Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  . . . Within seconds the whole stretch of road was bursting and blazing under streams of rocket and cannon fire. Ammunition wagons exploded like multi-coloured volcanoes. Several teams of horses stampeded and careered wildly across the fields, dragging their broken wagons behind them. Others fell in tangled heaps, or were caught up in the fences and hedges. It was an awesome sight: flames, smoke, bursting rockets and showers of coloured tracer – an army in retreat, trapped and without air protection.18

  Quesada believed that his British counterparts never approached tactical air support with enough imagination; for instance, they did not follow the Americans in using radar for the navigational guidance of fighter squadrons rather than merely for defensive purposes. He felt that the RAF was hampered by the incubus of its immense force of Spitfires, superb aircraft for high-level interceptor work, of which there was now almost none, but unsuited to the ground-attack task because of their small 1,000-pound payload and lack of robustness. It was essential for any close-support aircraft to be able to withstand small-arms fire. The British Typhoon carried 2,000 pounds and was a sound ground-attack aircraft, but Quesada much preferred his own Thunderbolts and Mustangs, the former also carrying 2,000 pounds.

  A close personal friend of both Spaatz and General Ira Eaker, Quesada would never acknowledge any lack of enthusiasm for the support of ground forces among his USAAF colleagues. Indeed, he argued that it was precisely because of their long-term ambitions for their service that ‘Spaatz saw that it was vital that we should do whatever we could for the land battle – it was always on his mind that after the war we must have an independent air force. We were obsessed by proving our worth.’

  Nothing above diminishes the claims of the Allied air forces to have made a vital contribution to the Normandy campaign. The bombers’ execution of the Transport Plan was central to ensuring that the invasion forces won the battle of the build-up. The fighter-bombers’ low-level operations inflicted immense damage upon the German army, above all in the later stages of the campaign. The issue is simply whether, if the leading airmen of Britain and America had devoted themselves earlier and more wholeheartedly to the support of the armies, the air forces could have provided even more effective, perhaps decisive, direct support for the ground offensives. From 1940 to 1942, the humiliations of the British army were consistently attributed to the Luftwaffe’s command of the air. Yet in 1944, when the Allies possessed air forces of a strength Goering’s pilots had never dreamed of, the German army continued to mount a formidable resistance until broken in bloody ground action.

  10 » THE OPEN FLANK

  By the last days of July 1944, the German army in Normandy had been reduced to such a condition that only a few fanatics of the SS still entertained hopes of avoiding defeat, far less of achieving victory. Any faint prospect of replacing the huge casualties in the west vanished in the wake of the Russian offensive against Army Group Centre, which had destroyed 28 German divisions in five weeks, a blow as shattering to Hitler as that which was now befalling him in Normandy. The Allies’ intelligence reports of the German order of battle flattered their opponents – or perhaps themselves by detailing the divisions still before them: Panzer Lehr, 2nd SS Panzer, 12th SS Panzer and so on. In fact, these formations were shattered ruins of their old selves, sustained by a fraction of the men and a tiny fragment of the armour and gun power that they had carried into battle weeks before. Attrition, not manoeuvre, had been decisive in reducing von Kluge’s formations to a state in which they could no longer sustain the sagging line. As the tide poured over the walls of their sandcastle from Bourguébus to Rennes, they lacked both the mobility to race the Allies to the breaches and the fighting power to seal the gaps, even where they could reach these. Von Kluge reported to Hitler:

  Whether the enemy can still be stopped at this point is questionable. The enemy air superiority is terrific, and smothers almost every one of our movements . . . Losses in men and equipment are extraordinary. The morale of our troops has suffered very heavily under constant murderous enemy fire, especially since all infantry units consist only of haphazard groups which do not form a strongly coordinated force any longer. In the rear areas of the front terrorists, feeling the end approaching, grow steadily bolder. This fact, and the loss of numerous signal installations, makes an orderly command extremely difficult.1

