The most decorated American unit in the war was the 82nd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, universally called the Slant Eyes. The battalion’s 640 soldiers were all Japanese Americans, largely from California.
General Clay said, “We were short on antitank weapons, but I knew if I sent the Japs against the panzers, they’d fight like demons. They are a warrior race, and they’d try to make up for their treacherous cousins at Pearl Harbor.”
Wilson Clay made a better general than he would have an ambassador.
David Yamashita told me after the war, “They called us a reconnaissance battalion, but that was a lie so that we wouldn’t be scared. We were a tank destroyer unit without antitank weapons.”
Private Yamashita had been told that panzers without infantry leading them to point out targets were largely blind and could be snuck up on.
“Can you imagine?” he asked me. “We were trained to single-handedly stalk and disable tanks. We had been told that because tanks are so noisy, they can’t surprise you and so killing them would be fun and easy. In theory, it should have been, I suppose.”
“Was it?” I asked.
Yamashita laughed lightly. “The maxim was that tanks were no longer a technical surprise, but only a tactical surprise. To hell with that. One of a panzer’s chief effects is on morale. They just scare the crap out of you.”
“I can imagine.”
“You were an aide at headquarters, so you probably can’t imagine.”
This was a theme I heard again and again during my interviews. I didn’t like it much.
Yamashita snorted, “We didn’t have bazookas, so they gave us mines and smoke bombs and called us ‘assault engineers.’ All you need to be an antitank assault engineer are Jesse Owens’ legs and a frontal lobotomy.”
An assault on a panzer was made by a two-man team, the smoke-layer and the mine-layer. “My teammate, Francis Noguchi, and I flipped a coin. I won, so I was the mine-layer, which was lucky for me because the smoke-layer usually gets killed.”
At the Battle of Haywards Heath, Yamashita and Noguchi had run ahead of a lead panzer that was engaged in a short-lived firefight with a Sherman. They used a glade for cover. A hundred yards ahead of the German armor, they sprinted into the pasture and threw themselves onto their stomachs. Yamashita and Noguchi were forty yards apart, waiting as the growl of the tanks’ engines grew closer.
“The grass wasn’t very high, and my nose was right down in the dirt. And on they came. The ground trembled under me. It was my first crack at this duty, and I was so afraid I started chewing the dirt under my mouth. I’ve no idea why I did that, but it calmed me some.”
The panzers were in a loose deuce formation, two of them side by side. Both rolled east of the American antitank team. Noguchi waited until the nearest panzer drew abreast before he jumped to his knees, twisted the fuse on a smoke bomb, and hurled it in front of the nearest tank. He pulled another grenade from his belt and threw it mightily. Then he sprinted toward the panzer and threw yet another.
Smoke billowed from the grenades and began drifting across the field in trailing gray clouds. The nearest panzer’s turret immediately swung toward Noguchi, who was still lobbing one grenade after another. The smoke layer dropped to the grass, but the turret machine gun roared. Bullets bit into the field in swaths that after two short swings found Noguchi, lifting him into the air above the grass, then blowing him back, rolling him over and over.
He had accomplished his mission. The panzers’ vision was obscured by thick haze, and they could not cover each other.
Yamashita leaped to his feet and charged the nearest tank, a Tauchpanzer, a diving tank, made for amphibious landings and river crossings. Rubber sheets had covered the commander’s cupola, the hull machine gun hatch, and the mantlet, but had been blown off by small charges detonated from inside the turret once the tank had gained dry land. The Tauchpanzer’s crew had not had time to cut away the air hose, held on the surface by a buoy when the tank was under water, and the tube followed the tank like a tail.
The panzer’s turret began its terrifying swing toward Yamashita, searching for him. But it took the gunner forty-four cranks on the traverse handwheel to bring the turret half a circle, a slow operation. The tank began pivoting on its tracks. The panzer crew would know he was coming.
“It was a matter of geometry, really,” Yamashita told me. “I had to stay in the blind zone until I got to the undefended angle.”
The blind zone was on either side of the tank when the turret was pointing ahead or to the rear. The undefended zone was below the turret and hull machine guns’ ranges, in the dirt insanely close to the grinding monster. The co-axial machine guns’ vertical movements were severely limited.
“I sprinted as fast as my legs and the AT mine and Thompson I was carrying would let me. I truly believe I was crazed with fear, simply out of control. I was yelling at myself, ‘You’re running the wrong way, fool. You’re running the wrong way.’ But, by God, I beat it. I dove and rolled toward the treads. The turret swung above my head, its machine gun blasting. The bullets soared harmlessly over me.”
Yamashita grinned at me. “I have never felt better before or since. I was the king of England, standing alongside this fifty-ton killing machine, knowing it was utterly helpless.”
The Tauchpanzer whirled on its treads, spinning to find its tormenter, but Yamashita ran easily alongside it until he came to a U-bracket on the aft deck. He tossed the mine onto the engine deck and climbed after it, keeping his submachine gun aimed at the commander’s cupola.
He crawled forward. Heat rose through the engine screens. The turret swung. He gained his feet and walked around the deck to keep pace with the undefended back of the turret. He glanced over his shoulder. The smoke screen was still holding. He bent to attach the mine where the turret met the ceiling armor. He threw the switch, then jumped from the deck.
To protect the mine-layer, the mine had only a two-second delay. “Just as I hit the ground, the panzer’s turret blew a dozen feet into the sky, rotating twice in a full circle, looking like a maple seed pinwheel, before it landed on the ground.”
Yamashita lifted a grenade from his belt, pulled the pin, and lobbed it over the road wheel fender and into the exposed turret ring. The fiery blast soared skyward.
“I used the dead tank as cover as I ran back into the trees. I was laughing all the way. A fool’s laugh, I suppose. But I felt good.”
General Clay explained Earl Seldon’s invention. “He called it ‘islands of resistance,’ and its innovation was its depth. There was something repelling about deliberately letting Wehrmacht armor through the line, but he convinced us it was the only way to stop them.”
The islands of resistance were pockets of antitank guns, mortars, machine gun nests, and medium artillery. Depending on terrain, the islands were five hundred to a thousand yards apart. The weapons could fire to the flank or rear as well as to the front.