Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  The 29th Division’s narrative of an action south of Lison on 11 June, when two companies of the 175th Infantry advanced across the Vire, perfectly reflects the experience of scores of units in those painful, bitter weeks in the bocage when every yard of ground was gained with such painful slowness:

  It was with difficulty that Major Miller managed to get his heavy machine-guns up to a base-of-fire position to sweep the hedges of the suspected road. Radio channels within the company were not functioning, and the ‘pass-it-back’ method of requesting the weapons to come forward was slow. The entire command weight of the company at this point rested upon small unit leadership. Could the sergeant make his men do what he wanted? Was the sergeant a leader? Some exemplified all the finer qualities, about one-third fell down in this respect. All were handicapped by a general lack of understanding of the situation that confronted them. The enemy never presented himself as a target in this phase, and the fire of the company had, seemingly, little effect on him. On Gen. Cota’s insistence the other weapon of the infantry – movement – paid off well. Our troops continued to move into the fire by rushes, by creeping, by crawling, by ever moving forward. Result – enemy fire diminished and then stopped.

  . . . Cota had advanced only 25 yards when the crisis broke. One or two burp guns, which seemed to be located behind the high hedge that bordered the left side of the road, opened up with their excited chattering. The column on both sides of the road immediately dropped into the ditch – but this ditch was a shallow affair, about 4 or 5 inches deep, and offered no natural concealment of any kind. The suddenness with which the fire started, after the intense quiet of the last 20 minutes, stunned every member of the company. They dropped there and lay still. Several men were hit by the bullets spraying along, ricocheting off the road and nipping the shrubbery. Someone yelled ‘Return the fire! Shoot back at the bastards!’ At intervals men would rise from the ditch and try to escape from the entrapment by either scurrying to the rear, or trying to vault over the hedges. One man attempting to cross the left hedge received a blast of burp gun fire that shoved him crashing back into the road – dead . . . Shea [Cota’s aide] worked his way back through the culvert to the road. Gen. Cota was standing in the shelter of a corner of the hedgerow at the road junction opposite the culvert. He was smiling. ‘What’s this, “Cota’s Last Stand”?’ he quipped. ‘One minute I’m surrounded by a rifle company – those birds started to shoot – and I looked around to find myself all alone.’11

  Most or all of the German 243rd, 709th, and 91st Divisions were in the Cotentin, reinforced by the 6th Parachute Regiment, the 206th Panzer Battalion, and the Seventh Army Storm Battalion. Despite the vast weight of Allied air power interdicting communications, the 77th Division was also able to reach the area virtually unscathed, and VII Corps was in consequence obliged to pay dearly to enlarge the Utah perimeter across the swamp-ridden ground northwards. Major Harry Herman, executive officer of the 9th Division’s 2nd/39th Infantry, described the struggle to overcome the huge concrete casemates of Fort St Marcouf, even after it had been subjected to heavy air attack:

  Not a shot is fired taking our first objective. We walk upright into the bunker through one of the doors of twisted steel, throw in a hand grenade just for luck, and rush in on the ready to be greeted only by dead jerries strewn around inside 20-foot-thick concrete walls like so many loaves of bread – concussion. It feels rather strange and eerie, all very quiet, the sea beyond the fort looking cool and green. Have the Germans pulled out? Where is the 4th division? Where is our heavy weapons company? We worm our way to the top of the bunker, get careless, stand up, loll around, planning the next jump.

  While we are discussing this possibility, the entire party is suddenly lifted up and sat down hard by a blast that wounds Colonel Lockett in the head and arm. It is direct frontal fire, amazing because it gives no whistle and you find yourself out in the open with a tight expression around the eyes when the thing hits. At dusk, we open up: a tremendous sight. The entire strip of beach being combed and raked by sixteen cannon, 3 and 4 inch naval guns, 8 mortars, 16 machine-guns for fifteen minutes. Then we jump off, being greeted with very heavy enfilade fire on our 15-foot wide front. The 155 mm barrage had only bounced off the fort. I send G Company on a flanking mission to the left in an effort to either divert or knock out the resistance there which is preventing any forward movement. G reports that they are up to their chests in water and can go no further. We, the remainder of E Company, start forward again after laying in that damn water for a day and a half. We inch up the road along with a tank destroyer while the first battalion is engaged in heavy rifle fire. It seemed that we would finally get to the church which was our first phase line, but sweeping machine-fire tears the road. Men will not move and finally we have to withdraw. We have taken a beating.

