This attack by 7th Armoured Division should have succeeded. My feeling that Bucknall and Erskine would have to go started with that failure. Early on the morning of 12 June I went down to see Erskine – gave him his orders and told him to get moving . . . If he had carried out my orders he would not have been kicked out of Villers-Bocage but by this time 7th Armoured Division was living on its reputation and the whole handling of that battle was a disgrace.10
Yet the men of 7th Armoured Division bitterly resented any suggestion that, in the Villers battle, they had given less than their best. It was enormously difficult to adjust their tactics and outlook overnight to the new conditions of Normandy after years of fighting in the desert. They were newly-equipped with the inadequate Cromwell, which many of their gunners had scarcely test-fired, after fighting with Shermans in North Africa. There had been spectacular acts of individual heroism, many of which cost men their lives. The 1/7th Queens, especially, had fought desperately to hold the town. For those at the forefront of 22nd Armoured’s battle, it was intolerable to suggest that somehow an easy opportunity had been thrown away through any fault of theirs. The German achievement on 13/14 June had been that, while heavily outnumbered in the sector as a whole, they successfully kept the British everywhere feeling insecure and off-balance, while concentrating sufficient forces to dominate the decisive points. The British, in their turn, failed to bring sufficient forces to bear upon these. It seems likely that Brigadier Hinde, while a superbly courageous exponent of ‘leading from the front’, did not handle the large brigade group under his command as imaginatively as might have been possible, and higher formations failed to give him the support he needed. It is remarkable to reflect that the men on the spot believed a single extra infantry brigade could have been decisive in turning the scale at Villers, yet this was not forthcoming. Some 7th Armoured veterans later argued that Montgomery and Dempsey should have taken a much closer personal interest in a battle of such critical importance. For whatever reasons, the only conclusion must be that the British failed to concentrate forces that were available on the battlefield at a vital point at a critical moment of the campaign.
A sour sense, not of defeat, but of fumbled failure, overlay the British operation on the western flank. On 11 June, while 7th Armoured was probing hesitantly south, on its left flank the 69th Brigade of 50th Division was hastily ordered forward to exploit what was believed to be another gap in the German line, around the village of Cristot. Lieutenant-Colonel Robin Hastings of the 6th Green Howards was mistrustful of the reported lack of opposition – he anyway lacked confidence in his elderly brigadier – and was no more sanguine after his battalion had waited three hours for transport to its start-line. When the Green Howards moved off, two companies up, they were quickly outdistanced by their supporting tanks of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards, who raced forward along through the orchards. They failed to observe the hidden positions of panzergrenadiers of 12th SS Panzer, who had been rushed forward to secure the Cristot line in the hours since the British reconnaissance. Lying mute after the passage of the tanks, the SS poured a devastating fire on the Green Howards advancing through the corn, while anti-tank guns disposed of the British armour from their rear. Only two of the nine Shermans escaped, and the advancing infantry suffered appallingly.
With one company commander dead and the other wounded, Hastings’s B and C Companies were pinned down. He ordered A to move up on the right and attempt to outflank the enemy. When he himself began to go forward to sort out B and C, his battalion headquarters came under such heavy fire that he was compelled to call up D Company, his last reserve, to clear the way ahead. CSM Stan Hollis, whose courage had done so much for the battalion on D-Day, was now commanding a platoon of D. As they advanced up a sunken lane edged with trees towards the enemy, they came under fierce fire from a German machine-gun. Hollis reached in his pouch for a grenade and found only a shaving brush. Demanding a grenade from the man behind, he tossed it before he realized, to his chagrin, that the had failed to pull the pin. A second later, he concluded that the Germans would not know that and charged them, firing his sten gun while they were taking cover from the expected explosion.
Hastings found that A and B Companies had joined up amid the burning British tanks, one turning out of control in continuous circles between the trees. They gathered the German prisoners and pressed on. Then A Company commander was killed, and the attack was again pinned down. The Green Howards had lost 24 officers and suffered a total of 250 casualties. ‘I think there’s a lot of work for you to do, padre,’ said Hastings wearily to Captain Henry Lovegrove, who won a Military Cross that day. The padre searched the hedges and ditches around Cristot for hours. He became a smoker for the first time in his life after a few horrific burials. Lacking armoured support and an artillery fire plan, the Green Howards could not hold their ground against German counter-attacks. Bitterly, Hastings ordered a withdrawal. The SS immediately retook possession and by nightfall were counterattacking towards the British start-line on Hill 103.
