Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  The flail tanks of the Westminster Dragoons were modified to wade rather than to swim the last yards to the beach. As they tipped over the LCT ramps, the drivers saw the view through their periscopes turn dark green, then progressively lighten until the sky appeared once more and water poured off the hulls as they crawled up the shore. Captain Roger Bell halted for a moment to check his position below La Rivière. His crew watched three sappers from a neighbouring AVRE Churchill clambering out onto its hull. Then there was a massive explosion, hurling sappers and fragments of tank into the air all around them and a sledgehammer thump on their own tank. For a moment they believed that they themselves had been hit by a shell, until Captain Bell reported that the engine of the exploding Churchill had struck them. They saw another tank explode. Corporal Charlie Baldwin in the co-driver’s seat spotted the flash of the German gun and called over the intercom: ‘Eighty-eight-pillbox-eleven o’clock.’ They traversed rapidly and fired. ‘Missed,’ said Baldwin laconically. Jimmy Smith, the gunner, fired again and once more they assumed a miss. Bell said that they must press on anyway. They only learned later that they had destroyed the German gun. For all the attention focused since D-Day upon the role of the specialized armour, it is striking to notice that, on the beaches, the ‘funnies’ performing as conventional gun tanks made a markedly greater impact on the course of the battle than they did by using their engineer equipment, although this was obviously also valuable.

  They began flailing at the high-water mark, and continued until they reached clear ground, where Bell pulled the pin on the green smoke canister to signal to the infantry that a lane was open. It fell on the floor of the turret, and they gasped and cursed amid the choking fumes until it could be retrieved and tossed out. Bell fought through the days that followed with his hair, face and moustache dyed a brilliant green. They drove on towards Crépon, Baldwin suddenly glimpsing three Germans cowering in a shellhole in the road. As they passed, the tank track slipped sideways into it and, over the roar of the engine, the Englishman caught the sound of the terrible screams beneath them. At their rendezvous in an orchard, they had just begun to boil a kettle when a bullet smacked against the hull beside them. They leapt quickly back into the tank and scanned the scenery. Like so many Allied soldiers in the weeks that followed, they decided that the shot could only have come from a church tower overlooking them. They worked high explosive rounds up and down the building until they were convinced that nothing inside it could have survived. Then the tanks moved on.

  The 6th Green Howards, landing 1,000 yards eastwards below the German strongpoint at La Rivière, suffered the common run of small comedies, tragedies and moments of heroism. When the LCA carrying the battalion HQ group grounded, its stern at once began to swing round towards a mined obstacle. The CO, Robin Hastings, sat on the ramp and dropped his feet cautiously into the water to explore the depth. Hitting bottom when he was only ankle-deep, the colonel paddled ashore. This was not an absurd precaution. Sergeant Hill of 16 Platoon, who had survived the entire North African and Sicilian campaigns, jumped from the ramp of another LCA into a deep shellhole, from which he could not extricate himself before the vessel ran over him.

  Sergeant-Major Stan Hollis reached the beach feeling a little foolish, for he was already suffering a self-inflicted wound from a bad burn on the hand. He had carelessly seized the barrel of the bren gun with which he had been firing over the side of the craft as they closed in. His D Company advanced only a few hundred yards inland before they began to take casualties from a position to the right of the road. Major Lofthouse, the company commander, pointed it out to Hollis: ‘There’s a pillbox in there, sergeant-major!’ Without hesitating, Hollis sprang to his feet and ran 30 yards to the German position, spraying sten-gun fire as he went, until he reached the weapon slit, where he thrust in the barrel and hosed the interior with fire. Then he climbed on the roof, pulled the pin from a grenade, and leaned over to drop it through the slit. Not content with this, he began to advance alone along the communicating trench to the next pillbox. Its garrison hastily emerged and began to surrender. Hollis returned with 25 prisoners.

  The sergeant-major, who performed a succession of feats of this kind in the weeks that followed, was later awarded the Victoria Cross. Every unit in every war needs a handful of men willing to commit acts of sacrificial courage to enable it to gain its objectives, and it is the nature of these that few who carry them out survive. But Hollis did, and lived to keep a Yorkshire pub after the war. Lieutenant-Colonel Hastings described him as a simple, straightforward Yorkshireman keen on horse-racing: ‘He was absolutely personally dedicated to winning the war – one of the few men I ever met who felt like that.’

