Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (34 page)

On 2 July, they took over a sector of the front near Villers-Bocage from 12th SS Panzer, and spent their first days in the line laying mines and attempting to clear up the appalling wreckage of battle around them – dead men of every nationality, abandoned equipment, shattered vehicles. Harassing fire from British artillery taught them very quickly about the Wehrmacht’s desperate shortage of medical supplies. Hohenstein watched his friend Heinz Alles bleed to death when an artery was severed by a bullet in the leg: ‘A man was lucky if he could get an injection. The doctors could only try to do something for those with a chance of life.’ Some men’s nerve cracked very quickly. After 20 July, they convinced themselves that the shortages of supplies and ammunition and the breakdowns of administration were the fruits of treachery within their own army. In reality, of course, the entire creaking logistical
machinery sustaining the German forces in Normandy was collapsing under the strain of air attack and attrition. Morale among the soldiers of the 276th ebbed steadily: ‘The lack of any success at all affected the men very badly. You could feel the sheer fear growing. We would throw ourselves to the ground at the slightest sound, and many men were saying that we should never leave Normandy alive.’

It is important to cite the example of formations such as the 276th Infantry, indifferent soldiers, to emphasize that by no means the entire German front in France was in the hands of elite formations. Many German infantrymen were happy to seize an opportunity to be taken prisoner. They developed what they themselves called sardonically ‘the German look’, ever craning upwards into the sky, watchful for fighter-bombers. While the Tommies played brag in their slit trenches, the Germans played ‘skat’ in their foxholes a few hundred yards away, and listened to Lili Marleen on Radio Belgrade. They were as grateful as their Allied counterparts when, for a few days or even weeks, their sector of the. front was quiet, and they endured nothing worse than harassing fire and patrols. They prayed for rain and cloud to keep the
Jabos
– the
Jagdbombers
– away from them. Their greatest luxury was the capture of a few American soup cubes or tins of coffee. They pored earnestly over the English cooking instructions, and were jealously scornful of the Allies’ material riches. Few German soldiers, even of moderate units, felt great respect for the fighting qualities of their enemies. Sergeant Heinz Hickmann of the Luftwaffe Parachute Division said: ‘We had no respect whatever for the American soldier.’ Colonel Kauffmann of Panzer Lehr remarked wryly that, ‘the Americans started not too early in the morning, they liked a little bit too much comfort.’ Corporal Hohenstein reported that his men were constantly puzzled by the reluctance of the Americans to exploit their successes: ‘We felt that they always overestimated us. We could not understand why they did not break through. The Allied soldier never seemed to be trained as we were, always to try to do more than had been asked of us.’
Here was one of the keys to German tactical success on the battlefield. Colonel Brian Wyldbore-Smith, GSO I of the British 11th Armoured Division, said: ‘The Germans were great opportunists. They were prepared to act – always.’

It is striking to contrast the manner in which Allied units which suffered 40 or 50 per cent losses expected to be pulled out of the line, even disbanded, with their German counterparts, who were merely reassembled into improvised battlegroups – the
Kampfgruppen
– which were an essential ingredient of so many of the German army’s victories, and of its very survival for so many weeks in Normandy. Cooks, signallers, isolated tank platoons, stray Luftwaffe flak units, were all grist to the mill of the
Kampfgruppen
, which proved astonishingly cohesive and effective in action. When Sergeant Hans Stober of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers found the
Flakabteilung
in which he served destroyed by air attack, he saw nothing remarkable in being transferred, with his surviving men, to
Kampfgruppe Ullrich
. A few weeks later, after the collapse at Falaise, he was serving with the remnants of 116th Panzer in
Kampfgruppe Fick
. In the middle of the Normandy battle, 116th Panzer’s engineer battalion was drafted to fight as infantry and called upon to mount major ground attacks. The US First Army were surprised to discover that one of their German prisoners in mid-July was a pay corps clerk, who had been given a week’s infantry training and thrust into the line. No one could suggest that this manner of organizing an army or fighting a battle was a proper substitute for the maintenance of balanced and fully-equipped formations. But it was a critical factor in the German army’s ability to avoid utter collapse even when most of its armoured and infantry formations had been battered into ruin.

The American Colonel Trevor Dupuy has conducted a detailed statistical study of German actions in the Second World War. Some of his explanations as to why Hitler’s armies performed so much more impressively than their enemies seem fanciful. But no critic has challenged his essential finding that on almost every battlefield of the war, including Normandy, the German soldier performed more impressively than his opponents:

It is undoubtedly true that the Germans were much more efficient than the Americans in making use of available manpower. An American army corps staff contained 55 per cent more officers and 44 per cent fewer other ranks than its German equivalent. In a panzergrenadier division in 1944–45, 89.4 per cent of the men were fighting soldiers, against only 65.56 per cent in an American division. In June 1944, 54.35 per cent of the German army consisted of fighting soldiers, against 38 per cent of the American army. 44.9 per cent of the German army was employed in combat divisions, against 20.8 per cent of the American. While the US army became a huge industrial organization, whose purpose sometimes seemed to be forgotten by those who administered it, the German army was designed solely as a machine for waging war. Even the British, who possessed nothing like the reserves of manpower of the Americans, traditionally employed officers on a far more lavish scale than the German army, which laid particular emphasis upon NCO leadership.

