The Second World War (115 page)

Montgomery faced the bulk of the German panzer divisions for very simple reasons, as he had been warned before the invasion. The British Second Army on the eastern side was closest to Paris. If the British and Canadians were to break through, then the German Seventh Army further west and the formations in Brittany would all be cut off.

The strength of German resistance on the British sector had forced Montgomery to reassess his ideas about seizing the flat ground south of Caen for airfields. He tried to turn a painful necessity into a virtue by claiming that he was holding down the panzer divisions to give the Americans the chance to break out further west. Neither the Americans nor the Royal Air Force, desperate for their landing strips, were convinced.

Despite his fighting words to Eisenhower, Montgomery had indicated to Major General George Erskine of the 7th Armoured Division that he was not looking for a ‘show-down’ after all. ‘
Complete change so far as
we are concerned,’ Erskine’s intelligence officer noted in his diary just before Epsom, ‘as Monty doesn’t want us to make ground. Satisfied that Second Army has drawn all enemy panzer divisions, now wants Caen only on this front and Americans to press on for Brittany ports. So VIII Corps attack goes in but we have very limited objective.’

The German counter-attack during the afternoon of 29 June was aimed mainly against the 15th Scottish Division on the western side of the salient. The Scots fought well, but the real damage to the newly arrived SS Panzer Corps came from the Royal Navy. Dempsey, fearing a greater counter-attack on the south-eastern side round Hill 112, told O’Connor to pull back his tanks. Montgomery halted the offensive the next day because VIII Corps had lost more than 4,000 men. Once again the British command had failed to reinforce success rapidly. Tragically, the fighting over the next few weeks to recapture Hill 112 was to cause far more deaths than defending it would have done.

Both Rommel and General Geyr von Schweppenburg were appalled when they saw the effects of naval gunfire from thirty kilometres away on
the
Hohenstaufen
and
Frundsberg
. The craters were four metres across and two metres deep. The need to persuade Hitler that they must withdraw their forces behind the River Orne became even more urgent. Geyr was shaken by the losses in this defensive battle, when he would have preferred to use his panzer divisions in a massive counter-attack. They had been drawn into the battle to act as ‘corset-stiffeners’ to the weak infantry divisions, and now there were not enough incoming infantry divisions to enable him to pull out his panzer formations to refit. So Montgomery, far from ‘calling the tune’ on the battlefield as he liked to claim, had in fact been trapped in this battle of attrition by the German army’s own problems.

Geyr wrote a highly critical report of German strategy in Normandy which called for a flexible defence and the withdrawal of their forces behind the Orne. His comments on OKW interference, which clearly meant Hitler, led to his swift dismissal. He was replaced by General der Panzertruppen Hans Eberbach. The next senior casualty was Generalfeldmarschall von Rundstedt himself, who had warned Keitel that they would not be able to hold the Allies in Normandy. ‘
You should make an end
to the whole war,’ he told Keitel. Rundstedt, who had also endorsed Geyr’s report, was then replaced by Generalfeldmarschall Hans von Kluge. Hitler would have liked to replace Rommel as well, but that would have created a disastrous impression both in Germany and abroad.

Kluge arrived at Rommel’s headquarters, the Château de La Roche-Guyon on the Seine, and made derisive comments about the conduct of the battle so far. Rommel exploded and told him to visit the front first to see the situation for himself. Over the following days Kluge did so and was shaken by what he found. It was very different to the picture which had been painted for him at Führer headquarters, where they had claimed that Rommel was unduly pessimistic about Allied air power.

Slightly further west, Bradley’s US First Army was bogged down in its own bloody battles in the marshes south of the Cotentin Peninsula and in the
bocage
countryside north of Saint-Lô. The constant battalion-size attacks against the German II Paratroop Corps cost many casualties. ‘
The Germans haven’t much left
,’ an American divisional commander observed with wry respect, ‘but they sure as hell know how to use it.’