  Austin Baker, wireless operator in an armoured recovery vehicle of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards, was in an LCT which struck a mine as it manoeuvred inshore, among infantry wading up to their necks in the sea. Baker was hurled forward by the concussion, smashing a tooth on the turret hatch rim, but he managed hastily to close down the lid. The sailor directing the ramp lowering was hurled bodily into the air, and as the leading scout car drove off it was immediately knocked out by a shell. The others drove quickly off the beach, joining a procession of vehicles moving forwards between grassy banks and the skull and crossbones warnings, ACHTUNG MINEN, that were among the most familiar landmarks of every German battlefield. The village of Ver-sur-Mer had been considerably damaged in the bombardment, but a little cluster of French civilians emerged from the ruins to cheer and throw flowers. After losing their way for a time, Baker and his crew reached the inevitable orchard rendezvous. Among the other crews of the squadron, they began to exchange their excited stories of the landing while they drank tea and shared bully beef and biscuits with the crew of their wrecked landing craft, who had followed them ashore. Two tank commanders had already been killed by small-arms fire during the clearing of La Rivière. Two tanks had been swamped on the beach and a third disabled by a mine. A troop commander of B Squadron had met a self-propelled gun almost immediately after landing, and been beaten into action by the German’s shot. This took off his leg, killed his operator and wounded the rest of the crew.

  Yet nothing could dampen the exhilaration of those who had survived, sitting as wondering sightseers on ground that over four long years had attained for them the alien and mysterious status of the dark side of the moon. Corporal Portway of 231st Brigade thought that ‘once ashore, it all seemed better organised than most exercises’. By 10.30 a.m., the British Second Army had landed fifteen infantry battalions, seven commandos, seven tank regiments, two engineer assault regiments, nine field artillery regiments and detachments of scores of supporting units. There had been setbacks, local failures, severe casualties to certain units, poor performance by some specialist equipment. Yet overall, the plan had succeeded stunningly well. Almost everywhere along the British line, the German coastal positions had been rolled up. It now remained to press forward to complete the second phase of the D-Day operation, to exploit German shock and surprise, ruthlessly to seize the vital ground inland.

  Inland

  Hitler’s appointments for the morning of 6 June were not altered by the news of the Allied landings. He himself was in the Berghof at Berchtesgaden. OKW’s Chief of Operations, Jodl, was in the little Reichchancellerie. For their usual midday conference that day, both men, along with their principal staff officers, were compelled to drive for an hour to Klessheim Castle, where they were officially receiving a Hungarian state visit. In a room beside the great entrance hall of the castle, Hitler was briefed on the first reports of the invasion. He approached the map of France on the wall, gazed at it for a moment, chuckled and declared in unusually broad Austrian tones: ‘So, we’re off.’1 Then, after a few moments’ further conversation with Jodl, he departed to meet the new Hungarian Prime Minister. A junior officer from Jodl’s staff was dispatched to von Rundstedt to emphasize that there must be vigorous local counter-attacks against the beachhead.

  Corporal Werner K
ortenhaus and the rest of his company of 21st Panzer had begun to move up the Falaise–Caen road at 8.00 a.m. They were deeply unhappy, for the road ran perfectly straight and open. Moving in column in broad daylight, they felt utterly vulnerable – as indeed they were. The company was frequently halted to allow other units to speed past them. On the distant horizon, they glimpsed the smoke of the battlefield. Just south of Caen, they spotted an odd little tableau of two British soldiers standing alone in the corn by the road with their hands up, almost certainly men of 6th Airborne who had been dropped hopelessly wide. The panzers had no time to take prisoners, and hastened on. Then they learned that three companies of the regiment had been ordered to swing north-west, to move against the seaborne landings. They themselves were to head up the east bank of the Orne to engage the British airborne troops. As they moved forward, they were repeatedly compelled to pull in by the roadside and scramble beneath their tanks as Allied aircraft roared low overhead. They suffered their first casualty, a very young, half-trained replacement named Rammelkampf, who was killed by a machine-gun bullet from a strafing Typhoon. It remains one of the minor mysteries of D-Day that throughout their long drive up the road to the battlefield that morning, even after the lifting of the cloud that hampered air operations for part of the morning, 21st Panzer suffered little material damage from Allied fighter-bombers. Yet Kortenhaus and his comrades cursed the absence of the Luftwaffe as they watched the enemy overfly them with impunity. Where, they asked, were the thousands of German aircraft that they had been promised would be in the sky to support them on ‘The Day’?

