Hitler's Panzers (50 page)

Hitler’s admonition to attack at full strength was also theoretically sensible. Kluge, however, was in no position to concentrate the divisions that were holding together his rapidly collapsing front. He managed to assemble 2nd and 116th Panzer, Das Reich, and elements of the Leibstandarte in XLVII Panzer Corps under Hans von Funck—about 300 tanks and assault guns. Funck was a first-rate tank man who had commanded 7th Panzer Division from 1941 to 1943 and XLVII Panzer Corps since March. Speed was his best force multiplier, and the panzers had not forgotten how to hit fast and hard. Going in on the night of August 6, Das Reich captured Mortain and opened the road to Avranches. On its right, the army’s 2nd Panzer drove through one American regiment and almost encircled another.

“Almost,” however, was the operative word. Funck and Kluge lacked the reserves to exploit initial successes. The Americans rallied instead of breaking. Artillery fire called in by a battalion surrounded on high ground outside Mortain took toll of Das Reich’s columns; antitank guns blocked the division’s armor. The 30th Infantry Division and elements of 3rd Armored halted and then counterattacked 2nd Panzer and Leibstandarte. Omnipresent fighter-bombers—American Thunderbolts and British Typhoons—savaged the unarmored vehicles backed up on every road in the sector. Orders to shift to the defensive were garbled or misunderstood, risking both the operation and the troops involved.

Kluge reported the attack no longer feasible. Hitler ordered it continued, sent Eberbach south to command the strike force in place of Funck, and told him to jump off on August 11. Eberbach, whose Nazi sympathy was mostly situational, reported the state of his troops was such that he could not attack before August 20. It took almost two days for him, Hausser, and Kluge, working together, to change Hitler’s mind.

Meanwhile 3rd Army took Le Mans on August 8, and II Canadian Corps mounted Operation Totalize against German positions south of Caen now weakened by the withdrawal of their panzer elements for the Mortain offensive. On the night of August 7-8 two infantry divisions, each led by three battle groups of a tank company or battalion and an infantry battalion mounted in improvised full-tracked armored personnel carriers, bit deeply into the German defenses. But the two armored divisions, one Canadian and one Polish, which were expected to complete the operation by opening the way to the Falaise road junction, were both green. They faced, moreover, a Hitler Jugend Division that moved into the gap with its ranks refilled, its tanks replaced, and a new commander, Kurt Meyer.

Cocky beyond the point of arrogance at 34, Meyer kept in touch with his forward elements by motorcycle, and had 18 broken bones to prove it. His involvement in the murder of Canadian prisoners, which earned him a sentence as a war criminal, was arguably a resume-enhancer in his particular subculture. In his first outing as a divisional commander, Meyer also proved a master of flexible defense. Supported by a Tiger battalion and by 88mm flak guns firing over open sights, Meyer’s Panthers and Panzer IVs bent, snapped back, and held. By August 10 the division was down to 35 tanks. But Falaise was still 13 miles in its rear.

By August 13 it was reasonably clear on both sides of the line that the German armies in Normandy were on the ragged edge of being surrounded. No more than a 30-mile gap remained between the Allied pincers; whatever happened on the ground, the Jabos, the fighter-bombers, would be waiting. Kluge, fighting with a piano wire around his neck, had his command convoy shot out from under him on August 14 and spent the day out of contact. On August 15 he finally prepared an order for a general retreat and informed Hitler and the High Command that withdrawal was necessary. Hitler authorized the withdrawal and simultaneously replaced Kluge with Model.

Kluge committed suicide; Model was in no position to do more than implement Kluge’s orders. At this stage the Germans’ situation was desperate but not hopeless. The Canadians were making heavy weather of the final advance on Falaise, owing in good part to Hitler Jugend, which for the second time in ten weeks fought its frontline units to near destruction. Eberbach’s panzers were still holding on along the southern flank. German staffs also knew how to organize retreats; one might say they were becoming specialists in the subject.

