How Hitler Could Have Won World War II (31 page)

On June 10, Rommel proposed to Hitler that all armored forces in the line be replaced with infantry formations, and that armor be shifted westward to cut off and destroy the Americans in the lower Cotentin peninsula (7th Corps that had landed at Utah and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions). But Hitler vetoed the plan, and the Germans were forced into a wholly defensive operation.

This led to a murderous battle, but the outcome was never in doubt. Overwhelming Allied power was building day by day. Before long the Allies would burst out of Normandy and roll over the German army.

22 THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE

ALL THE DISASTERS PREDICTED BY ERWIN ROMMEL FOR FAILURE TO MOVE UP forces in advance now came to pass. Practically every unit ordered to the battlefront suffered heavy damage. Reinforcements had to be thrown in as soon as they arrived, and their strength eroded rapidly. Battle losses ran 2,500 to 3,000 a day. Tank losses were immense, replacements few.

Allied aircraft destroyed the railway system serving Normandy and smashed anything moving on the roads in daytime. The supply system was so damaged that only the barest essentials reached the front.

As Hitler repeated his familiar order to hold every square yard, Rundstedt and Rommel went to Berchtesgaden on June 29 to talk with the Fuehrer.

Hitler's ideas for stopping the western Allies were utterly unrealistic. The navy was to attack the Allied battleships, but Admiral Dönitz pointed out only a few small torpedo and other light boats were available, and they could accomplish little. A thousand of the new Me-262 twin-engine, jet-propelled fighters were to wrest control of the air over Normandy. However, Anglo-American air attacks in the winter and spring of 1944 had virtually wiped out the pool of skilled German pilots. The Luftwaffe could produce only 500 crews, most of them ill-trained. Consequently, very few Me-262s, with a speed (540 mph) and armament (four 30-millimeter cannons) exceeding any Allied fighter, ever flew against the Allies.

Rundstedt and Rommel told Hitler the situation was impossible. How, Rommel asked, did Hitler imagine the war could still be won? A chaotic argument followed, and Rundstedt and Rommel expected to be ousted from their jobs.

Back at Paris on July 1, Rundstedt got Hitler's order that “present positions are to be held.” He called Hitler's headquarters and told a staff officer he couldn't fulfill this demand. What shall we do? the officer asked. Rundstedt replied: “Make peace, you fools.”

The next day an emissary from Hitler presented Rundstedt with an Oak Leaf to the Knight's Cross and a handwritten note relieving him of his post because of “age and poor health.” Hitler replaced Rundstedt with Günther von Kluge, who at first thought the situation was better than it was. He changed his mind the moment he visited the front.

Rommel, to his surprise, remained at his post. About this time Rommel and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, concluded that the Germans should commence independent peace negotiations with the western Allies. Their idea was to open the west to an unopposed “march in” by the British and American armies, with the aim of keeping the Russians out of Germany. Everything had been prepared and Kluge and others won over, when fate intervened on July 17: Rommel was severely wounded by a low-flying Allied aircraft near Livarot.

Three days later, on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the secret opposition to Hitler, placed a bomb under a table where Hitler was meeting in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived. Immediately afterward, he replaced the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, with Heinz Guderian, who reported to Hitler at noon on July 21.

“He seemed to be in rather poor shape,” Guderian wrote. “One ear was bleeding; his right arm, which had been badly bruised and was almost unusable, hung in a sling. But his manner was one of astonishing calm.”

Hitler quickly recovered from the physical effects of the bomb. An existing malady, which caused his left hand and left leg to tremble, had no connection with the explosion. The attempt on his life had a profound effect on his behavior, however. Guderian wrote that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general . . . now became profound hatred. . . . What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation. . . . He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”

Hitler commenced a wave of terror against anyone suspected of a role in the bombing plot. This led to numerous executions. On October 14, 1944, Rommel, recovering from his wounds at his home in Ulm, received the option of a People's Court trial, which would have meant execution, or taking poison and getting a state funeral—and no persecution of his wife and son. Rommel chose poison.