  Several hours later, we start out again, this time with no barrage. We meet the first battalion which, in spite of mines and heavy fire, is coming up the beach. Walking ‘at the ready’ behind our TDs, they absorb most of the hail of fire that greets us. We get to the first bunker, Sergeant Hickey with a crowbar forces open the vent and we plant a 5 lb TNT block inside, which opens a hole about the size of a man’s body. Through this the TD fires 5 rounds of HE. That was that. Like killing flies with a sledgehammer. We have lost only 14 men, but the first battalion is in trouble. They lost Colonel Tinley who was first hit by a rifle bullet in the chest then while being carried on a stretcher, the litter bearers stepped on a mine. So he was buried later at St Mère Eglise. We gain the front part of the church, but jerry has the rear part and the cloisters. It is point-blank firing for a good hour until we have to get out because they got up in the rear and threw potato mashers down the belfry onto the altar where we are entrenched.12

  The Americans gained the fort at last after blasting their way inch by inch through the defences in the manner described by Herman. The 9th Division found such fighting tolerable after all their experience in North Africa and Sicily, but already other, greener American formations were proving sluggish in action. Herman and his men watched the first actions of the 79th Division with deep dismay: ‘They were almost a cruel laugh. They had one regiment attacking through our assembly area whose commander could not read a map, and they lost more men than I’ve ever seen through damn recruit tricks. It is quite evident that they are not prepared for combat – a shameful waste of good American lives.’13 Major Randall Bryant, executive officer of the 1st Battalion of the 9th Division’s 47th Regiment, found his unit summoned into action to relieve the 90th Division, a formation whose record was almost disastrously unsatisfactory throughout the Normandy campaign. Bryant and his men marched past the 90th’s infantry, lying by the roadside behind the line: ‘They looked awful – unshaven, dirty, pitiful.’14

  Carentan fell only on 12 June, and it was the 13th before the two American beachheads were at last in firm contact across the great flat sweep of wetlands dividing them. That day, Taylor’s paratroopers fought off a determined counter-attack by 17th SS Panzergrenadiers. Ultra intercepts had provided Bradley with warning of this German movement. Without explanation, he ordered Gerow immediately to move elements of 2nd Armored Division into the area in time to support the Airborne, and subsequently to push back the SS. In the two weeks that followed, although Gerow’s V Corps progressively pushed its perimeter southwards to Caumont, American attention focused squarely upon the drive for Cherbourg, the critical OVERLORD objective of gaining the Allies a major port. Already, the American commanders were profoundly conscious that time was slipping away, that more and more German forces were arriving on the battlefield, that ground was only slowly being gained. There was concern about the quality of infantry leadership. A forceful directive from First Army reminded all officers that they must wear badges of rank. Many had removed them, for fear of snipers. When on 14 June Gerow of V Corps told General Hodges, with some satisfaction, that his men had achieved all their objectives, Hodges reminded him with a quiet smile: �
�Gee, the objective of Berlin.’15 Yet the chronic shortage of supplies – above all, of artillery ammunition – was such that First Army could sustain only one major thrust at a time.16

