You never forget the first time you hear tanks. Depp had not told us what to expect this day (deliberately). We were set to digging foxholes in some remote field or other. Our individual techniques varied a lot, and so the Drill Masters thought there was always room-for-improvement, as they say.
You got your entrenching tool off your pack (we still had the WWI type, where you had to take them off and unroll them to get at anything!). Then you picked out your spot and began to dig. Some dug too much, some dug too little. Others sloped sides unduly, some did not clean out the bottoms, and so on and on. Depp was in his heyday: he could cite bible, book, chapter and verse of the Army Manuals on how to dig personnel shelters and everything, and he was super-sensitive to the tiniest infraction. Like today, he was almost maniacal that we “line them up” and dig them all in a narrow row...
"An' when it comes to marchin' he'll see their socks are right,
An' when it comes: to action 'e shows 'em how to sight.
'E knows their ways of thinkin' and just what's in their mind;
'E knows when they are takin' on an' when they've fell be'ind.
So we had been hard at it for maybe 45 minutes or so, when we first head distant engines. Motors or something. Since we were a long way out in the woods, this attracted the attention of a few. Someone speculated that we must be “near” the edge of the Camp, and were hearing “highway machinery” or trucks or something. Someone else opined it might be “farmers” – or something. Maybe "gearheads" working somewhere in a far-off motor pool. No one really cared. Most just ignored it.
The sound got louder and louder. And it was accompanied now by a most ominous “clank, clank, clank” - louder and louder. And loud shrieks and squalls of bare-metal-on-bare metal. What in hell could that be?
We sort of all stopped the same time and looked at the same edge of the clearing back into the woods. You could make out vague movement there... O.D.-colored movement actually... something big... and then the first two entered our field! Giant, noisy, clanking monsters – Shermans! – and they advanced out at right angles to us – then the tread on the near side stopped turning, and the opposite side kept turning so they spun right around and then both treads engaged again and they headed right for us!
Jeezul! The only thing missing was the famous song of advancing German panzer troops wafting our way in the hot Georgia air - the one where they stand around in a circle you know, and stomp their boots and sing of hot days and freezing nights spent in their metal monsters... Jawhol! Well, maybe you don't know, (months later we were often to see them doing this in the prisoner compounds overseas - though they weren't supposed to! LOL!), so here's the best I could find in a Midi format for you: much too slow and ponderous as played here, but you might recognize the tune if you are into Militaria (it was the basic theme later of the famed movie, "Battle of the Bulge"...)
Our Mentor, squatted down on the ground beside us, spoke:
“Now y’all’s men here – don’ nobody be goin’ and shittin’ in his drawers here! Them’s nothing’ but tanks coming at ya, and nothin’ to be skeery ‘bout! Why them armored corps people they blind as bats in there – they probably cain’t even see ya. .... Yet...”
No one believed him.
He continued:
“Now what all’s they going to do here... is drive right over ya!
Too late we now understood: today’s ‘object lesson’ was to dig a hole deep enough and safe enough to let one of these monsters pass right over you! Holy Geez! Now we knew why we had to be in one long row – so the tanks could straddle us!
There was a last moment scurry by the laggards to toss out a few more shovelfuls and then like a prairie dog town when a hawk flies overhead – there was not a head to be seen.
On and on they came. 
“Clankety-clank-clank! Squeak! Squeak!”
The ground vibrated. At the last moment Depp rose, and made some kind of hand signal to the unseen operators of these monsters. Then they turned course ever so slightly and began to straddle the foxholes right down our row! With a stench of engine fumes and oil, and blocking out of the sun, they passed right on over us!
A short distance beyond they halted, huffing and rumbling.
“Naow, y’all’s get on board!,” Depp was yelling at us. “Climb up on the engine decks and lie down!” We had already gone over this unlikely scenario back in the Pecan Grove – so knew what was expected of us. We helped each other up onto the relatively flat engine hatch covers behind the turrets – then four guys lay prone there, side-by-side. Depp was standing alongside us now and hollering at me over the engine noise:
“Powell! Y’all’s lay down on top of yore buddies, ya hear? And grab the hatch handle on either side ‘cause you got the longest arms up there – the ones you always scratching body parts with when I tell you to stand ‘Tenshun!”
Then he stepped back.
I lay on top of the four, sort of spread-eagled and my arms strained to the utmost to grasp a hatch handle or any protuberance on either side. The idea was that the fifth man on these rides, riding on top of his pals, was somehow a sort of “guarantee” that no one else would fall off (!) as he held them all together in a sort of loose bundle...
Thus prepared, we rode forth into battle! The noise of the engines just below us was horrific. But over the howl and whine and screech of metal on metal, I heard the outside guy on the left side say, “Powell, you sunabich, if you leggo and drop me off here under this tank’s treads (!) I ain’t gonna ever gonna forgive you!”
Grin!
It was a wild ride across the clearing....!
“...Ja unser Sinn; Es braust unser Panzer... Im Sturmwind dahin”
("...Joyful our Mind; Our tank roars ahead...Within the Storm Wind")
Scrape Here for more 'Barrel...'