The Spy with 29 Names (30 page)

First the Fife and Forfar, now this: the LAH had had a very successful day.

Operation Goodwood continued for another couple of days, with more tank victories for Peiper and the other German forces, successfully defending the area south of the city of Caen. Finally, on 20 July, the offensive had to be called off. The British had lost around 3,500 men and hundreds of tanks. German losses, by comparison, were minimal.

It was clear that if Monkey Blacker had not been promoted to second-in-command on the eve of the battle he would probably have suffered the same fate as his friend Bill Shebbeare. In later years Blacker would sometimes wonder what might have become of Bill.

‘Personally known to Attlee, almost certainly eventually a junior minister in the post-war Labour government, he had a brilliant mind and would have started on level terms with others of his age and with a Service background such as Denis Healey. Too nice, perhaps, for politics, but beneath the charm there was a tough streak. Anyway – it was not to be.’

JOCHEN PEIPER HAD
demonstrated the superior destructive force of his Panzer unit. Yet despite inflicting a heavy defeat on the British during Operation Goodwood, the LAH had suffered casualties of its own, and unlike the Allies – who seemed to have an endless supply of tanks to replace the ones lost on the battlefield – the Germans had to use what they had. Most Panthers or Tigers that were successfully ‘brewed up’ by the enemy constituted a complete loss for the Germans: there were practically none in reserve to take their place.

There was little time to rest or recover from battle. Allied troops could be relieved by multiple waves of reserves coming over the Channel. But for German soldiers in the front line this was a luxury they could not afford. Millions were involved in the fighting on the Eastern Front, while the whole 15th Army was still waiting in the Calais region for the Allied assault that must inevitably come from Dover and south-east England. The men fighting in Normandy were practically the only combatants that the Germans had available.

Then there were the incessant artillery bombardments and attacks from the air. Even hardened officers, like Peiper’s former commander in the LAH, Sepp Dietrich, found the conditions worse than when fighting the Red Army.

‘Normandy, in July and August ’44,’ Dietrich wrote, ‘was the worst time I have spent in my fighting years . . . It used to take me six hours to move ten kilometres from my headquarters to the front.’

Peiper was also suffering. After the flush of victory at the Bourguébus ridge, he found himself under frequent bombardment. He had set up his regimental headquarters at the chateau of Garcelles-Secqueville, where the basement had been fortified and turned into a shelter. Radio silence had to be maintained at all times for fear of alerting the Allies to their position. Nonetheless, British ships in the Channel pinpointed him and fired shell after shell. The roof fell in, and two SS men were killed.

Peiper had two Panthers parked outside the chateau with ditches dug underneath as shelters in case his HQ came under bombardment. His men could dive out of the windows and take cover, the steel of the tanks offering more protection than the bricks and mortar of the building itself.

One day, during such an attack, a member of the motorcycle reconnaissance platoon found himself lying next to Peiper under one of the Panthers:

‘I remember very clearly how one day I, too, found myself under this command tank of Peiper’s. I had just arrived with a report from Kuhlmann when a formation of enemy bombers “laid down a carpet”. A second and third wave followed, and bombs rained down. The bombs were bursting at such short intervals that Peiper – in spite of his famous calm and imperturbability – said, “Now’s it’s time to get out and under the tanks!”

‘We lay there close together – Peiper, Hans Gruhle, signals commander Helmut Jahn, and I – and waited. And then, in that depressing atmosphere, Peiper said, “They’re trying to finish us off here and now – (pause) – but I believe we will win this war, just like the First!”

‘These words by Peiper did not have a shocking effect on me. I had also had serious doubts about our chances of winning the war since the previous winter’s difficult battles . . .’

After years of heavy fighting, and now at the receiving end of a merciless Allied bombardment, Jochen Peiper was close to cracking up.

More fighting was to come, however. Caen was finally in the Allies’ hands, but after Operation Goodwood, they once again launched an offensive designed to push south from the city towards the town of Falaise – Operation Spring.

