The Second World War (112 page)

‘
Some boats were coming back
after unloading,’ wrote a member of the 1st Division, ‘others were partly awash, but still struggling. Some were stuck, bottomed out, racing their motors and getting nowhere. Some were
backing up short distances and trying again… I saw craft sideways, being upturned, and dumping troops into the water. I saw craft heavily damaged by shellfire being tossed around by the waves. I saw craft empty of troops and partly filled with water as though abandoned, awash in the surf. Men were among them struggling for the pitiful protection they gave.’

Traumatized soldiers froze at the foot of the bluffs, until officers managed to force them up with the warning that they would die on the beach unless they got inland and killed Germans. The defenders had been reinforced with a small part of the 352nd Infantry Division, but not nearly as many men as some accounts have claimed. Fortunately for the Americans, the 352nd’s main reserve some 3,000 strong was first sent off on a wild-goose chase in the early hours of the morning in response to the exploding puppet paratroops, and then was wiped out by a British brigade which had advanced diagonally inland from Gold Beach. In any case, the slaughter and chaos at Omaha during the morning was enough to make General Bradley consider abandoning the beach altogether. Just in time, news came back that some groups had made it up the bluffs comparatively unscathed, and that Omaha could yet be won. A combination of a few Sherman tanks engaging the bunkers, and American and British destroyers sailing dangerously close in and firing with impressive accuracy at the German positions, also tipped the balance in the invading force’s favour.

On Gold Beach, the British 50th Division wasted little time pushing inland. One brigade halted just short of Bayeux at nightfall and took the town without casualties the next morning. The Canadian 3rd Division had a much tougher time on the Juno sector, where the Germans had fortified seaside villages and created networks of tunnels. On Sword, which ran up to the small port of Ouistreham, the British 3rd Division had trouble with the unusually high tide which delayed the landing of tanks. Minefields on either side of roads and artillery fire blocking them with blazing vehicles meant that the rapid attack inland on the city of Caen was slow off the mark. And the dogged defence of a large German bunker complex made things worse. On their flank, the 6th Airborne Division had secured its allotted area between the Rivers Orne and Dives, blowing bridges to prevent a panzer counter-attack from the east.

Montgomery’s plan was to seize Caen and the land beyond for airfields as rapidly as possible, but German resistance with machine guns and anti-tank guns concealed in solid Norman farmyards and hamlets proved far harder to crack than they had thought. Allied intelligence had also failed to spot that the 21st Panzer Division was already in the area of Caen. There was too a strange contradiction in Montgomery’s scheme. On the one hand, he wanted to take the ancient city of Caen in the first twenty-four hours of the battle, an objective which was clearly over-optimistic. On the
other, he had ordered the destruction of Caen with a massive raid by heavy bombers on 6 June, yet the rubble blocking the streets could only hinder his own troops and aid the defenders. Hardly any Germans were killed at all in the raid, while the shock and suffering of the civilian population was terrible.

Allied commanders were afraid of a great German panzer counterattack, which contributed to their excessive caution. Luckily, Hitler’s failure to take a decision until the late afternoon of 6 June to commit his tank formations played to their advantage. And while ground-force commanders had overestimated the effect of the heavy bomber missions, they underestimated the success of the fighter-bomber squadrons, roving inland to attack any German armoured columns heading for the invasion area. The 1st SS Panzer Division
Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler
, the 12th SS Panzer Division
Hitler Jugend
and, most of all, the Panzer Lehr Division received a battering from Typhoons and P-47 Thunderbolts.

The Canadian 3rd Division saw the need to seize villages and bring forward their anti-tank guns quickly to strengthen the defence. But the British 3rd Infantry Division, with certain honourable exceptions, was slow in pushing forward. The result was that the British Second Army on the eastern flank failed to take ground at the moment when it could have been seized with comparatively light casualties. Once Rommel flung Panzer Group West against the British and Canadian sectors, as General Morgan had predicted, it would be a whole month before Montgomery’s forces took the city which had been their first objective. The shortage of space on the British side of the invasion area prevented the RAF from establishing forward airfields and slowed the build-up of forces. It is surprising, in the light of the failure to seize either Caen or Carpiquet airfield, that Montgomery should have signalled Eisenhower on 8 June: ‘
Am very satisfied
with the situation.’