The problem lay in implementation. The long-standing postwar debate among British, Canadian, and US soldiers and scholars over exactly who failed to close the Falaise pocket, and why, has tended to obscure the actual results of withdrawing through a steadily shrinking bottleneck. The full strength of Allied tactical air power came into play. Artillery, even tank guns, joined in to create a gauntlet of fire defying all efforts to break through it. Second and 9th SS Panzer Divisions bought time and space on August 19-20 against an isolated 1st Polish Armored Division. But when the tallies were cast, 10,000 Germans were dead, 50,000 were prisoners, and the Normandy campaign was over.

The question now was whether the Germans could retreat faster than the Allies could pursue them. Continuous air strikes combined with a suddenly burgeoning French and Belgian Resistance to inflict constant nagging losses. The panzers, army and SS, had salvaged a surprising number of men, but their AFV strengths were frequently counted in single digits. By early September Army Group B was down to 100 tanks—2,200 had been lost. Not only damaged tanks, but most of the field repair facilities as well had been abandoned.

The resulting decision was to withdraw the bulk of the panzers behind the Westwall, into Germany, for reequipment. German armor nevertheless fought two sharp rear-guard actions in the autumn of 1944. The most familiar was a coincidence: the dropping of the British 1st Airborne Division onto II SS Panzer Corps and its 9th and 10th Divisions around Arnhem. Two bodies cannot occupy the same space. Whatever the strategic possibilities of Operation Market-Garden, its execution reflected a combination of groupthink and hubris at all command levels, particularly culpable in discounting intelligence reports of a mechanized German presence.

The “bridge too far” is better understood in British paratrooper John Frost’s words as “a drop too many.” A World War II airborne division had no chance in a close-quarters, stand-up fight with two armored divisions, even in the midst of refitting, unless it confronted an extremely obliging enemy. German corps commander Wilhelm Bittrich, in the Waffen SS since 1934, had led Das Reich, then Hohenstaufen capably. His division COs, Walter Harzer and Heinz Harmel, were both in their thirties, both “fast-burners” who had proven themselves in Normandy. Taken fully by surprise, the SS panzers reacted promptly and with deadly effect. Arguably more remarkable was their punctilious concern for red crosses, white flags, and soldierly honor.

Farther south the Lorraine campaign pitted George Patton against a reconfigured 5th Panzer Army, and both of them against weather and terrain. The Lorraine plateau, surrounded by natural barriers, with its rivers running north-south, and with successive lines of high ground that had shaped tactics in earlier wars, did not lend itself to sweeping mobile operations even apart from the overlapping networks of man-made fortifications that crisscrossed the region. Constant rain turned fields into glutinous mud. “I can imagine no greater burden,” wrote a frustrated Patton, “than to be the owner of this nasty country where it rains every day and where the whole wealth of the people consists in assorted manure piles.”

The Americans were short of fuel and replacements. The Germans were short of everything except experience—and some of that experience was questionable. Fifth Panzer Army was led by Hasso von Manteuffel. He had commanded a battalion, a regiment, and a brigade of panzer grenadiers in Russia, a division in North Africa, and finally 7th Panzer Division and Grossdeutschland in the east. Like most of his contemporaries he led from the front, and was enough of a Hitler favorite to be promoted directly to army command despite the impeccably aristocratic background that gave him the nickname “panzer baron.”

Half his armor strength was in divisions that had been shot to pieces since June 6; the other half consisted of four newly organized panzer brigades. Ideally including a battalion each of Panthers and Panzer IVs and a fully mechanized panzer grenadier battalion, these brigades were originally intended as mobile reserves to counter enemy breakthroughs before they could become breakouts. Their commanders and cadres were largely Eastern Front veterans. However, they lacked the staying power to cope with the levels of artillery and air support available through US communications systems. They lacked the experience and training to counter small- unit tactics far more flexible than anything encountered in Russia. Not least, they often lacked a maintenance element to repair damaged tanks and salvage broken-down ones. That meant rapid, permanent declines in armored strength.

The brigades were also the only reinforcements available for the Lorraine counterattack. In preliminary operations, the 106th under Franz Bake, among the best of the panzers’ regimental-level COs, took the 90th Infantry Division by surprise before dawn on August 8. By late afternoon, three-quarters of Bake’s men were down and only nine of his original 47 AFVs were still operational. On September 13, a French armored battle group encircled and annihilated the 112th Panzer Brigade: a fight at even odds that prefigured the fate of the general offensive launched five days later.

