The Spy with 29 Names (29 page)

The Germans had also spotted the hill, however, and by the next morning the tanks of the 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend had taken up positions there. It would take a month to remove them and Hill 112 would become one of the best-known landmarks in the entire Battle of Normandy, its name etched in the memories of the thousands of British soldiers who fought over it.

On this first day, a detachment of tanks led by Bob Clarke was ordered up to try to dislodge the enemy. ‘Cheerful and likeable’, Clarke was a former corn-merchant who had recently married a racehorse trainer’s daughter from Newmarket. Now he charged into his first battle operation with unfortunate and inappropriate courage.

‘He motored up the hill as if on exercise,’ Blacker described, ‘and innocently allowed his tanks to drive too far over the ridge and expose themselves.’

The result was a disaster: all the Shermans in Clarke’s squadron were immediately hit and destroyed by the German Tigers, suffering heavy casualties. A few moments later, manoeuvring his own squadron in an attempt to outflank the SS troops, Blacker caught sight of Clarke lying on the ground. His first thought was that his body looked shorter than usual, until he realised that Clarke’s legs had both been cut off below the knee. He died a few minutes later.

Soon afterwards the 23rd Hussars were relieved and pulled out of the battle. In three days they had suffered eighty casualties – around half of them fatal – a figure that constituted 20 per cent of their strength.

Bloodied yet exhilarated at still being alive, Blacker and his men had no idea that their worst day in Normandy was yet to come.

Although on high alert for an imminent Allied invasion across the narrowest part of the Channel, the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH enjoyed its stay in northern Belgium. The city of Bruges offered the usual entertainments for fighting men away from the front, and despite a ban on leave, the officers of Jochen Peiper’s armoured regiment would often head off for quick trips to the bars and brothels.

The last party was on 16 June. Werner Wolff was Peiper’s former adjutant and was now an Obersturmführer – equivalent to senior lieutenant – in command of the 7th Tank Company. The 16th was the date he had arranged to get married. Owing to the state of alert, however, Wolff was unable to leave his post to join his bride-to-be, and Peiper had arranged for the girl to be brought over from her home in the Baltic states and smuggled over the Belgian border to the chateau of Knesselare for the wedding ceremony.

The castle was bedecked with a giant black SS flag as well as the Nazi swastika flag. An LAH officer married the couple following the quasi-pagan SS rites, the bride touching bread and salt as symbols of life, and the groom touching an SS sword in his role as protector of the family. A flame burned in an urn while the couple swore oaths of loyalty and exchanged SS rings. A copy of
Mein Kampf
was then taken out of a wooden casket decorated with runes and handed to
the groom before they passed out through an arcade of saluting SS officers.

At the dinner, Peiper gave a speech at the head table. Then the serious drinking began as the wedding festivities continued into the night.

The next morning, however, on 17 June, the LAH received orders it had not expected.

Thanks to the intelligence reports from its spy network in Britain, German High Command still considered the threat to the Pas-de-Calais to be real and imminent, but a crack force like the 1st SS Panzer Division would not be kept out of the fighting for ever. On the coast further west the Allies were establishing a powerful bridgehead which needed to be crushed as quickly as possible. It was time once again to move out, to where they were meant to have gone a week before.

It was time to go to Normandy.

Had they gone at the start, the journey would have been much quicker and shorter. In the intervening days, however, much had changed in northern France. Bridges over the Seine had been knocked out, making the crossing slower and more difficult. Then there was the Allied air superiority to deal with. RAF Typhoons, with ground-attack rockets, were particularly effective at slowing columns of German tanks from moving around in the hours of daylight.

But another factor complicated the LAH’s progress to Normandy: a lack of trains to move men and supplies. Most of the local engines and wagons had been taken over to the east, where, since the middle of May, Peiper’s SS comrades were busy rounding up Hungarian Jews and transporting them to Auschwitz. Racial cleansing, the ‘ideological war’ of the Nazis, was a greater priority at this crucial stage than the logistics of moving men and materiel to the new front opening up in France.

