Bayerlein had personally ridden forward by motor-cycle to the 901st Regiment, whose commander, Colonel von Hausser, was sitting in a cellar beneath an old stone tower. Von Hausser declared gloomily that his entire front line had been devastated. Yet the survivors resisted with all their usual stubbornness. Colonel Hammonds Birks of 120th Infantry radioed to 30th Division that ‘the going was very slow . . . the boche had tanks dug in, hull down, and were shooting perhaps more artillery than they had ever previously used along any American sector.’ First Army’s diary recorded bleakly: ‘This day, a day to remember for more than one reason, did not bring the breakthrough for which we had all hoped . . . There was no question but that the postponement of the attack from Monday to Tuesday, plus two successive days of bombing of our own troops, took the ginger out of several of the front-line elements.’
Yet even in these first encounters, General Collins found cause for encouragement. While the German positions were resisting fiercely, they did not appear to form a continuous belt of defences. They could be outflanked, bypassed. In contrast to the meticulously prepared succession of defensive positions in depth with which the Germans on the Bourguébus Ridge met GOODWOOD, below the St Lô–Périers road on 25 July, they retained only a crust. This, despite all the warning they had received of an impending American thrust. It was a tribute to the efforts of the British and Canadians that von Kluge’s fears, as well as his principal forces, were still decisively fixed upon the eastern flank. That day, the 25th, the 2nd Canadian Corps launched a new attack towards Bourguébus which quickly broke down and was counter-attacked by 9th SS Panzer. But, faced with two heavy assaults, it was to the east that von Kluge chose to go himself that day, to inspect the front. Against the 14 British and Canadian divisions, the Germans still deployed 14 of their own, including six panzer. The Americans faced only 11 seriously weakened enemy divisions, two of them armoured. The old Panzer Lehr began the COBRA battle with a strength of just 2,200 men and 45 operational armoured vehicles in the front line. Against this weary gathering of German battle-groups and depleted infantry formations, the full weight of 15 American divisions would shortly be committed. Bayerlein was enraged to receive a visit from a staff officer of von Kluge, conveying the Field-Marshal’s order that the St Lô–Périers line must be held: not a single man must leave his position. A battalion of SS Panthers was on its way to provide support. Bayerlein said flatly: ‘Out in front every one is holding out. Every one. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews – they’re all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post. They are lying silent in their foxholes, for they are dead. You may report to the Field-Marshal that the Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated.’23 In keeping with the occasion, at that moment a vast ammunition dump exploded nearby, hit by fighter-bombers. Bayerlein’s remarks were only slightly exaggerated.
On the afternoon of the 25th, Collins learned enough about the vulnerability of the Germans to outflanking movements to risk giving the order to his mobile columns to start moving. By nightfall, elements of 1st Division were outside Marigny. The next morning, across the entire VII Corps front, units began to shake free from engagements with the defenders of Panzer Lehr and move fast across country, reporting that resistance was crumbling before them. The tank columns were slowed by the need for the ‘Rhinos’ to spend an average of two and a half minutes cutting through each hedgerow. But delays of this order were trifling by comparison with the hours of sluggish progress under fire that had marked each battle in the bocage since D-Day. The entire offensive was rapidly gaining momentum. Pockets of resistance at crossroads halted the American tanks only for such time as it took the infantry to jump down and pour fire into them. Sergeant Hans Stober and his company of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers had been ordered to hold their positions for 24 hours. ‘But we found that American units in company strength had bypassed us. There was no choice but to order us to withdraw.’24 So it was for thousands of German soldiers the length of the line. As darkness fell on the night of the 26th, the forceful Brigadier Maurice Rose of 2nd Armored’s Combat Command A – the equivalent of a British brigade group – raced on. His men’s progress had been dramatically rapid, a tribute to the careful training of his tank companies before the attack, alongside the foot soldiers of 22nd Infantry. At 3.00 a.m. the next morning, they had reached the first objective of COBRA, a road junction north of Le Mesnil-Herman. By noon on the 27th, 9th Division was also clear of all organized German resistance, and moving fast. Since the rear areas were alive with German stragglers and retreating units, it proved essential to provide armoured escorts for the American supply columns racing to follow the lead troops. Everywhere behind the front, they were now meeting the chaos of German defeat – fleeing men and vehicles, enemy columns searching desperately for a route of escape.