Hastings remained bitter about the losses his men had sustained in an attack that he believed was misconceived – that was simply ‘not on’ – a fragment of British army shorthand which carried especial weight when used at any level in the ordering of war. Before every attack, most battalion commanders made a private decision about whether its objectives were ‘on’, and thereby decided whether its purpose justified an all-out effort, regardless of casualties, or merely sufficient movement to conform and to satisfy the higher formation. Among most of the units which landed in Normandy, there was a great initial reservoir of willingness to try, to give of their best in attack, and this was exploited to the full in the first weeks of the campaign. Thereafter, following bloody losses and failures, many battalion commanders determined privately that they would husband the lives of their men when they were ordered into attack, making personal judgements about an operation’s value. The war had been in progress for a long time; now, the possibility of surviving it was in distant view. The longer men had been fighting, the more appealing that chance appeared. As the campaign progressed, as the infantry casualty lists rose, it became a more and more serious problem for the army commanders to persuade their battalions that the next ridge, tomorrow’s map reference, deserved of their utmost. Hastings was among those who believed that an unnecessary amount of unit determination and will for sacrifice was expended in minor operations for limited objectives too early in the campaign. The problem of ‘non-trying’ units was to become a thorn in the side of every division and corps commander, distinct from the normal demands of morale and leadership, although naturally associated with them.
EPSOM
The debacle at Villers-Bocage marked, for the British, the end of the scramble for ground that had continued since D-Day. The Germans had plugged the last vital hole in their line. Henceforward, for almost all the men who fought in Normandy, the principal memory would be of hard, painful fighting over narrow strips of wood and meadow; of weeks on end when they contested the same battered grid squares, the same ruined villages; of a battle of attrition which was at last to break down Rommel’s divisions, but which seemed at the time to be causing equal loss and grief to the men of Dempsey’s and Bradley’s armies.
In the days following Villers-Bocage, unloading on the beaches fell seriously behind schedule in the wake of the ‘great storm’ of 19/23 June, which cost the armies 140,000 tons of scheduled stores and ammunition. Montgomery considered and rejected a plan for a new offensive east of the Orne. With the remorseless build-up of opposing forces on the Allied perimeter, it was no longer sufficient to commit a single division in the hope of gaining significant ground. When Second Army began its third attempt to gain Caen by envelopment, Operation EPSOM, the entire VIII Corps was committed to attack on a four-mile front between Carpiquet and Rauray towards the thickly-wooded banks of the river Odon. Three of the finest divisions in the British Army – 15th Scottish, 11th Armoured and 43rd Wessex – were to take
part, under the command of Lieutenant-General Sir Richard O’Connor, who had made a brilliant reputation for himself leading the first British campaign in the western desert. A personal friend of Montgomery since their days as Staff College instructors together in the 1920s, O’Connor had been captured and spent two years languishing in an Italian prisoner-of-war camp. This was to be his first battle since Beda Fomm in 1941. Early on the morning of 26 June, 60,000 men and more than 600 tanks, supported by over 700 guns on land and sea, embarked on the great new offensive: ‘The minute hand touched 7.30,’ wrote a young platoon commander of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers:
Concealed guns opened from fields, hedges and farms in every direction around us, almost as if arranged in tiers. During short pauses between salvoes more guns could be heard, and right away, further guns, filling and reverberating the very atmosphere with a sustained, muffled hammering. It was like rolls of thunder, only it never slackened. Then the guns nearby battered out again with loud, vicious, strangely mournful repercussions. Little rashes of goose-flesh ran over the skin. One was hot and cold, and very moved. All this ‘stuff’ in support of us! . . . So down a small winding road, with the absurd feeling that this was just another exercise.1
In the first hours, VIII Corps achieved penetrations on a three-mile frontage. But then, from out of the hedges and hamlets, fierce German resistance developed. Some of the great Scottish regiments of the British army – Gordons, Seaforths, Cameronians – began to pour out their best blood for every yard of ground gained. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall of the 2nd KRRC, later to become professional head of the British army, observed that a battalion of the Argylls which infiltrated forward in small groups by use of cover reached their objectives with modest casualties. But the great mass of the British advance moved forward in classic infantry formation: ‘It was pretty unimaginative, all the things that we had learned to do at battle school. A straightforward infantry bash.’2 That evening, the young platoon commander of the KOSB wrote again:
Rifle fire from the village periodically flared up. We were in bewildering ignorance of what was happening. The rain dripped and trickled into our slits, and there had been no hot food since before dawn. The big shells banging away on the T-roads jarred us, while the faces of the three dead Fusiliers could still be seen there as pale blobs through the gloom and rain, motionless among the shells, with their ghastly whiteness. And this, and those savage crashes, and the great spreadeagled hounds, and the grim churchyard across the wall, evoked a dull weight of depression such as one could never have dreamed. All the elation of the morning had ebbed away. It seemed there was no hope or sanity left, but only this appalling unknown and unseen, in which life was so precious where all rooted, and where all was loneliness and rain.3
The prose of Passchendaele seemed born again. A new experience very terrible in kind was being created in Normandy – that of the infantry soldier locked in battle of an intensity few men of the Allied armies had ever envisaged at their battle schools in Britain. Nor was the struggle much less painful for the crews of the armoured units. A tank wireless-operator of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards on the British left flank recorded in his diary the fortunes of his squadron on the morning of 26 June:
The whole squadron was now in the field, with the tanks scattered around by the hedges. We soon discovered from the wireless that we were in a trap. There appeared to be Tigers and Panthers all around us – there were about six on the high ground ahead, four in the edge of the wood just across the field to our left. Between them they covered every gap. The hours dragged by. In our tank we sat without saying much, listening intently to what was going on over the wireless. I was eating boiled sweets by the dozen and the others were smoking furiously. I didn’t know how long we’d been sitting there when the tank behind us was hit. It was Joe Davis’s. I saw a spout of earth shoot up near it as a shot ricocheted through it. Some smoke curled up from the turret, but it didn’t actually brew up. We did not know till after that the whole turret crew had been killed. Brian Sutton and his co-driver baled out, but I didn’t see them. That made six of the squadron killed already that day. In Lilly’s crew Fairman had been killed inside the tank and Digger James had been blown apart by a mortar bomb as he jumped off the turret. Charrison was badly burnt and George Varley was rumoured to be dead. One of Thompson’s crew, Jackie Birch, had been shot through the head by a King’s Royal Rifle Corps man who mistook him for a Jerry after he baled out . . .
