Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (33 page)

Once the Allies were firmly established ashore, the only sane strategic course open to the Germans was precisely that which Hitler’s madness would not allow – a progressive, carefully ordered retirement forcing the Allies to fight hard for every gain. The Germans would have been relieved of one immense handicap if they could have fought beyond the range of Allied naval gunfire. Southern France could have been abandoned, releasing the forces of Army Group G to support the decisive battle in Normandy. Some writers have sought to suggest that if the Allied FORTITUDE deception plan had been less successful, and if powerful elements of Fifteenth Army had been freed early in the campaign to fight for Normandy, the Germans might even have emerged victorious.
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It is impossible to accept this. With stronger forces the battles would have been much harder, and Allied losses and delays even more severe. But while much has been said above about the
shortcomings of British and American forces in attack, there was no doubt of their fighting prowess in defence. Then, all the terrain factors working for the Germans would operate for Montgomery’s divisions, and the British army especially would fight in circumstances in which it always excelled. Overwhelming Allied air and firepower would have disposed of even the strongest German counter-attack in Normandy long before it reached the sea, although a thrust in bad weather, of the kind that crippled Allied air support in the Ardennes, could have caused the Allied high command serious concern.

Much speculation has been lavished upon the extent to which the activities of the anti-Hitler plotters, most notably Rommel’s Chief of Staff, General Hans Speidel, contributed to the difficulties of the German defence. It is suggested that certain key divisions, including 116th Panzer, were kept back from the battle in the Pas de Calais to support the conspiracy. This debate was clouded by the self-serving post-war testimony of Speidel and others when they were seeking to establish their credentials as anti-Nazis. There can be no doubt of Rommel’s sincerity in expecting a second Allied invasion. He devoted precious days to visiting formations of Fifteenth Army, checking their state of readiness, adjusting their deployments. 116th Panzer was edged nearer the coast in two separate moves following visits by Rommel, which bewildered officers of the unit who expected to be ordered to Normandy, but seem most unlikely to have been related to the machinations of the 20 July plotters. Much more serious than any tampering of this kind was the vacuum in German intelligence. The second most important factor in the German defeat in Normandy, after inferiority of resources, was the blindness of the high command. Almost totally devoid of air reconnaissance, with every agent in Britain under British control, lacking any breakthrough in Allied codes and aided only by the fruits of low-grade wireless interception and prisoner interrogation on the battlefield, Rommel, von Rundstedt and von Kluge knew pathetically little of their enemies’ potential strength or plans. Ignorance, plain ignorance, contributed much
more to their failure than any possible acts of deliberate deceit by conspirators among the intelligence staffs. A critical contributory factor to this, as to so much else, was the dead hand of Hitler. More than any other aspect of military operations, intelligence must be conducted in an atmosphere unhampered by preconceptions. Yet Hitler’s generals, above all in the latter half of the war, were never permitted to assess their predicament freely, and to act in accordance with their findings. Every act of military planning was conducted within the straitjacket of Hitler’s manic instructions, which consistently ran counter to reality and logic. In such a climate, in absolute contrast to that surrounding the brilliantly conducted intelligence operations of the Allies, it becomes far less surprising that Rommel and so many of his colleagues were deluded by the fantasy of FUSAG’s threat to the Pas de Calais. Their confidence, their flair and imagination, their belief in themselves, were sapped and corroded by years of serving a lunatic who lacked the military ability which served the other great dictator, Stalin, so well. The German generals were conducting a campaign in which, after the first days, they had no faith, by methods wholly inimical to all their instincts and training. It is difficult to believe that anything they might have done, in these circumstances, would significantly have altered the course of events.

The glory of German arms in Normandy – and it was glory, in however evil a cause – was won by the officers and men at divisional level and below who held the line against the Allies under intolerable conditions for more than two months. Colonel Kurt Kauffmann, operations officer of Panzer Lehr, believed that in the first few days a really determined thrust against the Americans could have driven them into the sea. Thereafter, ‘I realized that the situation was hopeless, with more than 40 per cent of our infantry gone and the tremendous Allied shelling and air activity.’
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Yet it was Kauffmann who led the dramatically successful counter-attack into Villers-Bocage on 13 June, and Panzer Lehr which
remained one of the formations most respected by their Allied opponents even after it had suffered crippling losses. ‘Should we win this war, Kruger,’ the senior signals officer of 12th SS Panzer Division remarked acidly to one of his lieutenants, ‘I shall write a book about why we should have lost it.’
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Yet no division fought with more fanatical tenacity than the Hitler Jugend, whose soldiers had an average age of 18½. ‘It was a situation for despair, but there was no alternative but to keep one’s nerve,’ said Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian, son of the great panzer leader and senior staff officer of 116th Panzer Division. ‘One had to hold before one’s eyes the memory of Frederick the Great, and perhaps also to think of the words of the American general who said that the man who wins a battle is he who can remain standing until the last five minutes.’
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Brigadier Williams said: ‘The Germans adjusted much better to new conditions than we did. By and large they were better soldiers than we were. The Germans
liked
soldiering. We didn’t.’
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General Quesada of the American IXth Air Force found afterwards that, ‘One’s imagination boggled at what the German army might have done to us without Hitler working so effectively for our side.’
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Fritz Langangke’s Panzer V
Abteilung
of 2nd SS Panzer Division was posted at St Sauveur-Lendelin in corps reserve early in July, when it was suddenly ordered forward in a crisis move to meet a new American breakthrough. He himself was directed to take his platoon to a point on the road near St Denis, and block any enemy advance along it. He asked for the position of the HKL – the main battle line – and was told that this was unknown. Late in the evening, he led his five Panthers cautiously forward, each commander straining his eyes and ears above the roar of his engine and squealing of the track for a hint of the enemy. At last there was a rattle of small-arms fire against the hull of Langangke’s tank, and he concluded that he had come far enough. The platoon pulled back to deploy on each side of the road, hull down behind a hedge.
‘It was a pretty tight night,’ said the German. The crews sat absolutely silent in their tanks, whispering when it was necessary to report by radio, listening constantly for movement in front of them. At dawn, despite their careful camouflage, one of the ubiquitous American Piper Cubs pinpointed them, and artillery fire began to fall around the position. Towards noon, men of the division’s 3rd Der Führer Panzergrenadiers belatedly arrived and began to dig in around them, while the 6th Parachute Regiment deployed on their left. Conventional wisdom demanded that the tanks should fall back at nightfall and leave the infantry to hold the positions. But Langangke understood that there could be no such refinements here, where the tanks were being employed as strong-points, and their moral support was essential to the infantry, even of an SS division.

