Smoyer had a simple motto: “Shoot fast and shoot straight.” Makos says Smoyer saved the lives of his crew members and those in other tanks because he was such a great shot. People lined the street outside Smoyer’s hotel as he rode proudly to the USS Constitution Museum, where he and the author signed copies of “Spearhead.”ĭuring World War II, Smoyer says he sat in a seat inside and kept close watch for targets while another soldier drove. Makos says he planned the surprise tank ride in Boston because of the city’s patriotic history and the sense that people would respond if they found out about the event. It saved me.”Īdam Makos, an author of books about military history - including one about Thomas Hudner, a Navy pilot from Fall River, Massachusetts - tells Smoyer’s story in his new book “ Spearhead: An American Tank Gunner, His Enemy, and a Collision of Lives in World War II.” He had gotten a tip that Smoyer was living in obscurity and “not even his neighbors knew what he did in the war.”
We went through many battles with a tank like that. “An old friend,” Smoyer said before he climbed onto the tank with the help of a cane. But in Boston this week, the now-95-year-old Pennsylvania native got a huge surprise: The author of a new book about Smoyer’s exploits as a tank gunner in World War II arranged to have a real Sherman tank carry him to a local book signing. The 95-year-old veteran was surprised with a ride through the streets of Boston in a Sherman tank, one of the tanks most widely used by the U.S. World War II tank gunner Clarence Smoyer poses for a portrait near the Charlestown Naval Shipyard in Boston, Feb.
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