Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  Being a regular officer I realise the seriousness of this request and its effect on my career. On the other hand I have the lives of the new officer personnel (which is excellent) to consider. Three days running a major has been killed or seriously wounded because I have ordered him to in effect stop them running during mortar concentrations. Unless withdrawn from the division I do not think I can get the battalion fit to fight normally and this waste of life would continue. My honest opinion is that if you continue to throw new officer and other rank replacements into 6 DWR as casualties occur, you are throwing good money after bad.

  I know my opinion is shared by two other commanding officers who know the full circumstances.

  In the field

  30 June 1944 (Sgd)______________, Lt-Col., Commanding, 6 DWR27

  If the difficulties of 6th DWR were exceptional, it is seldom that the plight of a moderate unit under pressure on the battlefield is so precisely chronicled. Montgomery, on whose desk this report finally arrived, was furious. He wrote to the Secretary of State for War, P. J. Grigg, saying that he had withdrawn 6th DWR from the 49th Division, and castigating its commanding officer: ‘I consider that the CO displays a defeatist mentality and is not a “proper chap”.’28 The unit was disbanded. The Commander-in-Chief perhaps had no other option but to adopt a ruthless attitude to any manifestation of failing will at this juncture in the battle. If some divisions had proved capable of extraordinary exertions and sacrifices, in a struggle of such magnitude it was the overall quality of the army, rather than of a small number of outstanding units within it, which would determine its outcome. It was because of problems such as these that Montgomery found it necessary to keep elite formations, such as 6th Airborne, in action long after their casualties and exhaustion made them deserving candidates for relief. It must also be said that even average German formations proved capable of continuing to fight effectively when reduced to 25 per cent of their strength. None of the German formations transferred from the eastern front to Normandy were found wanting by their commanders (as 7th Armoured and 51st Highland were) because they had been over-exposed to action. When the war was over that most astringent of military critics, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, made his own comments upon the performance of British units in Normandy:

  Time after time they were checked or even induced to withdraw by boldly handled pockets of Germans of greatly inferior strength. But for our air superiority, which hampered the Germans at every turn, the results would have been much worse. Our forces seem to have had too little initiative in infiltration, and also too little determination – with certain exceptions. Repeatedly one finds that big opportunities were forfeited because crucial attacks were stopped after suffering trifling casualties. That was particularly marked with the armoured formations.29

  Montgomery’s massive conceit masked the extent to which his own generalship in Normandy fell victim to the inability of his army to match the performance of their opponents on the battlefield. After all the months of meticulous training and preparation for OVERLORD, British tactics were shown to be not only unimaginative, but also inadequate to cope with the conditions of Normandy. Battalion and brigade commanders seemed capable of little beyond the conventional setpiece assault ‘by the book’. It may be argued that it was Montgomery’s business to adjust his plans to the limitations of his forces. But it was enormously difficult, indeed all but impossible, to retrain an army, to change the entire tactical thinking of a generation, in mid-campaign. Montgomery was uncommonly skilled in making the most of the units he had, discerning the qualities that suited a certain division to a certain role. It was he himself who declared that the British are a martial, not a military people. There was nothing cowardly about the performance of the British army in Normandy. But it proved too much to ask a citizen army in the fifth year of war, with the certainty of victory in the distance, to display the same sacrificial courage as Hitler’s legions, faced with the collapse of everything that in the perversion of Nazism they held dear. Brigadier Williams said: ‘We were always very aware of the doctrine, “Let metal do it rather than flesh”. The morale of our troops depended upon this. We always said: “Waste all the ammunition you like, but not lives.” ’30

  But in Normandy, the Allied armies discovered the limits of what metal alone could achieve. Individual Allied soldiers proved capable of immense sacrifice and bravery; men who felt – like Sergeant-Major Hollis of the Green Howards or Corporal Kelly of the 314th Infantry at Cherbourg – that winning the war was their personal responsibility. But the British failure to gain Caen in June 1944 revealed a weakness of fighting power and tactics within the British army much more than a failure of generalship by Sir Bernard Montgomery.