  Wholesale collapses in morale were resulting in the mass surrender of units swamped by the American advance. General Hausser of Seventh Army, a legendarily tough SS commander, reported that 10 of his divisions had disintegrated, leaving scattered bands of demoralized stragglers roaming north-west France without equipment or leadership. Sergeant Hans Stober admitted that even in 17th SS Panzergrenadiers, from mid-July shell-shock – hitherto an almost unrecognized condition in SS units – became a significant problem. ‘By this stage, the whole German army was deteriorating,’ said Lieutenant Langangke of 2nd SS Panzer. ‘We no longer had a chance to do anything big. We could only play foxes, do this or that in a small way. Heim ins Reich – Home to Germany – was the principal thought in many people’s minds.’ It was astonishing that the German east–west front held together at all. Yet the surviving fragments of the old elite units still disputed the Allied advance at every stage.

  The reverberations of the bomb explosion on 20 July at Hitler’s headquarters echoed through the upper ranks of his army. ‘At one moment was to be seen a set of men and things which together formed a focal point of world events,’ wrote one of the survivors, Jodl’s Deputy Walter Warlimont. ‘At the next, there was nothing but wounded men groaning, the acrid smell of burning and charred fragments of maps and papers fluttering in the wind.’2 Hitler’s chronic mistrust and scorn for his generals became manic. Throughout the Normandy campaign, he had intervened in their decisions. Now he began to sweep aside the unanimous advice of men as unfailingly loyal to him in the past as Hausser, Eberbach, Dietrich, as well as the wavering von Kluge, and to direct the battle in a fashion that severed all contact with reason or reality. On 30 July Jodl placed before him an order ‘for possible withdrawal from the coastal sector’, which was in effect a blueprint for the evacuation of France.3 Hitler brushed this aside, saying that it was not at present necessary. Jodl anyway telephoned Blumentritt at von Kluge’s headquarters and told him to be prepared to receive such an order when it came. Late on the night of 31 July, Hitler personally briefed Warlimont for the trip he was to make to France, declaring simply: ‘The object remains to keep the enemy confined to the bridgehead and there to inflict serious losses upon him in order to wear him down.’4 When Warlimont received his final orders at the midday conference the next morning, Hitler said irritably, ‘You tell Field-Marshal von Kluge to keep on looking to his front, to keep his eyes on the enemy and not to look over his shoulder.’5 Warlimont was to be Hitler’s personal agent at von Kluge’s headquarters, ensuring that the havering Field-Marshal executed his orders precisely.

  The Führer suffered increasingly from self-pity in the days following the assassination attempt. On hearing a recital of the sufferings of his soldiers and of the German people, he remarked crossly: ‘I think it’s pretty obvious that this war is no fun for me. I’ve been cut off from the world for five years. I’ve not been to a theatre, a concert or a film . . .’6 It was a remarkable irony that, at a time when his own faith in his army was crumbling, most of its officers and men in the field were shocked by news of the bomb plot, and were continuing to hold their positions despite intolerable difficulties. Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian of 116th Panzer was astonished and disgusted by the news from the rear: ‘We were not part of some South American military junta. We had the constant feeling that there were traitors in our midst.’ Captain Eberhard Wagemann of 21st Panzer staff had long ago concluded, in a discussion with an older officer of the division who was a personal friend of Count von Stauffenberg, that the war could not be won. But like many German officers, he felt that however hopeless the situation, ‘no officer, no soldier had any business
to concern himself with treachery.’ Corporal Adolf Hohenstein of 276th Infantry retained no faith in victory, but was thoroughly dismayed by Stauffenberg’s bomb. ‘It cost us thousands of lives at the front,’ he believed. A 21st Army Group intelligence report based upon prisoner interrogation following the bomb plot concluded: ‘The overall effect of the news on the men of fighting units was one of no excitement. One effort to end the war had been frustrated. Therefore everything was as before.’7 The same document came to the conclusion that only 5 per cent of German troops now believed in the possibility of final victory. 10th and 12th SS Panzer were the only divisions in which it could be said that morale was still high.

