The Second World War (63 page)

The correct figure was 126 from 11th Armoured alone, more than half its strength; the Guards Armoured Division had lost another sixty in its first battle. Goodwood was close to being a disaster. Montgomery’s post-battle protestations that it had not really been expected to produce a break-out were treated with impatience by both Churchill and Eisenhower. Churchill’s patience in any case had been wearing thin at the slow pace of the advance inland. It was D + 43 on 20 July, the day the Goodwood fighting finally spluttered out, and the ‘phase lines’ drawn on the planners’ maps before D-Day had forecast that the Allies should be halfway to the Loire by that date. As it was they had not yet even reached the projected line for D + 17. Montgomery had to argue at length to Churchill to persuade him that his grand design retained its logic and that a result would not now be long delayed.

Compulsively self-justifying though he was, Montgomery was right both to put the disappointment of Goodwood behind him and to argue that it had served a purpose. For it had indeed pulled Army Group B’s armoured reserves back towards the British front at the moment when they had been concentrating to meet what growing evidence indicated was a great American offensive in the making. During July the Americans had been fighting a horrible and costly battle in the
bocage
south of the Cotentin. Between 18 and 20 July the 29th and 35th Divisions had lost respectively 2000 and 3000 men in the battle for Saint-Lô – five times the number of casualties suffered by the British armoured divisions in the same period east of Caen. German losses were even worse: the 352nd Division, the Americans’ principal opponent, still in action after its stubborn defence of Omaha beach, almost ceased to exist after Saint-Lô. Its casualties went to swell the total of 116,000 suffered by the Seventh Army since 6 June, for which only 10,000 replacements had come from the
Ersatzheer
(Replacement Army) in Germany. Material losses had been equally severe: against 2313 tanks produced in German factories in May-July, 1730 had been destroyed, one-third of them in France, but by the end of June only seventeen replacements had arrived. The strength of the perimeter drawn around the Allied bridgehead was stretched close to breaking-point; and it was about to be subjected to a powerful blow at its weakest point.

On the morning of 25 July – after a false start when American aircraft bombed their own infantry – four American infantry and two armoured divisions moved to the assault west of Saint-Lô behind a heavy carpet bombardment. They belonged to General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins’s VII Corps. He had a reputation for hard driving of subordinates which the day’s events justified. General Fritz Bayerlein, commanding Panzer Lehr in VII Corps’s path, testified to the weight of the attack: ‘After an hour I had no communication with anybody, even by radio. By noon nothing was visible but dust and smoke. My front lines looked like the face of the moon and at least 70 per cent of my troops were knocked out – dead, wounded, crazed or numbed.’ The next day opened with another carpet bombardment. Progress, less than a mile the day before, increased to three and the American 2nd Armoured Division reached positions from which it stood poised to break out. Kluge, OB West and also the new commander of Army Group B, ‘sent word’, Bayerlein recalled, ‘that the line along the Saint-Lô-Périers road must be held at all costs, but it was already broken.’ He promised reinforcement by an SS tank battalion with sixty Tigers; it arrived with five. ‘That night’, Bayerlein went on, ‘I assembled the remnants of my division south-west of Canisy. I had fourteen tanks in all. We could do nothing but retreat.’ Panzer Lehr had once been perhaps the best and certainly the strongest armoured division in the German army. Its condition was an index of the state to which the
Westheer
had been reduced by six weeks of fighting in Normandy. Hitler was nevertheless adamant that the crumbling front must be restored and the situation reversed.