  5 » THE AMERICANS BEFORE CHERBOURG

  The bocage

  Something between a week and a month of intense action suffices to transform most infantrymen from novices – unable to discern the source of firing, uncertain of the scale of danger, unconvinced of the need to dig deep – into veterans or casualties. In the days following 6 June, the American forces in Normandy faced few German opponents of the quality and determination of those who were already moving into battle against the British Second Army. But for the men of Bradley’s divisions, fighting first to unite their beachheads, then to expand these and secure Cherbourg and the Cotentin Peninsula, the first encounters with the enemy in the close confinement of the Norman bocage proved a testing experience. ‘Although there had been some talk in the UK before D-Day about the hedgerows,’ wrote Gavin of the 82nd Airborne, ‘none of us had really anticipated how difficult they would be.’1 The huge earthen walls, thickly woven with tree and brush roots, that bordered every field were impenetrable to tanks; each one was a natural line of fortification. In the Cotentin, the difficulties of the ground were compounded by wide areas of reclaimed marshland likewise impassable to armour, which was thus restricted to the roads. Gerow’s V Corps, which had endured so much to secure Omaha beach, was fortunate during the next phase of their advance inland in meeting few German reinforcements – only the 30th Mobile Brigade began to arrive on 7 June to support the badly mauled 352nd Division. The American 29th Division, which had revealed its lack of experience on D-Day, made slow work of its move westward to link up with the survivors of the Ranger companies still holding out on Pointe du Hoc.

  ‘Those goddam Bosch just won’t stop fighting,’ Huebner of 1st Division complained to Bradley, when the latter hitched a lift ashore in a DUKW on the morning of the 7th.2 But the 18th and 26th Regiments of 1st Division pushed forward to link up with the British XXX Corps across the river Drome on 8 June, and Isigny was cleared on the night of 7/8 June. The redoubtable Brigadier-General Cota of 29th Division was one of the first men into the ruined town, where the Americans found only the acrid smell of burning and the crackle of flames from buildings ignited by shells and bombs lighting up the darkness.

  ‘Hell, they didn’t even blow the bridge’, Cota yelled to Col. Gill as he walked across the sturdy stone span [related the divisional after-action narrative]. Everyone was on edge waiting for sniper fire, and it was fortunate for the few prisoners that dribbled out of the ruins that they did not get shot. One of them offered to lead our men to a place where 14 of his comrades were hiding. He said they’d give up but were afraid to come out. A patrol was hastily organised, and under the prisoner’s direction, rounded up his fellow soldiers.3

  Cota dispatched a liaison officer, Lieutenant Delcazel, to report to the division that Isigny was clear. Less than a mile along the road to the division CP, his jeep was surrounded by armed men who disarmed the lieutenant and his driver and took them back to their positions. It emerged that these were not Germans, but a hodgepodge of Poles, Serbs and Russians whose officers and NCOs had fled, and who were chiefly concerned to find the means to surrender safely. They were mortally frightened of being intercepted by nearby German troops, who would shoot them at once if their intentions became apparent. After much discussion with the captured Ameri
cans, on the morning of 10 June they marched fully armed down the road towards Maisy until they encountered an astonished American half-track driver. Delcazel ran forward shouting, ‘Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot! They want to surrender.’ 75 men walked forward and laid down their weapons. A squadron of impeccably-attired White Russian cavalrymen in astrakhan hats, who surrendered a few days later, sent forward a deputation to an American reconnaissance troop to demand its strength. They declared that they were eager to give up, but could only do so in the face of a substantial force. The Americans convinced them that they were in sufficient strength for honour to be served. In those first days after the landings, First Army found the quality of their opposition extraordinarily uneven: at one moment a handful of GIs were receiving wholesale enemy surrenders; at the next, an entire division was being held up by the stubborn resistance of a company of Germans with a detachment of anti-tank guns.

