Divided on D-Day

by Edward E. Gordon

  When the First SS Panzer Corp's attack finally began on June 9, Allied naval and concentrated artillery gunfire inflicted heavy losses. In a postwar interview with Liddell Hart, Rundstedt stated his surprise on how the battleship fire greatly hampered the German counterstroke. Allied fighter-bombers also contributed to halting the German advance with saturation bombing. The sheer volume and accuracy of the naval gunfire completely surprised the panzers. On June 10 Rommel also wrote, “The effect of the heavy naval guns is so immense that no operation of any kind is possible…either by infantry or tanks.”8

  The secret to the accuracy of the Allied naval shelling was the placement of forward naval observers with the frontline units. In a matter of minutes they communicated directly with warship fire-control centers to accurately pulverize German positions.9

  The last major German counterattack was planned for dusk on June 10. Again Ultra intercepts (decoded enemy messages) helped the Allies through pinpointing the exact headquarters location of General Geyr von Schweppenburg's Panzer Group West. On the evening of June 10, rocket-firing Royal Air Force (RAF) Typhoon squadrons flying low located Geyr's headquarters, which had not been properly camouflaged. The RAF attack destroyed all the radio equipment, thus incapacitating the signal's battalion. Geyr was wounded, and seventeen other officers were killed. Panzer Group West was decimated, and the attack was canceled. Yet even if such a counterattack had occurred, it would have, as we will see, run head-on into Montgomery's belated second effort to take Caen.10

  Where was the Luftwaffe during all of these attempted German counterattacks? The German troops’ grim humor was that the Allied planes had silver paint. The Luftwaffe planes were colorless and rendered invisible. In France they say the planes are on the Russian front. On the Russian front they say they are in France, and in Germany they say they are at the front.

  Approximately one thousand fighters and bombers were transferred from Germany and Italy to attack the Allied buildup. Through June and July this number of aircraft was maintained despite the loss of one thousand planes by July 7. Yet no more than 250 fighters were sent up daily due to the vastly superior Allied air forces. The Luftwaffe incurred very high losses, and their airfields were pounded by continuous raids. Supply, repair, and pilot replacement efforts broke down.11

  Nightly German air raids over the Allied beaches were limited to 80 to 120 bombers. Many were mine-laying sorties that deployed large quantities of a new type of pressure-sensitive oyster mine. These mines were very hard to detect, and as there were no effective countermeasures against them, they accounted for most of the Allied ships sunk during NEPTUNE.

  Another important Luftwaffe weapon was the rocket-propelled Henschel HS 293 radio-guided aerial bomb. This early air-launched guided missile struck the USS Meredith at 1:00 a.m. on June 8. She later sank after a second German bomb attack.12

  The Allies, however, were able to effectively counter the German naval attacks. From their bases at Cherbourg, Boulogne, and Le Havre, fast German E-boats conducted nightly sorties on Allied warships on the extreme flanks of the invasion and on cross-channel traffic. Some Allied ships were damaged but at great cost to the German E-boats. The Kriegsmarine pinprick attacks never materially altered the Allied channel operations or the buildup of forces in France.

  German U-boats were rendered ineffective by the massive air-surface antisubmarine screen that enveloped all Allied shipping operating in the English Channel. On the night of June 7 a British Liberator bomber piloted by Ken Moore, a Canadian officer, sank two German U-boats within twenty-two minutes, thus making naval history. During the month of June, twenty-five U-boats were sunk, twelve in the channel and the Bay of Biscay.13

  Based on Ultra decrypt of Enigma signals, Admiral Ramsay initiated a naval sortie by the Tenth Destroyer Flotilla that smashed the German Eighth Destroyer Flotilla west of its Cherbourg base. These were the last German destroyers able to attack NEPTUNE shipping. On June 14, 325 Lancaster bombers destroyed about forty German surface vessels in an attack on the Port of Le Havre. Thus by the end of June, both the Luftwaffe and Kriegsmarine were broken reeds.14

  HITLER'S POLICY STRAITJACKET

  A few minutes after midnight on June 12, the Germans deployed a new offensive weapon that might have altered the course of the Normandy invasion. Launched from Holland, the first V-1 rockets struck London. Hitler believed that he could break British morale with relentless V-1 attacks on their capital. Between June and October 1944, over 9,500 V-1s hit London. Extensive areas of Central London were ultimately evacuated as the bombardment unnerved many people.

