Hallowed WWII battle tank gets a home
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 nearFort Belvoirwent 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, fromthe 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.
On Monday 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 aWorldWar II Higgins landing boat, and a World War I French tank, the Five ofHearts, which is believed to be the only surviving such tank used by American soldiers in thewar.
On Dec. 26, 1944, Army Lt. Charles Boggess was in command of Cobra King, and driving with Gen. GeorgePatton’s ThirdArmy 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.
Patton was close to Bastogne, and Boggess was ordered to take Cobra King and some other tanks and punch through the enemy lines.
“I believe it is appointed to each man to have a few minutes of glory in his life,” Boggess told the Chicago Tribune during a visit to Bastogne in 1984. “Mine lasted 4 miles and 25 minutes.”
Cobra King was already battle tested. It had been knocked out of action in France in November, 1944, repaired, and sent back to the fight, said Army museumhistorian PatrickR. Jennings.
The commander who preceded Boggess, Charles Trover, had been killed in Luxembourg by a sniper as he stood in the turret on Dec. 23. And now Cobra King was being ordered to dash into Bastogne. “It was a dramatic day,” Boggess recalled. “It was a day that you didn’t know if you would live or die.”
Boggess and his crew — driver Hubert Smith, codriver Harold Hafner, gunner Milton Dickerman, and loader James Murphy — pushed Cobra King at full speed, sweeping the road ahead with gunfire until they breached the German lines.
Jennings, the historian, said the tank crew spotted in the distance some soldiers who through binoculars looked like Americans. But the tankers were wary because infiltratingGerman troops were said to be dressed as Americans. Finally, an America soldier strode up to the tank, stuck his hand out to Boggess and said, “Glad to see you.”
But Cobra King’s war wasn’t over. It continued the push into Germany, until it was put of commission on March 27, 1945, during a doomed raid to try to rescue allied POWs from aGerman prison camp.
The missionwas a fiasco, and the tank was hit by a round that penetrated its armor and started a fire inside.
The crew, different from the one at Bastogne, escaped. But the tank was abandoned, Jennings said. The Germans later torched the inside.
“When it breaks through at Bastogne, that’s when it really gains its moment in history,” Jennings said Thursday.
“Up to that time it’s another tank,” he said. “But it gets its moment in history. It’s written on the side. And I would bet within two weeks rain and snow washed all that chalk off. And they’re right back in the mix again.”
“It goes back to being a piece of equipment again,” he said.
“It’s only later, as history starts to unfold, that it becomes precious to us,” he said. “Until then, it’s just another piece of equipment.”