Fifth Panzer Army’s attack was structured along the lines of the ripostes at which the Germans had become so expert in Russia. This was the first time Patton’s army had faced one of these sophisticated, multiple-axis strokes on a large scale. In some of the heaviest armored fighting since Normandy, 4th Armored Division took advantage of fog to come to close quarters with the Panzers at Arracourt on September 19, claiming a kill ratio of ten to one and showing comprehensive battalion-level superiority over German units that made such un-German mistakes as reading maps incorrectly. Manteuffel was ordered to push on even as losses increased beyond prospect of immediate replacement. On September 29 his superiors finally ordered him to stand down. Of more than 600 tanks and assault guns initially committed, almost 500 had been lost for no advantage in particular.

THE SLOWDOWN OF the armored war in the West offers an opportunity to address the campaign’s major technical subtext: the quality of Allied armor. For practical purposes that means the Sherman tank. Three major variations of the M4 tank fought in Northwest Europe: the original M4, the M4a3 with a 76mm high-velocity gun, and the Firefly, a British variant mounting their 17-pounder antitank gun. Shermans were the principal equipment of the American, Canadian, French, and Polish armored formations, plus two of the three British armored divisions and four of their seven three-battalion independent brigades. For good and ill, it was a Sherman war.
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The image of victory in the West achieved by throwing thousands of tanks against the enemy’s hundreds remains one of the major tropes in the historiography of World War II. An anecdote that developed in many versions during the final months of World War II describes a German officer boasting to his American captors of the superiority of German weaponry. When asked why, if his hardware was so good, he was the one in the POW cage, the answer was, “I had a battery of 88s. The Americans kept sending tanks down the road. We kept knocking them out. We ran out of ammunition. You didn’t run out of tanks.”

The other side of that story is the Germans’ grim nickname for the Sherman as the “tommy cooker,” recognition of the Sherman’s propensity for bursting into flame before the crew could get out. Allied equivalents—the polite ones—were “Zippo” and “Ronson.” A continually growing body of technically and tactically oriented works concedes the mechanical reliability of US tanks but emphasizes shortcomings in armor protection and firepower by comparison not only to the German Panzer IVs, Panthers, and Tigers, but the Soviet Union’s T-34s and the KV/JS family of heavy tanks.

Underlying the discussion is the assumption that American industry could have manufactured and distributed armored fighting vehicles of any kind desired and in any numbers requested. Between 1942 and 1945, the United States manufactured almost 50,000 Shermans. To this figure can be added over 6,000 Grants and Lees, with their sponson-mounted 75mm cannon, and another 7,000 plus of the M3/M5 family of light tanks. Common sense correspondingly indicates that the technical shortcomings of US tanks vis-à-vis their principal opponents reflected policy decisions rather than production capacities.

American tank development between the wars was structured by a consistent commitment to mobility and reliability over gun-power and armor protection. In that sense the Germans and Americans had more in common than is generally understood—and for many of the same reasons. The Armored Force created in 1940 took most of its immediate cues from the Germans’ experience in France. Those successes were understood—legitimately—as greatest and most cost-effective when achieved by maneuver as opposed to combat. US tanks were similarly projected for use in masses, by divisions and corps, as instruments of penetration and exploitation as opposed to breakthrough. Those missions were perceived as demanding above all speed and reliability. In 1940 those qualities were technologically easier to incorporate in a light tank—especially for a country with no significant experience in tank design and manufacture.

Fast, reliable light tanks were by no means an end in themselves. Mediums would be necessary to break resistance too heavy for the light tanks and to serve as a counterattack force when necessary. Tables of organization for armored divisions initially called for a ratio of one medium regiment to two light ones. After the Tunisian campaign that proportion was reversed. The Sherman’s gun proved effective at up to 2,500 yards firing armor-piercing ammunition. Its high-explosive shells were devastating not only to infantry positions (a major original purpose of the medium tank) but against dug-in antitank guns as well.