Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  The focus of the struggle now concentrated upon a few square miles of fields and little villages in which the wreckage of a half-million-strong army was fighting for survival. Command and control by signal had been almost entirely lost. Such direction as existed was provided by German officers to whatever men they chanced to find around them. Blackened vehicles, blackened corpses, blackened buildings and hedgerows scarred every acre over which the fighter-bombers had passed. The wounded were merely gathered where they might be tended by their captors when the Allies reached them – there were no more drugs and few enough doctors. Men ate what they could find in shattered vehicles or farmhouses – every surviving building was crowded with stragglers hunting food or seeking shelter from the shelling and bombing, or merely rest from the interminable march among the dead. The Allied cordon was a swollen, bulging sac against the walls of which thousands of men were pressing and forcing their bodies in a hundred places, seeking escape and often dying to find it. Amongst a vast mass of despondent Germans who sought only to surrender, there were still some thousands who fought at Falaise with desperate courage, hurling themselves again and again against Allied positions despite ferocious artillery fire and concentrated machine-guns.

  Montgomery issued a directive on 20 August urging his forces to greater efforts: ‘There is no time to relax, or to sit back and congratulate ourselves. I call on all commanders for a great effort. Let us finish the business in record time . . . The first task of Canadian army is to keep the Normandy “bottle” securely corked.’14 On the 22nd, it was concluded that all significant German forces west of the Allied lines were dead or in captivity. The ‘cork’, it was concluded, could be removed from the empty bottle. The Allied armies could make free with the ruins of St Lambert and Coudehard, Chambois and Trun, the ghastly killing ground of the Falaise Gap.

  12 » THE GAP

  Some men had already been fortunate enough to achieve their Heim ins Reich before the collapse in Normandy came. Corporal Schickner of 2nd Panzer was in hospital in Germany recovering from a head wound inflicted by an American sniper in July. Lieutenant Schaaf and his gunners of the 1716th Artillery had been sent back to re-equip with new guns when those which they had fired since 6 June were worn out from ceaseless use. Corporal Kortenhaus of 21st Panzer was still in hospital after catching his foot in his tank track. Captain Wagemann of 21st Panzer staff had been posted back to Germany at the end of July. But the mass of the German army in Normandy remained, to endure one of the great nightmares of military history in the Falaise Gap. Pounded by shells from north and south and fighter-bomber strikes from first light to dusk, the long columns of men, horse-drawn carts and the few surviving tanks and vehicles struggled slowly eastwards, past their unburied dead by the roads and in the fields, the stinking carcasses of countless hundreds of horses and cattle, the ruins of Panthers and half-tracks, field cars and trucks, the last hopes of Hitler’s armies in France.

  20 August was a beautiful summer’s day. To the straggling clusters and columns of Germans moving painfully eastwards, the weather mocked them as shells searched the roads and tracks, and tore open the meadows in which so many sought safety. The detested Piper Cubs droned busily overhead, directing their destruction. Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian sent two officers forward to St Lambert to reconnoitre a route for the vestiges of his division. With the coming of darkness, at the head of a column of 300 men, 50 vehicles and a battery of guns, they edged cautiously forward beneath the Allied positions, moving 100 yards at a time, then halting in silence to listen, then slipping forward again. At last, after hours of desperate tension, they met panzergrenadiers of 2nd SS Panzer holding the eastern line. Guderian and his men sank wearily into oblivion by the roadside, and slept all through the day that followed. Yet his glimpse of safety was illusory. The next morning, he was ordered to take the remnants of the formation south, to stiffen the tenuous line against American pressure. On the road in his Volkswagen field car, he was caught by an Allied fighter-bomber diving out of the sun. Guderian, hit in the shoulder, was still in the vehicle when the petrol tank exploded. He never fought again in France.

