Germany Never Expected Sherman Fireflies To One-Shot Tigers

Germany Never Expected Sherman Fireflies To One-Shot Tigers
Saint-Aignan-de-Cramesnil, Normandy, August 8, 1944, twelve forty-seven hours, and SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittmann commanding Tiger 007 of the schwere SS-Panzer-Abteilung 101 watched through his commander's cupola as his column of seven Tiger tanks advanced north along Route Nationale 158, completely unaware that British gunner Joe Ekins was already tracking him through the sights of a Sherman Firefly's seventeen-pounder gun from eight hundred meters away, the specially-modified tank hidden in the woods south of the village with its long barrel camouflaged to look like a standard seventy-five millimeter Sherman, about to prove that the supposedly invincible Tiger could be destroyed with a single shot from a gun the Germans had dismissed as impossible to mount in a medium tank turret.
The morning mist still clung to the Norman hedgerows as Wittmann's Tigers rolled forward, their eighty-eight millimeter guns traversing slowly, searching for targets among the British positions that Operation Totalize had established during the night, and the tank ace with one hundred thirty-eight confirmed kills felt confident in his Maybach-powered fifty-six ton beast that had never failed him from Kursk to Villers-Bocage, its frontal armor of one hundred millimeters supposedly impervious to any Allied tank gun at combat ranges. German doctrine held that the Tiger I was worth five Sherman tanks, maybe more, and tank crews across the Wehrmacht treated this as gospel truth, especially after the massacre at Villers-Bocage just eight weeks earlier where Wittmann himself had destroyed thirteen tanks, two anti-tank guns, and fifteen transport vehicles in less than fifteen minutes using a single Tiger, turning the British advance into a chaotic retreat that shocked even veteran Desert Rats who thought they had seen everything in North Africa.