________________________________________________________________________Richard S. Kem
We then were trying to reduce the antitank ditch down to doctrinally fit us and to a size that
was capable of stopping the enemy--or not stopping them but having them present targets to
our gunners because our concept was bring them into a killing zone, hold them to present
good targets, and then kill them. Recognizing the mass formations of their kinds of attack,
we had to be able to service many targets in only so much time because of the mass of what
was coming at us in terms of armor. So, recognizing an obstacle not covered by fire is
ineffective, then any obstacle to be effective had to provide some kind of delay to improve
the capability of our gunners to get the target. So, with the antitank ditch, what we were
looking for was having a ditch of such minimal dimensions that it could be dug with as much
ease as possible and yet present the kind of an obstacle that would break up the flow of this
massive armor down an avenue of approach, cause them to be stopped to get into the sights
of our gunners, our gunners meaning in the combined arms context.
We had our 563d Engineer Battalion (Composite), with two combat support equipment
companies, run tests at Grafenwhr on various sized antitank ditches to see what could
happen. It came out with, as I recall, that a 1.8-meter-high ditch, dozer width, with a spoiler
berm on the friendly side, would disrupt the enemy tank. The tank would have to move
forward, go down a ditch, and then when it came up it would have to rock back and forth,
trying to obtain an ability to work its way through the ditch. When it did that, it would
provide opportunities for belly shots--exposing the lesser protected belly of the tank to our
TOW [tube launched, optically tracked, wire guided] gunners and tank gunners. That was the
concept and design of the antitank ditch.
With a lot of experimentation with that, we then built that into our war plans. Some were up
in the Meiningen Gap, which was a broad plain to the west of Wrzburg, and a high-speed,
massed armor approach. We planned some rather extensive antitank ditches that would
require some days to put in. The extent of the obstacles was dependent on the number of days
of before-battle prep available. In other places, in narrow valley defiles, the antitank ditches
would be relatively shorter. We were doing a lot of this kind of thinking.
The other point at that time was that we still had massive stocks of the mines left over from
World War II. We did not have a good new modern mine. All of these became things I later
took on when I commanded the Engineer School at Fort Belvoir. We were trying to solve the
problems of that day in the field, but these weren't newly discovered; they were old, existing
problems.
We didn't have a new modern mine but we had lots of the old kind, so the idea was how do
you put the old one in more rapidly? There had been developed mine plows with chutes.
Engineers would pull this behind a truck and slide the mines down the chute. The plow
would open the ground and just let one slide underneath before it closed. We also started just
leaving mines on top of the ground, armed, recognizing they were exposed. In the smoke of
battle, with all kinds of lead flying, a person's eyes might well not be fixed to the ground as
they, in their mass of armor, are churning forward. Again, it wasn't always a stop we needed.
We wanted to delay, we wanted disruption of the formations.
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