  Lieutenant Walter Kruger, signals officer of 12th SS Panzer, was wounded by shrapnel as he sat in his truck in a great unmoving press of transport on the Falaise road. ‘Then I saw that the whole column was on fire. Everybody was running.’ He walked for three days, then sat by the roadside near Breteuil among the endless lines of filthy, bloody, exhausted men passing east, looking for survivors of his own unit and collecting them to continue the retreat. His divisional commander, Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, outstanding combat commander and fanatical Nazi, escaped according to his own account ‘guided by a French civilian’. It is not difficult to picture the means of persuasion Meyer brought to bear. Yet even the iron Meyer described later how he climbed out of his vehicle amid the shambles of the Gap, ‘my knees trembling, the sweat pouring down my face, my clothes soaked in perspiration’.1 He and his men represented, at one level, the utmost perversion of national socialism. Yet at another, they command reluctant respect. No formation caused the Allies such deep trouble in Normandy until the end as 12th SS Panzer.

  Sergeant Hans Stober of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers encountered no difficulties driving east until he and his handful of surviving men reached the Dives. There they became entangled in the chaos of the retreat. By ruthless determination they forced a way through and found a track north of Mont Ormel that remained open, and slipped past the silent Canadian army positions in darkness, with the men and even a few vehicles. ‘The Poles never closed that pocket for anybody who really wanted to get through,’ claimed Stober scornfully. Eventually they reached a reporting station near Paris, which had been set up to gather and reorganize men arriving from the west. Ten days after passing Mont Ormel they reached the Saar area, where they spent three days resting and regrouping. Then they were sent back into action with the remains of 116th Panzer in Kampfengruppe Fick.

  General Eugene Meindl of II Parachute Corps spent two hours hidden beneath a wrecked Polish Sherman within yards of the Allied lines, waiting for a moment to make his escape from the pocket. Like so many men in those days of turmoil, he had a succession of extraordinary personal encounters: with his own son; with a general named Eric Straube whom he was disgusted to find bivouacked in comfort with his staff, well supplied with food and wine; with a corps commander whom he did not identify, sitting weeping alone by the roadside. Meindl finally fought his way out at the head of a few score paratroopers and three tanks of 2nd SS Panzer.2 General Hausser of Seventh Army was wounded by shrapnel as he marched amongst his men, and was carried out upon the back of a tank of 1st SS Panzer.

  Lieutenant Fritz Langangke of 2nd SS Panzer had been driving since the beginning of August in a hastily-repaired tank with chronic overheating problems. Its collapse on the start-line for the Mortain counter-attack probably saved his life, and the same Panther carried him eastwards as the line crumbled, sustained by petrol drained into a canvas bucket from abandoned vehicles. In the final days of the pocket, the Panther’s engine caught fire for the last time. The crew blew it up and started walking: ‘We just kept going along with the rest of the German army.’ They rejoined the remains of the division around Mont Ormel, finding their tank regiment now under the command of Major Enzerling. Their old commander, the bullet-headed Colonel Tyschen, an officer in the mould of ‘Panzer’ Meyer, had died in the Mortain battle. The spirit of absolute doom was abroad. Enzerling solemnly visited his tank crews to say farewell to each man personally. Just west of the Seine, they were finally compelled to abandon all their vehicles, and each man to seek salvation as best he might. Langangke and eight others reached the river at Elbeuf to find French resistants already all over the town, waving tricolours and shooting at German stragglers. The lieutenant and his group hid in a house, considering their next move. There was no choice open to them save to cross the river. Neither his gunner nor his loader could swim, but they had to try. They drowned. Langangke himself
reached the eastern bank clinging to the bloated body of a dead cow which was floating downriver amidst a host of other hapless animals and debris from the battlefield. He rejoined his unit at Huy-on-the-Maas, whence they were withdrawn to retrain and re-equip.

