The great majority of Allied soldiers who went to Normandy had never before seen action. Many thousands of British troops, especially, had lingered at home through two, three, four years of training and routine. They approached the campaign with an eagerness that promised much to their commanders. ‘We were all very scared, but glad that we were now going into battle,’ said Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs. ‘We had been frightened that the war would end before we were really in it. People had no great urge to kill, but they wanted to face the challenge to their manhood of being in danger.’16 Major William Whitelaw and his brother officers of the Scots Guards tank battalion were ‘thrilled that we were actually going to do something. We had been terrified that we weren’t going to get there, and worried how we should answer that question about “What did you do in the war, daddy?” ’17
The first shock of battle, the first losses, however severe, did not entirely destroy the sense of wonder, exhilaration and fulfilment that was created by the consummation of months and years of training. A British infantryman wrote of the period following his first action in another theatre at this time:
We had been in some bloody fighting and lost many men, but the sense of nastiness had been overlaid, even at the time, by an exhilarating aura of adventure. I did not of course then realise that that sense of adventure, with its supercharged impulses of curiosity and excitement, was one of the few advantages that the infantryman new to battle enjoyed over the veteran; and that it would, alas, gradually fade away. Thereafter we would become much better soldiers, hardened and more expert. But we would also, to that end, have to draw more deeply on our innermost resources of discipline, comradeship, endurance and fortitude.18
After the enormous initial excitement of the landings, the quick capture of Bayeux, and the dramatic American seizure of Cherbourg and clearance of the northern peninsula, the mood among the men of the Allied armies slowly changed, stiffened as the line of battle congealed. They learned the cost of digging slit-trenches beneath trees if these were struck by shellfire, the vital importance of oiling rifles to protect them from the ravages of rust that set in almost overnight, the price of leaving magazines filled too long so that in action their springs would no longer feed the weapon chambers. As most soldiers on most days found themselves holding fixed positions among the nettles and cow parsley of the hedgerows, at risk principally from mortar and artillery harassing fire, they dug deeper and adjusted to a routine of war: dawn stand-to; breakfast of tea, coffee or self-heating soup in their observation positions or foxholes or tank harbours; then the daily grind of infantry patrolling or tank deployments – for the Allied armour almost invariably withdrew from the front line during the hours of darkness. There were map shoots by the gunners or local attacks to adjust a salient or clear a start-line for major operations to come. Among the greatest strains on all the armies in Normandy was the sheer length of the summer day – from 4.45 a.m. to 11.15 p.m. in the first weeks of June. This bore especially heavily on commanders and staff officers, who were compelled to continue writing reports and issuing orders when they returned to their headquarters from the front with the coming of the brief darkness. Most commanding officers found that they could remain on their feet only by sleeping a little during the day. It was difficult to remain undisturbed. One British colonel posted a sign outside his CP: ‘HAVE YOU HAD YOUR ORGANIZED REST TODAY? I AM HAVING MINE NOW.’19 Men discovered that they could sleep on their feet, under bombardment, in their tanks, on the march. Fatigue, and the struggle to overcome it, ruled their lives.
For the tank crews, even in battle, there were hours sitting motionless, closed down beneath their hatches, firing an occasional shell merely to provide a receptacle into which to urinate. Inside their hulls, they were vulnerable only to direct hits from artillery or mortar fire, but they were often more ignorant than the infantry of what was taking place around them. During the critical battle for Villers-Bocage, Trooper Denis Huett of 5th RTR never saw a German. Scout cars radioed that enemy tanks were approaching, ‘and stuff started flying about’. They once traversed their turret violently to meet an oncoming tank, to discover just in time that it was one of their own. A nearby battery of 25-pounders was firing over open sights. Three of the crew of a neighbouring Cromwell, who lost patience with all the hanging about, dismounted for a private reconnaissance beyond the hedge and did not return, for they walked 100 yards to a barn and found themselves staring into the muzzle of a German tank commander’s Schmeisser. In an uncommon moment of humanity, when he learnt that it was the lap gunner’s 21st birthday, he produced a bottle of wine in celebration before sending the prisoners to the rear.