The result was that Peiper did not reach his assembly point south of Caen until 5 July, a month after D-Day.

Garbo had slowed the LAH reinforcements down, and crucially its tanks had failed to make it to Normandy in the early days of the campaign. But they were still dangerous. The Allied advance of Operation Epsom, bogged down around Hill 112, had ground to a halt. The stage was set for another British attempt to encircle Caen,
Operation Goodwood, this time striking around the east and south of the city.

Where Peiper and the LAH would be waiting for them.

A few days before the launch of Operation Goodwood, Monkey Blacker received news that depressed him: he was being relieved of his command of C Squadron and being made second-in-command of the regiment. No longer in the front line with his tank crew, his job was effectively to act as a replacement for the colonel in case he became a casualty in battle. There was little time to feel sorry for himself, though, and he accepted the decision as best he could.

His replacement as C Squadron leader was Major Bill Shebbeare. A former president of the Oxford Union and editor of
Isis
, Shebbeare had been a Labour councillor for Holborn and was a Labour parliamentary candidate. Now an officer in the 23rd Hussars, he had written a short book on his military experiences – a manifesto for a democratic army which he called
A Soldier Looks Ahead
, and which he signed anonymously as ‘Captain X’. With a rose-tinted view of the Soviet Union, he was a convinced anti-Nazi and secretly – like his contemporary Denis Healey – a member of the Communist Party.

On 8 June Shebbeare had been ordered to stay behind in Aldershot while the rest of the 23rd Hussars set off for Normandy, but now he had managed to get himself over and was keen to see some action.

‘Small and slight, with a head that seemed too big for his body, complexion pasty, his full lips could break into a most charming smile which lit up his whole face. He looked very like a garden gnome.’

Despite holding different political views, Blacker and Shebbeare had become close friends.

Now Shebbeare was to take over C Squadron, and one of the first things he did was to scribble a note to Blacker.

‘I do indeed believe C Squadron’, he wrote, ‘to be the best armoured squadron in the army and everything I have seen of the men’s spirit here confirms me in this. It makes me feel such a usurper to have taken over ready-made and without any effort on my part, a squadron that you have taken three years to create. I feel that when we go into action again that I need have no worries except my own ability to give them the leadership they deserve.’

Operation Goodwood, the biggest tank battle in the history of the
British army, began on the morning of 18 July. At around half-past five over 1,000 Lancasters bombed the German positions. These were followed by American B17s and an artillery barrage. The bombardment lasted for several hours, driving many of the German soldiers that survived it mad. Others committed suicide.

And yet the bombing was not wholly effective, failing to reach the German tanks further back that would later prove so lethal.

The forty-six Panthers and fifty-nine Mark IV’s of Jochen Peiper’s regiment were practically unscathed. And now they knew what was coming. Peiper’s commander used a trick he had picked up on the Eastern Front of putting his ear to the ground to listen for the rumblings of an approaching tank assault. The dust kicked up by the hundreds of Shermans now moving slowly towards them confirmed that this was the beginning of a major Allied offensive. The German tanks moved into position and waited.

Ahead of the British were a number of small villages and hamlets lying in open, flat countryside, while beyond was a low promontory – the Bourguébus ridge, quickly renamed ‘Bugger Bus’ by the approaching Sherman crews.

After long delays caused by traffic jams of tanks stretching for miles as they tried to squeeze through minefields and over bridges, the battle began. The 11th Armoured Division was at the forefront of the attack, made up of the 3rd Royal Tank Regiment and the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, with Blacker’s 23rd Hussars coming in reserve behind them. Bill Shebbeare, now wearing the helmet and goggles of a tank commander, had waved to Blacker as he set off at the head of C Squadron, with Blacker tagging along in his own tank alongside that of the regimental commander.

As they moved ahead it became clear that the bombing raid earlier in the morning had only had a partial effect. While some German defenders emerged from their dugouts looking shaken by the experience and only too willing to surrender, further on Tiger tanks were waiting in some of the villages. The 23rd Hussars were ordered to deal with them as best they could, before being relieved by another regiment behind them. By the time they caught up with the Fife and Forfar things were already beginning to turn for the worse.