By June 27, the Americans had pushed the Germans out of the Cotentin peninsula and seized Cherbourg (though the Germans damaged the port and it took weeks to get it operating). Meanwhile, Montgomery's British forces on the east had been unable to budge the Germans from Caen. Danger arose that the Allies would be boxed into Normandy, especially as a Channel storm June 19–23 severely damaged the Mulberries on the Norman coast and drove 800 vessels up on the beaches.

Omar Bradley, commanding the U.S. 1st Army, began moving his forces south to carry out the original plan of Overlord: breaking out to Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, thereby opening the door to capture of Brittany and the ports there by George Patton's 3rd Army, to be committed at this time. These advances in addition would give the Allies space for a massive turning movement that could sweep across France to the German frontier.

Bradley lined up twelve divisions in four corps to crack through in a massive frontal assault. Troy H. Middleton's 8th Corps and J. Lawton Collins's 7th Corps on the west were to drive full speed down the west coast of the peninsula to Avranches. Meanwhile Charles H. Corlett's 19th Corps would seize St. Lô in the center, and Leonard T. Gerow's 5th Corps at Caumont would “hold the hub of the wheel,” in Bradley's words, protecting the right flank of the British 2nd Army.

Middleton's corps, on the extreme west, opened the attack on July 3. But it failed completely. Collins's 7th Corps had no better luck the next day, while 19th Corps made only meager gains around St. Lô.

To Bradley and his corps commanders the fault lay with the leadership within the American divisions, which in numerous cases was inadequate. Bradley replaced several commanders, but the great problem the Americans faced was the
bocage—
the hedgerow country of Normandy— which caught the Americans by complete surprise. Planners, solving problems of the landings, had paid little or no attention to the terrain just behind the beaches. No troops were taught how to deal with it.

Virtually the entire American sector—from the coast of the Cotentin to the line Caumont-Bayeux—was
bocage
country. In the British sector to the east the land was part
bocage
and part rolling countryside punctuated by hamlets and small woods. For centuries Norman farmers had enclosed their land in small fields by raising embankments three or four feet high. These banks were overgrown with dense shrubbery, brambles, hawthorn, and small trees. The hedgerows were intended as fences to hold livestock, mark boundaries, and protect animals and crops from sea winds. Each field had a gate to admit animals and equipment. Dirt tracks or sunken lanes ran between these hedgerows, permitting troops and weapons to move free from observation from the air or on the ground. The effect was to divide the terrain into thousands of walled enclosures.

The
bocage
proved to be ideal country for the Germans to defend. Antitank weapons
—Panzerfäuste,
or bazooka rocket tubes—and machine guns posted in the hedgerows could remain hidden until a tank was within fifty yards, destroy all but the heaviest tank with one shot, and stop the advance of infantry. In addition, tanks, assault guns, and 88-millimeter antiaircraft guns concealed in the
bocage
or villages could knock out any Allied tank up to 2,000 yards distant.

The Germans organized each field (mostly seven to fifteen acres) as a defensive stronghold, posting machine guns in the corners to pin down Americans advancing across in the open. They placed other automatic weapons in the hedgerows on the front and flanks of the attackers. Once they had stopped the attack, the Germans brought down preregistered mortar rounds on the field. Mortars caused three-quarters of American casualties in Normandy.

American artillery fire could not be used often, since the range was so close that rounds might land on Americans. This undermined the standard American method of fighting. Infantry habitually maneuvered to locate the enemy, then called on artillery to finish him off. Green infantry tended not to move at all under fire, but to seek the nearest cover or hug the ground.

The hedgerows also nullified the tanks' greatest advantages, mobility and firepower. Tankers were reluctant to operate within the confined spaces of the
bocage,
yet if they stayed on the main roads or lanes they made excellent targets. Commanders realized tanks had to get off the roads, but this forced them into the hedgerows.

