My papaw was with the 3rd Army in the Ardennes, winter '44 and he has recounted the following story to me many times.

He was ordered to drive a "chow" truck that had already broken the arms of two other drivers (a result of ruts in the "road" and a lack of power steering). He heard an incoming shell and dove out the passenger side of the truck just before it exploded. He lied in a ditch for an unknown amout of time until a tank stopped and pulled him in thru a hatch in the floor. Before it was over there were 11 men squeezed into a 5-man tank(possibly a M4) and they "broke-out" the next day, Christmas day.

He believes there was a book written about this event "A Tank Called Buzzard". Because I have quite a library of military history books, he has often asked me to find it. I have looked for the book sporadically over the years with no luck.

A couple of ideas I had:
Maybe, the "Buzzard" was a unit nickname.
Maybe, the story was not a book but an magazine article, perhaps in Yank, or some other.

I know there are very few details, but if anybody has heard of this story or knows if/when it was published, I would very much like to find it. I do believe the story exists in some form or another.

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Travis Allen