Das Reich (14 page)

At 6 pm on 6 June, General De Gaulle broadcast to France from the BBC: ‘The supreme battle has begun . . . For the sons of France wherever they may be, whatever they may be, the simple and sacred duty is to fight the enemy by every means at their command.’

The first of scores of G-3 SHAEF daily bulletins on the development of Resistance reported that, despite heavy German shortwave jamming, the Action Messages had been generally well received on the medium wave: ‘General reports indicate that the
maquis
are increasing in strength earlier than anticipated, without much interference from the Germans.’

The news of the Allied landing trickled erratically to the officers of the Das Reich. Many men heard it for the first time from exulting or nervous French civilians on the streets of Montauban or the villages in which they were quartered. Among most veterans, it inspired a sense of relief that at last the waiting and uncertainty were ended. The decisive battle had begun. But most unit commanders were acutely conscious of their shortages of equipment and transport, and the inadequate training of the new drafts. Ernst Krag, commanding the assault gun battalion, had been retraining an infantry company to make up his shortage of gunners. Heinrich Wulf’s reconnaissance battalion was still awaiting an entire company’s complement of heavy armoured cars.

Karl Kreutz, commanding the artillery, heard of the landings at the little château where he had his headquarters from his adjutant Gerstenburger, a middle-aged reserve officer who had been a bank clerk before the war. Kreutz, a robust, jovial man
unlike any stereotype of an SS officer, began urging his batteries into activity: ‘We knew that every single day was vital, every day lost was a day won for the Allies.’ His 105 mm battalion’s gunners were sadly under-trained. One entire unit lacked towing vehicles. In some of the division’s dispersals, on their own initiative officers ordered drivers to begin requisitioning French civilian trucks and cars to make good the transport shortages. Some officers and men were absent on courses and on leave. Borkmann, adjutant of Otto Pohl’s tank unit, was still on his way back from his own wedding in Silesia, and did not rejoin them until four days later, having hitch-hiked perilously in their wake. One entire tank company was absent in Germany, collecting new Panzer Vs.

As the news from Normandy filtered through the camps and parks around Montauban, there was little doubt in any man’s mind that within hours they would be ordered to entrain for a move 450 miles north to support the counter-offensive in Normandy. Yet all through that critical day of 6 June no orders from Army Group G reached the Das Reich. One of the decisive factors in the triumph of the Allied landings was the hesitant, poorly coordinated German response in the first hours of D-Day, and for that matter in the days that followed. As wave after wave of British, American and Canadian forces advanced across the beaches, the four weak infantry and one armoured division of Dollman’s 7th Army were left alone to man the defences. OKW
²
prevaricated, hypnotized by the spectre of a second landing conjured up by the brilliant Allied deception operation.

The SD’s
³
interception of the Resistance Action Messages was ignored. At 4 am, Von Rundstedt requested Berlin’s assent to move the Panzer Lehr and 12th SS Armoured Divisions against the beach-head, but received it only twelve hours later. At 6.30 am, 21st Panzer was only fifteen miles from the coast and ready to
move, but at 10 am it was ordered to shore up the defence of Caen. That afternoon, 21 Pz launched the only armoured counter-stroke of the day, without support. Its tanks reached the coast at one point before they were driven back, having lost a quarter of their strength. At 4.55 pm, Von Rundstedt telephoned 7th Army HQ, and

At 5 pm, Sepp Dietrich’s 1st SS Panzer Corps was given its first orders since the landing – to prepare to counter-attack west of Caen at first light on 7 June. In the event, Allied air and artillery action, together with the fuel shortages that crippled every German troop movement, prevented the Panzer Corps from passing its start line on the seventh. Its first, belated assault was launched the following day, 8 June. All over northern France the destruction of the rail system, the Allied fighter bomber attacks and the chronic petrol problem left units straggling over hundreds of miles of road and track as they crawled forward to the battle zone.

Yet while the signals centres of Army Group B were swamped by ill tidings of Allied success in the north, so those of Army Group G at Toulouse were receiving a torrent of messages from isolated German garrisons all over south and central France, announcing the uprising of Resistance:

First Army signalled from Bordeaux: ‘The departments of Dordogne and Corrèze are held by terrorists. Part of the department of the Indre and the town of Tulle are dominated by gangs.
⁴
The town of Limoges is besieged. Périgueux and Brive are expecting attacks by gangs. Tulle has been under attack with mortars and artillery since last night (information from the SD).’

It had been obvious for many months to the abler German commanders – above all Rommel and Von Rundstedt – that an attempt to hold every yard of Occupied France once the invasion began would be militarily disastrous, and would merely cause weakness everywhere. Yet as late as 16 June, when Von Rundstedt urged OKW to abandon all France south of the Loire and bring the sixteen infantry divisions then in southern France to join the line in Normandy, this idea was rejected as ‘politically impossible’ by Berlin.

