PART 1

September 17, 1944, smelled like burnt grease, cordite, and wet Dutch dirt. We were rattling along a sunken farm road outside Son, part of the push toward the bridges, squeezed tight into thirty tons of steel that never felt thick enough.

I was nineteen years old. In the army, they called me Private Eddie Kowalsski, but inside that turret, I was just the pair of hands shoving shells into the breech. I had never touched the traverse controls.

I had never pulled the trigger on the 75mm gun. My entire war consisted of lifting twelve-pound high-explosive and armor-piercing rounds out of the floor bins, racking them home, and keeping my boots clear of the recoil guard. Hank Miller was our gunner. He was twenty-two, had a girl named Clara in Altoona, and could lay a sight on an orchard fence post while we were rocking over a ditch.

Then the world split open.

The hit didn’t punch through our front plate, but it hit the ground five feet to our left and slammed against the bogie wheels with a noise like a church bell ringing in your ear. The concussion threw me sideways against the radio mount. Before my head stopped buzzing, a second shot shrieked right through the commander’s cupola.

It was instant. Hank slumped right over the traversing wheel. He didn’t make a sound. His helmet tumbled off, bouncing once against the steel floor before settling near my right foot.

Our tank commander, Sergeant Miller (no relation to Hank, just an older farmer from Ohio who kept a tobacco tin in his shirt pocket), fell halfway out of the hatch, blood running thick down the side of his neck and into his wool collar.

Our driver, Dutch, stomped both pedals, stalling the engine in the ditch. The radio was screeching static.

“Sarge,” I yelled, choking on hot smoke. “Sarge, Hank’s down. Hank’s dead.”

Sergeant Miller’s face was chalky gray. His teeth were clenched so hard I thought they would crack. He grabbed my jacket with his left hand, leaving a smear of red across the olive drab cloth. He didn’t tell Dutch to throw it in reverse. He didn’t call for an evacuation.

He looked down into the turret well, straight into my eyes, and gave me one word: “Shoot.”

I dragged Hank’s shoulders back, pulling him clear of the basket and wedging his body against the radio bulkhead.

My hands were shaking so bad I could barely get my boots onto the pedals. I pulled myself into the gunner’s metal seat. It was still warm from Hank. The leather pads around the periscope smelled like sweat and hair tonic.

Through the narrow glass, my stomach dropped through the floorboards.

A German Panzer sat right in the sunken road, roughly four hundred yards out. Its long barrel was already traversing through the hedgerow dust, centering directly on our hull.

I grabbed the elevation handwheel and spun it forward to depress the gun. The steel wheel stopped dead with a sharp metallic clunk.

The road dipped steeply ahead of us. At four hundred yards, with our front treads stuck on the ditch lip, the sight couldn’t angle down far enough to put the crosshairs on the Panzer’s lower plate. The reticle rested uselessly in the tree branches above the German turret.

To target the tank’s hull, I had to bring the barrel down, but the periscope sight linkage had jammed against the hatch frame from the cupola hit.

I was aiming blind. We had maybe five seconds before the German loader rammed a shell home and put a round straight through our engine block.

I reached down frantically, my boots sliding in the smoke haze, searching for anything. My heel kicked something small and flat against the diamond-plate floor. I reached down into the grime and picked it up.

It was Hank’s five-inch broken trench shaving mirror.

PART 2

The glass had a diagonal crack across the silver back, but the little metal casing was intact. Hank had taped the edges with black friction tape so it wouldn’t cut his fingers while he shaved out of a steel pot.

“Eddie!” Sergeant Miller coughed from the hatch above. His voice was bubbling now. “Eddie, he’s laying on us!”

I looked at the breech. It was empty. I scrambled down into the loader’s space, snatched an armor-piercing shell from the rack, shoved it into the chamber with the heel of my palm, and locked the breech block shut. The steel snapped shut with a hollow clank.

Then I scrambled back into the gunner’s seat.

Four hundred yards away, the Panzer’s hull shifted slightly as its tracks bit into the mud. I couldn’t see the target through the primary periscope sight because the linkage was pinned high, pointing at the gray sky. If I raised the gun to see what I was doing, the shot would sail forty feet over the German’s head. If I dropped the barrel where it needed to go, the sight was completely useless.

I took Hank’s mirror, rubbed the dried soap and mud off the glass with my thumb, and shoved my arm up into the open observation slit next to the mantlet.

The cold wind hit my fingers. I tilted the broken five-inch glass downward, angling it back toward the commander’s auxiliary prism beneath the hatch rim.

The image in the glass wobbled violently. I saw branches, upside-down grass, a strip of road, and then the boxy outline of the German hull.

It was backwards. Everything in the reflection was reversed.

I put my left hand on the manual traverse wheel and my right hand on the gun elevation crank. My mind fought my muscles. Turning the wheel clockwise made the image in the cracked mirror swing the wrong way. My heart pounded against my ribs like a hammer on an anvil.

“Driver,” I screamed into the interphone. “Brace the brakes!”

Dutch didn’t answer with words. I just heard the rattle of the hand levers locking down.

Through the bottom half of the cracked shaving glass, I saw a puff of blue exhaust smoke rise from the German tank. That meant their driver had settled his tracks. Their gunner had found his mark. He was adjusting his final mils right now.

