The Second World War

by John Keegan

  It was this decision which had brought the 116th, 2nd, 1st SS and 2nd SS Panzer Divisions to stand shoulder to shoulder at Mortain, only twenty miles from the Atlantic, on the flank of General Omar Bradley’s US First Army which was streaming southwards into Brittany. Disastrously for them, for the Westheer and for Hitler, however, the signals which had directed their deployment had been monitored by the Ultra decryption service since 5 August; their objectives, Brécey and Montigny, were passed to Montgomery’s headquarters and four American divisions, the 3rd Armoured, 30th and 4th, with the 2nd Armoured in support, were directed to block their path down the valley of the river Sée which Hitler had designated as their avenue to the ocean.

  The Westheer’s ordeal

  Some 200 German tanks (in first line), attacking without artillery preparation to assist surprise, advanced in two columns either side of the Sée during the night of 6-7 August. The southern column overran the outposts of the 30th Division but was stopped when the American infantry coolly dug in on high ground, called forward the divisional tank-destroyer battalion equipped with assault-gun-type weapons, which destroyed fourteen tanks, and waited for daylight and better weather conditions to bring out the tactical aircraft which would wreak even greater damage. Thus did a quite average American infantry division deal with the vanguard of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, almost invincible sword of the Panzer arm.

  On the north bank the 2nd Panzer and 1st SS Panzer (the Adolf Hitler Division, which had never failed the Führer) were stopped even more easily by the infantry of the US 9th Division; the commander of the 116th Panzer Division declined to intervene and was relieved of command. At daybreak the US 2nd Armoured Division counter-attacked; it ‘appeared to materialise out of thin air’, noted the official historian, writing at a time when the Ultra secret was still jealously guarded. The 2nd Armoured Division and rocket-firing Typhoons of the Second British Tactical Air Force, which flew 294 sorties on 7 August, reduced the 2nd Panzer Division’s tank strength to thirty that day. From Rastenburg Hitler demanded that the attack ‘be prosecuted daringly and recklessly. . . . Each and every man must believe in victory.’ As dusk fell on the Mortain battlefield, however, defeat confronted each unit which had been committed to Operation Lüttich.

  Other events of 7 August increased the Westheer’s ordeal. On that day Montgomery had launched a new drive into the German lines at the opposite end of the bridgehead, aimed towards Falaise. It followed two recent but aborted thrusts, by the Canadians down the track of the Goodwood offensive on 25 July and by the British towards Caumont (Operation Bluecoat) on 2 August. Operation Totalise, mounted on 7 August, was not the outright success Montgomery hoped it would be, even though preceded by a carpet bombardment as heavy as that before the Americans’ Cobra two weeks before. It was again mounted by the Canadians, who met heavy resistance from their sworn enemy, the 12th SS Panzer (after a massacre of Canadian prisoners by the Hitler Youth Division early in the campaign, few of its soldiers survived capture at Canadian hands). However, the Canadians were now stronger than at any stage of the campaign; they had recently been joined by their own 4th Armoured Division and also by the émigré 1st Polish Armoured Division, which had a particular quarrel to settle with the Germans, made all the more bitter by the Poles’ awareness of the battle currently raging in Warsaw between Bor-Komorowski’s Home Army and the security troops of the German occupation force. Operation Totalise did not reach its objectives; but it thrust these two armoured divisions forward into positions from which they menaced the rear of the whole German Panzer concentration engaged in Normandy.

  That concentration (less the 12th SS, which still stood on the British front) now numbered ten divisions and was grouped at the far western end of the bridgehead – in various states of disarray. Panzer Lehr, originally the German army’s ‘demonstration’ division and before 6 June the strongest in its Panzer arm, was a shadow; all four SS Panzer divisions, the 1st, 2nd, 9th and 10th, had been grievously damaged in close combat since late June; the 17th SS Panzergrenadier, weak in armour to begin with, was a cripple; the 2nd, 21st and 116th Panzer had all suffered heavy tank losses, the last in the Mortain battle; only the 9th Panzer, which had arrived in Normandy from the south of France in August, remained largely intact. Even the 9th Panzer did not have its full complement of 176 tanks (half Mark IV, half Panther); average tank strengths were half the figure, and Panzer Lehr had almost no tanks at all.