Peiper’s tanks, as before, were in their way, and as before, they put
up fierce resistance. At the village of Tilly-la-Campagne it was the turn of the Canadian 3rd Infantry Division to receive the brunt of the LAH’s force, and it suffered heavy casualties. A similar fate awaited armoured divisions that tried to attack the LAH near Rocquancourt.

As with Operation Goodwood, the Allies had made only small gains and at a high cost. But the bombardment and stress of command had finally taken its toll on Jochen Peiper. He was having a nervous breakdown. By 2 August he was relieved of his post as commander of the 1st SS Panzer Regiment and sent from the front to recover.

It was clearly embarrassing for a man of such high military repute to have a nervous condition: it did not fit with the SS ideas of a warrior-officer bravely and calmly leading his troops from the front. So the real reason why he had been relieved was covered up: when he reached the SS hospital he was officially diagnosed as suffering from ‘jaundice caused by an inflammation of the gall bladder’.

Back at the front, however, things were developing quickly. While the LAH had been holding back the Canadians taking part in Operation Spring, further west the Americans had timed their own big push south to coincide. So while the British and Canadians had to fight against the best German forces in Normandy, including over six Panzer divisions, the US troops only faced one and a half German armoured divisions.

The result was that General Patton, now relieved from playing the head of FUSAG – the imaginary army group dreamed up by the deception planners in London – managed to push out of the Cotentin Peninsula into Brittany and further south.

His point of breakthrough, however, was narrow, and there was only a thin corridor of US-held territory linking the Cotentin and the newly liberated areas. It was here that Hitler decided to launch a counter-attack. Operation Lüttich was designed to be a master counter-stroke, splitting the US army in two and halting its advance deeper into France.

Hitler’s best forces, who until this point had mostly been fighting in the eastern sector against the British and Canadians, were now ordered west to fight the Americans. The tanks of the LAH, but without the respected and admired Jochen Peiper to lead them, moved out from their positions south of Caen and headed towards the US lines.

Operation Lüttich – what the Americans called the Mortain counter-attack – was a disaster for the Germans. Most of the divisions involved, including the LAH, were under strength, and many failed to reach their assembly areas in time for the attack owing to Allied air attacks whenever they tried to move across country. As a result the operation had to be delayed by a day. When finally things got going, during the early hours of 7 August, the Germans enjoyed some success, but once daylight broke, and the tanks could be spotted from the air, RAF Typhoons swarmed over them, causing havoc. In one day the LAH alone lost thirty-four Panthers and ten Mark IV tanks.

Operation Lüttich was called off. The German army in north-west France was in disarray and on the run.

Now that the LAH had been moved westwards to fight the Americans, the British and Canadians finally broke through and started heading from the area south of Caen towards Falaise. Meanwhile US forces were coming up from the west and south, encircling the German 7th Army, along with units from the LAH and other Panzer divisions, in a lethal pocket. Tens of thousands of German soldiers raced to get out to safety before the gap at the eastern end of the pocket was closed. Many did make it, but the majority – over 50,000 men – were trapped. The result was a bloodbath, and the biggest defeat for the Wehrmacht since Stalingrad a year and a half earlier.

The Battle of Normandy was lost: all they could do was fall back. The LAH as such now barely existed. It had lost some 5,000 men, along with all of its tanks and artillery.

Some wondered if everything would have gone so wrong during Operation Lüttich if Peiper had been with them.

‘If Peiper had been there this would not have happened!’ a staff commander remarked. Despite being pulled back from the front, and the near destruction of his regiment, Peiper’s fame as a commander of genius lived on.

Peiper was luckier than many of his comrades and managed to flee the enemy advance, eventually recovering in an Upper Bavarian hospital, near his family home. Physically and mentally wrecked, he could only sit and watch as the Allies pushed deep into northern France.

IN LONDON, GARBO
was drafting a letter to Kühlenthal insisting that FUSAG was still an imminent threat to the Pas-de-Calais, while explaining away the fact that General Patton was now obviously commanding forces in northern France. As ever, Kühlenthal accepted his agent’s information at face value.

