Why twelve American gun crews fired blind at enemy they couldn't see during WW2 — and stopped Hitler's last Normandy offensive with a tactic that violated every gunnery manual. This World War 2 story reveals how improvised fog combat changed the Battle of Mortain.
August 7, 1944. Sergeant Robert Callahan, 823rd Tank Destroyer Battalion Company A, crouched behind a three-inch M5 gun east of Mortain, France. Dense fog reduced visibility to fifteen feet. Four SS Panzer divisions with two hundred tanks were advancing toward his position. Callahan's crew began firing at German muzzle flashes they could barely see through the gray. Every training manual said aimed fire was impossible without visual identification. Senior Army officers called towed guns "obsolete deathtraps."
They were all wrong.
What Callahan discovered that morning wasn't about following gunnery procedures. It was about using the fog itself as intelligence in a way that contradicted everything Camp Hood had taught. Each German muzzle flash revealed a target for three seconds. By the end of that four-hour battle — Operation Lüttich's opening engagement — other gun crews across the Mortain sector started doing what Cal