  The SS and those men of the German army still determined to fight on were enraged by the wholesale collapse of will that they saw around them in those days. Lieutenant Ernst Krag of 2nd SS Panzer’s assault gun battalion came upon a group of Wehrmacht armoured crews intent upon blowing up a company of new Panthers which they had just brought forward from Germany as replacements. The furious Krag ordered them to hand over the tanks intact to his own men, and they salvaged five. ‘What do you do,’ he demanded bitterly, ‘if even your commanders have begun to work according to the principle of Heim ins Reich?’ Colonel Kurt Kauffmann, the operations officer of Panzer Lehr, who had contributed so much to the recapture of Villers-Bocage in June, walked out of the pocket in the clothes he stood up in, the entire divisional headquarters and its documents having been lost in the American breakthrough. He was posted to the eastern front for speaking openly about the hopelessness of the military situation.

  The Hawker Typhoon – the ‘Tiffy’ to all its pilots – was a big, heavy, rugged fighter-bomber which bore the brunt of the RAF’s low-level ground-attack tasks over Normandy, carrying eight 50-pound rockets or 2,000 rounds of bombs. Handling a rocket-equipped Typhoon was a delicate art, since the rails reduced its speed and affected its handling. It was necessary to attack either at very low level – risking heavy punishment from ground fire – or almost vertically, as most pilots preferred. Typhoons were the principal destructors of the retreating German army at Falaise, and became legendary in the last nine months of the war for their effectiveness in the ‘cab rank’ role, circling over advancing troops until directed onto a target by a forward air controller.

  Corporal Adolf Hohenstein of 276th Infantry marched eastward out of the pocket with a handful of men, having lost all contact with his unit. A general passed along the column of slow-moving soldiers, telling them that it was every man for himself – they were now encircled. Hohenstein said that this did not trouble him as much as it might, ‘for in Russia we had been surrounded again and again’. He was one of the few who had escaped from the Sixth Army’s disaster at Stalingrad, clinging to the hull of a tank. Now they came upon a château, where they paused to gaze sadly upon the wonderful library, torn open to the elements by shellfire. Around noon on 20 August, they were lying in a field wondering desperately how to cross the flat ground ahead, littered with dead horses, burning vehicles, wounded men, and still under furious shellfire. Suddenly the firing stopped. There was a rumour, probably unfounded, that a local truce had been declared while a German hospital was handed over to the Allies. They seized their moment, and hastened through the smoking chaos, wading the Dives to reach St Lambert. Many men, said Hohenstein, were no longer seeking to escape, but merely lingering in the hope of making a safe surrender. The houses of St Lambert were crowded with Wehrmacht fugitives who had abandoned their weapons and clutched only sheets to assist their efforts to give themselves up. Men said that it was no longer possible to get through to the east.

  In the church, Hohenstein found scores of wounded being treated with such pathetic resources as the doctors still possessed, and a cluster of generals. The corporal met a colonel who said that he was going to take a tank through, and if the soldier wished, he could follow with his men. That night, when darkness came, they fell in behind the tank, moving eastwards. But they were deeply uneasy, travelling with the squealing monster that now seemed more a source of danger than security. They decided to separate from it and make their way alone. It started to rain, and the corporal had only a feeble torch to check their bearings. At 5.00 a.m. on the 21st, they approached the village of Coudehard, its houses burning quietly in the early morning light. They heard voices. They strained to discover from the shelter of the trees to which army the men belonged. At last they moved cautiously forward until an unmistakably German accent called ‘Halt!’ They had reached the lines of 10th SS Panzer.

  They struggled on eastwards in the days that followed, hastening to remain ahead of the Allies. In the little village of Le Sap near Vimoutiers, they found the entire population gathered around tables laid out with food and wine to greet their liberators. The exhausted, desperate Germans seized what provisions they could carry. Wary of a sudden attack by local résistants, Hohenstein told the frightened Frenchmen: ‘Me and my men just want to get through here in one piece. In a few hours you’ll have a chance to find out if the other army treats you any better than ours.’ They marched the mayor and the curé at pistol point in front of them through the town until they were safe on the road beyond. On 25 August, they crossed the Seine at Elbeuf, sitting on a tank which was carried across on the sole surviving ferry, already under artillery fire. ‘After Normandy,’ said Hohenstein, ‘we had no illusions any more. We knew that we stood with our backs to the wall.’