Meanwhile, on the night of 31 July to 1 August, Pujol’s compatriots in the 2nd Armoured Division finally reached Normandy, disembarking in choppy waters at Utah beach: Spanish soldiers in a French unit wearing US Army uniforms and driving American tanks. For many in La Nueve, including Lieutenant Amado Granell, it was an emotional moment, and they cried as they bent down to pick up handfuls of sand from the beach. In their minds the conquest of France would be just the beginning. Once the Nazis had been pushed back over the Rhine, Franco’s days in Madrid would be numbered. There would be another Allied landing soon, they were certain, this time on the Spanish coast.

Numbering some 150 men with Shermans, half-tracks and jeeps, these soldiers were here not only to liberate French soil; they had an ideological hatred of the enemy and scores to settle from their own Civil War. Some were anarchists, others Trotskyites; a handful were
communists. Some, like Granell, were simply soldiers who had fought – and lost – on the Republican side.

Many in the French 2nd Armoured Division considered them unruly, a difficult bunch to handle. General Leclerc had put Captain Dronne, a Spanish speaker, in charge of them; he managed to keep them under control, more or less. But they were good fighters, among the best in Leclerc’s force, so they were often at the vanguard of the action, sometimes as much as 15 kilometres ahead of the rest of the division.

They arrived in time for the collapse of the German 7th Army in the Falaise Gap. Here, in the small town of Écouché, they found themselves surrounded by fleeing remnants of the 1st SS Panzer Division LAH and the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. The Germans were broken and defeated, yet pockets were still resisting. Knowing that the enemy was made up of members of the SS only made the soldiers of La Nueve fight even harder. They suffered seventeen casualties on 16 August, but the enemy was now on the run, heading westwards towards Paris, chased by the Allies. What would happen in the City of Light itself, though? Would the Germans put up a fight? The city might be destroyed, yet it held the key to the whole country. Whoever was in control of the capital was effectively in control of France.

General de Gaulle wanted the Allies to march in and take Paris as quickly as possible. General Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, however, was more cautious. He wanted to engage the Germans first to the north of the city and defeat them before entering the potential bloodbath that a battle for Paris might turn out to be. Besides, there was a race on for Berlin against the Soviets. A diversion to empty Paris of Germans could prove costly.

Nonetheless, the French decided to move in the direction of Paris anyway: on 19 August resistance fighters in the city had started an uprising. It was imperative to reach them and bring an end to Nazi rule. Further to the east, in Warsaw, an uprising by the Polish resistance was being mercilessly quashed by the Germans as the Red Army halted in its tracks and refused to move in on the city in support. The same thing could not be allowed to happen in Paris.

After the rapid collapse of the Germans in the wake of the Allied breakout from Normandy, it was time to take advantage of the situation.

Early in the morning of 23 August La Nueve started rolling eastwards. Eisenhower had finally given in to de Gaulle’s pressure, and Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division had permission to strike on Paris. The French forces were not alone, however: the US 4th Infantry Division were also marching towards the capital. There was a competition to be the first to arrive. By midday on 24 August Spanish soldiers reached the Parisian suburb of Antony. The road into Paris, where the resistance fighters were struggling to take the city with little more than handguns, appeared to be clear.

But now, just when the prize appeared to be in sight, La Nueve received orders to hold back and support other units on the outskirts of the city.

Reluctantly they turned around to head to La Croix de Berny, where a German 88mm artillery weapon was causing havoc. Before long, La Nueve dealt with it and the gun was put out of action.

At this point Leclerc himself arrived, and spoke to Granell and Dronne.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ he demanded.

‘
Mon général
, I’m following the order to pull back,’ Dronne replied.

‘No, Dronne. Head straight for Paris, enter Paris. Don’t allow yourself to be held up. Take whichever route you want. Tell the Parisians and the Resistance not to lose hope, that tomorrow morning the whole division will be with them.’

Leclerc was adamant: they had to move in to support the resistance fighters. Hitler had given orders to destroy the city in the event of an Allied attack: they had to move before it was too late. And they had to reach central Paris before the Americans. La Nueve should leave at once.