A Sherman stands under the bandstand roof on the market square in Clervaux, a few hundred metres below the castle. It is freshly painted and the gun is sealed, so at first glance it looks like any restored museum piece. The damage is still on it. There is a gouge in the left side of the turret where a round glanced off, a scar above the gun mount, and a hole seven or eight centimetres across where a round went in between the turret and the hull. The bronze plaque, moved down with the tank, calls it the only known surviving combat vehicle of the 9th Armored Division put out of action in the fighting for Clervaux.
The tank is an M4A3(76)W, registration number USA-30100145-S, from Company B of the 2nd Tank Battalion, 9th Armored Division. It carried the tactical marking B-2. Jean Milmeister’s research argues it had been attached to the 3rd Platoon to replace a tank the platoon was missing.
It came to Clervaux on 17 December 1944 because the town was about to be overrun. The 110th Infantry Regiment of the 28th Infantry Division held the villages on the ridge above the Our, and by the second morning of the German offensive those villages were going one by one. Marnach, five kilometres east on the road in, had been breached at midnight. I have written about the defence of Marnach separately, because that is where the road to Clervaux was lost. The 9th Armored Division was in reserve nearby and sent Company B forward with nineteen medium tanks. Colonel Hurley Fuller, commanding the 110th, split them into three platoons and gave each a task. The US Army official history puts the company’s arrival in the afternoon. Local research places B-2 and the 3rd Platoon in the town at about eleven in the morning.
This tank took position at the castle gate, at the top of the town, and fired down the road towards Marnach at the leading elements of the 2nd Panzer Division. It did not sit there in the open. After each shot the crew reversed into the corner by the Kratzenberg house for cover, then came forward again.
The Marnach road, the main paved approach, was the one this tank covered, but it was not the only way in. A secondary road dropped down from Urspelt with a hairpin turn, and a third approach ran past the railway station. The Germans came in from the north and the south both.
Around midday a round glanced off the tank. It reversed into the corner of the Kratzenberg house and the crew bailed out. The Sherman was abandoned but still largely intact. At about five that afternoon the platoon commander, Lieutenant Scully, still hoped to get it back and sent three men towards it. German machine-gun fire drove them off.
So the hit that went in between the turret and the hull, wrecking the gun and the mantlet, came later than that. Charles MacDonald places it after daylight on 18 December. The tank carries the evidence of three strikes, but the order of them cannot now be established. Three running Shermans of Scully’s platoon survived the night in the town. B-2 stayed where it was, abandoned at the castle gate.
Above and behind it, 102 officers and men of the regimental headquarters company held the castle itself. Radio contact ran until 05:28 on the morning of 18 December, and the garrison held on for several hours after that. German engineers and self-propelled 88s set the building alight, and the survivors surrendered later that morning. Fuller had already left his command post in the Hotel Claravallis the previous evening and was captured going cross-country. There is no official casualty return for this phase. Members of his staff put the regiment’s losses at about 2,750 officers and men, a figure that covers the whole of the fighting on the Skyline Drive and not Clervaux alone.
On the 28th Infantry Division day of my Battle of the Bulge tours we follow the attack in the order it happened: the Our crossing at Dasburg, then Hosingen and Marnach, then down into Clervaux, and on to Wiltz. Standing at the castle gate, the ground explains itself. You can see the length of road the crew were shooting at.
The tank stayed where it had been knocked out, beside the Kratzenberg house, until 1956, when the Luxembourg Army moved it up to the castle’s outer courtyard. It sat there for more than sixty years, the turret repositioned and welded in place, the gun sealed. In 2019 it was taken away for the first time since, and was restored over four years. It came back not to the castle but to the market square below it, and was presented there on 14 December 2024, three days short of eighty years after the fighting.
The detailed research on this tank, by Jean Milmeister and the Clervaux diorama group, is published on the Diorama Clervaux website.