Lieutenant Philip Reisler of 2nd Armored was sitting dozing in the turret of his Sherman on a bend in a sunken road, his crew sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion in the hull beneath him, when he heard an unfamiliar engine sound behind him, and turned to see a German half-track driving fast in his direction, the soldiers inside it laughing, oblivious of the Americans. The vehicle smashed full-tilt into the tank and stopped dead, its radiator hissing and steaming. The horrified German driver tore his gears in a desperate effort to reverse, while Reisler fumbled equally clumsily with his machine-gun, simultaneously kicking his gunner into life. A German machine-gunner began to fire wildly, and the half-track somehow swerved around the tank. Then the Americans slammed a 75 mm at point-blank range into its rear: it slewed across the road and began to burn. Reisler’s coaxial machine-gun killed the crew as they leapt out of the flames. At that moment, a second half-track rounded the corner, steered around the tank, halted behind the flaming barricade and received another 75 mm shell which blew most of its occupants alive into the road. One German walked in a daze to the Sherman and leaned against it, shaking his head. Reisler pressed the trigger of his pistol. To his dismay nothing happened. The German, however, scrambled hastily up the bank into an orchard, and infuriated the American by turning back and grinning before he walked unhurriedly away through the trees. Three more Germans marched towards the tank, hands in the air. The tank crew chatted to them by the roadside. Reisler suggested to one that he should hide his wristwatch in his sock, for otherwise the MPs would surely take it.
A few minutes later, Reisler’s battalion commander walked down the road and took over the Sherman’s radio. His own tank, he said, had been hit. From the orchard came a burst of submachine-gun fire. The colonel seized a Thompson gun and emptied clip after clip into the trees until, assuaged, he stepped down and walked forward to the wreck of his own tank with Reisler. The lieutenant peered down into the driver’s seat, and was appalled to find only the man’s lower half remained. He looked upwards, and saw the remainder of the body hanging obscenely from the telephone wires, 20 feet above his head, one hand gently waving.
The flak battalion of the 17th SS was wiped out by air attack. ‘The troops had been trained to lose a battle quite calmly,’ said one of its survivors, Sergeant Stober, ‘we knew that the vital thing was to stick together. But we could see that the Americans had learnt how to break through, ignoring their flanks and pushing on to occupy crossroads and set up blocking positions so that our vehicles and heavy weapons could not get through. We lost vast quantities of matériel.’
On 26 July, VIII Corps joined the offensive on the right. Middleton felt compelled to use the 8th and 90th Divisions to lead his attack, because their positions alone possessed clear paths in front through the floods and swamps. Both bitterly disappointed First Army by failing to gain ground. But the next morning, first light revealed that the Germans in front of them had gone, compelled to pull back because of their crumbling left flank, leaving only immense minefields to delay the advance of VIII Corps.
A sense of exhilaration such as they had not known since Cherbourg, perhaps not matched since 7 June, was now overtaking the Americans as they dashed th
rough villages which welcomed them with all the warmth of civilians whose homes and possessions and livestock had not been destroyed. ‘This virtual road march was such as the American army was designed for,’ Russell Weigley has written, ‘especially the American armored divisions. Appealing also to the passion for moving on that is so much a part of the American character and heritage, it brought out the best in the troops, their energy and mechanical resourcefulness.’25 The infantry clung to the tank hulls and sat up in the trucks waving wildly to French onlookers as they raced south-westwards, blackened German vehicles by the roadside testifying to the achievement of the fighter-bombers in clearing the roads ahead of them. Despite stiffening resistance east of Coutances on the 28th, that evening the CC B of Middleton’s 4th Armored swung up from the south to reach the town. ‘The highlight of the day’, recorded First Army’s diary of the 29th, ‘occurred when a considerable force of enemy tanks, vehicles and guns were bottled up on the Roncey–St Denis le Vêtu by-highways by elements of the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divs, and was pounded to bits by armor, artillery and aircraft.’ Lieutenant Eichen of the 120th Infantry said: ‘By now we were expecting to push them all the way through to Germany. You might come to a hill line or a road junction and find a few tanks or 88s firing from it, but for all the rest of that week it was just push and go.’