If OKW and Army Group G had kept their heads, withdrawn their weak, and obviously panicky, local garrisons and abandoned large tracts of southern France to the Resistance, it would have avoided immense problems. The
résistants
posed no military threat to major formations, and could be disposed of at leisure once the vital battle in Normandy had been won. Instead, Army Group G now deployed piecemeal every man, gun and vehicle that could be scraped together to counter-attack
résistants
wherever they had massed. Not even the most optimistic Allied planner before the invasion had anticipated that the German High Command would
be so foolish as to commit major fighting formations against
maquisards
. Perhaps the greatest contribution that Resistance made to D-Day was now to goad the Germans into deploying against the
maquis
forces out of all proportion to the real threat that they represented. General Heinz Lammerding had argued even before D-Day that it was essential to retain control of south central France, and to suppress the
maquis
. On 5 June 1944 he drafted a memorandum to 58th Corps which bears heavily on much that followed:

Lammerding suggested a forceful propaganda offensive to drive home to the population that the miseries of repression were brought upon them by the actions of the terrorists. He proposed a wholesale seizure of vehicles and petrol stocks throughout the terrorist area, intensive sweeps and checks on movement, and the occupation of Cahors, Figeac and Brive by powerful units. Then, most formidably:

Lammerding’s memorandum was forwarded to Army Group G by 58th Corps endorsed by its commander: ‘With reference to the punitive and reprisal measures proposed by 2nd SS Pz, the general commanding heartily concurs.’

Early on 7 June, Army Group G dispatched a long signal to 58th Corps which began:

In other words, despite the onset of invasion, a version of Lammerding’s own plan was to be put into immediate effect. It was an extraordinary decision, and one which OKW would quickly regret.

At 11.15 on the morning of 7 June, signals were at last dispatched to all elements of the Das Reich warning that a move was imminent. Unit commanders were summoned to the villa on the edge of Montauban where Lammerding’s headquarters stood festooned with its aerials, busy with scurrying clerks and signallers. All that day and far into the night, around the divisional area men laboured filling tanks, assembling fuel and ammunition, checking
guns and vehicles. Most of the local population were heartily glad to see them preparing to go. But there were also partings with girlfriends, and sincere expressions of good wishes. A few girls tied flowers to the radiators of trucks and half-tracks. One gave Private Schneid a paper bag full of biscuits for the march: ‘Did her compatriots later cut off her hair for that gesture?’ he mused afterwards. Some of the SS gave the civilians with whom they had been billeted their unused ration books. Ernst Krag was saddened that he would no longer hear the elderly doctor with whom he had been billeted play the piano so beautifully. Whatever hatred the German Occupiers inspired as a mass, it is absurd to imagine that there were not moments of private sympathy, even warmth. Several German officers found that the families with whom they lodged apologized in private for being unable to greet them in public. Marguerite Rollet, one of the Frenchwomen who had a group of troopers billeted in her house, was struck by the irony that they would bring her food to supplement the rations and behaved with perfect courtesy in the house. Meanwhile, they returned from anti-partisan sweeps laden with booty from bicycle parts to the ducks and chickens of the hapless households through which they had passed.

For the divisional staff, the movement order created immense problems. Every armoured formation takes it for granted that its tracked vehicles move between battlefields by rail or transporter, for they are chronically prone to breakdown if driven for long distances on their caterpillars. On receipt of the warning order from 58th Corps, Major Stuckler at once signalled a routine request to the Corps for rail space for his tanks and assault guns, which could be of no possible value to anti-terrorist operations. To his utter astonishment it was peremptorily refused, without explanation. A heated exchange of signals followed as he remonstrated with Corps about the consequences to the tank units of a long road movement. But the order stood. The tanks and assault guns were to drive north via Figeac and Tulle. This was the first important, direct achievement of the Resistance rail-cutting
operations, of the havoc wreaked by Brooks and his men with the precious flatcars.

Next came a further furious message from the division to 58th Corps about wheeled transport. Weeks earlier they had been assured that, when the day came, they could count upon the provision of a pool of requisitioned French vehicles, sufficient to move an entire battalion. The staff had repeatedly warned Corps that unless pre-emptive action was taken, these vehicles would mysteriously disappear when they were needed. Now, indeed, their fears were fulfilled. The vehicles were gone, and every local Frenchman denied knowledge of them. Worse still, to the fury of the unit transport officers who had requisitioned vehicles on their own initiative, they were now ordered to return these. The local commander, desperate to maintain some
modus vivendi
with the local population after the Panzers had gone, insisted that no transport was to be arbitrarily commandeered. To the SS, it was another example of the feeble attitudes of local garrisons. They complied sullenly, and divisional headquarters began the difficult struggle to reorganize its formations for movement.