Recent News (November 2009): "After the Battle" magazine issue 145 (which came out in October 2009) had an excellent article ("The Liberation of Chartres ... and a Tank" by Jean-Paul Pallud that definitely ties the tank to Maj. Lohse at the time it was stopped in Chartres. This raises a number of questions, such as (1) whether Maj. Lohse had temporarily taken command of one of the D/31 light tanks (since the only tanks allocated to 31 Tank Bn were in D/31) for that specific mission or if he had been allocated one of the D/31 light tanks by Col. Erlenbusch on a continuing basis and (2) who all the men of the tank crew were.

On June 5, 2008, news media in France and around the world covered the story of the recovery of a tank of the 31st Tank Battalion (US 7th Armored Division) from where it had been buried for 64 years under the rue des Perriers in the southern part of Chartres, France. All sorts of hoopla and errors permeated these journalistic accounts. This web page is intended to give accurate information about this tank.

The presence of this tank showed that the penetration of one of the two forces of 7th Armored Division that attacked into Chartres on the night of 15-16 August 1944 penetrated in strength far more deeply into the city than had previously been realized. So this web page is also intended to give an understanding of that aspect of the battle.

Contents of this web page (which is very much under construction)

1. Links to News Media Coverage of the Tank
2. Correction of News Media Errors about the Tank
3. Penetration in Strength of 7AD Force #1 on Night of 15-16 August 1944

Here are links to some of the news media accounts.

• Television
  • TF1 (French ) - good live video coverage of the recovery
• Print
  • Sky News - 5 good still photos of the recovery, with minimal text, rife with errors

Journalists do not usually make good historians. The job of a journalist is to take the events he or she is seeing in his or her immediate area and attempt to elevate them to being the most important thing that happened in the universe that day, so that their article and not someone else's will be printed or posted on the web. This journalistic fact of life does not lend itself to accuracy.

So here are corrections of some of the most glaring errors that appeared in the various news media accounts of the recovery of the buried tank.

1. The tank was NOT a "D-Day Tank".
   The 7th Armored Division (including 31st Tank Battalion) did not come ashore in France until more than 2 months after D-Day, arriving in fragments beginning on 10 August 1944 and continuing to arrive piecemeal for several days thereafter.
2. The tank was NOT the tank of Maj. Leslie Lohse.
   Maj. Lohse was the Operations Officer (S-3) of the 31st Tank Battalion. On the night of 15-16 August 1944, he was acting battalion commander and led Force #2 which attacked Luisant, in the southwest part of the Chartres metropolitan area. All of the tanks with Force #2 were medium tanks and not light tanks. In addition, the Germans stopped Force #2 west of the area where the buried tank was recovered.
3. The tank did NOT run out of gas.
   The tank was disabled when Germans fired a rocket at it and damaged the right tread of the tank. This was documented in a 1982 memoir which Roger Joly quotes on page 65 of his 1994 book.
4. The burial of the tank was NOT unknown. The "discovery" of the tank was a "discovery" only to anyone who was ignorant of the events.
   Roger Joly, on page 65 of his 1994 book, clearly records that the tank had been buried. He also gave the means (Americans used a Caterpillar to push it into a shell hole or bomb crater) and the location (directly in front of the F.F.I. stele) of the burial.

For now, here is a very brief summary of the results of research in the 7th Armored Division records and also in Roger Joly's 1994 book La Libération de Chartres. There is still more to do in this, but the following seem well established.

1. The tank that was recovered was definitely an M5 light tank.
2. The 31st Tank Battalion had the only tanks that were in Chartres on the night of 15-16 August 1944.
3. The only light tanks in the 31st Tank Battalion were in Company D.
4. Company D of 31st Tank Battalion was attached to Force #1 (23rd Armored Infantry Battalion, minus companies B and C, plus company D of 31st Tank Battalion)
5. Force #1 attacked Lèves, France (just northwest of Chartres) earlier in the day on 15 August. Then in the evening Force #1 launched an attack into Chartres, which succeeded in breaching the German defenses in the northwest part of the city.
6. The fact that the tank was stopped (which is documented on page 65 and in a photo on page 111 of Roger Joly's book) at rue des Perriers, where it was later pushed into a shell hole and buried, is undeniable proof that the tank had made it from the northwestern part of the city all the way through the city to the southeastern sector. (The area was not then part of the city proper, as it is now.)
7. Thus the penetration in strength into the city by Force #1 went much deeper than has been previously recognized. Roger Joly has documented that the penetration went deeply, but it is now clear that the penetration went deeply in strength.

Many things have prevented me from following up on this web page. However, Eric Santain sent the following in an e-mail on August 17, 2008. His thoughts are important and deserve to be here. I am not going to be able to follow up on this any time soon.

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