  Following the capture of Isigny and the link-up of Omaha and Utah, the eastern American flank gave the Allied high command little anxiety in the aftermath of its troubled landings. All attention was focused north-westwards, upon the struggle of General Collins’s VII Corps to secure the Cotentin. Montgomery was eager that V Corps should press on southwards while Collins moved west and north, but Bradley told his commanders: ‘Nobody’s going anywhere until Joe gets Cherbourg. I want to see Pete and Gee dug in solidly on their fronts. The other fellow might still hit them, and we’re not going to risk his busting through to Omaha beach . . .’4

  The German forces in the peninsula lacked the mobility and cohesion to mount a large-scale counter-attack against the Utah beachhead. But they could still defend the hedgerows and causeways with bitter tenacity, and launch a succession of local assaults in battalion or regimental strength which, at times, caused the American command much anxiety. 7 June found the airborne divisions still fighting hard to concentrate their scattered companies, and to gain the elusive passages through the floods which alone could promise Collins’s corps a breakout from the beaches. Bradley told Collins to pour all the air power he wished onto Carentan, ‘and take the city apart. Then rush it and you’ll get in.’5 It quickly emerged that by no means all the American units coming ashore could match the paratroopers’ determination or skill on the battlefield. Jittery leading elements of the 90th Division moving forward from Utah encountered an approaching column of German prisoners, and opened fire upon them with every weapon they possessed. When the 325th Glider-borne Infantry were shown by Gavin and his tired soldiers where they were to make their attack, their battalion commander declared that he did not feel well, and had to be relieved. When the unit finally advanced in the face of German fire, on this first encounter with the enemy, they halted and could not be persuaded to move. Gavin was compelled to signal his paratroopers to pass through and seize the objective themselves. The airborne divisions had expected early relief after carrying out their D-Day missions – withdrawal to England to prepare for a new parachute operation. Yet because of a serious shortage of determined and competent American infantry, they were now to be called upon to fight through to the end of the battle for the Cotentin. Their experience and their achievement, lightly armed and having borne the brunt of the first fighting for the peninsula without armoured support, proved that an elite American force could match the troops of any army in Normandy. But those of them who had experienced little action before found the process of learning as painful as any line infantryman.

  Private Richardson of the 82nd Airborne – who unlike most of his comrades had not seen action – was last seen asleep in a field in the midst of the Cotentin on the evening of 6 June. By the night of the 7th, he was dug into a hedgerow looking out across a field to a wood, amid the machine-gun platoon of his battalion:

  Someplace far off in the distance beyond the woods I began to hear a squeaking noise. It was the sound of a rusty wheel that needed grease, the sound of an old farm wagon I’d often heard around my farming village home. Some French farmer hauling goods? That seemed unlikely with two armies poised with uneasy fingers on the triggers of a thousand guns. Germans? That too seemed unlikely. If the Germans were moving through territory where we might be, wouldn’t they be silent? Wouldn’t they creep practically on tiptoe? I dismissed the idea that this distance noise meant anything dangerous, or tried to. The trouble was the noise, the only noise in the whole night around me, was coming our way. For a time there was a silence, then I heard someone shout ‘HALT!’ and immediately a burst of fire – sub-machine gun, German. What was happening? Why wasn’t the machine-gun platoon doing something? Finally there was firing from one of our machine-guns, the slower dat-dat-dat, tracer bullets though instead of being aimed were going up into the sky in a crazy wavering arc. I finally woke Johnson up and we sat there staring at the tracers flying around the sky. When the shooting stopped we could hear the Germans running around yelling and gradually moving back towards the road near the house. Then the house was on fire, and after a time the vehicle that made the squeaking noise started up again, but this time it headed down the road away from us.6

