Welcome back to Our American Stories with Lee Habib, where we shine a light on the incredible tales that define our nation. Today, we’re joined by Adam Makos, a brilliant author and historian whose passion for World War II began with the stories of his own grandfathers. That spark led him to create Valor Magazine and, eventually, to write powerful books like Devotion and his latest, Spearhead. Adam’s deep research uncovers the astonishing, long-hidden bravery of American heroes, and today, he shares the remarkable journey of a quiet WWII tank gunner whose extraordinary experiences remained a secret for decades.
Meet Clarence Smoyer: a young man from Allentown, born into deep poverty, who learned early on to fight for his family. This upbringing forged a quiet strength that would serve him well as a tank gunner in the legendary, yet often overlooked, Spearhead Division. Picture their Sherman tanks, often outmatched, breaking through enemy lines in radio silence, creating chaos and facing down the enemy’s most formidable armor. Adam Makos brings to life Clarence’s story, including what’s been called the most famous tank duel of World War II—a gripping tale of courage and survival from a ‘gentle giant’ whose heroism is finally getting the recognition it deserves in Spearhead.
📖 Read the Episode Transcript
My grandfather has got me interested, Lee. I was a kid, and they used to take me to air shows and museums. They both fought in World War II, and they didn’t see combat, and so for them, World War II was fascinating. They were fascinated by the heroes who had won the war by the time they got into it, so they were able to talk about it. They were able to show me and my brother their photo albums, and they lit the spark in us that we thought World War II was cool, and we thought the men who fought it were the best Americans. And what we did to show our appreciation. We started a little homemade newsletter, and it eventually became a little magazine called Valor Magazine, and we would interview veterans—at first our grandfathers, next the guy next door, and then guys in our city, and before you know it, we were kids in high school and then later in college publishing a magazine to honor people who were four times our age. In this case, a friend in college had told me about this local hero in his hometown. The guy was living in Allentown, and my buddy said, “Listen, there’s a hero there from World War II who had fought as a tank gunner. He was one of our most decorated gunners, and he’s living there in a row house in Allentown. Nobody knows he’s there—not his family. They don’t know what he did in the war, or his neighbors don’t.” I didn’t know much about armored warfare, but I knew there was something special about this guy because he had supposedly fought this duel in World War II that was said to be the most famous tank duel of the war. So one day I just went knocking, and Clarence Schmoyer opened the door and invited me into his kitchen table. His family grew up in deep poverty. His father was away working for the CCC. His mother was a housekeeper. They lived in a house, so you might say, dilapidated. You could hear the neighbors on the other side of the wall.
So he grew up poor. And Clarence, when he would come home from high school, whereas other kids would go to football practice or they would go hang out at the movie theater, Clarence came home, and he—one of his classmates, her father, was in the candy business. So he went to that man, and he said, “I’d like to sell candy.” And so Clarence would take a box of chocolate bars, Hershey’s and all those, and just like a ballpark vendor, he would go door to door at night. Again, he’s a fourteen-year-old kid selling candy bars to try to help his family. And that’s where he developed that protective nature. And he also developed a little bit of a selfish nature in one sense, and that he believed that no one was going to help him, no one was going to look out for him, and he had to take care of his family because no one’s going to help us. Clarence Smoyer was a member of this Spearhead Division. Now, he was a twenty-one-year-old gunner at the time. He’s a tall, lanky kid with blonde hair.
Wyat. I always said he was a gentle giant, and I was always amazed that he was a great tank gunner. But one of the reasons he lived in obscurity was partially because he chose that, and partially because he was in an obscure unit, the Spearhead Division. During World War II, it’s very little known. It’s called the Third Armored Division, and a lot of people confuse it with Patton’s Third Army. The Third Army is a big unit. The war reporters are tagging along, and they’re sending back the dispatches. Patton is charging out of France. Patton is doing this; Patton slapped the guy. You know. The whole unit is being tracked. The Third Armored Division was a unit known for breaking through the enemy lines and then running in radio silence, just like a submarine behind the lines, sowing chaos. And so the reporters weren’t sending back dispatches. This unit was just creating mayhem. It lost the most tanks of World War II of any American unit. It lost more men killed in action than the 101st Airborne or the 82nd Airborne, and nobody knows its name.
Talk about tanks before we go anywhere else. Who are these men? Is it a volunteer mission to be inside these tanks like it is for subs? How does it all work?