  The divisions, moreover, were in the wrong place. The surviving German infantry divisions, terribly reduced in numbers, were bunched into three groups, one group of seven standing in the path of the British and Canadians advancing on Falaise, one group of five scattered about in the path of the American break-out into Brittany, the remaining nineteen still clinging to the collapsing perimeter of the bridgehead they had defended so stoutly since 6 June. All were in imminent peril of encirclement, as the British-Canadian 21st Army Group drove south to cut off their line of retreat to the Seine, while the American 12th Army Group swung eastward to meet it behind their backs. But the Panzer divisions of what had recently been designated the Fifth Panzer Army were at the extremity of danger. Hitler’s maniac dream of decapitating the American break-out at Mortain had carried them to the furthest end of the Normandy front, from which they could battle their way to safety from between the closing jaws of the Allied encirclement only at the cost of mortal combat.

  How great that cost was becoming the 12th SS Panzer had learnt in Totalise, where the three Canadian infantry battalions of the 4th Armoured Division, mounted for the first time in the campaign in armoured carriers, had suffered only seven fatal casualties during their assault; so dense was the strength of their accompanying armour that it had simultaneously succeeded in bringing an end to the career of Michael Wittmann, the Wehrmacht’s most renowned tank commander. He had destroyed 117 Russian tanks before arriving in Normandy; there he had been largely responsible for blunting the British attack at Villers-Bocage on 13 June. On 7 August he was cornered in his Tiger by five Shermans which destroyed it with a concerted salvo of gunfire. Given the opposed effects of Allied reinforcement of the bridgehead and German losses within it, such disparities of strength were now standard and would determine the final outcome of the Normandy battle with mathematical inevitability.

  Inevitability had been hurried forward by a telephone conference held between Bradley (with Eisenhower at his side) and Montgomery on 8 August. The Americans had suggested that, since the Seventh Army and the Fifth Panzer Army were clearly no longer able to manoeuvre as a result of the blows rained on them in the recent Goodwood, Cobra and Totalise operations, strategic sense spoke for abandoning the plan, conceived before D-Day, for a ‘wide’ envelopment of the Wehrmacht in Normandy reaching as far south as the Loire. They proposed instead that a ‘short hook’ be staged by the Americans, designed to achieve rapid formations with the British and Canadians near Falaise. Montgomery agreed that ‘the prospective prize was great’ and left Bradley to issue the necessary orders to his subordinate, George Patton, who commanded the formations which the plans for a ‘short hook’ would bring into play.

  Patton, the phantom with whom the authors of the D-Day deception scheme had deluded the Abwehr during the spring of 1944, was now a figure of substance and power on the Normandy scene. It was his Third Army which had assumed responsibility for the Saint-Lô breakthrough and his dynamism which had driven it through the defended zone and out into open country. ‘The passage of Third Army through the corridor at Avranches’, he wrote later, ‘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.’ Patton characteristically exaggerated his achievements. The logistics of the Avranches manoeuvre were chaotic, and the tactical success of Operation Cobra owed more to the personal leadership of his VII Corps commander, Collins, than to his own generalship. Nevertheless,
without Patton’s relentless demand for action, the Third Army’s Blitzkrieg would not have occurred.

  Blitzkrieg was what Third Army’s breakthrough amounted to; it was the first – and, as it would turn out, the last – true exercise in that operational form achieved by a Western army in the Second World War. Blitzkrieg proper entailed not merely the sudden and brutal penetration of the enemy’s front by concentrated armoured force and the rapid exploitation of that success; it also required that the enemy forces lying beyond the point of break-in should be encircled and destroyed. That was the pattern of operations that the Wehrmacht had achieved in France in 1940 and in western Russia in June to October 1941. Thereafter it had fallen outside every combatant army’s grasp. The Wehrmacht’s great advances into southern Russia in spring and summer 1942 had not achieved encirclements on the scale which had brought the Red Army to the verge of destruction the year before, while the great eastern battles of 1943 and early 1944 had been struggles of attrition, as at Kursk, or bludgeoning Russian frontal offensives. The lightning dashes along the coast of North Africa by Rommel and his British adversaries in 1941-3 more resembled old-fashioned cavalry raids than campaigns of decision; had the Anglo-American Torch army not arrived in Algeria in November 1942, who can say how long the game might have been protracted? In Italy, where the terrain precluded breakthrough, none of the fighting had been touched by the electricity of Blitzkrieg; while Montgomery’s efforts in the early stages of the Normandy campaign to unleash the lightning of armoured penetration against the Germans had all foundered because of their system of fixed defences and rapid counter-attack. Bagration, by which the Red Army had brought about the destruction of Army Group Centre in June 1944, was the only operation in the preceding three years of combat which replicated in its form and effects the spectacular German triumphs of Sickle Stroke and Barbarossa.