Bradley’s First Army to the west of Caen and on the Cotentin Peninsula faced lighter opposition but much worse terrain. Field Marshal Brooke had warned of the difficulties of the Normandy
bocage
, with its small fields surrounded by very high, dense hedgerows that rose from solid banks, with sunken tracks in between. Brooke had studied the topography in 1940, but those who had never seen such unusual countryside had imagined it to be like western England, with small hedges which a Sherman tank could smash through with ease. But the first problem American forces faced was marshland and flooded areas. Paratroopers had dropped into it, with many fatal results, and much of the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula which they needed to seize was waterlogged.

After the beachhead at Omaha had been secured, Lieutenant General
Leonard ‘Gee’ Gerow ordered his divisions to advance inland as rapidly as possible. The 1st Infantry pushed south and east to link up with the British at Port-en-Bessin on 7 June. The 29th Infantry Division, which had received such a battering, sent its reserve regiment westwards towards Isigny. Bradley hoped to link up the Omaha and Utah beachheads as rapidly as possible. But the two airborne divisions were still involved in furious fighting along the Rivers Merderet and Douve and round Sainte-Mère-Église, until the 4th Infantry Division advanced inland from Utah with tank battalions in support.

Once the Germans had been forced back from the south-east corner of the Cotentin Peninsula, the 101st Airborne managed to take the town of Carentan, largely thanks to confusion on the German side. On 13 June, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen mounted a counter-attack. Bradley knew of its approach from Ultra intercepts and rapidly switched part of the 2nd Armored Division across. American paratroopers south of Carentan fought a semi-guerrilla withdrawal back towards the town, until Brigadier General Maurice Rose appeared, leading his Shermans from an open half-track. The SS panzergrenadiers fled in confusion. Next day, the two invasion areas were joined up.

The Germans expected a major attack south from Carentan, but Bradley had a much higher priority: securing the Cotentin Peninsula with the port of Cherbourg at its tip. On 14 June the newly landed 9th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne attacked across the neck of the peninsula. Urged on by VII Corps commander Major General Lawton Collins, known as ‘Lightning Joe’, they reached the Atlantic coast in four days. Then, with three divisions across the peninsula, VII Corps advanced north with heavy air support and took Cherbourg on 26 June. Hitler was outraged when he heard that Generalleutnant Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben had surrendered.

The Allies, having been so fortunate with the weather for the invasion, soon suffered badly. An enormous storm in the Channel destroyed the artificial Mulberry harbour constructed at Omaha and smashed vessels and landing craft ashore. The Americans found themselves desperately short of artillery ammunition, thus thwarting an advance southwards during the Cherbourg operation.

The British build-up of forces was also brought to a halt, just as a stalemate was developing. German resistance round Caen had intensified with the arrival of the SS
Hitler Jugend
. To make matters worse, low cloud grounded the Allied air forces. The British 50th Division with the 8th Armoured Brigade had advanced south from Bayeux, but they had come up against violent counter-attacks from the Panzer Lehr Division round Tilly-sur-Seulles and Lingèvres.

On 10 June Montgomery met Bradley at Port-en-Bessin, and with a map
spread on the front of his staff car Monty explained that he did not want to hammer head-on into Caen. He intended to encircle it, with 51st Highland Division attacking from the 6th Airborne’s sector east of the Orne. At the same time, 7th Armoured Division would slip down south out on his right flank into the edge of the American sector near Caumont, then swing back east towards Villers-Bocage behind the Panzer Lehr Division. It was a bold plan, and in many ways a good one, if it had been carried through promptly and with full force. In the event, it turned out to be little more than a reconnaissance in force, which was scandously under-supported.

On 13 June the spearhead, consisting of just one regimental battle-group, reached Villers-Bocage, but without a reconnaissance screen in front. As a result the Cromwell tanks of the Sharpshooters (the 4th County of London Yeomanry) ran into a devastating ambush of Tiger tanks led by the panzer ace Michael Wittmann, of the SS 101st Heavy Panzer Battalion. This, combined with the sudden arrival of the 2nd Panzer Division on 7th Armoured Division’s exposed southern flank, prompted a humiliating retreat. The French townspeople who had so joyfully welcomed the Desert Rats the day before, now found their town smashed to rubble by RAF bombers.