You know, in the early days it was, but then after a while they started putting guys in it, whether they liked it or not. Especially in the late war, you almost had to be forced into a tank. The thing is, the Sherman tank is such a beautiful machine. We always think it’s invincible, but you’re right. It’s like a submarine that can’t hide. And in the early war our Shermans were a fine tank. When they went into the African campaign, the British were using them before us, and they reported great results. You’ve got five men in that machine: a gunner, a loader, a bow gunner, a commander, and a driver. So it’s a tightly packed unit, a band of brothers in an American tank. The trouble was, by 1944 or ’45, we took those same Sherman tanks that had been fighting in Africa and we sent them into Normandy, and there they encountered this German tank called the Panther, and this thing had a bigger gun, and it had massive armor. And by 1944-’45, there was almost a rule: you need seven or eight Shermans to tackle one Panther or Tiger tank of the enemy. Well, Clarence was at first a loader in the tank, and he loved it because he didn’t want to hurt anybody, wanted to get through World War II without taking a life. Never even liked to hunt rabbits as a kid, because he’d have to kill them. And so he was happy to just shovel the shells into the gun and let somebody else pull the trigger.
Now, when the unit was training up on the English seacoast, they said, “Now what happens if our gunners get knocked out? The loaders need to know how to shoot.” So Clarence and the other loaders were all put in the gunner seat. They were given a competition. “You have to shoot out a target one thousand yards away, up on the coastal bluffs, and we’re going to see who’s the best loader-turned-gunner.” And Clarence nailed this thing eight times, and his crew received a big magnum of Scotch as a reward. And they all drank that night and they said, “Someday you are going to be our gunner, because, like it or not, you have a talent.” And so after the heavy losses in France, when they were charging through Belgium again, gunning for the German border, Clarence was put in the gunner seat, and this reluctant warrior is suddenly given the most responsibility on the tank, because if you miss, that means your enemy gets to hit you. And statistically, when a Sherman tank was hit, one man was going to come out dead; another was going to come out wounded. So Clarence, the reason he was such a great gunner, wasn’t because he hated the enemy. It was because he loved the men inside that tank—his family, he called them—and he knew if he missed, one of them was going to come out dead, another wounded.
And you’re listening to Adam Makos, and he’s talking about the life of Clarence Moyer, which is captured in his book, Spearhead. And when we come back, we’ll learn more about this tanker-gunner and his fellow soldiers’ lives in that tank, and so much more here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we returned to Our American Stories, with Adam Makos, author of the New York Times bestseller Spearhead. Adam, tell me how old Clarence was when he was sent to the European Theater of World War II and what his first taste of combat was like.
He was twenty when he went on that ship over to England. He came in about three weeks after D-Day, entered the Hedgerow fighting, led the breakthrough out of France. It was a harrowing job. I mean, when we talk about selflessness, every time his commander would come back from the briefing, he had a pipe, and the pipe in his mouth would be bouncing up and down because his teeth were chattering so badly. Every time these guys got in these tanks to go charge forward toward the Germans, they were terrified. But guys like Clarence, they embraced that. “Well, there’s that biblical verse which says, ‘Who will go forth for us?’ And then the answer is, ‘Send me.’” Clarence embodied that; it was that idea that, “Well, somebody has to, so send me.” Somebody has to protect the guys behind us in the column. Somebody has to go first, leading the way, being the first tank over the hill, the first tank around the bend. When leading is oftentimes a death sentence. For Clarence, his first taste of responsibility was at Mons, Belgium. We had broken out of France, and we found out there’s this German army running back to Germany. So the Spearhead Division was given orders: turn on a dime, go north, and lay an ambush for them. So they did, and they beat the German army there. And you’ve got one hundred thousand or more Germans coming toward you. And we parked our tanks around the various roadblocks. Clarence’s tank that night was coiled up. They would park five tanks in a fan, and a German tank that night blundered into their position in the dark, and it parked right next to. He’s in the gunner seat. He’s got a German tank idling next to him in the dark. And his commander, a young man named Paul Faircloth, came up. They were all trying to catch some shut-eye, and Paul said, “Okay, we’ve got to shoot.” And Clarence threw this fit because he didn’t want to shoot in the dark when this enemy tank, even though he could hear it, even though he could almost touch it, he knew if he missed, he was going to hit the tank on the other side of him. And the tank on the other side of that German was American. And so the German tank shuts down its engine, and we have to wait till daylight. Now, so Clarence is in that sardine can for hours and hours, and the hours are ticking by, and it’s just this nerve-wracking thing where you have the enemy tank next to you, and it probably knows you’re there.
And it’s probably waiting to shoot you too. And then when daylight comes, he finally has the courage to pull that trigger, and he kills the first tank of World War II that he would kill. But the amazing thing was he was afraid to look inside. “All the guys in the tank said, ‘We’ve got to look inside and see: Did the German crew get out in the night?’” “Did we just kill them all?” And Clarence wouldn’t do it. He refused to get out. He refused to ever look inside the hatch. Instead, his commander went and did it for him. And Paul looked inside, and he shut the hatch, and he never told Clarence what he saw in there. But Clarence was so reluctant, so fearful, that it wouldn’t be for many months that he found the courage to even own up to what his job was.