  Because Hitler thought that this use of theV-1s would decide the war, he refused to direct those rockets against the British embarkation ports or the massive concentration of Allied ships off the Normandy coast. The V-1s had the potential of seriously disrupting the invasion's logistics. If this new weapon, which had been hitting London at the rate of one hundred per day, had been switched to the invasion bridgehead, it might have forced the withdrawal of Allied naval units from the French coast. Fortunately for the Allies, this did not happen. Hitler had made another fateful decision.15

  By June 10 Rundstedt and Rommel both realized that their efforts had a scant chance of success in Normandy. They doubted the German army's ability to throw the Allies back into the sea. Thus they wanted to wage a defensive campaign with a free hand to deploy their forces. But even before the invasion, Hitler had tied their hands with a rigid no withdrawal policy. Shortly after D-Day he repeated these orders.

  To their despair, Rommel and Rundstedt knew the piecemeal commitment of the panzer divisions was a fatal race to simply plug the gaps in their defensive lines, like an emergency fire brigade. This ultimately would lead to collapse. Hitler had set up a battle of attrition that Germany could not win.16

  After the war, Rundstedt explained to Allied interviewers why this was a “great mistake.” “I wanted to relieve them with infantry divisions but they were always too closely engaged and anyway were under fire from the Navy. I wanted to establish the infantry behind the Orne, get them properly dug-in, but I wasn’t allowed to yield ground [by Hitler].”17

  By June 11 Rommel told Keitel the hopelessness of their situation: “[T]he enemy has complete control of the air over the battle area up to a distance of about a hundred kilometers behind the front, and with powerful fighter-bomber and bomber formations immobilizes almost all traffic by day on roads or in the open country.”18

  Rommel understood that his soldiers could only stop the Allied breakout for a time at the cost of heavy casualties on both sides. He further realized that Germany could not win in Normandy, nor win the war. On June 14, Rommel wrote to his wife, “The situation does not improve. We must be prepared for grave events. The troops are fighting with the utmost courage, but the balance of strength tips more heavily against us every day.”19

  During the Normandy campaign Hitler's politically driven command and control policies were disastrous for the German military. His interference ranks high among the many factors leading to the ultimate defeat of Germany.

  MONTY'S BIG LIE

  In the early morning of June 7 Montgomery landed in France. He was unperturbed by the British and Canadian failure to take Caen and its airfields. He reported that “all was going well and the original plan was being worked to…. Caen was not captured.”20

  On June 11 Montgomery made his first attempt to disguise a change in his own plan when he informed General Alan Brooke that “my general policy is to pull the enemy on to Second Army [British and Canadian] so as to make it easier for First Army [American] to expand and extend the quicker.”21

  Eisenhower thought that Monty's June 11 message was an admission that his original plan had been nullified by the Caen failure. Ike interpreted this British switch to the defensive as Montgomery's reversion to his previous battlefield behavior of overcaution and reluctance to risk heavy casualties. At that time whatever Monty's intention, it was not clear to the other Allied commanders.22


  Montgomery's later attempts to pretend that the Normandy ground battle unfolded according to his original planning documents are ludicrous. His biographer Nigel Hamilton offers this explanation: “Like a master chess player, he knew it would be a long battle…. The slogging match could now begin.”23 This scenario implies that Montgomery sought to mount a siege of Caen. This was exactly the opposite of what the British wanted because of their limited manpower reserves.

  Until Montgomery's June 11 invention of his new strategy, he had always made it perfectly clear that D-Day required an initial aggressive thrust that gained more ground and broke through the German defenses to take Caen. British-Canadian armored forces would rapidly move onto the Falaise plain, then toward the Seine and Paris. This was Montgomery's original planned “feint” at Caen that would draw the German panzers into a battle highly favorable to the Allies. Overwhelming British-American air superiority and the mobility of their much larger armored forces would destroy any German counteroffensive. This “feint” in turn would assist a faster American breakthrough in support of the British.

  Instead Montgomery distorted his intentions in later years by pretending that the British and Canadians carried out his original plan by holding a line north of Caen into mid-July. This is one of the great myths of World War II.