Five days before Cobra, as the American breakthrough operation was codenamed, a group of army officers had made an attempt to assassinate Hitler in his headquarters. On 20 July, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a disabled veteran who held a staff appointment with the
Ersatzheer
, placed a bomb under the conference table at Rastenburg and then escaped to fly to Berlin and direct a conspiracy designed to replace the Nazi leadership throughout Germany with military appointees. By a succession of mischances the conspiracy miscarried. The bomb wounded but did not kill Hitler. An early misapprehension that the explosion was an act of sabotage was corrected. The signals officer who belonged to the conspiracy was accordingly prevented from interrupting outward communication from Rastenburg. Goebbels was thus able to mobilise soldiers loyal to Hitler in a military reaction against the conspiracy in Berlin. The conspirators were quickly arrested, and several of them, including Stauffenberg, were shot the same evening. By nightfall the danger of a coup had been averted and Hitler, even though isolated in his Rastenburg fortress, was once again secured in power. However, the 20 July Plot understandably reinforced every one of his deep-laid prejudices against the higher ranks of the army of which Stauffenberg was the epitome. An aristocrat, a devout Christian, a cavalryman – Hitler hated not only the church and the nobility but also horses, riding, equestrian apparel and everything they represented – Stauffenberg had been drawn into the anti-Hitler conspiracy because he recognised the mortal danger of defeat into which the Führer had led the fatherland and anticipated the disgrace and punishment that the iniquity of Nazism would bring to his countrymen in its wake. Stauffenberg’s motives, in short, were patriotic rather than moralistic, though his moral sense was deeply engaged by the conspiracy. For both his patriotism and his morality Hitler had only hatred and contempt, feelings which he automatically transferred to all he identified as belonging to Stauffenberg’s social class and professional caste. Far too many of them, he believed, officered the
Westheer
. General Heinrich Graf von Stülpnagel, the military governor of France, was certainly in the plot; so too, Hitler believed, was Rommel, even though he came from outside the ‘old’ officer class and since 17 July had been lying seriously injured in hospital. He had also a suspicion, though not proof, of the complicity of Kluge, since 4 July the linchpin of the battle against the ‘Anglo-Saxons’ as both OB West and direct commander of Army Group B. Only a resolute – and successful – riposte to the American breakthrough at Saint-Lô would convince him that his suspicions were misfounded and restore his belief in the dedication of the
Westheer
to the National Socialist revolution.

The test of the
Westheer
’s loyalty – also designed to produce a strategic reversal of the military situation in the west – was to be a counter-attack with all available armour into the flank of the American spearhead which was driving south from Saint-Lô between the
bocage
country and the sea towards the interior of Brittany. On 2 August an emissary from Rastenburg, Walter Warlimont, deputy chief of OKW’s operations staff, reached Kluge’s headquarters at La Roche-Guyon, believing he was to discuss with the field marshal the question of withdrawing to a defensive position deeper within France. On his arrival, however, he discovered that Hitler had meanwhile sent in orders to begin a counter-offensive as soon as possible, to start from Mortain and drive to the sea, and that he expected its results – as Warlimont discovered when he returned to Rastenburg on 8 August – to lead to a ‘rolling up of the entire Allied position in Normandy’.

The Mortain counter-attack began on 7 August. It involved, immediately, four Panzer divisions, the 116th, 2nd, 1st SS and 2nd SS, and was intended to draw in four more, the 11th and 9th from the south of France, which Hitler had already promised to Kluge on 27 July, and the 9th and 10th SS from the Caen sector. Together these eight divisions, deploying 1400 tanks, would lead the
Westheer
, in an operation codenamed Lüttich (Liège), towards a great counter-encirclement of the invaders, the consequences of which would match Ludendorff’s breakthrough into the rear of the French armies at Liège exactly thirty years earlier to the day. As Hitler had told Warlimont on the eve of his mission to Kluge, ‘The object remains to keep the enemy confined to his bridgehead and there to inflict serious losses upon him in order to wear him down and finally destroy him.’

The battle of which Operation Lüttich marked the opening stage was to develop into the largest clash of armour in any of the campaigns fought on the Western Front, if not the largest of the war. Only the Battle of Kursk, fought the previous July, had assembled a larger number of German Panzer divisions – twelve, against ten in Normandy; but at Kursk the German offensive had been defeated by minefields and anti-tank guns rather than by mobile riposte. The Battle of the Falaise Gap, by contrast, took the form of a gigantic manoeuvre of twenty armoured divisions (ten German, ten Allied), tank against tank, over 800 square miles of countryside and extending through the two weeks of frenzied movement and violent combat.