The Americans destroyed two tanks within minutes of encountering Lieutenant Fritz Langangke’s platoon of 2nd SS Panzer; a third bogged in a ditch. Langangke’s driver, Zeeger, jumped down to fix a towing shackle to the hill of the cripple, and was immediately wounded badly in the face by shell fragments. Shocked, the man staggered into the undergrowth and vanished from sight. A retreating tank met him and got him away to the rear. Langangke leapt from his turret to the empty driving position and steered the Panther himself until, two hours later, a new driver was found for him. They all knew that the front was crumbling: ‘Verloren!’ – lost! – was a word they heard much of that week.
Sergeant Helmut Gunther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers had returned from hospital in Le Mans on the 14th after being wounded in the abortive American offensive in early July. The reconnaissance battalion with which he served was already reduced to two understrength companies, which were merged and placed under his command. They were sent together with the pioneer battalion to defend a supposedly quiet sector of the front. On the 23rd–24th, they heard the sound of fierce fighting on their right as a neighbouring paratroop unit held off a local American attack. Then, although they themselves were not in the direct path of VII Corps’ assault, they were hastily ordered to fall back as the line around them cracked.
We were marching, marching back all the time. One morning we were ordered to keep a road open, but we found that the Americans had already blocked it. The roads were crowded with American vehicles, and all that we could do was to take to the fields on foot. On the fourth day, by sheer coincidence we ran into some of our own unit’s vehicles, and kept going by road. But we were losing stragglers all the time – some of us later had letters from them from America. Once when we were moving to take up position an army staff car stopped beside us. I saluted. The officer in it asked me where we were going. ‘Have you gone crazy?’ he said. ‘The Americans are there already.’ Then he drove on. In a ditch in a wood we met ten exhausted paratroopers who asked us for water. I suggested that they come with us, but they were reluctant. We moved off, and a while later heard shooting. One paratrooper caught up with us, and told us that all the rest were dead. They had tried to surrender, but it was too difficult.
We found a pig in a farm, killed it and cooked it. We took sheets from the farmhouse and laid them out on the table and prepared to eat. Suddenly a Luftwaffe man burst in shouting: ‘The Americans are right behind me.’ We grabbed the corners of the sheet with everything inside it, threw it in the back of a field car, and pulled out just as the first Sherman came in sight. Eventually we met up with our battalion headquarters, who were expecting the enemy at any moment. From then on, I could not distinguish the days. I had seen the first retreat from Moscow, which was terrible enough, but at least units were still intact. Here, we had become a cluster of individuals. We were not a battleworthy company any longer. All that we had going for us was that we knew each other very well.26
The offensive now entered a new and bloodier phase. As the American columns lay strung out over miles of unfamiliar country, German units began to fight with all their customary ferocity to escape entrapment. There were elements of 2nd SS Panzer, 17th SS Panzergrenadiers and the 353rd Infantry Division seeking to break free, while von Kluge was at last moving reinforcements west – 2nd Panzer and 116th Panzer under the command of XLVII Panzer Corps. A single self-propelled 88 mm gun overran two American companies near Notre Dame de Cenilly until Sergeant Robert Lotz of 41st Armored Infantry shot out its periscope, then closed in to kill its commander. A fierce counter-attack was fought off by CC B of 2nd Armored and cost the Germans dearly when Quesada’s fighter-bombers were vectored onto the scene. Americans came across abandoned German vehicles whose occupants had decided to flee on foot. On the night of 29 July, elements of 67th Armored Regiment and 41st Armored Infantry found themselves fighting for their lives against a column from 2nd SS Panzer and 17th SS who smashed through their lines in the darkness near St Denis-le-Gast. Most of the Germans eventually escaped, but they left behind 500 prisoners. Other elements of the same American units were attacked near Cambry the same night, and fought for six hours. But now the commanders of First Army knew that they were dominating the battlefield and that the German assaults reflected the thrashings of desperate men, rather than a genuine threat to the American front.