The Tyneside Scottish came back across the field in single file, led by a piper who was playing what sounded like a lament. I felt lucky to be alive.4
A German counter-attack was repulsed on 27 June. The next day, in mud and rain, tanks of 11th Armoured at last poured across the bloody stream of the Odon to gain the heights of Hill 112 on 29 June. Now, at the desperate bidding of General Dollman of Seventh Army, who committed suicide a day later, General Hausser of II SS Panzer Corps launched a major counter-attack. 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, newly arrived from the east, were hurled against VIII Corps – and driven back. It was a fine fighting achievement by the British divisions and their air support, marred by the tragedy that, at this moment, General Dempsey misread the balance of advantage. Still expecting a greater effort from Hausser’s Panthers, he concluded that O’Connor’s exhausted men were dangerously exposed east of the Odon. On 29 June, he ordered the withdrawal of 11th Armoured to the west bank. The next day, Hill 112 was lost. Montgomery ordered that EPSOM should be closed down. VIII Corps had lost 4,020 men, 2,331 from 15th Scottish Division, 1,256 from 11th Armoured and 43rd Division.
Major Charles Richardson of 6th KOSB came out of EPSOM, his first battle, overcome with horror and disgust after seeing his battalion lose 150 casualties. ‘We were one big family. I knew every man.’5 He remembered a briefing from a psychiatrist before leaving England, who said that if men wanted to talk about a terrible experience they had endured, it was essential to let them do so rather than to stifle it in their minds. Talk they now did, about the spectacle of the Royal Scots Fusiliers cresting a hill to find the Germans dug in on the reverse slope, ‘something we had never envisaged’; about the Germans who shot it out until the Borderers were within yards of their positions and then raised their hands, ‘much good it did them’; about the vital importance of keeping pace with the rolling barrage of the guns.
One of the most remarkable features of EPSOM, like almost all the Normandy battles, was that its failure provoked no widespread loss of confidence by the troops in their commanders generally, or Montgomery in particular, the one general familiar to them all. Senior officers criticized and cursed errors of tactics and judgement. The men fighting the battles became more cautious in action, more reluctant to sacrifice their own lives when told for the third, fourth, fifth time that a given operation was to be decisive. But at no time did their faith in the direction of the campaign falter. ‘We thought the senior officers were marvellous,’ said Trooper Stephen Dyson: ‘They had all the responsibility, didn’t they?’6 Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs ‘. . . found it increasingly difficult to see how we should get out of all this – it seemed an absolute deadlock. There was some effect on morale, and places got a bad name, like Caumont. But when Montgomery passed us one day in his staff car all my crew stood up in the tank and cheered.’7 Lieutenant David Priest of 5th DCLI said: ‘I thought it was going alright, but it might take years. We didn’t seem to move very much.’8
After the war, Montgomery said:
Of course we would have liked to get Caen on the first day and I was never happy about the left flank until we had got Caen. But the important thing on the flank was to maintain our strength so that we could not only avoid any setback, but could keep the initiative by attacking whenever we liked. On this flank ground was of no importance at all. I had learnt from the last war the senseless sacrifice that can be made by sentimental attachment to a piece of ground. All I asked Dempsey to do was to keep German armour tied down on this flank so that my breakout with the
Americans could go more easily. Ground did not matter so long as the German divisions stayed on this flank. If I had attacked Caen in early June I might have wrecked the whole plan.9
It was in consequence of nonsense such as this that a great professional soldier caused so much of the controversy about the Normandy campaign to focus upon his own actions. By his determination to reap the maximum personal credit for victory and to distort history to conform with his own advance planning, he also heaped upon himself the lion’s share of responsibility for much that went wrong in Normandy. No sane commander could have mounted British attacks of the kind that took place in June and were to follow in July without every hope of breaking through the German defences, or at least of causing the enemy to make substantial withdrawals. Part of Montgomery’s exceptional quality as a commander lay in his ability to retain an atmosphere of poise, balance and security within his armies when a less self-disciplined general could have allowed dismay and disappointment to seep through the ranks. Montgomery served his own interests and those of his men very well by maintaining his insistence to his subordinates that all was going to plan. But he did himself a great disservice by making the same assertions in private to Eisenhower, Churchill, Tedder and even his unshakeable patron, Brooke.
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 19
