German Soldiers Were Shocked When One M18 Hellcat Destroyed 3 Panthers Then Vanished At 60 MPH

Video Description

September nineteenth, nineteen forty-four. Seven forty-five in the morning. Hill Two Forty-Six, near Réchicourt-la-Petite, France. Sergeant Henry R. Hartman sat in the commander's hatch of his M18 Hellcat, peering through the thick autumn fog that had settled over the Lorraine countryside like a gray shroud. His breath condensed in the cold morning air as he scanned the tree line eight hundred yards away. Behind him, three other Hellcats from Lieutenant Edwin Leiper's platoon spread across the hilltop, their seventy-six millimeter guns pointed toward the invisible enemy. Through the mist, Hartman heard it first. A low rumble, mechanical and ominous, growing louder by the second. Tank engines. Many of them. Then, materializing from the fog like steel ghosts, came the Panthers. Five, no six, then more. The distinctive angular silhouettes of Germany's most feared tank, forty-six tons of sloped armor and a high-velocity seventy-five millimeter gun that could penetrate any Allied tank at two thousand yards. Behind them, infantry in field-gray uniforms moved through the ground fog, at least a company's worth of troops from the one hundred thirteenth Panzer Brigade.