And let’s talk about the key moments in his development as a warrior. Talk about a few of them. Tell a few stories about Clarence’s progression to this leader and this fighter.
So Clarence’s commander, Paul, who we were talking about, the next day, they’re getting shelled, and Paul is going out of his tank to help some wounded men, and Paul got blasted by a mortar, his leg torn off, and he died right in front of Clarence’s eyes, thrown up on a bank in Belgium. So Clarence watches his friend die. The American Army grinds its way into Germany through the West Ward. They have to blast their way through these pillboxes, and they first meet these Germans who refused to surrender, so the Sherman tanks had to literally go around it and shoot in through the back door. So he had to see that. He had to battle his way through the West Wall, so he was in this downward spiral, and then they get called into the Battle of the Bulge. That’s where they really came toe-to-toe with the German Panther tanks because Hitler threw everything he had left into this battle. And Clarence gets to watch as the American tanks in many cases have to hide from the enemy because we just couldn’t handle them. So there are times where he’s hiding in the night, and a German column of tanks is driving just outside, just beyond him in the forest, and he has to hold his fire. So he goes through this crucible of things that would break a lot of people today. And coming out of the Battle of the Bulge, the Army realized they had to change something, and that change was the Pershing. It was the super-tank that was supposed to end the Third Reich. Well, Clarence is given one of the twenty Pershings that come to the European Theater, and it’s untested. He pulls it up to a hill overlooking a German valley, the Rhineland, and it’s flooded down there and all the houses are abandoned, and half the Third Armored Division gathers around him, including his general, General Maurice Rose, who was actually the highest-ranking Jewish American in the European Theater. General Rose is a two-star, and he’s standing next to Clarence’s tank, and he’s going to watch a firing demonstration. So Clarence climbs in, and he’s nervous as can be, and he sets his sights on the chimneys of these houses, a thousand, two thousand yards away, and he blasts the easiest one, and the chimney explodes. And his crew started laughing because outside of the tank, nobody had seen this Pershing’s ninety-millimeter gun fire before, and it had such a blast that came out of the sides as well as the front that it bowled General Rose over into the mud and his entourage. And they all are getting up, and they’re soaking wet, but they watched a chimney explode, and they’re happy. The men are cheering because these were guys who used to say, “Give us a Panther, and we’ll take on the enemy.” They used to say, “Our tanks are only good for driving around the countryside. We want tanks to fight with, not look good in parades.” So this is a unit that has been depressed. They were actually taking their Sherman tanks, and they were up-armoring them, just like our Humvees in Iraq. They were taking armor off of German tanks that had been knocked out and welding it to the front of our Shermans. They had been taking sandbags and putting them on the Shermans. They had been taking concrete and making concrete armor on the Shermans. That’s how terrified they were. Suddenly they’re watching this Pershing tank—the only thing that can go toe-to-toe with the German tank—and they know there’s hope. And the Third Armored Division set its sights on a city called Cologne. And the significance of Cologne was that we had to get a bridge across the Rhine. We had to get into the heart of Germany and end this thing, and the Rhine was like this natural barrier. So the Third Armored Division sets out fighting through the little Rhineland towns, approaching Germany’s third largest city, and Cologne was known as the fortress city because Hitler had ordered it defended to the last, and we knew we had to conquer this block by block, and it was going to be the biggest urban battle of the European War.
This is where Clarence really stepped up, because he’s got the Pershing, and he’s put in the front. That was the downside to the new tank. It meant that you were going to lead every attack, and he assumed that responsibility. When they lined up at the gates of the city, his commander said, “Gentlemen, I give you Cologne. Let’s knock the hell out of it!” And he comes into Cologne, and he’s leading them block by block. The armored infantry is moving up alongside of them. The danger in Cologne was you had to watch out for not just your left, not just your right. You had to watch out above and below because you have German soldiers on the rooftops with Molotov cocktails. You had German 88-millimeter guns, cannons dug into the basement level; enemy soldiers using the basements as tunnels, so they would knock down the walls and they could move an entire block unseen. You also had that fear of a German soldier with a Panzerfaust, which is a glorified bazooka, who could just step out of any doorway and put that thing right through your tank. And then on top of it, the biggest fear and the most uncommon thing for urban warfare: German tanks. They were spotted in the city. There were several of them that had crossed the bridge to make a last stand. And you could turn any corner, and that’s what Clarence worried about. You could turn any corner, you could come to any intersection, and you could drive right into the crosshairs of a German tank. And he did.
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