  The biter bit

  There was an excellent reason why Blitzkrieg had lapsed after the Kiev encirclement of September 1941 and why the chance to revive its form reappeared in France in August 1944: Blitzkrieg depended for its effect on the co-operation or, at the very least, the acquiescence of the enemy. In France in 1940 the Allies had both acquiesced and co-operated. By failing to provide their front in the Ardennes with adequate anti-tank defences – obstacles, anti-armour weapons, tank counter-attack forces – they had invited the German armoured offensive at that point; by their simultaneous advance into Belgium which carried the best of their mobile divisions eastward past the shoulder of the German Panzer divisions at the precise moment when those were hurrying westward, they actively co-operated in their isolation and ultimate encirclement.

  The penalty for acquiescence and co-operation in the opponent’s Blitzkrieg plans were quickly learned, by Germany’s enemies at least. Indeed, as we have seen, both the French and the British correctly identified during the first week of the German Blitzkrieg of May 1940 that the right response was to attack into the flank of the armoured column as it drove towards its objective. The Russians too eventually learned the same lesson and at Kursk, a sector in which they had been given time to prepare the ground, they not only amputated the German spearheads but then ground the attacking forces to pieces in the dense minefields and network of fire positions in which they had become engulfed. Kursk may be regarded as the first battle in which the anti-tank gun, with which infantry had been equipped as early as 1918, actually performed the role intended for it – to deflect and if possible destroy attacking enemy tanks without recourse to supporting armour.

  By 1944 each British and American infantry division had 60-100 anti-tank guns, as well as several hundred hand-held anti-tank missile projectors; the latter were weapons of last resort, but the former were genuine tank-destroyers. The enhanced effectiveness of the anti-tank gun derived not only from the growth in its distribution but also from the greatly increased calibre of those on issue to the infantry by mid-war – 57-mm was standard, 75-mm common and the heavier 80-mm and 90-mm available in specialist units. It is a rule of thumb that armour is penetrable by rounds equal in diameter to its thickness, and only the thickest tank armour exceeded 100 mm. Therefore, as the German armoured divisions engaged in Operation Lüttich found in their attack on the American 30th Division at Mortain, infantry could now hold their positions and inflict losses on the enemy under the weight of concentrated armoured attack.

  The precariousness of the Fifth Panzer Army’s position, confronted by superior enemy tank concentrations and by genuinely self-defending infantry formations, was now extreme. Its best hope was to form protective flanks along both southern and northern edges of the salient occupied by the Seventh Army behind which the battered German infantry divisions in Normandy could begin to make their withdrawal to the Seine. If Kluge, commanding both the Fifth Panzer and the Seventh Armies, as well as Army Group B, had enjoyed the freedom to make strategic decisions, there seems little doubt that he would have ordered exactly that disposition of his force. But freedom of decision was not what Hitler would concede him. On the contrary, on 10 August he sent orders to Kluge that Operation Lüttich was to be resumed the following day: ‘The [Panzer] attack failed because it was launched prematurely and was thus too weak, and under weather conditions favouring the enemy. It is to be repeated elsewhere with powerful forces.’ Six Panzer divisions were to engage in a more south-westerly direction under the command of General Hans Eberbach.

