The Second World War (64 page)

Arras emphasised to the Germans that the most effective means of waging armoured warfare against an equal enemy was to use a combination of tanks and anti-tank weapons; and they were to learn in their desert war against the British that these tactics worked in offence as well as defence. At the First Battle of Tobruk in April 1941 the Afrikakorps broke the perimeter of the fortified port with its tanks, but many of these were quickly lost to Australian tank-hunting parties because the defenders closed the gaps behind the intruders and prevented the German infantry from following in support. These tactics of divide-and-win were shortly to be used by Rommel against the British desert army itself. In the open desert battles of Sidi Rezegh and Gazala, from November 1941 to June 1942, Rommel perfected a method whereby he engaged British tanks with his own, retreated to draw the enemy on to a screen of anti-tank guns and then advanced when the losses inflicted had robbed the British of the means to conduct a mobile defence. Motorised infantry and self-propelled artillery accompanied his advancing tanks, thus ensuring that British positions overrun could be held and consolidated.

It was a positive advantage to Rommel in his adoption of these tactics that, for extraneous reasons, the number of tanks in German Panzer divisions had been halved since 1940. Hitler’s purpose in reducing divisional tank strengths in late 1940 was to accumulate a surplus on which new Panzer divisions could be built; the number of divisions was in fact doubled between the fall of France and the opening of Barbarossa. The indirect effect of this bisection was to force German commanders to make better use of the non-tank elements of their Panzer divisions, particularly the mechanised infantry (Panzergrenadiers) and self-propelled artillery. Out of this necessity was born a true doctrine of tank-infantry-artillery co-operation which the Panzer divisions brought to a high level of practicality in 1943-4, as they found themselves progressively outnumbered by the enemy, particularly on the Russian front. Even when divisional tank strengths fell below 200 (from the 400 that had been standard in 1940), German Panzer divisions proved themselves equal or superior to much stronger Allied formations – as, for example, the 10th Panzer Division demonstrated when it routed the US 1st Armoured Division at Kasserine in Tunisia in February 1943. British and American armoured divisions followed the German pattern of organisation from mid-war onwards, shedding tank battalions and acquiring larger complements of motorised infantry and self-propelled anti-tank artillery to achieve a better balance of arms. The Americans, out of their large automotive capacity, were actually able to put their ‘armoured infantry’ into tracked carriers, with a notable improvement in mobility. Even so, the best German Panzer formations – those of the privileged SS and such favoured divisions as the army’s Lehr and the Luftwaffe’s Hermann Goering – remained superior to their Allied counterparts until, after the battles of Normandy and White Russia, the relentless effects of attrition, imposed at the front by combat and at the rear by aerial bombardment, began to depress their strengths below the level at which losses of men and equipment could be made good from the Replacement Army and the tank factories.

Superior organisation and experience alone, however, did not explain Germany’s ability to wage armoured warfare on equal terms against a coalition of industrially superior powers from early 1942 until late 1944. The quality of German armour also counted significantly in the balance. German armoured vehicles were, with only one or two exceptions, better than their equivalents in the opposing armies. British armour in particular was lamentably inferior to the German products. Though the British had invented the tank, first deployed it in action in September 1916, and largely conceived the theoretical basis of armoured warfare, they did not succeed in building an effective tank in the Second World War. That crucial balance between firepower, protection and mobility which underlies successful tank design eluded them. Their Infantry Tank Mark I, which at Arras Rommel found he could penetrate only with his eighty-eights, was strong but almost immobile. The Churchill was equally tough but scarcely faster. Only the Cromwell, which appeared in 1944 to equip the reconnaissance battalions of British armoured divisions, had speed and protection; its gun remained inadequate. As a result the British divisions of 1944 were dependent on the American Sherman for their main tank strength, but the Sherman too had defects: though fast, reliable and easy to maintain, it burnt readily and lacked gunpower. Britain’s most successful contribution to Anglo-American armoured capability was to fit its fearsome 17-pounder anti-tank gun to specially adapted Shermans, called Fireflies, which provided British armoured divisions with their principal if not only antidote to heavy German armour in 1944-5. The great merit of the Sherman, and a tribute to America’s industrial power, was that it could be manufactured in quantity. In 1943-4 the USA produced 47,000 tanks, almost all Shermans, while Germany produced 29,600 tanks and assault guns. Britain, in 1944, produced only 5000 tanks.