All one night and through the next day, Huett and the other crews remained in their tanks, periodically starting the petrol engines to charge the batteries, acutely watchful when darkness came and they were no longer able to pull back to harbour: ‘Oh gawd, we thought, and every time we saw a shadow we were sure something was out there.’ Somebody said that they were surrounded. They were deeply relieved on the night of 15 June when at last they retired, exhausted infantry clinging to their hulls. But of who had gone where, who had gained or lost what, they understood little. There was only the vague ranker’s awareness, communicated to Corporal Topper Brown, that, ‘the Germans had chewed us all for arsepaper, hadn’t they?’20
The tankmen pitied the infantry, their bodies naked to every form of high explosive, just as most foot soldiers preferred the comfort of their slit trenches to facing the enemy in a vast, noisy steel box which seemed to ignite instantly when hit. Tank crews could carry all manner of private comforts and extra rations with them, and despite strict orders against cooking inside the tanks in action, all of them did so, brewing up on the floors of the turrets. The chief handicap was the poor visibility through their periscopes with the hatches closed. Many of the best tank commanders were killed by small arms, standing up in their turrets for a wider view of the battlefield. Their greatest fear was of breakdown or throwing a track under fire, which would compel them to dismount. Corporal Bill Preston of the US 743rd Battalion had been in action for 32 days when his crew came upon another Sherman bogged down in a hedgerow ditch. He was peering out of the turret watching his commander and wireless operator hitch a cable to the casualty when two German mortar rounds dropped in their midst. Of the two men on the ground, one was killed and the other wounded. Preston himself fell to the bottom of the turret paralysed – his neck broken by a hit in the spine. ‘Dad’s not going to like this,’ he thought through his coma. He spent the next six months in hospitals, and reflected more pragmatically: ‘Thank God I’m out of it.’21
Every forward unit suffered a steady drain of casualties from snipers, mortaring and artillery fire, which both sides employed daily to maintain pressure upon each other, the Allies in greater volume since they possessed greater firepower. 2nd Panzer reported in July that they were receiving an average of 4,000 incoming artillery and 5,000 mortar rounds a day on their front, rising dramatically during British attacks to a total of 3,500 rounds in two hours on one occasion. It is important to remember that throughout the campaign, even in sectors where neither side was carrying out a major offensive, there were constant local attacks. To emphasize the staggering weight of firepower that the Allies employed in support of their movements, it is worth citing the example of a minor operation near Cristot on 16 June. Throughout the night of the 15th, the German positions to be attacked were subjected to harassing fire. In the early morning of the 16th, from H-35 to H-20, naval guns bombarded the objectives. From H-15 to H-Hour, Typhoons rocketed and strafed them. A squadron of tanks provided covering fire for the assault from a hull-down position on the flank. An entire armoured regiment carried out a diversionary manoeuvre just north of the intended thrust. A company of heavy 4.2-inch mortars stonked selected German positions from H-15 to H-Hour. The operation itself was supported by seven field regiments of 25-pounders, and four regiments of medium guns. At H-Hour, noon on the 16th, the battal
ion of 49th Division making the attack advanced two companies forward, at the normal infantry assault pace of 25 yards a minute; a troop of tanks accompanied each company. The tanks led across the open fields beyond the start-line, then, as they approached an orchard, allowed the infantry to overtake them and sweep it for anti-tank guns, before the tanks once again took over. At 1.15 p.m. the battalion passed through Cristot, where it reorganized. They found 17 German dead in the village and two armoured cars and one soft-skinned vehicle destroyed. The British had lost three killed and 24 wounded, almost all by enemy mortars. A few hundred yards of fields and ruins had been gained, at uncommonly small cost in British life. But the extraordinary firepower that had been deployed to make this possible readily explains why the Allies in Normandy suffered chronic shortages of artillery ammunition.22
Every German unit reported ceaselessly on the agonizing difficulties caused by constant Allied air surveillance, even when there were no incoming air strikes. The mere presence in the sky of Allied spotting aircraft frequently reduced every nearby German gun to silence. Anti-aircraft fire was discouraged by bringing down an immediate Allied barrage upon its source.
Snipers were detested and feared as much for the strain that they caused to men’s routine movements in forward areas as for the casualties that they inflicted. Their activities provoked as much irrational resentment as the killing of baled-out tank crews or parachutists in mid-descent. Both sides habitually shot snipers who were taken prisoner. ‘Brad says he will not take any action against anyone that decides to treat snipers a little more roughly than they are being treated at present,’ wrote the First Army commander’s ADC in his diary: ‘A sniper cannot sit around and shoot and then capture when you close in on him. That’s not the way to play the game.’23 It is important to distinguish here between the work of the specially-trained, superbly-camouflaged marksmen who worked with telescopic-sighted rifles between the lines during periods of static warfare, and the universal habit of describing any man hit by a small-arms round as ‘shot by a sniper’.
One of the chronic preoccupations of Allied commanders in Normandy was the need to persuade attacking infantry to keep moving, not to cause incessant delays by taking cover whenever small-arms fire was heard in their area. For most infantrymen, when a shot came from an unseen gun – and almost every gun fired in Normandy was unseen – it was a reflex action to seek cover until the danger had been pinpointed. No habit caused greater difficulties and delays to Allied movement, nor proved more difficult to overcome when those junior leaders who resisted it and pressed on were so frequently killed. ‘It is a natural tendency for inexperienced troops to think that every bullet that comes over their heads is fired from about a hundred yards away,’ stated an acerbic British report after the early fighting in France, ‘whereas in fact it is probably fired from a much greater range.’24 Many units in defensive positions habitually sprayed the surrounding area – above all, nearby woods – with random gunfire at dawn to shake out any enemy who had infiltrated during the night. Commanders sought in vain to discourage this practice, which almost invariably provoked an unwanted exchange of shooting.
