Word: armorers
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This fortress was more than a series of coastal guns. It was not just a wall, a thing to be pierced. It was a mobile fortress. Its walls could move from hill to hill. It consisted of great pools of armor and flesh, standing well inland from the coasts, ready to fling themselves at enemy beachheads, and of planes and submarines, striking on the approaches to the coasts...
Each has drawn a battalion or more from the 1st Armored Division pool. The amount of armor has varied with the job done. In mountain warfare one infantry division can hardly use more than one attached battalion, since the tanks must use the passes. For warfare on the plains, three to six Panzer battalions might be attached to an infantry division...
...example was Ritchie's failure before Tobruk: a massed and disastrous assault by British tanks without infantry support. (Said one American observer: "He sent the backfield into the game but kept the line on the bench.") At El Alamein it was different. Montgomery's spear head of armor burst through a breach made by artillery and infantry...
...such a change Lieut. General Jacob L. Devers, Chief of the U.S. Armored Force, like any other sound soldier, sees no reflection on his tanks, only the result of the ebb & flow of battle doctrine. Said he: "While capable of smashing through the severest obstacle, [the armored division's] most important use is against vital enemy rear areas . . . air, armor, artillery and infantry must be properly combined and their individual capabilities exploited. ... The tank, like the battleship and the airplane, is merely a means of carrying fire power to the enemy...
...waited and trained and fought throughout the winter, the climax toward which the Tunisian campaign had been growing for months and which the enemy had tried to stave off with counter-attacks - the most recent of which, only two nights before, had cost him 33 tanks when his armor plunged headlong into British gun positions. It was a moment carefully chosen: the Eighth Army had taken Takrouna and was diverting Axis strength to the southwest; since before dawn other British units of the First Army had been attacking just to the south; before the next dawn American units would launch...