It was Russia, alone among Germany’s enemies, which matched its output of tanks in quality and quantity. In 1944 Soviet tank production totalled 29,000, most of which comprised the remarkable T-34. This tank owed much of its technology to the independent American designer, Walter Christie, from whom the Soviet Union bought prototypes at a time when fiscal stringency kept the US Army on a shoestring budget. To Christie’s chassis and suspension the Russians added an all-weather engine and sloped armour, as well as an effective gun, thus producing such a well-balanced design that in 1942, when Albert Speer succeeded Dr Fritz Todt as head of the German armaments industry, the German army actually considered copying it wholesale as a successor to the ageing Panzer Mark IV. That humiliating concession of technical inferiority was ultimately avoided by the production of the Mark V Panther. Although the new tank failed at Kursk – as late as January 1944 Hitler was calling it ‘the crawling Heinkel 177’ in an allusion to a disappointing bomber – it eventually justified the effort put into its development in Normandy, where it equipped many of the Panzer battalions of the SS divisions. Even in 1944, however, the Mark IV remained the Panzer arm’s mainstay. It had originated before 1939 as the final series in a ladder of designs, each larger than the one before. The Mark IV in particular had proved remarkably adaptable and had been progressively improved; finally, when equipped with a ‘long’ 75-mm gun as its main armament, it became almost a match for the T-34 itself.

Its predecessors, notably the Panzer Mark III, had also been readily adaptable as self-propelled anti-tank and ‘assault’ guns, and from February 1943 onwards, when the tank pioneer Heinz Guderian became Inspector-General of Panzer Troops, it was incorporated with the tanks into a new ‘Panzer arm’. Such weapons suffered from the disadvantage that their guns fired only in the direction that the vehicle itself was pointing; but, because they lacked complex turret machinery, they were cheap to produce, and their low profile made them difficult to detect when deployed in well-chosen defensive positions on the battlefield. Their design was rational enough to be widely imitated by the Russians as well as the Americans and British, and they largely provided the mobile firepower of the Panzergrenadier divisions like the 17th SS, which the Allies found such formidable opponents in France. The German army itself distinguished little between tanks and assault guns. Indeed, Guderian’s main difficulty in reorganising the Panzer arm in 1943 lay in overcoming the reluctance of the artillery to relinquish control of its assault guns, which, according to its senior officers, provided gunners with their sole opportunity to win the Knight’s Cross, the Wehrmacht’s ultimate decoration for bravery.

The only instrument of armoured warfare which German commanders regarded as qualitatively different from the rest was the Mark VI Tiger, which was not allotted to divisions but organised in independent battalions, kept under central control and committed to crucial offensive and counter-offensive missions. The Tiger had defects – its enormous weight was symptomatic of creeping ‘gigantism’ in German tank design which robbed it of speed while its turret traversed with ponderous deliberation: but, with its 88-mm gun and 100-mm-thick armour, it proved consistently superior, in static if not mobile operations, to every other tank of the war. The cough of the Tiger’s engine starting up in the distance was something all Allied soldiers remembered with respect.

Tigers, Panthers, Mark IVs and assault guns were all to play their part in the great armoured battle in Normandy which, culminating in the holocaust of the Falaise Gap, was about to begin at Mortain on the night of 6-7 August. Hitler, inspired as so often at the map table by a pictorial glimpse of opportunity, had decided that the outpouring of the American armies from Normandy into the narrow corridor between Mortain and the sea laid them open to a decisive counter-stroke. ‘We must strike like lightning,’ he had announced to his OKW operations staff on 2 August. ‘When we reach the sea the American spearheads will be cut off. . . . We might even be able to cut off their entire beachhead. We must not get bogged down in cutting off the Americans who have broken through. Their turn will come later. We must wheel north like lightning and turn the entire enemy front from the rear.’