  The principal consequences of the bomb plot among the men in Normandy was to sow an almost poisonous mistrust within the officer corps. It was ironic that many officers whose confused sense of honour had convinced them that they should not be party to the bomb plot, now suffered bitter consequences because that same interpretation of honour had prevented them from betraying the plotters to Hitler. The Wehrmacht found itself deprived of all power or respect within the German state, subjected to the final humiliation of being compelled to adopt the Hitler salute. Relations between the SS and the Heer – the soldiers of the Wehrmacht – were normally good at field level. Now a chasm widened between the fanatical loyalists and those despairing of victory and increasingly weary of defeat. In the hospital where Corporal Werner Kortenhaus of 21st Panzer was recovering from his wounds, a young soldier playing chess said as they talked about news of the bomb plot: ‘He’d be better dead.’ An SS NCO sprang to his feet and caught the speaker a furious slap across the face. Kortenhaus himself, along with most men of the Heer, had no illusions left: ‘We reckoned that the whole game was up.’ The SS were increasingly obsessed by the conviction that the anti-Hitler plotters were contributing directly to their misfortunes on the battlefield. ‘It was obvious to us that there was a lot of treachery,’ said Lieutenant Walter Kruger of 12th SS Panzer. Hitler raged that the lack of Panzerfausten in Normandy was clearly the consequence of sabotage by the Quartermaster-General, Wagner, one of the dead plotters.

  After the war, when the names of those concerned with the plot were shown to include such men as Rommel’s Chief of Staff, Hans Speidel, and Graf von Schwerin, commanding 116th Panzer, thousands of their former comrades sought to blame their treachery for the misfortunes that befell the German army in Normandy. Above all, they allowed themselves to be convinced that delays in moving units from the Pas de Calais and in getting ammunition and supplies to the front were the result of sabotage. There will never be conclusive evidence one way or the other. But it remains far more probable that the failures and difficulties were genuine accidents and errors of war. The plotters were guided by a desire to make peace on the best available terms with the western Allies. Nothing could have made this task more difficult than for Hitler’s death to take place at a moment when the German army was in collapse after a shattering defeat. It was very much to the plotters’ advantage that the line in Normandy should be stable when the Führer died. By July, some officers and men were giving less than their best efforts to the war because they were convinced of its futility. But there was a great gulf between passive defeatism of this kind, and an active attempt to sabotage the campaign. By early August, the German army in France was on the edge of catastrophe because of its ruin on the battlefield and the demented strategy of Hitler, not because it had been betrayed from within.

  For the Allied armies, the battle now took on a new character. Hitherto, while generalship had naturally been important, the progress of the campaign depended above all upon the ability of British, American and Canadian units to seize ground from their German opponents on the next ridge, in the next hedge, beyond the next road. Henceforth, while hard fighting still lay ahead, Normandy became a commanders’ battle. It was the decisions of the generals that determined the manner in which events unfolded in August, their successes and failures which brought about the position that was achieved by September.

  Of all the Allied movements of the campaign, few have evoked such widespread post-war criticism as the American ‘right turn’ into Brittany at the beginning of August.8 The German XXV Corps was known to be weak and lacking the mobility to create a major threat to Bradley’s armies. Montgomery anticipated that no more than a single US corps would press on west from Avranches towards Brest and the other Breton ports. In fact, two of Patton’s three corps swept across the bridge at Pontaubault into Brittany, and Bradley was determined to embark on no reckless adventures south-eastwards unless he was certain of holding the Avranches ‘elbow’ in their rear. ‘We can’t risk a loose hinge,’ he said.9 He feared a German counter-attack north-westwards, breaking through to the coast and cutting off Patton’s armoured divisions from their fuel and supplies – with disastrous consequences. Bradley himself later accepted responsibility for the decision, for good or ill, to swing large American forces west into Brittany.

