germans used with great effectiveness against armored vehicles. The blast shook the vehicle, blew off one of its tracks, and sent shrapnel into the arms and faces of some of his men. But the turn had saved them from death or serious injury as the projectile hit the tractor with a glancing blow.
“Everybody out the left side!” Amos yelled.
The men scrambled out of the tractor, some having the presence of mind to grab their carbines as they exited. They sheltered behind the listing vehicle, protecting them from the rifle and machine gun fire coming from the right side of the road. Once on the ground, Amos checked his men huddling in the shadow of the tractor. Some were bleeding, but their wounds were superficial, mostly cuts from shrapnel. All looked frightened.
He scooted toward the front of the vehicle and peered around. He could see firing from a grove of trees about sixty yards to the right of the road. It was small arms fire from rifles and at least one, maybe two, machine gun positions. No more Panzerfaust projectiles were being fired. Down the road a tank and another tractor were on fire, and he could see no movement in either the troop-carrying truck in front of him or the one behind him.
Amos sat there thinking for a minute. He wasn’t an infantryman and had never been in combat. Battlefield tactics did not come naturally to him. He considered just staying put and waiting. Surely a tank could easily flush out the enemy position. But the ambush had snarled traffic on the road and there were stands of birch trees on the sides. Amos wasn’t sure how long it would take a tank to make its way to where they were. Many of the wounded in the trucks needed medical attention. The longer they waited, the more some would die. Amos felt he had to do something.
“All right, men, listen up. We’re gonna have to take out that position. I want Clarence, Smitty, Jackson, Reggie, BJ, and whoever else has their carbine to scoot down that way.”
He pointed toward the howitzer they had been towing.
“The ground is lower than the road, so if you stay down, you should have cover. You two,” he said, pointing to two others in the team, “get to the front of the tractor.”
“I don’t have my carbine,” one of them said to him. “Should I try to get it from the tractor?”
“No. Too risky. Take mine.”
Amos had a plan in mind. Having watched training films, he suspected that the German machine guns were MG42s, a terrifying weapon that could fire 1,500 rounds in a minute—nearly twenty-five every second. He also knew that the machine gun’s rapid rate of fire would soon overheat its barrel, forcing its crew to change it. German infantry teams generally carried spare barrels, and a veteran Wehrmacht crew could replace a barrel in less than thirty seconds. But, if his team could put some fire into the grove, that would force the Germans to keep their heads down and maybe take a little longer to fit on a new barrel. That could give him enough time to get to the heavy machine gun mounted on the tractor’s roof.
“When I give the signal, give me some cover fire into that grove of trees and I can hit them with the Ma Deuce,” he ordered.
The “Ma Deuce,” the cannoneers’ slang for the Browning M2 machine gun bolted atop the tractor, was a formidable weapon. Its rate of fire was much slower than the German machine guns they were facing—about five hundred rounds a minute. But its .50 caliber bullets packed much more punch. But to fire it, Amos had to stand on a firing platform in the interiors of the tractor, his upper body poking through a hatch in the roof, but his lower torso and legs exposed in the cabin. Amos watched his men crawl into position. He waited. The closest German machine gun paused. They were changing the barrel. He took a deep breath.
“Covering fire!” he shouted.
Read what happens next in Black Messiahs…