Using
lessons learned
on the eastern front, the Germans managed to make up for their inferiority in numbers, artillery and above all aircraft. They dug little bunkers into the raised base of the impenetrable hedge-rows, a hard and laborious task given the tangle of ancient roots, to make machine-gun nests for the first line of defence. Further back, the main line would contain enough troops for an immediate counter-attack. Behind
them, usually on rising ground, an 88mm gun would be sited to knock out any Shermans supporting an infantry attack. Every position and vehicle was meticulously camouflaged, which meant that Allied fighter-bombers could do comparatively little to help. Artillery was the arm on which Bradley and his commanders relied: the French civilians, not surprisingly, felt that they did so to excess.

The Germans themselves described fighting in the
bocage
as ‘
a dirty bush war
’. They would plant mines at the bottom of shell craters in front of their positions so that an American soldier, throwing himself in to take cover, would have his legs blown off. Alongside tracks they rigged what the Americans called castrator mines or ‘bouncing Bettys’, which jumped up and exploded at crotch height. Their tanks and field gunners became expert at firing tree-bursts, which meant exploding a shell in the crown of a tree to blast splinters of wood into anyone sheltering below.

American tactics tended to rely on ‘marching fire’ as infantry advanced, which meant constant firing at any likely enemy positions ahead. The amount of ammunition used was truly staggering as a result. The Germans needed to be more efficient. Tied to a tree, a German rifleman would wait for the infantrymen to pass, then shoot one of them in the back. This prompted the others to throw themselves flat in the open, and German mortar teams would then shell them with air-bursts as they lay there with the full length of their bodies exposed. Aid men who went to help the wounded were shot down deliberately. Quite often a single German would emerge with his hands up to surrender, and when some Americans moved forward to take him prisoner, he would throw himself sideways and hidden machine guns would shoot them down. Not surprisingly, few American soldiers took prisoners after such incidents.

Combat exhaustion was not recognized as a condition in the German army; it was treated as cowardice. Soldiers who attempted to evade fighting with self-inflicted wounds were simply shot. The American, Canadian and British armies were extraordinarily enlightened by comparison. Most of the
psychoneurotic casualties
had occurred as a result of the fighting in the
bocage
, and the majority of victims were replacements, thrown in ill trained and unprepared to step into the boots of battle casualties. Some 30,000 men in the US First Army were accounted psychological casualties by the end of the campaign. The surgeon-general of the US Army estimated that American front-line forces suffered a 10 per cent rate of psychiatric breakdown.

Both British and American army psychiatrists wrote after the war that they had been struck by how few cases of combat exhaustion they had found among German prisoners of war, although they had suffered far more from Allied bombing and shelling. They concluded that the Nazi
regime’s propaganda since 1933 had almost certainly helped prepare their soldiers psychologically. In a fairly similar fashion, one could say that the great hardships of life in the Soviet Union had toughened all those who served in the Red Army. The armies of western democracies could not be expected to withstand the same levels of hardship.

While Rommel and Kluge assumed that the main breakthrough in Normandy would come from the British–Canadian sector on the Caen front, they also imagined that an American attack would come down close to the Atlantic coast. Bradley, however, had focused on Saint-Lô as the eastern end for his forming-up area for the big attack.

After the disappointing results of Epsom Montgomery did little to confide in Eisenhower, who became increasingly exasperated by his apparent complacency. Montgomery could never admit that any of his campaigns were not going according to his ‘master plan’. Yet he was aware of the resentment building both at Eisenhower’s headquarters and back in London at his lack of progress. He was also acutely conscious of the country’s manpower shortages. Churchill feared that, if their military strength was whittled away, Britain would have little say in the post-war settlement.

In an attempt to achieve a breakthrough without losing many more men, Montgomery was prepared to contradict a favourite dictum. In a briefing to war correspondents the previous autumn in Italy, he had stated categorically that ‘
heavy bombers cannot participate intimately
in a land battle against the front line’. On 6 July, he proceeded to request precisely that from the RAF to help him take Caen. Eisenhower, desperate for movement, fully supported him and met Air Chief Marshal Harris the next day. Harris agreed to send 467 Lancaster and Halifax bombers that evening over the northern suburbs of Caen, defended by the 12th SS
Hitler Jugend
. But the attack suffered from target creep.