  Patton won the admiration of the world for the energy and ruthlessness with which he forced his army through Avranches and into its dash across Brittany. ‘If the greatest study of mankind is man,’ he said, ‘surely the greatest study of war is the road net.’10 He wrote with justified pride of his own direction of the movement:

  The passage of Third Army through the corridor at Avranches was an impossible operation. Two roads entered Avranches; only one left it over the bridge. We passed through this corridor 2 infantry and 2 armoured divisions in less than 24 hours. There was no plan because it was impossible to make a plan.11

  Yet for all the verve and energy of Patton’s movements, of which so many other American and British commanders were envious, there is considerable force in the remarks of those veterans exasperated by the Patton legend. They declare: ‘He didn’t break out. He walked out.’12 Bradley had no patience with Patton, dismissing one of Montgomery’s wilder flights of strategic fantasy with the adjectives, ‘militarily unsound, Pattonesque’. He wrote of Third Army’s great sweep in early August: ‘Patton blazed through Brittany with armored divisions and motorized infantry. He conquered a lot of real estate and made big headlines, but the Brittany campaign failed to achieve its primary objectives.’13 Bradley referred, of course, to the rapid seizure of the western ports in a usable condition. The true architects of Patton’s rush through Brittany were Collins and the men of his VII Corps who had broken the German line in COBRA – and the British and Canadian armies still facing the bulk of von Kluge’s effective formations. It is essential to emphasize that there was no German front in the west – merely a disorganized jumble of units retreating with all the speed that they could muster into the fortified ports where they were expected to make a stand. When Patton’s army later met serious German resistance, the American divisions under his command fought no better and no worse with his leadership than under that of any other commander. At the beginning of August 1944, the posturing general was the man for the hour, performing feats of movement that probably no other Allied commander could have matched. But it would be absurd to suppose that he discovered a key to the downfall of the German armies which had escaped his peers. It was they who made possible the glory that he now reaped with such relish.

  The fruits of the dash into Brittany were intoxicating for the men riding the tanks and trucks – an almost unopposed swing across country already largely in the hands of the French Resistance, gaining for Gerow’s 6th Armored Division 4,000 prisoners at a cost of 130 killed, 400 wounded, 70 missing. Yet most of the Germans in the region were given time to withdraw into Brest, whose garrison swelled to 38,000 men, and whose defences held until 19 September. Far more seriously, the vital turn east towards Mayenne and Alençon, intended to initiate the rolling up of the main German front in Normandy, was delayed by days.

  Major-General John ‘P’ Wood of the 4th Armored Division was one of the outstanding American commanders of the campaign. On 2 August, having advanced over 50 miles in four days, Wood and his tanks stoo
d west of Rennes, where he had shrewdly bypassed a 2,000-strong German garrison – too weak to present a serious threat, but possibly strong enough seriously to delay a direct assault. Wood perfectly grasped the urgency of turning east. Late on the afternoon of 3 August, his tanks were more than 30 miles south of Rennes, and had cut seven of the ten major roads to the city. Wood gave initial orders for a move south-east, on Châteaubriant. Then Middleton at VIII Corps intervened. First, he ordered that Wood must not merely cut off Rennes, but capture it. This Wood’s 13th Infantry achieved with a bold push for the heart of the city which prompted the defenders to withdraw during the night of the 3rd. But Middleton’s eyes were still fixed west towards the sea. Quiberon Bay had been a vital Allied objective since D-Day, the intended site of a major artificial port. VIII Corps’ commander drove to see Wood and insist that, rather than pressing east, where the countryside yawned empty of all significant German forces, 4th Armored must make for the coast. Early on the morning of 4 August, Middleton found Wood standing by his vehicles in a field, stripped to the waist, gazing at the maps laid out before him on the grass.