The Second World War (62 page)

Because of the immobility of all the German infantry divisions, it was the handling of the Panzer divisions by Army Group B and OKW which alone threatened the invaders with riposte. Of the four within or close to the invasion area, only the 21st Panzer Division, positioned near Caen on the eastern flank of the British Sword beach and ‘airborne bridgehead’, was close enough to the scene of action to exert a decisive effect. Its commander, like Rommel, was absent on the morning of D-Day (Rommel, by furious driving from Ulm, would arrive at Army Group B headquarters at 10.30 in the evening). Rommel’s chief of staff, Hans Speidel, succeeded in extracting permission from OKW for the 21st Panzer Division to intervene at 6.45 am, but it was two hours before General Erich Marcks, next in the chain of command, passed on an operational order. That order required the tanks to probe into the gap between Sword and Juno beaches, to halt the British advance on Caen, which was only eight miles from the sea, and ‘roll up’ the bridgehead.

Advancing on Caen from Sword beach was a brigade of British infantry led by the 2nd Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry. It should have been accompanied by the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry but they were trapped in a giant traffic jam on the beach. The Shropshires had therefore to take each German defensive position as they came to it by orthodox fire and movement. Progress was slow. In the afternoon the tanks caught them up, but at six o’clock the column ran into the vanguards of the 21st Panzer Division, which had been delayed by one time-wasting mission after another on its way to the front. Its guns at once forced the Shropshires to go to ground, three miles short of Caen, and its 22nd Panzer Regiment moved forward to attack the bridgehead. ‘If you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea’, Marcks warned the regimental commander with all too exact foresight, ‘we shall have lost the war.’ However, its Mark IV tanks ran into the Staffordshire Yeomanry’s anti-tank Fireflies (Shermans armed with the long 17-pounder) and suffered heavy losses. A few made contact with the infantry of the 716th Division still holding out at Lion-sur-Mer; but, when they were overflown by the 250 gliders of 6th Airborne Division bringing reinforcements to the parachutists across the Orne, they concluded that they risked being cut off and withdrew. By nightfall, though Caen remained in German hands, the Sword bridgehead perimeter was intact and the crisis of D-Day had passed.

Though the Germans could not know it – Marcks’s gloomy prognosis was an inspired guess – their opportunity to extinguish the invasion at its outset had now passed. On 7 and 8 June the next nearest Panzer division, the 12th SS (Hitler Youth), came forward to assault the Canadians in their bridgehead west of Caen and inflicted heavy losses on them, but the Hitler Youth failed to break through to the sea; a Germany army officer reported seeing some ‘crying with frustration’. Meanwhile the invaders were linking hands across the gaps that separated Sword from Juno and Gold and the British from the American beaches (the British were joined to Omaha on 10 June, Omaha to Utah by 13 June), as their navies simultaneously outstripped the enemy in the race to bring reinforcements to the battlefront. The explanation of the Allies’ success in ‘the battle of the build-up’ is simple. The Channel was a broad highway, wholly under Allied control; only a few ships were lost to mines and E-boat attack; and, although some of the new ‘schnorkel’ submarines succeeded in reaching the Channel from Brittany, they suffered heavy losses, so the general effect was trifling. By contrast, not only was the carrying capacity of the French roads and railways grossly inferior to that of the Allied transport fleet, but the whole interior of northern France lay under the eye of the Allied air forces, which, from 6 June onwards, redoubled their pre-invasion efforts to destroy the transport infrastructure and shot at anything that moved in daylight. Rommel himself was to be severely wounded in a ground attack by a British fighter while driving in his staff car on 17 July.

Even if Hitler had allowed reinforcements for the Seventh Army to be drawn wholesale from the Fifteenth, First and Nineteenth, they would have found great difficulty in reaching the battlefield at any rapid pace. As it was, he forbade the transfer of units from the Fifteenth, the nearest army, until the end of July, lest the ‘second invasion’ materialise in the Pas de Calais, and he only grudgingly released others from the First and Nineteenth. The Panzer divisions moved first; the 9th and 10th SS Panzer, returning from a counter-offensive mission in Poland, took four days to cross Germany but a further eleven days to reach Normandy from the French frontier, entirely as a result of air attack. The march of the unmechanised divisions was even more laborious. The 275th Division, for example, took three days to cover thirty miles from Brittany to Normandy (6-8 June) and then another three days to reach its battle positions. Allied reinforcement divisions were meanwhile moving from southern England to Normandy in less than twenty-four hours. The first month of the Normandy battle therefore resolved itself into a struggle between arriving Allied formations that were attempting to seize ground deemed essential to the development of a successful offensive and break-out, and German mobile divisions seeking to nail and wear them down. The essential ground for which the Americans struggled, the Cotentin and the port of Cherbourg, lay within the bridgehead (they reached the Atlantic coast of the peninsula on 18 June); for the British the essential ground was Caen and its environs, from which they could plunge into the open plains that led directly to Paris a hundred miles away.