By the summer of 1944 the mystique of
Blitzkrieg
had been long overlaid. In the summer of 1940 Kleist and Guderian had been able to count on the mere appearance – or even rumour – of tanks to panic infantry into flight or surrender. Now commanders could no longer have such expectations. Green or shaken infantry would, of course, still run at the approach of tanks, and had done so on numerous occasions in Normandy; but experienced infantrymen had learned for themselves, as they had been taught, that flight was even more dangerous than keeping to their positions in the face of armoured attack. For by 1944 tanks did not operate, as they had in their palmy days, as independent spearheads; they advanced only in close concert with specialist infantry of their own, the Panzergrenadiers, and under the protective bombardment of supporting artillery. Defending infantry who left their trenches to make for safety thus exposed themselves to several sorts of fire: that of the tanks themselves, that of the tanks’ foot soldiers and that of their associated gunners. In the face of this most terrifying of all assaults, therefore, the defenders struggled to hold their ground, counting on their own anti-tank weapons to hold the attackers at bay while calling for their own artillery support and air strike – if that were available – and hoping that friendly tanks would come forward to do battle with those of the enemy. In short, by 1944 the tank had ceased to be an autonomous instrument of strategy but had taken its place in an elaborate machinery of tactical attrition, which achieved its effects by a cumulative wearing-down of resistance rather than by a rapier-like penetration of the enemy’s front.

The dethronement of the tank from the status of revolutionary ‘war-winning’ weapon to that of workaday tool of tactics followed a pattern long established in the history of armaments. The ironclad, the torpedo and the machine-gun had each at first appearance been hailed as making defence, even war itself, ‘impossible’; to each, in turn, an antidote had been found and the ‘revolutionary’ weapon subsumed within a slightly altered and more complex system of war-making than had prevailed before. However, although the tank had undergone a similar displacement, its autonomy had been doubted from the outset and disputed energetically between the two great theorists whose names will always be associated with its development. Major-General J.F.C. Fuller, who had masterminded the first great tank offensive at Cambrai in 1917, saw no future place for any but the tank arm on the battlefield; Basil Liddell Hart, his friendly rival in their paper debates of the 1920s and 1930s, argued that the tank would not win battles single-handed and that all arms, including infantry and artillery, would in future be mechanised, to produce armies which would resemble fleets of larger and smaller armoured and mobile ‘land ships’.

Liddell Hart looked too far into the future; not until forty years after the end of the Second World War would even the most advanced states command the wealth and industrial resources to mechanise their field armies completely. It was nevertheless he, not Fuller, who saw the future true. Already by 1944 ‘land fleets’ existed in embryo. It was with a land fleet of Panzer and Panzergrenadier divisions that OB West had striven to defeat the Allied invasion; and it was with a land fleet of armoured and mechanised divisions that Montgomery and Bradley would achieve the encirclement and destruction of Army Group B. Allied tanks were to play the leading part in blunting the German attack which initiated the Battle of the Falaise Gap and then in making the advances which drew the line of encirclement around the enemy; but the ground they won was consolidated and held by their accompanying infantry and the work of destruction within the Falaise pocket was completed by their supporting artillery and air squadrons. Falaise was an all-arms battle, and its nature exactly depicts the extent to which armoured tactics had been rationalised since the early days of the war, when the Panzer generals had acted as if invincible.

The diminution of the tank can in fact be traced to an early date in the war’s development. Gamelin, for all his ineptitude of decision, correctly perceived the proper riposte to the Panzer thrust immediately after the crossing of the Meuse on 13 May 1940; it was to aim armoured counter-thrusts at the neck joining tank spearhead to infantry shaft. Two such counter-thrusts were mounted by de Gaulle’s 4th Armoured Division at Laon on 18 May and by Frankforce at Arras on 21 May. Unco-ordinated in time, however, and unsupported by large resources of infantry and artillery, both counter-strokes failed. It was the Germans rather than the Allies who profited by the experience of these engagements. At Arras, Rommel, commanding the 7th Panzer Division, rescued himself from over-exposure by calling into service the heavy (88-mm) anti-aircraft guns of his flak battalion to halt and turn back the charge of the Royal Tank Regiment into his divisional centre after it had evaded his armoured screen. The eighty-eights stopped the heavy British tanks – which his lightly gunned Panzers had failed to do – and saved him from a defeat which might have extinguished his career then and there.