Lieutenant Fritz Langangke of 2nd SS Panzer was ordered to rendezvous with a paratroop unit at a crossroads which was to be held open until evening. He arrived to find no sign of the infantry, and was reinforced only by a single tank – that of his company commander. They camouflaged the Panthers and deployed to cover the road. Their engines were switched off as the first Sherman appeared, and although they struggled to hand-crank the turret they were too slow. Their first round missed. While the American seemed to hesitate, Langangke roared hastily backwards, fired again and hit. The Sherman’s commander was still standing uncertainly upright in his turret when his tank caught fire; the second Panther accounted for the next two Shermans. Mist, most unusual for the season, was drifting across the road. In its midst, Langangke was shocked to see Germans moving towards the Americans with their hands up. These were the infantry he had expected to meet: ‘They had taken their chance to finish the war.’
There was a lull in the action. American artillery fire began to fall around the orchard, and the Germans took it in turns to doze. Then a solitary Sherman raced headlong towards them, and its gun began to traverse to meet that of the Panther. The German fired first. The American tank commander leapt from his burning turret and ran for cover. The heat in the Panther was becoming intolerable, and sweat was pouring down the crews’ faces. There was another pause. Then came a sudden massive explosion against the hull, and they looked out to see American infantry all around them. To their astonishment, the tank responded when they roared into reverse. But now they were clearly visible, in the open, and a succession of American tank shells hit them. The driver shouted: ‘I can’t see! The periscope’s gone!’ Langangke pushed up his head and directed the driver further back. Another shell sprang open the turret welding, and they could see daylight through the steel. The crew baled out, Langangke wrenching his neck as he jumped without removing his headset.
They left their company commander still in his tank, working on a jammed gun, and ran away down the road towards the main German positions. They were in open country when a passing fighter-bomber swooped upon them, and Langangke’s gunner was killed by a cannon shell. Like all soldiers attacked by aircraft, they felt a passionate hatred for the pilot: ‘If we had had a chance to get that man, there would have been another war crime.’ They walked on until they reached the hea
dquarters of one of the division’s panzergrenadier regiments, and were eventually provided with a repaired tank from the workshops, in time for the Mortain counter-attack.
Corlett had been pressing Bradley for a role for his XIX Corps in the offensive. Now he gained his point. As his men began to advance on the left of VII Corps, they encountered the first German reinforcements reaching the west. West of Tessy-sur-Vire, between the 28th and 31st, they collided with 2nd Panzer and then with the newly-arrived 116th Panzer in the fiercest fighting since COBRA began. On the 30th, Brigadier-General Rose’s CC A of 2nd Armored, recently attached to Corlett’s command, approached the town of Percy and was attacked in the rear by German tanks and infantry.
Percy lay in a hollow surrounded by hills. At about 4.30 p.m., a cluster of Rose’s tank commanders and infantry officers were at the bottom of the hill preparing to advance, ignorant of the powerful opposition in the area. Some of the tank crews were out of their vehicles, cheerfully milking cows in a field. Men of 4th Infantry lay on their backs under a hedgerow, smoking. Without warning, the entire area erupted under German mortar fire. Wounded and dying GIs lay scattered in the grass as the Americans hastily deployed to move up the hill, the tanks crawling forward at walking pace to allow the infantry to keep with them. As they paused to breast a hedge, two tanks were hit and burst into flames. The gunners poured fire into every hedge in front of them, but from his Sherman Lieutenant Phil Reisler could see infantry dropping around him:
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 36