Montgomery had hoped to take Caen on 6 June; when the effort failed, he launched three separate attacks to take the city. A local offensive by the Canadians was contained by the 12th SS Panzer Division on 7-8 June; an armoured attack west of Caen on 13 June was largely defeated by one of the few Tiger tank battalions in Normandy; finally a large offensive by the 15th Scottish Division (26 June to 1 July), codenamed Epsom, was blunted by the recently arrived 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions. At its last gasp, Operation Epsom secured ground across the river Odon, a tributary of the Orne which joined it at Caen. The most advanced position, the village of Gavrus, was taken and held by the 2nd Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders (the ‘thin red line’ of Balaclava), which had been forced to surrender at Saint-Valery four years earlier and been reconstituted in Britain since. However, an attempt by the supporting tanks of the 11th Armoured Division to break out into the open country south of the Odon failed and after five days of costly fighting – 4020 men had been killed or wounded – Epsom was called off.

The Americans meanwhile were overcoming the German defenders of the Cotentin, the 243rd, 709th, 91st and 77th Divisions. Two of these, the 77th and 91st, were good-quality formations; the attacking American formations, the 4th, 9th, 29th and 90th Divisions, were inexperienced and unprepared for the difficulty of the terrain. The hedgerows, backbone of the soon to be infamous
bocage
country, were field boundaries planted by the Celtic farmers 2000 years earlier. Over two millennia their entangled roots had collected earth to form banks as much as ten feet thick. ‘Although there had been some talk in the UK before D-Day,’ wrote General James Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division, ‘none of us had really anticipated how difficult they would be.’ Later in the campaign, the Americans fitted their Shermans with ‘hedgedozers’, but in June 1944 each hedgerow was impenetrable to tanks, as well as to fire and view. To the Germans they offered almost impregnable defensive lines at intervals of 100 or 200 yards. To the attacking American infantry they were death traps. Before them the green American infantry lost heart, forcing Bradley, the First Army commander, to call too often on the overtired parachutists to lead the assault. The ‘All American’ and ‘Screaming Eagles’ never flinched from the task; but the cumulative effect of losses in their ranks threatened these superb formations with dissolution. Lieutenant Sidney Eichen, of the incoming 30th Division, encountering a group of paratroopers in the Cotentin asked, “’Where are your officers?”, and they answered: “All dead.” He asked, “Who’s in charge, then?”, and some sergeant said, “I am”. I looked at the unshaven, red-eyed GIs, the dirty clothes and the droop in their walk, and I wondered: is this how we are going to look after a few days of combat?’

Step by step, however, the Germans were forced back into the perimeter of Cherbourg. Hitler planned to hold the French ports as fortresses – as he had done in the Crimea and was to do in the Baltic states – so as to deny them to the enemy, whatever ground was lost in the hinterland. On 21 June he signalled to General Karl Wilhelm von Schlieben, the port commander, ‘I expect you to fight this battle as Gneisenau once fought in the defence of Colberg’ (one of the epics of Prussia’s resistance against Napoleon in 1807). Five days later Cherbourg fell; the commander of the citadel requested the Americans to fire artillery at the main gate, to give him a pretext for surrender. Immediately afterwards he and all his men marched out under the white flag. On 26 June Hitler demanded that Rundstedt inaugurate court-martial investigations against all who could be held responsible. General Friedrich Dollmann, commander of the Seventh Army, whose headquarters directed the Normandy battle, took poison the same night. There had been many suicides in the Red Army in 1941 but few so far in the Wehrmacht; as the shades drew in around the Reich the number would grow.

Mid-June 1944 was a time of desperate crisis for Hitler, the worst he had faced since the surrender of Stalingrad seventeen months earlier. Although on 12 June he had at last opened his secret-weapons campaign against Britain, the launch rate of the V-1s was much lower than hoped, about eighty a day, of which only half reached London, and there were many misfires. One rogue flying-bomb crashed directly on to Hitler’s command bunker at Margival on 17 June during the course of the only visit he made to France throughout the Normandy battle. Moreover, although the danger in the west was great, a crisis on the Eastern Front now suddenly compounded his strategic difficulties. On 22 June, the third anniversary of Barbarossa, the Red Army had opened Operation Bagration, which, in six weeks of relentless armoured attack, destroyed Army Group Centre and carried the Russian line 300 miles westward from White Russia to the banks of the Vistula outside Warsaw; thirty divisions, 350,000 German soldiers, were killed, wounded or captured in the catastrophe.