I ignored the main reticle entirely. I used the crack in Hank’s mirror as my makeshift vertical hairline. I lowered the main 75mm gun until the physical lip of the barrel lined up with the front sprocket visible in the bottom shard of the mirror.

I held my breath. My right boot hovered over the firing pedal.

“God,” I muttered, “don’t let me miss.”

I stomped the foot trigger.

The 75mm roared, throwing the turret back against its ring. The gun smoked, the spent brass casing ejected automatically, and a cloud of bitter white powder rolled over my face.

I dropped the mirror to clear my eyes.

A loud thud hit our front armor, followed by a shower of dirt and metal fragments. Their shot had landed, but it was low. It had plowed into the road embankment fifteen feet in front of us, showering our glacis plate with gravel.

My shot had missed too. I had clipped the German tank’s left fender, tearing off the track guard, but the heavy steel hull was unmarked.

The German turret didn’t flinch. It was already correcting its aim.

PART 3

“Reload!” Sergeant Miller wheezed from above. His head drooped down inside the basket, his eyes half shut. “Load, Kowalsski… load!”

I dove out of the seat. I didn’t care about bruised shins or scraping my knuckles on the raw steel. I grabbed the second armor-piercing round. My hands were slick with sweat, but my grip held. I slammed the round into the breech. Clack.

I scrambled back onto the pedals. My boots slid once in the oil on the deck, but I caught the traverse handle.

Four hundred yards was practically point-blank for tank fire in the open. They wouldn’t miss a second time. Their barrel was rock-steady now, pointed right at the center of our turret ring. If that shot struck, none of us would walk out.

I picked up the five-inch broken mirror again.

My hands had stopped shaking. It was the strangest feeling of calm, like everything around me had gone completely quiet even though the tank engine was sputtering and the radio was still whining.

I held the mirror up to the slit. The reflection was clear.

I saw where my first round had hit. The torn fender hung down by their left idler wheel. Because the road was banked, their lower hull had tilted slightly toward our side when the driver tried to back away from the blast. That slight tilt exposed the softer drive housing right behind the front track.

I didn’t try to aim for the turret. The turret face on a German Panzer was too thick for our short 75mm gun at that angle.

I cranked the elevation wheel down until the barrel felt like it was pointing right into the dirt. In the mirror, I aligned the reflection of the exposed drive wheel with the lower right corner of the broken glass, compensating for the mirror’s reversed angle.

I moved the crosshair two inches to the left in my head to balance what the reflection reversed.

“On the way,” I said. Nobody heard me except Hank’s quiet form beside the radio.

I pressed the pedal.

The gun recoiled violently. The muzzle blast kicked up a wall of dust through the observation slit, blinding the mirror for half a second.

A split second later, a sharp, ringing crack echoed down the sunken lane. It wasn’t the dull thump of a miss. It was the distinct, hollow smack of high-grade steel punching through armor.

Through the clearing dust in the broken mirror, I saw the German tank jerk violently to its left. A jagged shower of white sparks sprayed from beneath its front track. Their turret turned wildly toward the ditch as their left track broke free and unspooled onto the dirt road like a dead ribbon.

Then fire took it.

A dull orange flash flared from inside their driver’s compartment, followed by a thick column of greasy black smoke that rolled out of their hatch. Two crewmen scrambled out of the top, tumbling over the side into the ditch weed and crawling away into the brush.

The Panzer sat dead in the mud, burning from the inside out.

ENDING

The turret went dead silent except for the crackle of burning oil from the road outside and the slow hiss of our own cooling gun tube.

I sat there in the gunner’s seat for a long time. I couldn’t move my legs. My knees felt like they were made of water.

Dutch cut the engine. He pushed back his hatch and stood up on his seat, looking over the rim. He didn’t say a word. He just turned around, looked down at me through the turret cage, and took a long breath through his nose.

Medics from the 506th Parachute Infantry found us twenty minutes later. They got Sergeant Miller out through the top hatch onto a stretcher. He was still breathing, his hand still clutching his tobacco tin. When they lifted him away, he looked down at me once through his swollen eyelids and nodded his head once. He didn’t have to say anything else.

Two stretcher-bearers came back for Hank.

I helped them lift him up through the hatch. It took three of us to get him out without dropping him. When they carried him away down the sunken lane toward the aid station behind the orchard, the sun was starting to break through the gray clouds over the Netherlands, turning the mud a dull bronze color.

I climbed back into the Sherman by myself to gather what belonged to our crew before the maintenance team towed the tank back to the depot.

The floor was littered with spent shell casings, grease rags, and empty ration tins. Down by the traverse pedals, half hidden under the footplate, lay the five-inch piece of broken glass with the black friction tape around the edge.

I picked it up. There was a smear of dried field dust across the silver backing, right along the crack that had served as my crosshair.

I didn’t leave it in the turret. I wiped the glass against my pant leg, wrapped it in a clean piece of rifle rag, and slipped it into my left shirt pocket, right over my heart.

I stayed in the armored division until the war ended in May, and I fired that 75mm gun plenty of times across France and Germany. But every time I climbed down into the turret and put my eye to the sight, I could still feel the weight of that little five-inch piece of cracked glass against my chest.