On the German side, Jochen Peiper was working closely with the LAH divisional commander, Teddy Wisch, on how to deal with the
British advance. Some of Peiper’s tanks were to take up positions on the Bourguébus ridge, while a battalion was to move down and engage the enemy directly and push them back over the railway line that they had recently crossed.

It was Peiper’s first proper military engagement since Kharkov back on the Eastern Front. Now, finally, after the delays and changes of order by Hitler himself, he was here in Normandy, fighting against the British. The Anglo-Americans might enjoy air superiority and have better artillery, but man to man, tank to tank here on the battlefield, their army was no match for the 1st SS Panzer Division. It was time to show what the best forces in the Wehrmacht were capable of.

By the time Blacker and the 23rd Hussars caught up with the vanguard tank regiments, it was too late.

‘We could soon see the tail of the Fife and Forfar’, Blacker wrote, ‘sitting in the middle of an open plain which gave them no more cover than a polo field. But why was there no sign of activity and why in any case were they just sitting there? There was something unreal about their stillness. As we motored closer we realised that they were all dead, burnt out. The only sign of life came from blackened, dishevelled parties on foot, tending wounded or trickling back.’

The Fife and Forfar had become the day’s first victims of Peiper’s Panthers. In a matter of minutes twenty-nine Shermans, including that of their commanding officer, had been destroyed.

A survivor of the massacre came up and spoke to Blacker.

‘I don’t think we have more than four tanks left in action,’ he said. ‘Both the 3rd Tanks and ourselves have been stopped by armour and guns up there on the ridge, and as you can see there’s no cover, so I should watch out.’

It was a desperate situation. Already, as they spoke, tanks of the 23rd Hussars were also being shelled. Spewing out a smokescreen for cover, they hastily beat a retreat behind the railway line, which provided some protection.

But the word soon came from command: they had to press on. There was too much at stake. The Bourguébus ridge had to be taken by nightfall.

Both A and B Squadrons had already suffered losses. Now it was time for C Squadron, Blacker’s former command, to push ahead. There was no time for thinking about tactics or planning: the situation
was urgent. It was only early afternoon on the first day and already Operation Goodwood was turning into a disaster. Bill Shebbeare was told to hurry forwards, capturing a village just ahead of them called Four, and from there proceed towards the ridge.

Eager and excited, Shebbeare set off with the tanks of C Squadron, crossing the railway lines and charging towards the German positions.

Then all at once the firing started, coming, it seemed, from all directions. Blacker had to sit back as his former command was torn apart by Peiper’s guns.

The first to go was the tank of Mike Pratt, who had come to the regiment almost straight from school. His Sherman quickly blew up after a direct hit, killing all inside. Next was Jock Addison’s tank. Addison, who later in life became an Oscar-winning film composer, managed to get out, but his driver, co-driver and gunner were all dead. His operator was only wounded and Addison managed to pull him out.

Inside Blacker’s former tank, the gunner watched in terror as shell after shell targeted his comrades’ Shermans. ‘Our turn next,’ he said. From the turret, however, there were no orders forthcoming. He looked up to Bill Shebbeare, expecting him to tell them what to do. But Shebbeare had fallen into a state of shock: ‘transfixed, speechless, frozen in a horrified stare at the appalling scenes ahead’.

Moments later, Peiper’s men scored a direct hit on C Squadron’s leading tank, the shell smashing into the turret. Bill Shebbeare was killed instantly. The gunner, Sam English, the driver and one other managed to get out of the tank, but caught fire as they did so. Their flesh burning, they put the flames out as best they could by rolling furiously on the grass.

C Squadron was now leaderless, with most of its tanks on fire. Many men were dead, others had horrific burns on their hands and faces. Within minutes, almost all the remaining Shermans had been destroyed by the German onslaught. Those that were still operational offered a minimal fightback, taking out a German anti-tank gun and a Tiger tank, before heading back to the cover provided by the railway line.

In all, C Squadron lost twenty tanks in the few minutes of the battle and was effectively wiped out.