Events on the Normandy battlefield demonstrated that most British or American troops continued a given operation for as long as reasonable men could. Then – when they had fought for many hours, suffered many casualties, or were running low on fuel or ammunition – they disengaged. The story of German operations, however, is landmarked with repeated examples of what could be achieved by soldiers prepared to attempt more than reasonable men could. German troops did not fight uniformly well. But
Corporal Hohenstein’s assertion that they were trained always to try to do more than had been asked of them is borne out by history. Again and again, a single tank, a handful of infantry with an 88 mm gun, a hastily-mounted counter-attack, stopped a thoroughly-organized Allied advance dead in its tracks. German leadership at corps level and above was often little better than that of the Allies, and sometimes markedly worse. But at regimental level and below, it was superb. The German army appeared to have access to a bottomless reservoir of brave, able and quick-thinking colonels commanding battle-groups, and of NCOs capable of directing the defence of an entire sector of the front. The fanatical performance of the SS may partly explain the stubborn German defence of Europe in 1944–45. But it cannot wholly do so, any more than the quality of the Allied armies can be measured by the achievements of their airborne forces. The defence of Normandy was sustained for 10 weeks in the face of overwhelming odds by the professionalism and stubborn skills of the entire Wehrmacht, from General of Pioneers Meise, who somehow kept just sufficient road and rail links operational to maintain a thin stream of supplies to the front, to Corporal Hohenstein and his admittedly half-hearted comrades of 276th Infantry.

The German soldier was denied the sustaining force granted to the Allied armies – the certainty of final victory. But Hohenstein claimed that he and others were motivated above all by ‘two words – “unconditional surrender”. If for the rest of my life I was to chop wood in Canada or Siberia, then I would sooner die in Normandy.’ There is no doubt that President Roosevelt’s insistence upon a public declaration of the unconditional surrender doctrine, despite Churchill’s deep misgivings, was of immense value to the Nazi propaganda machine: it stifled many Germans’ private hopes of some honourable escape from the war. They believed that defeat in Normandy, and beyond that defeat in Europe, would inaugurate a new dark age for Germany, a ghastly destiny for the German people. Their very sense of community with their American and British opponents, coupled with their view of the Russians as
barbarians from another planet, compounded their self-delusions. To the bitter end, many German soldiers harboured a sincere belief that they could make common cause with the western Allies against the Russians. To this end, they told themselves that it was essential to sustain a front until some agreement could be achieved.

There is also little doubt of the validity of the traditional view of the German soldier as naturally obedient and dedicated, far more so than most men of the Allied armies. He was a soldier, and therefore he fought. The British had come to terms with this reality over many years, but Americans were still astonished to discover the strength of this apparently unreasoning approach.

Most of the German army in Normandy followed his example.

Weapons

If the German army was a superb fighting instrument, a decisive factor in its ability to defend Normandy for so long, and to such effect, was the superiority of almost all its weapons in quality, if not in quantity, to those of the Allied ground forces. In the air and at sea, the Allies achieved a large measure of technological as well as numerical dominance in the second half of the Second World War. Yet the industrial resources of Britain and America were never applied to provide their armies with weapons of the same quality as those produced by German industry in the face of the Allies’ strategic bombing offensive. In 1942, Albert Speer and his staff took the decision, since they could not hope to match the quantitative superiority of the Allies, to attempt to defeat them by the qualitative superiority of German equipment. Feats on the battlefield, such as Captain Wittman’s ravaging of the British armoured column at Villers-Bocage, were only made possible by the extraordinary power of a Tiger tank in among even a regiment of British Cromwells. During the first weeks in Normandy, Allied tank units were dismayed to discover the ease with which their Shermans ‘brewed up’ after a single hit, while their own shells were unable to penetrate a Panther, far less a Tiger tank, unless they struck a vital spot at close range. On 24 June, Montgomery’s Chief of Staff, de Guingand, wrote to him: ‘If we are not careful, there will be a danger of the troops developing a Tiger and Panther complex . . . P. J. Grigg rang me up last night and said he thought there might be trouble in the Guards Armoured Division as regards “the inadequacy of our tanks compared with the Germans” . . . Naturally the reports are not being circulated.’
¹
Montgomery himself quashed a succession of complaints and open expressions of concern.

‘I have had to stamp very heavily on reports that began to be circulated about the inadequate quality of our tanks, equipment, etc., as compared with the Germans . . .’ he wrote to Brooke. ‘In cases where adverse comment is made on British equipment such reports are likely to cause a lowering of morale and a lack of confidence among the troops. It will generally be found that when the equipment at our disposal is used properly and the tactics are good, we have no difficulty in defeating the Germans.’
²

Montgomery knew that it was futile, indeed highly dangerous, to allow the shortcomings of Allied weapons to be voiced openly in his armies, for there was no hope of quickly changing them. The battle must be won or lost with the arms that the Allies had to hand. The Americans, characteristically, felt less disposed to keep silence about technical failure. On 3 July, Eisenhower complained formally to the US War Department about the shortcomings of many of his army’s weapons, following a meeting in France at which, ‘from Monty and Brooke E learnt that our AT equipment and our 76 mm in Shermans are not capable of taking on Panthers and Tigers.’
³
General James Gavin of the American 82nd Airborne Division described how his men first came to understand these things in Italy: