War Stories III (34 page)

Some in Hitler's entourage claimed that the hiatus was proof that the Normandy landings could be contained and defeated. But others, including Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, saw the Allied build-up at Normandy and the Red Army “
Bagration
” offensive on the Vistula east of Warsaw for what they were—the beginning of the end. He and a handful of senior officers decided it was time for a military coup—after which they would sue for peace.

On 20 July, von Stauffenberg planted a small bomb beneath the conference room table at Hitler's Rastenburg headquarters in East Prussia. The blast wounded but failed to kill the Führer—who launched an immediate
purge against any and all suspected of being part of the plot. Over the next nine months, some 5,000 Wehrmacht officers and civilians—most with no connection to the attempted coup—were rounded up by the Gestapo and summarily shot. Others—including the Desert Fox himself, Erwin Rommel—were forced to commit suicide.

 

U.S. troops advance at St. Lô.

Four days after the assassination attempt, with the British and Canadians still heavily engaged in the bloody fight for Caen, Bradley was ready to launch an American breakthrough from the Cotentin. Dubbed Operation Cobra, the attack was to commence immediately after 3,000 bombers and fighters from the 8th and 9th Air Forces “carpet bombed” German positions facing the four American infantry and two armored divisions west of St. Lô.

But Cobra had an inauspicious beginning. On the morning of 24 July the bombers dropped 4,000 tons of bombs through the heavy overcast—hitting the American lines with almost a third of the high explosives, killing thirty U.S. troops, wounding another 150, and causing Cobra to be
postponed for twenty-four hours. The following morning, with Bradley and Lieutenant General Leslie J. McNair looking on, the waves of B-17s returned. This time they swept over the American lines—instead of parallel to them—and again they dropped 4,000 tons of bombs, hundreds of which hit the U.S. jumping off positions—
again.

McNair and nearly all of his staff were killed outright. Another 400 GIs were killed and wounded. Bradley, watching from a café on a nearby hillside, barely escaped with his life. The 30th Infantry Division took the brunt of the casualties from the errant bombing, but still managed to get up out of their shallow fighting positions and launch the attack. Twenty-five-year-old Lt. Murray Pulver, a farm boy from upstate New York, a replacement in the 30th Division, was one of those who saw it happen—and still carried on. His resolve would be severely tested in the weeks ahead.

What changed was Adolf Hitler's belief that a surprise Panzer counter-attack could somehow stop the American advance. With George Patton's newly formed 3rd Army dashing into Brittany and Courtney Hodges's 1st Army headed east, Hitler ordered Gunther von Kluge to send four Panzer Divisions—the 1st and 2nd SS, the 2nd, and the 116th—on a sweep south, then west to smash through the American lines and cut off Patton's rear at Avranches.

As the Führer conceived Operation Lüttich, the 300 tanks and 50,000 troops commanded by von Kluge would be reinforced in the battle by 1,000 more tanks from the 9th and 11th Panzer Divisions coming from the south of France and the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions presently engaged at Caen. It would have been a brilliant strategy but for three factors: first, Allied bombing of the French rail and road networks made movement of armor on the scale envisioned impossible. Second, Ultra intercepts of German high command communications eliminated the element of surprise. And finally, for the German armor to get to Avranches, the Panzers would have to get through the 30th Infantry Division at Mortain—a quiet little village known for the Camembert cheese made on the dairy farms in the nearby rolling hillsides.

On 6 August 1944, as the German tanks started moving into position for the attack, Murray Pulver's Company B, 1st Battalion of the 120th Infantry Regiment occupied Hill 285, one of the two prominent terrain features in Mortain. Spread between 285 and the other commanding high ground, Hill 314, were Companies E, G, and H of 2nd Battalion, and K
Company of the 118th Infantry. Staff Sergeant Angel Garcia—the son of an alfalfa farmer from Los Angeles, California—led a machine gun squad in H Company and had his men deployed at the base of the hill. Second Lieutenant Robert Weiss, an artillery forward observer, was hoping for a quiet night when he climbed to the peak of 314 to establish an observation post late that afternoon.

Within hours, all three men would play key roles in the largest tank battle on the Western Front.