Hallowed WWII tank gets home at museum

FORT BELVOIR, Va. — The old battle tank arrived at 10:15 Thursday morning, covered in a black tarp and chained to the bed of tractor trailer.

The construction site near Fort Belvoir went quiet for a moment, as the truck backed in. And when they pulled away the tarp, the steel hide still bore the gouges and holes from enemy gunfire in 1944 and ’45.

This was “Cobra King,” a hallowed, 38-ton U.S. Army legend that during the World War II Battle of the Bulge bulled its way through German lines and was first to relieve the besieged defenders of Bastogne, Belgium.

Someone had taken a picture of the tank right after the battle, sitting in the snow with its crew, and the words, “First in Bastogne” scrawled on the armor in chalk.

The chalk was long gone Thursday as a work crane lifted Cobra King, with its black treads and white turret star, from the flatbed and set it inside the site of the National Museum of the United States Army.

The state-of-the-art museum, about 20 miles south of Washington, D.C., has been under construction since October, and is set to open in late 2019, officials said.

It will house scores of historic Army artifacts and works of art. The Sherman tank and several other “macro” items are so big that they must be installed in place, and the museum built around them.

Last week work crews put in a 27-ton Bradley Cavalry Fighting Vehicle that headed a charge from Kuwait to Baghdad in 2003. Later, the museum will install a World War II Higgins landing boat, and a World War I French tank, the Five of Hearts, which is believed to be the only surviving such tank used by American soldiers in the war.

On Dec. 26, 1944, Army Lt. Charles Boggess was in command of Cobra King, and driving with Gen. George Patton’s Third Army to the relief of Bastogne. There American forces had been hemmed in by the famous German offensive that created the big bulge in the allied lines.

Boggess’ tank was an experimental so-called “Jumbo” Sherman, better armed and armored than earlier Shermans, which had proved vulnerable to more potent German tanks. It had a 500 horsepower, V-8 gasoline engine, a 75 mm main gun and two machine guns.