It was this decision which had brought the 116th, 2nd, 1st SS and 2nd SS Panzer Divisions to stand shoulder to shoulder at Mortain, only twenty miles from the Atlantic, on the flank of General Omar Bradley’s US First Army which was streaming southwards into Brittany. Disastrously for them, for the
Westheer
and for Hitler, however, the signals which had directed their deployment had been monitored by the Ultra decryption service since 5 August; their objectives, Brécey and Montigny, were passed to Montgomery’s headquarters and four American divisions, the 3rd Armoured, 30th and 4th, with the 2nd Armoured in support, were directed to block their path down the valley of the river Sée which Hitler had designated as their avenue to the ocean.

Some 200 German tanks (in first line), attacking without artillery preparation to assist surprise, advanced in two columns either side of the Sée during the night of 6-7 August. The southern column overran the outposts of the 30th Division but was stopped when the American infantry coolly dug in on high ground, called forward the divisional tank-destroyer battalion equipped with assault-gun-type weapons, which destroyed fourteen tanks, and waited for daylight and better weather conditions to bring out the tactical aircraft which would wreak even greater damage. Thus did a quite average American infantry division deal with the vanguard of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, almost invincible sword of the Panzer arm.

On the north bank the 2nd Panzer and 1st SS Panzer (the Adolf Hitler Division, which had never failed the Führer) were stopped even more easily by the infantry of the US 9th Division; the commander of the 116th Panzer Division declined to intervene and was relieved of command. At daybreak the US 2nd Armoured Division counter-attacked; it ‘appeared to materialise out of thin air’, noted the official historian, writing at a time when the Ultra secret was still jealously guarded. The 2nd Armoured Division and rocket-firing Typhoons of the Second British Tactical Air Force, which flew 294 sorties on 7 August, reduced the 2nd Panzer Division’s tank strength to thirty that day. From Rastenburg Hitler demanded that the attack ‘be prosecuted daringly and recklessly. . . . Each and every man must believe in victory.’ As dusk fell on the Mortain battlefield, however, defeat confronted each unit which had been committed to Operation Lüttich.

Other events of 7 August increased the
Westheer
’s ordeal. On that day Montgomery had launched a new drive into the German lines at the opposite end of the bridgehead, aimed towards Falaise. It followed two recent but aborted thrusts, by the Canadians down the track of the Goodwood offensive on 25 July and by the British towards Caumont (Operation Bluecoat) on 2 August. Operation Totalise, mounted on 7 August, was not the outright success Montgomery hoped it would be, even though preceded by a carpet bombardment as heavy as that before the Americans’ Cobra two weeks before. It was again mounted by the Canadians, who met heavy resistance from their sworn enemy, the 12th SS Panzer (after a massacre of Canadian prisoners by the Hitler Youth Division early in the campaign, few of its soldiers survived capture at Canadian hands). However, the Canadians were now stronger than at any stage of the campaign; they had recently been joined by their own 4th Armoured Division and also by the émigré 1st Polish Armoured Division, which had a particular quarrel to settle with the Germans, made all the more bitter by the Poles’ awareness of the battle currently raging in Warsaw between Bor-Komorowski’s Home Army and the security troops of the German occupation force. Operation Totalise did not reach its objectives; but it thrust these two armoured divisions forward into positions from which they menaced the rear of the whole German Panzer concentration engaged in Normandy.

That concentration (less the 12th SS, which still stood on the British front) now numbered ten divisions and was grouped at the far western end of the bridgehead – in various states of disarray. Panzer Lehr, originally the German army’s ‘demonstration’ division and before 6 June the strongest in its Panzer arm, was a shadow; all four SS Panzer divisions, the 1st, 2nd, 9th and 10th, had been grievously damaged in close combat since late June; the 17th SS Panzergrenadier, weak in armour to begin with, was a cripple; the 2nd, 21st and 116th Panzer had all suffered heavy tank losses, the last in the Mortain battle; only the 9th Panzer, which had arrived in Normandy from the south of France in August, remained largely intact. Even the 9th Panzer did not have its full complement of 176 tanks (half Mark IV, half Panther); average tank strengths were half the figure, and Panzer Lehr had almost no tanks at all.