Tank Driver

"We followed the acting company commander as his tank started up the narrow road [into Noville]. There were destroyed buildings and disabled German tanks and vehicles everywhere we looked. I was the driver of the fourth tank in the column. It was getting dark and hard to see, so I was driving with my head partway out of the hatch. There was a church on our right and a small crossroads just beyond it. As we passed the crossroads, I saw the burning phosphorus of an armored piercing shell go over my head. Were we in enemy territory? All of a sudden, someone on the radio said, 'The tank of the third platoon leader's been hit.'... I closed my hatch and turned the periscope to look back toward town. I saw many German soldiers filing out of buildings." -- from the bookTank Driver is the story of a young man's combat initiation in World War II. Based on letters home, the sparse narrative has the immediacy of on-the-spot reporting. Ted Hartman was a teenager when he was sent overseas to drive a Sherman tank into combat to face the desperate German counterattack known as the Battle of the Bulge. Hartman gives a riveting account of the shifting tides of battle and the final Allied breakout. He tells about the concentration camps, the spectacle of the defeated Germans, and the dramatic encounter with Russian soldiers in Austria that marked combat's end. This is a vivid, personal account of some of the most dramatic fighting of World War II.