  The Germans resumed their attack on the paratroopers’ position early the following afternoon. Richardson fired only one round from the MI rifle he had picked up before it jammed, and he understood why its original owner had thrown it away. Feeling helpless and nervous, he began to shoot single rounds towards the woods from which the enemy fire seemed to be coming, pausing after each shot to ram home the sticking bolt. As a small boy, he had read a series of splendid children’s adventure stories entitled American Boys Over There, which had planted a vivid image in his mind of big-bellied, heavy-booted ‘nuns’ or ‘bosch’ charging across a field in spiked helmets against American doughboys, who eventually prevailed. Now, at each warning of a new German assault, he saw this picture more clearly. And at last, it became a reality. A solitary tank began to rattle slowly across the field towards the Americans, who could confront it only with fierce machine-gun fire. To their astonishment and delight, suddenly it halted. A plume of smoke rose from its turret. This was no Panther or Tiger, but some French-built makeweight. The paratroopers cheered, ‘like kids at a football game when their team scores’. The tank turned about and lumbered away into the woods. But the defenders’ exhilaration was stillborn. Moments later, very accurate mortar fire began to fall among them. ‘Men I had just lain shoulder to shoulder with began screaming in pain, screaming for help, hysterical helpless screams that made my stomach tighten. Because of the apparent protection of the hedgerow and our greenness, we had not realized the necessity of digging in and few of us had holes which would have saved us from all but a direct hit.’7

  Richardson remembered vividly a photograph that he had seen in a magazine, of a Russian soldier who was captioned as the only survivor of his company. Now, the young American felt that he shared the man’s sensation. When his unit, and the other survivors of the airborne divisions, were withdrawn from the battle at the beginning of July, after 33 days in action, his company numbered 19 men. His division had suffered 46 per cent casualties. Lieutenant Sidney Eichen of the 30th Division’s 120th Infantry was one of the men who relieved the 82nd Airborne. The green, unblooded newcomers gazed in shock and awe at the paratroopers they were to succeed:

  We asked them: ‘Where are your officers?’, and they answered: ‘All dead.’ We asked: ‘Who’s in charge, then?’, and some sergeant said: ‘I am.’ I looked at the unshaven, red-eyed GIs, the dirty clothes and the droop in their walk, and I wondered: is this how we are going to look after a few days of combat?8

  The 29th Division’s difficulties continued throughout the first weeks in Normandy. They called for all the leadership and driving power of Brigadier Cota and a handful of other officers to keep the men moving on their push south from the beaches. In the early hours of 10 June, Cota was at the command post of the 175th Regiment in a field at Lison, when three soldiers walked in from the east and announced they were from the 2nd Battalion, which had been surrounded and wiped
out. Despite the Brigadier’s scepticism and efforts to calm them, the sergeant with them insisted that they were the only survivors.

  We’d just gotten into our bivouac area when it all started [the sergeant described their collapse in the after-action narrative]. All of a sudden flares went up and burp guns started to fire into the big field where most of the battalion was located. We could hear the Germans yelling. Sometimes they’d yell ‘Surrender! Surrender!’ in English. We tried to fight back but we didn’t have any firing positions. Every time we tried to move the Germans would see the movement in the bushes for flares lit up the whole field, and they’d let loose with machine gun fire. They kept shooting mortars into the field all the time. There were seven or eight of us in the little group near me. We figured a way to get out, but a couple of the boys were hit as they tried to make it.9

  In the hours that followed, more stragglers from the battalion, including its chaplain, arrived and confirmed the NCO’s story. Later in the day, Cota talked forcefully to some hundred men of the battalion who had now been reassembled.

  The members of this group were visibly shaken from their experiences of the night before. One medical aid man called ‘Skippy’ just kept repeating over and over, ‘That bayonet charge, that goddam bayonet charge.’ Cota told the group that they were under the wrong impression – that the battalion had by no means been wiped out. General Gerhardt had already appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Sheppe, who had been acting as regimental executive, to take over command. He told them that they would have an opportunity to rest, be re-equipped and would be able to go back and fight the Germans. At the moment this proposition was not accepted too warmly.10