Grenades Just Eggs
“You spin around in your own length. It’s astonishing how fast those little tanks can turn when they have to. Fast enough to cut a man in two if he’s in the way. Yes, it happened more than once. Some Boches had an idea they could do something to a Renault with a hand grenade and tried it at close quarters. Might just as well have thrown eggs at us, unless some splinters got in the slits. And if they were close enough and we whirled her round they were out of luck sure—broken legs, you know, or mashed ribs.
“No, the Boche anti-tank gun never hurt us to amount to anything. Ever see one? It weighs about 50 pounds and shoots a whale of a bullet, but unless it strikes sharp at right angles it doesn’t go through. Pretty hard steel, you know, that tank armor. What did stop us, when we were stopped, was the 77. Even that took a direct hit. A 77 could go off right beside us and we’d hardly know it. But if it made a direct hit—well, you don’t expect to run a war without any casualties, of course. I recall one case where a 77 made a hit and set off all the ammunition in the tank. The tank was scrap steel and the men—well, we found a hand, and a shoe. Just literally blown to nothing.
“Of course there are places a tank can’t go. You read a lot about how a tank loves mud. Don’t you believe it. A tank can slither around in mud just like an automobile. Of course it can go, but it can’t climb at the same angle on mud as on dry ground and somehow we always did fight in the mud. Mud didn’t stop us of course, but it made it more difficult. On dry ground we can climb 45 degrees, and 51 degrees in reverse.
“You hear a lot about the way a tank can crawl over trenches. But that’s the big heavy tank. The little fellow can’t run over a trench the way it can down and up a shell crater. The Renault is tail heavy, you see. It gets its nose across a trench all right, but if the trench is a little too wide the heavy tail drops back into it. Then you have to get out and dig or get another tank to come and pull you out. That’s why two tanks together are worth four separately. They can jam themselves up and still get along by doing the brother act with chains. Once that I know of a tank got stuck and the second tank couldn’t pull it out. So the officer outside signals another tank and it comes up—all this under fire, mind—and he hooks that on, too, and the two of them pull the helpless one up and over. He got the D. S. C. for it, that officer.
“It’s not nice when you’re stalled, you know. As long as you can move around, the 77 has a hard time getting you. But if you get stuck somewhere it doesn’t take a Boche gunner so very long to get your range. That’s why we were so anxious to have self-starters put on the American tanks, when we thought we were going to have American tanks. If there had been any self-starters on our Renaults we’d probably be shy about twenty casualties. Engine stalls, Boche gets busy, chap inside struggles with a crank, takes time, 77 lands, signal back for a reserve tank to come on into action. No, they didn’t put the self-starters on. Don’t ask me why; I don’t know.