Allentown resident and WWII Veteran Clarence Smoyer, stand in front of a Sherman Tank Wednesday, September 18, 2019 behind the WWII Memorial in Washington D.C. Smoyer received the Bronze Star after 70 years after the war. (Rick Kintzel/The Morning Call)
World War II tank gunner Clarence Smoyer, renowned for his courage and deadly aim during the battle for Germany’s “Fortress City” of Cologne, died Friday at his home in Allentown. He was 99.
“So many people have been calling,” said his daughter, Cindy Buervenich, with whom he lived for about the last 10 years. “He’s not in any more pain and he’s with my mom.”
In March 1945, the Army corporal from Carbon County destroyed a fearsome Nazi tank in a duel near the Cologne Cathedral. Caught on film and shown in newsreels around the world, it’s one of the most famous tank scenes of the war.
Author Adam Makos describes the encounter in his bestselling book about Smoyer, “Spearhead.” The story follows the unassuming marksman and other tank crewmen as they fight their way across Europe into the German heartland. As a result of Makos’ efforts and the help of others, the onetime top gunner received a Bronze Star for valor — seven decades after his tank’s triumph in Cologne.
Smoyer was born in Parryville and grew up in Lehighton, living in a row house with his parents and three siblings. His father toiled for the Civilian Conservation Corps, and his mother kept house. To help support them, he quit high school and worked at Bethlehem Steel as a laborer.
[ 2019: Bronze Star pinned on WWII veteran from Allentown 74 years after epic tank duel ]
He was drafted in 1943, trained in Kentucky and assigned to the 3rd Armored Division. A few weeks after D-Day, he landed in Normandy as a loader on a Sherman tank. It was two days before his 21st birthday.
In France, Smoyer was injured three times. While he loaded shells during a firefight, hot fumes from the breech badly burned his arm. About a week later, a mortar blast ripped open his nose — a wound that earned him a Purple Heart. After that, he had a concussion when an artillery shell hit the Sherman’s turret just as he’d gone into the hatch.
He moved up to gunner in August 1944, even though he didn’t feel qualified for the job. He’d had little experience shooting, and yet he was a natural triggerman.
The 3rd Armored, called the “Spearhead” division, reached Germany by mid-September and redeployed to Belgium to help beat back the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Smoyer remembered cold nights in the Ardennes and weeks of confusion about exactly where he and his crew were, and whether friend or foe was in the next field.
In February 1945, the division crossed into Germany and pushed toward the Rhine River at Cologne. Smoyer was now the gunner on a new Pershing “super tank,” one of only 20 operating in Europe. He recalled his lieutenant saying over the radio: “Gentlemen, I give you Cologne. Let’s knock the hell out of it.”
The metropolis was in ruins from Allied airstrikes. In the rubble-strewn inner city March 6, Smoyer saw a German tank creep out from a street corner and pull back quickly. A building blocked it from view. When a car raced into the intersection, Smoyer blasted it with machine-gun fire. So did the gunner in the enemy tank, a Panzer. The car stopped, its driver dead. A door opened, and a passenger fell onto the street.
Smoyer couldn’t see the German tank. His crew had orders to keep going to the Rhine, beyond the cathedral, so they had to act. He fired shells at the building, causing bricks to crash down onto the Panzer and immobilize it.
Smoyer’s Pershing clanked onward to face a mighty Panther tank lying in wait at an intersection. The Panther had already destroyed a Sherman tank, killing three Americans.
As the Pershing edged into the intersection, Smoyer and his crew saw the Panther’s barrel pointed right at them. The German tank, 70 yards away, could have pounced but hesitated. Smoyer fired three armor-piercing shells and set it ablaze.
An American combat cameraman, Sgt. Jim Bates, captured footage of the showdown and afterward filmed the victorious tank crew, including Smoyer. At a theater in Pennsylvania, the gunner’s proud family saw the clip in a newsreel. In Cologne, reporters rushed to interview him, the attention making him uncomfortable.
He was in line for a Bronze Star but jinxed himself. Several days after the German troops retreated from Cologne, some boys and girls ran up to him on a street and begged him for bubblegum. He didn’t have any, but the kids kept pestering him. He asked a woman nearby to explain to them that he didn’t have what they wanted.
[ 2019: WWII gunner 'at a loss for words' as he rides a Sherman tank in south Allentown ]
Just then, military policemen pulled up in a jeep, and Smoyer knew he was in trouble. “You’re not supposed to be talking to the Germans,” one said, and reported him for fraternizing. A week later, Smoyer had a run-in with his captain while trying to defend himself. For now, he wouldn’t get the Bronze Star.
More battles followed Cologne. By war’s end, Smoyer had knocked out five German armored vehicles. He had not been wounded since the campaigns in France. Everyone on his tank crew survived. To him, they were family.
Back home, he married Melba Whitehead of Weissport, who had sent him homemade fudge and shared his zeal for roller-skating. The war had steeped her family in sorrow. Her brother Jimmy, an Army private first class, was killed in action in France.