During those terrible weeks of Bagration, the
Westheer
in Normandy continued to lose men in thousands but eventually succeeded in holding a line of defence. This illusory stability on the Normandy front after the fall of Cherbourg therefore brought a welcome sense of relief to Hitler’s twice-daily situation conferences at Rastenburg. In early July, despite a continuing erosion of the Seventh Army’s infantry strength, which was being ground away by incessant attrition in the hedgerow fighting, the perimeter of the bridgehead seemed to have been ‘nailed down’. Montgomery had commited himself to the capture of Caen; having failed to capture it on 6 June, he now conceived the scheme of using it as a focal point for successive blows which would destroy the German mobile forces while the Allies accumulated reserves for the break-out. On 19-21 June reinforcement of the bridgehead was interrupted by a great Channel gale, which wrecked the American and damaged the British Mulberry harbours. Improvisation, however, soon made good the capacity, so that by 26 June there were already twenty-five Allied divisions ashore, with another fifteen in Britain on their way, to oppose fourteen German. That represented not only a quarter of the
Westheer
but two-thirds, eight out of twelve, of its Panzer divisions. Hitler may have been able to convince himself that the invasion had been brought under control. Rundstedt could not; on 5 July he advised Hitler to ‘make peace’ and was at once relieved as OB West by Kluge. Montgomery, daily informed by Ultra intelligence of the rising losses suffered by the
Westheer
, stuck resolutely to his scheme of making Caen ‘the crucible’ of the Normandy battle.

On 7 July, after the RAF dropped 2500 tons of bombs on Caen, virtually completing the destruction of William the Conqueror’s ancient capital, the British 3rd and 59th and Canadian 3rd Divisions advanced on the city. They failed to take the centre but occupied all its outskirts. This operation, codenamed Charnwood, almost isolated Caen from the rest of the German positions in Normandy. There was evidence too that continuing American pressure was also drawing enemy armour away towards the base of the Cotentin, where it was planned that the ultimate break-out should erupt. Montgomery therefore decided that one more blow would bring on the climactic struggle with the Panzers that he sought and clear the way into the open country that led towards Paris. This new offensive was to be called Goodwood and would be mounted from the ‘airborne bridgehead’ east of the Orne into the corridor between that river and the Dives. Only one stretch of high ground, the Bourguébus ridge, closed the exit from that corridor to the high road towards Paris.

Goodwood, involving all three British armoured divisions in Normandy, the Guards, 7th and 11th, began on 18 July. It was preceded by the heaviest aerial ‘carpet’ bombardment yet staged in the campaign, took the defenders completely by surprise, and left the survivors trembling with shock. German tanks were overturned by the concussions and prisoners collected in the early stages of the advance stumbled to the rear as if drunk. By mid-morning the British tanks were halfway to their objectives and success seemed certain. Then the German army’s extraordinary qualities of resilience and improvisation were asserted: Hans von Luck, a regimental commander of the 21st Panzer Division, arrived on the battlefield straight from leave in Paris to find pockets of artillery and armour which had escaped the bombardment and hastily co-ordinated a defence. While the gunners, including those of a Luftwaffe anti-aircraft battery, began to engage and slow the advancing British tanks, the engineer battalions of the 1st SS Panzer Division – German engineers (
Pioniere
) were used to acting as infantry in an emergency – hastily dug in on the crest of Bourguébus ridge, while the tanks of both the 1st SS and the 12th SS Panzer Divisions were hurried forward to form an anti-tank screen. By the time the British 11th Armoured Division had forced its way through to the foot of the ridge it was mid-afternoon; and, as the British tanks began to deploy to climb it, they were caught by salvoes of 75-mm and 88-mm fire from the high ground above. The leading squadron of the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry went up in flames on the spot. The 23rd Hussars, coming to their rescue, were hit as hard. ‘Everywhere wounded and burning figures ran and struggled painfully for cover,’ the regimental history recorded, ‘while a remorseless rain of armour-piercing shot riddled the already helpless Shermans. All too clearly we were not going to “break through” that day. . . . Out of the great array of armour that had moved forward to battle that morning, one hundred and six tanks now lay crippled or out of action in the cornfields.’