Some way had to be found to break the impasse. Normal American practice had been for tanks and infantry to advance in separate echelons. In Normandy, astute commanders realized the two had to work together (thus recognizing at long last the
Kampfgruppe
system the Germans had perfected since 1940).

The 29th Infantry Division's method was one of the best. Developed in June and tested on July 11 east of St.-Lô, the 29th's system consisted of a four-phase operation. First, a Sherman M4A3 medium tank broke through enough vegetation in the center of a hedgerow to allow its cannon and machine gun to open up against the enemy-held hedgerow on the opposite side of the field. Meanwhile a 60-millimeter mortar crew lobbed shells behind the enemy hedgerow. Under intense covering fire of the tank's machine gun, a squad of infantry advanced in open formation across the field. As they closed on the enemy, the infantry tossed hand grenades over the hedgerow to kill or confuse the German defenders. Meanwhile, the Sherman tank backed away from its firing position, and an engineer team blew a hole in the hedgerow for the tank to drive through. The tank then rushed forward to assist the infantry in flushing any remaining enemy soldiers out of the hedgerow.

Although this and similar systems worked, the process was slow. Others were thinking of a faster and safer way to get Shermans through the hedgerows—since crashing through exposed the thin underside of the tanks to enemy fire.

Shermans equipped with bulldozer blades could do the job, but there were few such equipped tanks in the theater. Using explosives to break a hole in the hedgerow gave away the attack and served as an aiming point for German weapons. At last, individual soldiers came up with welded devices on the front of Shermans that could crack through the thickest hedgerow. In a prodigious effort, 1st Army welding teams produced 500 hedgerow cutters between July 14 and 25. By late July 60 percent of the army's Shermans were equipped with the device.

Bradley, stymied by fierce German defense of the hedgerows, conceived a new plan of attack, which he named Cobra. He decided to focus the breakout around St.-Lô, spearheaded by Lawton Collins's 7th Corps. The key feature would be a massive air attack on the narrow front. When Collins broke through, the whole weight of 1st Army, now fifteen divisions, would be thrown into the assault.

Meanwhile Montgomery drew up plans for an offensive at Caen, code-named Goodwood, to support Cobra. Montgomery launched Goodwood on July 18, preceded by a massive air attack by 1,700 heavy and 400 medium bombers. At first the British attack went well. Tanks advanced against the stunned German defenders. But bomb craters slowed the armor, and the Germans pulled themselves together and launched a counterattack. It gained no ground, but inflicted heavy losses on the British. On July 20, Montgomery called off the attack, having moved six miles south of Caen, but having lost 4,000 men and 500 tanks.

Bradley's Cobra plan was risky because aviators were not skilled in pinpoint strikes, and the operation called for saturation bombing of a rectangle three miles wide and one mile deep south of the east-west St.-Lô–Périers road. An error would bring bombs down on American troops.

Bradley did not want the aircraft to fly over American lines, and proposed that the planes approach on a course parallel to the St.-Lô–Périers road. On July 19 Bradley flew back to England to discuss the operation with top air commanders. They opposed a parallel approach, saying aircraft would be exposed longer to enemy antiaircraft fire and the approach would require hitting a one-mile-wide target, whereas a perpendicular approach would present a three-mile-wide target. But by the time he left, Bradley thought he had got their agreement. To minimize the chances of American troops being hit, Bradley withdrew them 1,500 yards north of the road.

Heavy rains caused postponement of Cobra until July 24. Cloud cover forced cancellation this day as well, but not before 400 bombers reached France and let go their bombs. To Bradley's horror, the bombers approached perpendicular to the American lines, not parallel. Many bombs fell on American positions, killing 25 and wounding 131. When Bradley complained, the air force brass claimed they had never agreed to a parallel approach. And they told Bradley they would not mount a second attack except in the same direction.