  To attack south-westward was to commit the Panzer divisions into the pocket which Eisenhower’s ‘short hook’ was now drawing around the Seventh Army. Hitler, the impresario of Blitzkrieg, was thus orchestrating exactly the manoeuvre best calculated to deliver his armoured striking force to its destruction. For all the evidence its enemies had given the Wehrmacht of the dangers of acquiescence and co-operation in Blitzkrieg, Hitler was now bent on tactics which more closely co-operated in a hostile Blitzkrieg than any employed by their enemies. Kluge, his immediate subordinate in the west, was aware of the ‘incredibility of a large military force of twenty divisions blissfully planning an attack while far behind it an enemy is busily forming a noose with which to strangle it’. However, he was inhibited, even more than most German generals in the wake of the 20 July bomb plot, by the knowledge that his own complicity was suspected by the SS and Gestapo, and that their suspicions had substance. Kluge had known that a plot was in the making, since many of the plotters had previously served on his staff in Russia, but he had neither dissociated himself from it nor, when invited to join, shown loyalty by refusing; ‘Yes, if the pig was dead’ were the words he had used on the evening of 20 July. He now recognised that he could rescue himself from suspicion only by accepting the right of ‘a command ignorant of front-line conditions’, as the Seventh Army’s chief of staff put it, ‘to judge the situation from East Prussia’. His two immediate subordinates, General Paul Hausser of the Seventh and General Sepp Dietrich of the Fifth Panzer Armies, both SS officers recently nominated by Hitler to replace army generals, were currently taking advantage of a loophole in his orders for the renewal of the attack to draw their divisions eastward and so away from the tightening clasp of the American ‘hook’. Kluge accepted the military logic of their redeployments but felt driven, none the less, to go through the motions of reviving the offensive as Hitler directed. On 15 August he set off on a tour of the pocket in which both his armies were now confined, with the object of persuading Hitler that he was carrying out his orders. The events of the day, ironically, were to produce exactly the opposite impression. Attacked in his staff car, exactly as Rommel had been twenty-nine days earlier, he spent most of the day skulking in ditches and reached the Seventh Army’s headquarters only at midnight. During the hours he had remained incommunicado Hitler – for whom 15 August was ‘the worst day of my life’ – had convinced himself that Army Group B’s commander was planning ‘to lead the whole of the Western Army into capitulation’. Late in the evening he decided to relieve Kluge of command, sent for Walther Model, ‘the Führer’s fireman’,
to replace him and ordered the disgraced field marshal to return to Germany. Kluge, who rightly divined that he was to be met on arrival by the Gestapo, took poison on the homeward flight.

  Kluge’s suicide could not expiate the mistakes which had led Army Group B into its present predicament. Nor could Model, for all his proven expertise in reconstructing broken fronts, rescue it. Hitler’s co-operation in the American Blitzkrieg had carried it too far into danger for anything but a pell-mell retreat to save its remnants from annihilation. And remnants were what the divisions of Army Group B now amounted to; though some 300,000 German soldiers were entrapped in the Falaise pocket, eight of the twenty surrounded divisions had disintegrated, while the tank strength of the best Panzer divisions – 1st SS, 2nd, 9th and 116th – had fallen to thirty, twenty-five, fifteen and twelve respectively. The renewal of Operation Lüttich was out of the question. Fortunately for the survivors, Hitler, in changing commanders, had also changed his tune. Model arrived in France on 17 August with orders to re-form the line on the Seine, holding enough ground to sustain the V-weapons attack on Britain and protect the frontiers of Germany from direct assault.

  His mission was overtaken by events. On 19 August Patton’s spearhead reached the Seine north-west of Paris at Mantes. This extension of Eisenhower’s hook, ordered by Bradley on 14 August, conceded the trapped Germans a temporary breathing space, since after that date the American concentration at Argentan, forming one shoulder of the gap through which Army Group B had to escape, did not move further northwards to meet the Anglo-Canadian concentration at Falaise. The thrust to Mantes nevertheless nullified any hope the Germans had of sustaining a defensive line on the Seine, which thereafter became merely the barrier that Army Group B must cross to make good its escape out of Normandy. Meanwhile the Germans within the pocket, from which all anti-aircraft units had been evacuated in the hope of using them later elsewhere, were being devastated by constant air attack, while the British and Canadians were bearing down from Falaise to Argentan to put the stopper in the bottleneck. In the bottleneck itself a newly arrived Allied formation, the 1st Polish Armoured Division, representative in the west of the large Polish army in exile still sustaining its war effort against the Germans, took and held the commanding heights of Chambois between Falaise and Argentan in three days of desperate battle from 18 to 21 August. Its tank crews and infantrymen launched a succession of assaults against the road below where Army Group B streamed to the Seine bridges and ferries; but a defence against them was made by the equally resolute 12th SS Panzer (Hitler Youth) Division, which there performed the last of its many crucial operational missions in Normandy.