  All that morning and well into the afternoon, 21st Panzer’s powerful armoured regiments – 127 Mk IV tanks and 40 assault guns – moved northwards, hampered by checks, delays and changes of orders imposed more as a result of failures of intelligence and the indecision of their own command than by Allied interference. Feuchtinger was impatient to move against the 6th Airborne bridgehead, but was frustrated by the British possession of the only bridge north of Caen by which his troops could cross the Orne. His panzergrenadiers were thus obliged to move through the city itself. The 2nd Battalion of 22nd Panzer Regiment, 40 tanks strong, with which Kortenhaus was driving, was already approaching the paratroopers’ perimeter when it was halted by orders from General Marcks at LXXXIV Corps. Marcks believed this to be a wasteful use of armour. One company only, the 4th, was left to support operations east of the Orne. The remainder were diverted to join the counter-attack west of Caen. The 1st Battalion, 80 tanks under Captain von Gottberg, was making its best speed to the start-line near Lebisey, where the regimental commander, Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski, was already waiting with General Marcks. The corps commander had driven in person to oversee the battle. It was around 4.30 in the afternoon before this, the first major German armoured counter-attack upon OVERLORD, was ready to jump off against the British 3rd Division.

  The Panzer IV was the most numerously-produced German tank of the war, equipping half the German tank units in Normandy. By 1944, it was obsolescent, but in its upgunned version – which the Allies called the Mk IV Special – was still a formidable enough opponent. Weighing 25 tons and moving at up to 25 mph, it carried 80 mm of frontal armour and 30 mm of side armour. Its 75-mm KwK 40 gun could penetrate 99 mm of armour at 100 yards, 92 mm at 500 yards, 84 mm at 1,000 yards. The ‘skirts’ shown surrounding the hull in this version were designed to absorb the impact of hollow-charge projectiles, but all German armoured units in Normandy were exasperated by the manner in which these were torn off during movements among the dense hedges and orchards.

  At 11.00 a.m. on the morning of 6 June, the three infantry battalions of Brigadier K. Pearce Smith’s 185th Brigade were assembled exactly as planned near the village of Hermanville, ready to begin one of the most vital British movements of the day – the advance to and seizure of Caen. The 2nd King’s Own Shropshire Light Infantry, who were to lead the advance on the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry, had landed in better order than they did in most exercises. They warmed themselves with self-heating cocoa in an orchard near Lion, and with satisfaction discarded their first sets of maps covering the beach area, turning now to the ones covering the ground ahead, marked, like those of all the invading force, with every known German position. They marched down the road into Hermanville amid the cheers of excited local civilians, and the encouraging spectacle of clusters of German prisoners being herded in the opposite direction. Yet already the brigadier and his unit commanders were deeply concerned by the non-appearance of the tanks that were to provide vital mobility and fire support. The Staffordshires had become embroiled in the vast traffic jam on Sword beach, which was to create critical delays for the next phase of the assault. The strong onshore winds had caused an unprecedentedly high tide. Instead of a normal width of 30 yards of sand, that morning the incoming mass of armour and soft-skinned vehicles was attempting to manoeuvre towards the beach exits across a mere 30 feet of beach. The Staffordshires found themselves immobile for an hour before they could even reach the road. Thereafter, their progress was agonizingly slow, nose to tail on the narrow road bordered on either side by uncleared minefields. It is arguable that, if there was a serious flaw in all the Allied landing schedules, it lay in allowing too many nonessential vehicles to clog the path inland in the first hours. Inevitably, among the wreckage and under continuing German shelling, the beach-masters were unable to direct the unloading operations with precision. All along the Normandy shore by the later stages of that morning, the difficulties of getting the spearhead units off the beaches and on their way inland were snowballing into serious delays for the follow-up brigades coming ashore. There was a lull, a period of reorganization, when men were brewing up at their rendezvous, locating their units and checking vehicles and equipment, from which the momentum of the advance never recovered that day. Lieutenant-Colonel F. J. Maurice, commanding the 2nd KSLI, bicycled back to the beach to investigate the plight of the Staffordshires, then pedalled forward once more to report to Brigadier Smith at Hermanville. 185th Brigade was ordered to start its move towards Caen on foot, to be followed by the tanks as speedily as possible. It was now noon.