  As the first Allied forces moved into the pocket, gathering up prisoners in their thousands, they were awed by the spectacle that they discovered:

  The roads were choked with wreckage and the swollen bodies of men and horses [wrote Group-Captain Desmond Scott]. Bits of uniform were plastered to shattered tanks and trucks and human remains hung in grotesque shapes on the blackened hedgerows. Corpses lay in pools of dried blood, staring into space and as if their eyes were being forced from their sockets. Two grey-clad bodies, both minus their legs, leaned against a clay bank as if in prayer. I stumbled over a typewriter. Paper was scattered around where several mailbags had exploded. I picked up a photograph of a smiling young German recruit standing between his parents, two solemn peasants who stared back at me in accusation . . . Strangely enough it was the fate of the horses that upset me most. Harnessed as they were, it had been impossible for them to escape, and they lay dead in tangled heaps, their large wide eyes crying out to me in anguish. It was a sight that pierced the soul, and I felt as if my heart would burst. We did not linger, but hurried back to the sanctity of our busy airfield near Bayeux.3

  Men moved among the bloated bodies firing bursts of sten-gun rounds to empty them of their ghastly gasses before they were burned. ‘Falaise was not the most frightening sight, but the most disgusting of the war,’ said Private Alfred Lee of the Middlesex Regiment. ‘The bodies crawled with blue-grey maggots. The spectacle was unspeakable when tanks drove over them. Many men had to put on their gas masks to endure getting through it.’ With the great burden of fear lifted from them, French civilians began to show much greater warmth and kindness to their deliverers. Trooper Dyson of the RAC, collecting replacement tanks from a depot near Villers-Bocage, was wined and dined with his mate by a French family: ‘They treated us like kings. That village made us feel that we had liberated France all on our own.’ The last shell fell on Caen as late as 17 August. Nicole Ferté, having endured weeks as a refugee in a convent crowded with terrified and wounded civilians, had at last been forced out into the countryside along with thousands of others late in July. She was living with a group of 30 in a barn, and was out scavenging for food one morning when she saw American tanks rolling down the road towards her. A GI sitting on the hull of the leading Sherman leapt down and kissed her, declaring in one of the phrases that the period of Liberation made immortal: ‘You look just like my girlfriend!’ Ironically, on that very day of liberation, the girl was wounded in the foot by shrapnel. But she recovered to work as interpreter to the Town Major of Caen, and to experience the extraordinary life of France amid the Allied armies that summer. She said sardonically: ‘All the Americans thought that everybody would go with them because they had the cigarettes, the stockings, the money.’ Many did.

  In a village south of Caen, a platoon commander of 15th Scottish Division sat with his men in their trucks:

  An enormous convoy crammed with dishevelled, dusty Wehrmacht prisoners rolls in the opposite direction: ‘The bastard
s!’, wrenches out my truck driver with a sudden rush of feeling; while a great bearded Frenchman, like a ferocious dog, stands alone in the desolation of a village square, shaking his fist at the vast POW convoy and yelling after them as though his heart would break: ‘Kaput! . . . Kaput! . . .’4

  Most Allied soldiers found that now, for the first time in the wake of their own crushing victory, they could spare pity for the defeated enemy. Trooper Dyson watched the lines of prisoners shuffling through the forward area, ‘some of them old men wearing overcoats down to their ankles’. Like so many Allied soldiers, he took a German’s belt for its eagle buckle, then felt ashamed because the man’s trousers fell down. ‘I looked at them all, and somehow it seemed unbelievable that they were the Germans, the enemy – some mother’s sons.’ Jerry Komareks’s battalion of the US 2nd Armored adopted a little blond 14-year-old Russian prisoner as a unit mascot. Pedro, as they called him, was given cut-down American fatigues and a pistol, then rode with them all the way to Berlin. There they were compelled to surrender him, crying bitterly, to the Russians. Presumably he was shot, like so many thousands of others turned over to the Red Army.5