The Smoyers had three children. Melba sewed at the Barson & Bishop garment factory. Clarence worked at Bethlehem Steel’s Waylite Co., where blast furnace slag was crushed into gravel or turned into cement blocks. After Smoyer retired as the Waylite plant supervisor, they spent winters in Florida, returning in the spring to their home in Towamensing Township, near Palmerton. In 2017, Melba died in her husband’s arms.
Smoyer attended 3rd Armored reunions. Like countless other combat veterans, he couldn’t shake from memory the horrors he had experienced. One incident in particular weighed on him.
The car he and the Panzer gunner had hammered with bullets wasn’t carrying Nazi soldiers. It had two German civilians — a grocer and a young woman who worked for him. The man was driving and was killed outright. The woman slumped onto the street, where American medics tried in vain to save her — a scene captured by Bates, the combat cameraman.
Did Smoyer kill the woman? The thought haunted him.
World War II veteran Clarence Smoyer, 96, poses for a picture in front of a Sherman tank after receiving the Bronze Star on Sept. 18, 2019, near the World War II Memorial in Washington. Smoyer fought with the U.S. Army's 3rd Armored Division, nicknamed the Spearhead Division. In 1945, he defeated a German Panther tank near the cathedral in Cologne, Germany — a dramatic duel filmed by an Army cameraman that was seen all over the world. (Alex Brandon/AP)
A Boy Scout named Peter Semanoff met Smoyer while doing an Eagle Scout project with World War II veterans in Lehighton. Semanoff later went to Lycoming College, where he got to know Makos, a classmate from Montoursville in Lycoming County. Makos went on to become a military writer. Semanoff urged him to interview Smoyer.
Makos, who lives in Denver, sat down with Smoyer in 2012 in Allentown. With that, “Spearhead” was in the making.
The next year, Smoyer went to Cologne and met Gustav Schaefer, the Panzer gunner who, with Smoyer, shot at the car carrying the young grocery store worker and her boss. They talked about the woman, 26-year-old Kathi Esser. Smoyer had fired at her car because he thought it held fleeing Nazis. Schaefer fired because he thought the blur of black was an American tank.
Smoyer found peace in connecting with his old foe. They became friends and stayed in touch until Schaefer’s death in 2017.
Two years later, Makos’ book put Smoyer in the limelight.
Allentown resident and WWII Veteran, Clarence Smoyer is perched on a Sherman tank on Feb. 22, 2019. The 95-year-old Allentown man rode the tank from his home to VFW Post 2124 to mark the launch of author Adam Mako’s book, “Spearhead." (RICK KINTZEL / THE MORNING CALL)
As part of a tour promoting “Spearhead” in February 2019, Smoyer rode a Sherman tank in south Allentown. Several hundred friends, family members and dignitaries watched the parade, which went from his home on Donald Street to Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2124 on Front Street.
“I’m overwhelmed,” Smoyer said. “I’m at a loss for words.”
The next month, Smoyer was in Denver, parading in a vintage tank and paying tribute to his commanding general, Maurice Rose, who was raised there. Rose was gunned down by a German tank commander a few weeks after the conquest of Cologne.
“We had the greatest general of the war,” Smoyer said. “Everybody liked him. He was right up front with us in battles.”
In May 2019, Smoyer spoke at the Lehigh Valley Veterans History Project Roundtable. Its chair, Mike Sewards, took him on trips and to other speaking engagements.
“He was always the perfect gentleman, never refusing to sign autographs, speak and shake hands with people no matter how long the line,” Sewards said. “He was one of the greatest of the Greatest Generation.”
Smoyer got his Bronze Star in September 2019. Makos helped persuade the Army to correct what he considered an injustice done 74 years earlier. The ceremony in Washington surprised Smoyer. He thought he was going to a book signing at the Pentagon. Instead, he was taken to the World War II Memorial.
Three other members of Smoyer’s crew — driver William McVey of Michigan, loader John DeRiggi of Levittown, Bucks County, and bow gunner Homer Davis of Kentucky — got the medal posthumously. Commander Robert Earley of Minnesota received it soon after the Cologne battle and died in 1979. Now, all five crewmen of the Pershing known as Eagle 7 were officially recognized for their bravery.
Pinning the medal on Smoyer was Army Maj. Peter Semanoff, the former Boy Scout who had talked Makos into writing about him. Smoyer said afterward: “I wear this in memory of all the young people who have lost their lives in battle.” News stories about the presentation hailed him as the “Hero of Cologne.”
Also in 2019, he received an honorary diploma from Lehighton Area High School.
With the death of his buddy Joseph Caserta in 2021, Smoyer became the last surviving member of Easy Company, 32nd Armored Regiment.
Makos cast Smoyer, who was a 6-foot-tall soldier, as a “gentle giant” who turned fierce in a firefight. On the day Smoyer paraded in Allentown, Makos asked: “How can a guy be a great World War II tank gunner and be such a gentle person?
“I found out that Clarence wasn’t a great gunner just because he was the best shot or because he wanted to kill the most Germans. He was a great gunner because he wanted to keep his friends alive.”
David Venditta is a freelance writer.