The tank platoon held its positions for two weeks, under constant artillery fire, protected by its very proximity to the Americans, which caused the enemy gunners to fire consistently beyond the German line. At night, when the crews risked crawling out of the vehicles for an hour or two of merciful release, they could hear the American convoys moving up with supplies, and hear American voices across the still summer air. Once, the enemy attempted an infantry attack in a fashion which astonished the German veterans. They marched forward in long, leisurely files towards the Panthers,’ ‘as if they were going to a carnival’. The SS opened a withering fire, and the attack crumpled.

Langangke remembered the next attack well, for it came on his birthday, 15 July. For a time amid the shooting, he himself could see nothing from his position closed down in his tank on the left-hand side of the road. At first, he could not understand why the Americans were not attacking in his sector, but he later found that the ground in front was too soft for armour. Then one of his commanders jumped on the hull and shouted: ‘We’ve had it – hit in the turret!’ Langangke ordered him to pull back, and ran across the road to see for himself. Five Shermans were approaching. He dashed back to his own tank, and told the crew: ‘We’ve got to get
across that road.’ They felt that there was only the slimmest chance of survival once they moved from their closely camouflaged position into the open. But they had to try. At full speed, the tank roared from cover and crashed across the road in front of the Americans – ‘the longest forty metres I travelled in the war,’ said Langangke. Then the driver was braking the left track to swing to face the enemy. Still undamaged despite some shellfire, they began to engage the Shermans at point-blank range. They glimpsed dead and wounded German infantry around them, and survivors running from their foxholes to shelter in the lee of the Panther. It was obvious that the foot soldiers were close to panic. The crew urged Langangke to fire on the move, but he knew that if they did so, there was little chance of a hit. Most of the Shermans had fired one or even two rounds before the Panther began to shoot, but it was the German tank which now demonstrated its legendary killing power. A few moments later, four Shermans were burning in front of them. The fifth roared backwards into the thick brush. ‘A thing like that puts you on an unbelievable emotional level,’ said Langangke. ‘You feel like Siegfried, that you can dare to do
anything
.’

The lieutenant jumped down from his tank, to be joined by one of his other commanders, and they ran forward up the ditch by the roadside to discover what the Americans were now doing. It was common practice among tank officers of all the armies in Normandy to resort frequently to their feet, for it was too hazardous to take a tank forward among the hedges without the kind of forewarning that only ground reconnaissance could provide. The Germans found the surviving Sherman still struggling to reverse over a hedge; engine revving, it staggered backwards and forwards on the rim of the obstacle. They retired to their tanks, Langangke cursing when he tripped over an abandoned infantry
Panzerfaust
that he could have used to good effect had he noticed it on the way forward. Back in the Panther, they fired a few rounds of HE and a long burst of machine-gun fire to clear the foliage obscuring the gunner’s view of the Sherman. Then they hit it once in the turret
with an armour-piercing shell. The American tank brewed up in the inevitable pillar of oily black smoke and flame. The surviving German infantry regrouped. The Americans continued shelling the area, but launched no further major attack. Langangke’s platoon had fought one among a thousand similar actions in those weeks in Normandy, demonstrating the remarkable tenacity and skill of the panzer crews and, above all, the superiority of their tanks.

Yet it would be absurd to give the impression that the German soldier found Normandy an easy, or even a tolerable battle. While many men said later that it was a less terrible experience than the war in the east, from which most of them had come, even veterans were deeply shaken by the experience of hurling themselves again and again into action against the great steamroller of Allied resources. 2nd Panzer Division reported in July on the difficulties they faced:

Hitler’s armies had always adopted the policy of fashioning some elite divisions to provide the smashing combat power at the tip of their spear, while others – including most of the infantry formations – were equipped and manned principally to hold defensive positions between major battles. The 276th Infantry Division was a typical, moderate line formation, stationed at Bayonne on 6 June, made up to strength by combing Germany for over-age men – including many miners, who had hitherto been excused military service. Corporal Adolf Hohenstein had spent much of the war building bridges with a labour unit in Russia until he was transferred to the 276th. A 22-year-old former student mining engineer, he was much younger than most of the men around him. He found the division ‘already pretty weak. We spent too much time doing old Prussian exercises rather than field training.’ On 16 June, they entrained for Le Mans, where they offloaded in pouring rain on the 19th. Thereafter, they marched by night to the front, advancing some 20 miles at a time, passing the days feeding the horses – upon whom they were overwhelmingly dependent for transport – among the cornfields where they halted. They loved their horses, and later were deeply depressed by the terrible casualties the animals suffered.