  Despite Collins’s eagerness to strike hard and fast for Cherbourg, Bradley concluded that the risk would be intolerable unless the peninsula was first cut, to isolate the port from German reinforcements. In the first days after 6 June, the American airborne divisions fought their way forward inch by inch to consolidate the tenuous footholds they had gained in their drop, and to defeat dangerous German counter-attacks such as that on 7 June against Ste Mère Eglise. Then, led by the 9th and 90th Divisions and elements of 82nd Airborne, V Corps launched its drive westward, completed at the little coastal holiday resort of Barneville on 18 June. For many of the Americans, it was an exhilarating dash, infantry clinging to the hulls of the Shermans and tank destroyers as they bucketed across the countryside, meeting only isolated pockets of resistance. Parties of fugitive Germans or half-hearted counter-attacks on American positions were ruthlessly cut down, although 1,500 men of the German 77th Division were able to escape southwards across country, surprising men of the 90th Division guarding a bridge over the river Olande, and taking more than 100 prisoners. The 77th was one of the few formations of reasonable quality in the Cotentin. Most of the German static units were undertrained, poorly-equipped, demoralized. Hodges’s First Army diary for 16 June recorded that, ‘the Boche artillery extremely weak, and G-2 [intelligence] reports an increasing demoralisation because of lack of ammunition and supply.’ Such tanks as the Germans possessed were almost invariably captured French or Czech models. ‘We knew that we were not facing the top panzers,’ said Corporal Preston of the 743rd Tank Battalion.17 The German units proved capable of stubborn resistance when defending prepared positions against direct assault, but lacked the will or the means to interfere with major American units manoeuvring in open country.

  There was a legendary exchange between Bradley and Collins at this time, when the First Army commander received a characteristic signal from Montgomery declaring loftily that ‘Caen is really the key to Cherbourg.’ Collins exploded: ‘Brad, let’s wire him to send us the key!’18 Yet while the Americans interpreted Montgomery’s words both as an excuse for British difficulties around Caen, and an attempt to diminish that which they themselves were seeking to accomplish in the Cotentin, Montgomery was correct. Almost every single German formation of quality was fighting against the British. There could be no comparison between the difficulty of facing 12th SS Panzer or Panzer Lehr, and that of rolling up the weak enemy divisions falling back on Cherbourg.

  Not that this diminishes the qualities of speed and energy which VII Corps displayed in reaching the great port. Collins was already revealing himself as one of the outstanding personalities of the campaign. The tenth child of a Louisiana Irish family, he was 48 years old. Like so many other American career soldiers, he had spent years between the wars gaining age and enduring stagnation, seemingly without hope of glory or professional fulfilment. In 1920, when he found himself demoted to captain in the general post-war rundown of the services, he considered resignation. He was 44 before he attained a lieutenant-colonelcy, and it was January 1943 before he saw action for the first time, as a divisional commander in the Pacific. As a young man, he had considered becoming a lawyer, and possessed uncommonly catholic tastes for a soldier. He had travelled widely in Europe and the Far East, was a fine shot and an opera lover. A ruthless driver of men, he unhesitatingly sacked officers of any rank who failed to match his standards. Beyond the various divisional and regimental commanders whom he dismissed in the weeks after D-Day, he disposed of an operations officer who persisted with the fatal American army pre-war doctrine of placing unit boundaries on high ground, and an artillery commander who seemed unable to understand the vital importance of forward observation. Intolerant of excuses, he had a superb eye for an opportunity on the battlefield: American – and British – forces in Normandy sorely needed more commanders out of his mould.

  Just 22 hours after gaining Barneville, having achieved an astonishingly rapid change of axis through 90 degrees, Collins’s men began to push north for the port. Middleton’s VIII Corps, newly operational, accepted responsibility for securing the American east–west line while VII Corps drove for the port. Collins was already agitating for a leading role in the push south when Cherbourg fell. Bradley told him: ‘Troy [Middleton of VIII Corps] likes to fight, too.’

  General Bradley also had some definite words to say about divisions and commanders who appeared to be fighting the war for newspaper headlines alone [reported Hodges’s diary]. This competition for publicity, he told General Collins, will have to cease.19

  The intensity of rivalry between senior officers in battle is often difficult for civilians to grasp. But it is a simple fact of life that for professional soldiers, war offers the same opportunities and fulfilments as great sales drives offer corporation presidents. This is not a moral judgement, but a reality as old as war itself. All that was new in the Second World War was that unique opportunities were available to commanders on the battlefield to ingratiate themselves with newspaper correspondents, and thus to make themselves national figures. In the British Army, only an officer of Montgomery’s rank could exploit this. But within the American forces in Normandy, many divisional commanders competed ferociously for publicity for themselves and their formations, and there was bitter jealousy, for instance, of the fame of ‘The Big Red One’.

