Jim Bates films a tank battle in Cologne
Around 2 p.m. on March 6, 1945, Tech Sgt. Jim Bates of the 165th Photo Signal Company approached a Pershing tank from the 3rd Armored Division idling in the streets of Cologne.
“Hey Bob!” Bates called out, summoning the tank’s commander, Sgt. Robert Earley. Bates told him there was a “monster” of a German tank just around the corner, and Earley hopped down from his tank to investigate.
“He says, I don’t know what we’re going to run into — we may never get back — but he said let’s see what we can do,” Bates recalled nearly half a century later. “He said if we can get there it’ll be a good place for pictures, I know. I said, I know, that’s great, let’s do it.”
The images Bates captured that day would cement his reputation as one of the finest combat cameramen working in Europe and, decades later, help one member of that tank crew get the recognition he deserved.
Jim Bates was born May 14, 1916 in Boulder, Colorado, but moved to Colorado Springs in 1923 and lived there most of the rest of his life.
After graduating from high school, Bates went to work for the Alexander Film Company, which produced short advertisements that ran in movie theaters. In seven years with the company, Bates gained experience as a cinematographer and director, and he put that experience to use after joining the Army in 1942.
Bates would jump into Normandy with the 82nd Airborne on D-Day but spent the first two days of the invasion as a foot soldier after his camera equipment sank into a canal upon landing. He was in the midst of the fighting at the Battle of the Bulge, shooting footage that would appear in newsreels back home, but it was that early spring day in Cologne that changed his life.
The events of March 6 are painstakingly documented in Adam Makos’ remarkable 2019 book, Spearhead, which follows the tank gunner Clarence Smoyer through the war. Just 21 years old at the time, Smoyer would fire the three shots immortalized on the critical 48 seconds of film Bates shot that day.
After his brief scouting missing with Earley, Bates took his small 16mm camera to the mezzanine level of a building on a corner that would give him a clear shot of the action to come.
I sat there and it seemed like forever and a day for them to get started, but of course they had to get all of the mathematics and everything set just exactly right so they knew exactly what they were going to do at the very second they stopped that tank.
I was just a little impatient and I got out and I think the German tank … saw me, because he started to turn his turret around. About that time, I heard our tank coming up. … The very second that he stopped, I was shooting by that time, and in the film you can see the armor-piercing shell going through the bottom of the picture on the still shots.
You can watch the footage and the interview with Bates in this 1994 video produced by the Pikes Peak Library District.
Those three rounds fired by Smoyer from the Pershing’s 90mm gun destroyed the Panther, leaving it a flaming wreck that was still smoking the following day.
Once everything appeared safe, Bates ran toward the Pershing and shouted at Early “I think I got it!” The tank commander was momentarily confused before Bates explained that he believed he had been able to film the encounter. He then asked Earley and his men to stand up in the tank so he could film them. A frame from that footage became the cover art for Spearhead.
The tank duel was just a small slice of the fighting Bates filmed that day in Cologne, but the stunning footage drew plenty of notice, particularly once it made its way into newsreels back home.
“Everything that could happen to me, photographically speaking, did happen that day,” Bates said. “There was everything from street fighting to house-to-house fighting. Everything that could happen. And consequently, it really was the crux of me getting a Bronze Star. That whole period of time that I worked with the 3rd Armored Division, they were so grateful for all of the coverage that I had given them.”
Back in Smoyer’s home state of Pennsylvania, his sister-in-law recognized him in the newsreel footage from Cologne. She would bring Smoyer’s parents to the theater and convince the owner to play the newsreel for them, so they could see that Clarence was alive. It was the first time his parents had ever gone to the movies.
As for the gunner himself, he didn’t see the film of the battle until receiving a VHS tape of the Bates documentary in 1996, and even then had a difficult time watching it because of the memories it brought back. But he took time to pay tribute to Bates and his colleagues for the work they did throughout the war.
“Those combat photographers took great risks,” Smoyer told World War II magazine in 2019. “They were brave men. Watching that film made it even more clear to me.”
Jim Bates remained in Europe through the end of the war, then stayed on to film newsreel footage at the Potsdam Conference that summer.
He married his English girlfriend, Monica Howard, in September 1946 and returned to Colorado Springs and the Alexander Film Company, where he would work until 1964. He worked for the next 20 years at the International Typographical Union before retiring.
In 1951, he accompanied members of the AdAmAn Club on their annual New Year’s Eve climb of Pikes Peak as a photographer. Three years later, he officially joined the group — which adds only one new member each year — and would continue making the climb annually until his 40th and final trip in 1995 at age 79.
Jim Bates died in 2002 at age 86, but his work lives on. Though the cameraman and Sgt. Robert Earley received Bronze Stars for their actions in Cologne, Clarence Smoyer was not decorated.
After researching and writing Spearhead, Makos sought to rectify that. He made his case to a review board, with Bates’ footage as a key piece of supporting material, and the board agreed. Clarence Smoyer and the other three crew members of the Pershing — Pvt. Homer Davis, Pfc. John DeRiggi, and Tech. Cpl. William McVey — were awarded the Bronze Star on Sept. 18, 2019.