As at Omaha, the bomb-aimers delayed a moment or two before dropping to be sure of not hitting their own forward troops. The result was that the bulk of their loads dropped on the centre of the ancient Norman city. German casualties were light in comparison to those of French civilians, who were the unsung victims of the fighting in Normandy. A terrible paradox emerged from the campaign. In an attempt to reduce their own casualties, commanders from western democracies were likely to kill more civilians by their excessive use of high explosive.

The British and Canadian attack went in the following morning. This delay gave the
Hitler Jugend
Division nearly twelve hours to recover, and their fearsome resistance inflicted many casualties. Then suddenly they disappeared, having received orders to pull back south of the Orne. The British and Canadians rapidly secured the north and centre of Caen. But
even this very partial Allied success did not solve the Second Army’s key problem. It still lacked the space to build sufficient forward airfields, and to deploy the rest of the First Canadian Army waiting back in Britain.

With great reluctance, Montgomery then agreed to Dempsey’s plan to use all three armoured divisions–the 7th, the 11th and the newly arrived Guards Armoured–to smash through towards Falaise from the bridgehead east of the Orne. Montgomery’s doubts had more to do with his anti-cavalry prejudices against armoured formations ‘swanning around’. As a profound military conservative it was not his idea of a setpiece offensive, but he could not afford more infantry casualties, and he had to do something. Complaints and jibes were not just coming from the Americans. The RAF was furious. Mutterings that Montgomery should be sacked now came from Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Tedder, and from Air Marshal Coningham, who had never forgiven Montgomery for hogging all the glory in North Africa and seldom mentioning his Desert Air Force.

Operation Goodwood, launched on 18 July, proved the most outstanding example of ‘very bold speech and very cautious action’ in Montgomery’s career. He sold the possibility of a decisive breakthrough to Eisenhower so strongly that the supreme commander replied: ‘
I am viewing the prospects
with the most tremendous optimism and enthusiasm. I would not be at all surprised to see you gaining a victory that will make some of the “old classics” look like a skirmish between patrols.’ Montgomery had also given the same impression to Field Marshal Brooke back in London, but the very next day he presented Dempsey and O’Connor with a far more modest objective, which was to advance a third of the way to Falaise and see how things stood. Unfortunately, briefings to officers implied that this was going to be a bigger breakthrough than Alamein, and press correspondents were told of a ‘Russian style’ breakthrough which might take the Second Army forward a hundred miles. Astonished journalists pointed out that a hundred miles meant all the way to Paris.

The RAF, still desperate for its forward airfields, was again prepared to provide bombers. So at 05.30 hours on 18 July 2,600 RAF and USAAF bombers dropped 7,567 tons of bombs on a frontage of 7,000 metres. Unfortunately, Second Army intelligence had failed to detect that the lines of German defence extended back in five lines all the way to the Bourgébus Ridge, which had to be taken if the Second Army was to advance to Falaise. To make matters worse, the complicated approach march of the three armoured divisions took them over Bailey bridges across the Caen Canal and the River Orne into the restricted bridgehead beyond, where the 51st Highland Division had laid a very thick minefield. Afraid of alerting the enemy, O’Connor ordered lanes to be cleared through it only at the very last moment, instead of removing the lot. But the Germans were
well aware of the impending attack. They had seen the preparations from tall factory buildings further east and from air reconnaissance. Ultra had picked up the fact that the Luftwaffe knew of the operation, yet Second Army stuck with its plan.

Troops stood on their tanks to stare in wonder and excitement at the destruction caused by the bombers, but the traffic jams which built up behind because of the narrow lanes in the minefields meant that the attack was fatally slowed. In fact the delays were so great that O’Connor halted the truck-borne infantry to allow the tanks to get through first. The 11th Armoured Division advanced quickly once they were through, but then found themselves ambushed by well-concealed anti-tank guns in stone farms and hamlets. These were objectives for their infantry to deal with, but the tanks were on their own and suffered terrible losses. The division had also lost their air liaison officer as an early casualty and so were not able to call for help from the Typhoon squadrons circling above. They then came under devastating fire from 88mm guns on Bourgébus Ridge and were counter-attacked by the 1st SS Panzer Division. The 11th and the Guards Armoured Divisions between them lost more than 200 tanks that day.