  The battle for Cherbourg

  At 2.00 p.m. on 22 June, preceded by a massive air bombardment, the Americans opened their attack against the three ridge lines on which the German outer defence of Cherbourg was centred. ‘The combat efficiency of all the [defending] troops was extremely low,’ admitted a German writer later.1 Cherbourg’s defences had been designed principally to meet an attack from the sea, and in an exercise early in May, General Marcks had demonstrated their vulnerability to landward assault by breaking through at exactly the points at which the Americans now attacked. Collins later expressed his astonishment that the Germans failed to make a stand on the outer range of high ground around the city, instead retiring immediately to the inner forts. They appeared to lack not only the numbers, but the will to conduct such a defence. Four German battle-groups had been formed from the remains of the units which had retreated up the Cotentin, and static defence in fortified positions is the least demanding role for poor-quality troops. If the Americans were able to mount their attack without enduring forceful counter-attacks, of the kind which were creating such difficulties for the British around Caen, it remained a harrowing task for infantry to advance into the intense machine-gun fire from the huge concrete bunkers.

  Major Randall Bryant’s battalion had fought a procession of minor skirmishes against pockets of German resistance up the peninsula, in one of which Bryant surprised himself as much as his men by successfully bouncing a bazooka round off a road into the belly of a German tank – the Americans had learned by bitter experience that direct fire would not penetrate its armour. Now, in the streets of Cherbourg, they began two days of nerve-racking house-to-house fighting on the road to Fort du Roule. They learned by experience the techniques of covering the building opposite while squads leapfrogged forward, paving their path with grenades, for it was a skill in which they had never trained. The enemy’s massive network of strongpoints had to be reduced one by one in dogged fighting, the assaulting infantry scaling the open approaches under withering machine-gun fire.

  We jump off Fort Octeville [wrote Major Herman of the 39th Infantry]. A barrage pins us down initially, but men filter through somehow, running like scared rabbits directly into the fort. We stop our artillery; it falls short on G Company, knocking out a platoon. Everything seems wrong. Our supporting tanks turn tail. With my Sgt. Maachi in tow, we crawl under heavy but high machine-gun fire up to the fort that looms up like Grand Central Station. I don’t quite remember what happens from here on, but pi
ecing it together, we got two bazookas up to about sixty yards from the fort when we hit the outpost. I kneeled up to fire my MI and a burst caught me in the right hip, taking my jacket with it. I started to run towards the pillbox, firing. A potato masher tore the gun out of my hands, ripping the forearm muscles of my right arm away, but not touching the bone. My boys said that I rolled down into a ditch, unconscious.2

  9th Division gained Octeville, and the 314th Infantry stormed Fort du Roule by other examples of the sacrificial courage which alone enables infantry to seize strongly fortified positions. When Corporal John Kelly found his platoon pinned down by machine-gun fire, he crawled forward to fix a pole charge beneath the German firing-slit, but returned to find that it had failed to detonate, and went back with another one. This time, the explosion blew off the protruding gun barrels, enabling the corporal to climb the slope a third time, reach the rear door of the pillbox and grenade it into silence. Lieutenant Carlos Ogden cleared the way for his company by knocking out an 88 mm gun with a rifle grenade although already wounded in the head, ignoring a second wound to run forward with grenades and silence the supporting German machine-guns. Both Kelly and Ogden were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

  The German Maschinegewehr MG 42 – universally known as the Spandau among Allied troops – was a superb general-purpose machine-gun, with a startling 1,200 rpm rate of fire. It could be fed either through boxed belts or – as here – by drum for greater portability. Distributed prodigally among all German units, it contributed decisively to their ability to generate immense defensive fire-power even when positions were manned by only small numbers of men. 750,000 were made before the end of the war, and achieved a remarkable reputation for reliability – the MG 42’s barrel could be changed in five seconds during periods of heavy firing.