Montgomery had insisted on having three of his desert divisions with him in Normandy–the 7th Armoured, the 50th Northumbrian and the 51st Highland. Several of their veteran regiments were to fight well in Normandy, but the morale, and in some cases discipline, of many others was not good. They had been fighting for too long and were not prepared to take risks. A ‘canny’ caution slowed them down. In the case of armoured regiments, a fear of well-camouflaged German anti-tank guns was easily understandable when the 88mm could knock them out from over a mile away. And less than a third of British tanks had the excellent 17-pounder gun, which could deal with a Tiger or Panther tank at a reasonable range. After the Villers-Bocage debacle, the 7th Armoured Division’s confidence was badly shaken. The 51st Highland Division’s attempt to attack east of Caen also collapsed. Montgomery was so horrified by the 51st’s performance that he sacked its general and considered sending the whole division back to England for retraining. It took until almost the end of the Normandy campaign before the Highland Division restored its earlier reputation.

In the US Army too combat performance varied greatly, not only between divisions but even within them. Psychological casualties could be high in green divisions, and the rate of nervous collapse among ill-trained and badly handled replacements was unnecessarily disastrous. To arrive at night in a new unit at the front without knowing anybody, and in most cases woefully under-trained, could hardly have been more demoralizing. The other soldiers shunned them, because they had arrived to replace their
buddies who had just been killed and whom they were still mourning.

Any ideas that the Germans must know that the war was lost were brutally shattered by the savagely effective defence they maintained, using all the lethal tricks learned on the eastern front. Apart from the elite Allied formations, such as paratroopers or rangers, the majority of men on the Allied side were armed citizens, who just wanted to get the war over and done with. They could hardly be expected to match the fervour of those indoctrinated from early youth into the Nazi warrior mindset and now persuaded by Goebbels’s propaganda that, if they failed to hold on in Normandy, their families, homes and Fatherland would be destroyed for ever.

The 12th SS
Hitler Jugend
was the most fanatical. Its officers had told their men before the battle that any SS soldier who surrendered without having suffered incapacitating wounds would be treated as a traitor.
Hitler Jugend
soldiers, if taken alive, would reject transfusions of foreign blood, preferring to die for the Führer. One could never imagine British or American prisoners of war wanting to die for King George VI, Churchill or President Roosevelt. Of course, not all German soldiers were such true believers. Many in ordinary line infantry divisions simply wanted to survive, to see their girlfriends and families again.

Once the Americans had taken Cherbourg, the battle of the
bocage
and the marshes south of the peninsula began in earnest. It was a bloody slog, with high casualties, as Bradley’s divisions extending from Caumont to the Atlantic coast fought forward to reach more open country, where the American armoured divisions could be deployed in their full force.

German generals claimed, perhaps with justification, that Bradley’s way of fighting with little more than single-battalion attacks, supported by a few tanks and tank destroyers, was easy for them to deal with. The commander of the 3rd Fallschirmjäger Division even boasted that it was perfect training for his green troops, many of whom had been transferred from the Luftwaffe and flight-training units simply to make up numbers. Using small combat teams with a mixture of infantry, pioneers for laying mines and booby-traps, self-propelled assault guns and well-sited anti-tank guns, German forces could inflict far more losses on the attacking Americans than they suffered themselves. Their main problem came from a shortage of ammunition and other supplies, because of Allied aircraft attacking any transport in the rear.

Bradley’s objective was the capture of Saint-Lô and securing the Périers– Saint-Lô road as his start-line for the main offensive, while Montgomery again tried to encircle Caen. He did not know that Rommel and Rundstedt had asked Hitler on 17 June for permission to withdraw their forces to a more defensible line behind the River Orne and beyond the range of Allied naval guns. Hitler, on a brief visit to France to impose his will on his
generals, refused to consider anything of the sort. It was this manic obstinacy and interference in command decisions which decided not just the pattern of the Normandy campaign but the fate of the whole of France.