Casualties
There was a brutally self-evident hierarchy of risk among the armies: naturally this was lowest among lines-of-communication troops and heavy artillery, rising through field artillery and armoured units and engineers, to reach a pinnacle among infantry. Of the British forces in Normandy by August 1944, 56 per cent were classified as fighting troops rather than service elements. Just 14 per cent were infantrymen, against 18 per cent gunners, 13 per cent engineers, 6 per cent tank crews, 5 per cent signallers. Even within an infantry battalion, a man serving heavy weapons with the support company possessed a markedly greater chance of survival than his counterpart in a rifle company. It was here that the losses, turnover of officers and men, became appalling, far more serious than the planners had allowed for, and eventually reached crisis proportions in Normandy for the American, German and British armies. Before D-Day, the American logisticians had expected 70.3 per cent of their casualties to be among infantry. Yet in the event, of 100,000 American casualties in June and July, 85 per cent were infantry, 63 per cent riflemen. The British forecast casualties on the basis of staff tables known as the Evetts’ Rates, which categorized levels of action as ‘Intense’, ‘Normal’ and ‘Quiet’. After the army’s early experiences in Normandy, it was found necessary to introduce a new scale to cover heavy fighting: ‘Double Intense’. Vision, for the men in the front line, narrowed to encompass only the immediate experience of life and death. ‘One was emotionally absorbed by the question: “Am I going to get through tomorrow?” ’ said Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs. ‘I really believed each time I went into action that I was going to get killed.’ For all his fear, Wilson was one of those young Englishmen who found the experience of war deeply fulfilling:
I had the delayed adolescence of so many English public schoolboys. Everything I learned about things such as how not to get a girl pregnant, I learned from my tank crew. In the truest sense, I developed a love of other men such as is not possible in Anglo-saxon society in peacetime. In some ways, our emotional capability developed beyond our years at this time. But in others, in our knowledge of life outside the battlefield, we were retarded.25
A close friend of Wilson’s, commanding another flamethrowing tank troop, was shot along with his crew when he was captured because the Germans considered that the Crocodile somehow transcended the legitimate horrors of battle. Much has been made of the shooting of prisoners – most notoriously, Canadian prisoners – by 12th SS Panzer and other German units in Normandy. Yet it must be said that propaganda has distorted the balance of guilt. Among scores of Allied witnesses interviewed for this narrative, almost every one had direct knowledge or even experience of the shooting of German prisoners during the campaign. In the heat of battle, in the wake of seeing comrades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of doing so. Many British and American units shot SS prisoners routinely, which explained, as much as the fanatical resistance that the SS so often offered, why so few appeared in POW cages. The 6th KOSB never forgave or forgot the action of a wounded SS soldier to whom Major John Ogilvie leaned down to give water. The German drank, then shot the British officer.
German treatment of prisoners was as erratic as that of the Allies. Sergeant Heinz Hickmann of the Luftwaffe Parachute Division was holding a crossroads with a 12-man rearguard early one morning, when he was nudged out of a doze by an urgent whisper: ‘Tommy’s here!’ They shot up the lead jeep of a convoy of 12 lorries, from which a procession of rudely-awakened British supply personnel tumbled out with their hands up. Embarrassed by the burden of 34 prisoners, Hickmann had them locked in a nearby barn, and left them there when his squad pulled out: ‘In Russia, we would have shot them.’ Some men had special reasons for fearing capture: Private Abraham Arditti of the US 101st Airborne could never forget the H for Hebrew imprinted on his dogtags. But although there were well-documented instances of SS units murdering their captives, overall it seems doubtful whether this was done on a greater scale by one side than the other. Lieutenant Philip Reisler of the US 2nd Armored watched infantrymen of the 4th Division carelessly shoot three wounded Germans. One of his fellow officers echoed a common sentiment in the unit: ‘Anything you do to the kraut is okay because they should have given up in Africa. All of this is just wasted motion.’ Patton described how a German soldier blew a bridge, killing several GIs after their leading elements had passed: ‘He then put up his hands . . . The Americans took him prisoner, which I considered the height of folly.’ Lindley Higgins of the US 4th saw a lieutenant shout impatiently to a soldier moving off with a prisoner: ‘You going to take that man to the rear?’, and simply pull out his pistol to shoot the German in the head. Once a definable atrocity had been discovered – as with the bodies of the Canadians kille
d by 12th SS Panzer – and the conscious decision taken to respond in kind, it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behaviour of one side and the other on the battlefield.
Corporal Topper Brown of the 5th RTR never even knew where his tank was hit when his squadron commander in the turret said quietly: ‘Bale out.’ He found himself alone in a ditch with his mate Dodger Smith, the gunner. They could hear the Germans digging in quite close to hand, and saw some tracer overhead. But they felt desperately tired, and after lying listening for a time, fell asleep. They woke in bright sunshine to hear only birdsong around them. Cautiously they explored, and found an abandoned Cromwell. They climbed onto the hull to find its commander dead inside, and tried in vain to use the radio to contact their own unit. Then they began to walk up the road until they heard voices, and found themselves face to face with a file of Germans. They put up their hands: ‘We couldn’t have got them no higher.’ Even when shells began to land nearby and the Germans took cover, the frightened young Londoners remained standing in the road with their hands in the air.
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 29