  Meanwhile ahead of them, 8th Brigade was attempting to clear the way by destroying the two key German strongpoints, ‘Morris’ and ‘Hillman’. ‘Morris’s’ 65-strong garrison surrendered to B Company of the 1st Suffolks at 1.00 p.m. after a heavy bombardment. But when the battalion’s A Company then attempted to seize ‘Hillman’, a network of strongpoints some 600 by 400 yards, they were met by furious fire which caused heavy casualties. The covering wire was breached, but the infantry could not get through under the intense machine-gun fire. A tank of the Staffordshires which sought to silence the position could make no impact with its 75 mm gun. Arthur Heal, the sapper officer attached to the Suffolks, recalled afterwards that the tanks declined to mount a direct assault unless the mines had been cleared in their path. The attackers possessed no heavy artillery support, for the gunnery forward observer had been killed earlier. Heal and a lance-corporal named Bolton crawled forward under cover of smoke, each clutching a mine detector. When the sapper found the first mine, scrabbling bare-handed to uncover it, he could not recognize any known German pattern. After gazing at it apprehensively for a few moments, he pulled it out and identified an aged British Mark II, booty from Dunkirk. He returned to report that there was no threat to the tanks, and late that evening the Suffolks, led by two squadrons of Shermans, successfully closed on ‘Hillman’ and stormed the position, using 30-pound Beehive charges to blow open the bunkers. In Chester Wilmot’s account of this battle, he is severely critical of the Suffolks for their sluggishness in taking a position that it was vital to seize quickly, at almost any cost. The battalion lost only seven killed that day. More recently, Carlo D’Este has argued that it was the fault of the planners, rather than of the infantry, who failed to assess the seriousness of the threat ‘Hillman’ represented. But there also seem to be grounds for believing that the tanks wer
e reluctant to force the issue. Whatever the cause, the delay in seizing the position enabled its defenders to inflict 150 casualties on the 1st Norfolks as they advanced southwards past ‘Hillman’, following the KSLI towards Caen. The stubbornness of a handful of positions behind the coast was remorselessly reducing the strength of the British push inland.

  Meanwhile the KSLI had been pressing on alone down the road to Caen, fighting a brisk battle for possession of Hill 61, whence Major Hof had telephoned Schaaf and asked him to bring his self-propelled guns to the aid of regimental HQ. Schaaf duly advanced across the cornfields. He saw the heads of the Shropshires peering at him over the standing corn, rapidly disappearing again when he opened fire. But by now, a squadron of the Staffordshire’s Shermans had caught up. When Schaaf spotted these, he determined that for self-propelled guns to engage tanks was beyond the call of duty. He beat a hasty retreat. When he next found a telephone line and tried to contact regimental HQ an English voice – presumably one of the victorious KSLI – answered the call.

  The Shropshires approached Biéville later in the afternoon, having fought a succession of tough little battles against moderate German opposition. They encouraged strong enemy fire from the village. ‘The civilians refused to evacuate themselves,’ one of their company commanders, Captain Robert Rylands, wrote later, ‘and at that early stage we were too soft-hearted to shell their homes – a proceeding which might have facilitated our advance considerably.’ W Company’s commander, Major Slatter, was hit in the shoulder by a sniper, but walked decisively forward to the house from which the shot had come and lobbed a grenade through its window before returning, grinning broadly, to have his wound dressed. The battalion now attacked from the flanks, sending one company forward east of the village, another west. After a fierce firefight in which they suffered heavy casualties, the Shropshires’ leading Y Company approached the commanding feature of Lebisey wood. They were told that there was little more opposition ahead. They were just three miles short of Caen.