  It was only after D-Day that this new strategy became his plan. None of Montgomery's preinvasion planning, reports, or presentations ever suggested that the British would stop short of attacking Caen. Thus Montgomery opened the door to what became a long battle of attrition in Normandy.24

  CAEN-ROUND TWO: VILLERS-BOCAGE

  In the first week after D-Day, Montgomery did not order an all-out attack on Caen. On June 7 to June 8 the British Third Division did renew its initial D-Day attack, but it was understrength and was easily defeated with heavy losses. Montgomery concluded that a frontal assault on Caen was doomed to failure as he wrote General Simpson, “I have decided not to have a lot of casualties by batting up against the place.”25

  Montgomery's new plan was to encircle Caen with a simultaneous attack by General Miles Dempsey's Second Army from east to west. I Corps formed the left pincer. On June 10 just as the corps began its attack, Rommel launched his own offensive to the east of Caen, thereby blunting Montgomery's planned envelopment. The Twenty-First Panzer Division rapidly routed the I Corp's attack. The objective of the right pincer, headed by the Seventh British Armored Division, was to drive rapidly inland twenty miles from the coast and take the key area-road network around Villers-Bocage. (See Map 8.) This was bocage country with sunken lanes and ten-foot-high hedgerows. The British were totally unprepared to fight in this beautiful but treacherous terrain, but they did reach Villers-Bocage on June 13 at 8:00 a.m.

  Fig. 7.1. Generals Dempsey and Montgomery. (Photo by Morris [Sgt.] No. 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit)

  All that stood between these British tanks and German encirclement was a tiny First SS Panzer Reserve of five Tiger tanks and one Mark IV commanded by Captain Michael Wittmann, a famed panzer ace. After reaching the outskirts of Villers-Bocage, he observed a column of twenty-five British tanks and half-tracks leaving the village. The British column had stopped for further infantry reconnaissance. While waiting to advance, the tankers unexpectedly dismounted from their tanks. This was a fateful mistake.

  Wittman sprang into action. Screened by a hedgerow, he took some of his sixty-ton Tiger tanks and ran down the parked unmanned tanks, firing broadsides at them and setting them ablaze. With the column finished, Wittman burst into Villers-Bocage and destroyed more of idled British tanks before withdrawing to rearm. He returned in the early afternoon with his entire force and crushed the outgunned British. Later in the day he was finally stopped by reinforcing British armor.

  This ended one of the most amazing engagements in the history of armored warfare. At the cost of four tanks, Wittman's attack had destroyed thirty British tanks and armored vehicles. The battle of Villers-Bocage was a German victory and the second Allied failure to take Caen. Two months passed before Villers-Bocage was taken by the Allies.26

  Both sides now dug in around Caen awaiting reinforcements. Reminiscent of World War I, the Norman countryside became lined with entrenchments and barbed wire with outbreaks of artillery and mortar fire. Montgomery's promised war of movement had stopped almost before it had started. Dempsey feared that the front had congealed. The suspicion arose that the formidable Seventh Armored Division had lost its esprit de corp. Its veterans felt that they had already seen their fair share of combat in the Mediterranean.27

  Sensing a crisis, on June 15 Eisenhower and Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder flew to Montgomery's headquarters to assess what was happening. From June 13 to 15, Monty wrote,

  The turning point of the battle was I think on 12 June, when the thrust line of 7 Armd DIV…broke through and reached Villers Bocage on morning 13 June. We were then in a position to be able to force a German withdrawal…[14 June.] The situation in that area is still a bit confused…. I have got to be certain of my position, step by step…. I would be stronger still if I had Caen itself, but I am quite well positioned as things are at present…. I have therefore decided to be defensive in the Caen sector…but aggressively so. [June 15.] The situation in the Caumont-Villers Bocage area is now well in hand.28

  Monty's account glossed over the important fact that the British were forced to retreat after gaining an important objective. Instead of an offensive to take Caen, Monty switched to the defensive. How could this still be aggressive? When his planned attack fell flat, how could everything still be “well in hand”?

  Thus in his meeting with Ike, Monty declared he had everything under control. He bristled when Eisenhower suggested that he lost the initiative to Rommel by not breaking through his flank around Caen and making the promised breakthrough toward Falaise. Montgomery's mismanagement and denial proved a costly mistake and set up a pattern he would repeat over and over again.29

  BOCAGE HELL

  From the air Normandy was a picture of bucolic splendor with green quilts of fields outlined by husky hedgerows. Crisscrossing the countryside, shaded lanes sometimes formed into leafy tunnels running between the fields. Larousse, the French dictionary, defines the bocage as a “pleasantly shaded woodland.”30

  These man-made barriers enclosed first the Celtic farm fields, then grazing livestock during the Roman era. Over one thousand years of growth bound the hedgerows’ roots into solid, earthen embankments with steep faces. The base alone rose from three to six feet. From this impenetrable base hawthorn, brambles, and trees often grew to a height of twenty feet.

  This bocage terrain, some fifty miles deep, was mainly located between the Orne and Vire Rivers. (See Map 9.) Within it were thousands of small fields one hundred to two hundred yards long, some no more than the size of a homesite. The hedgerows became a perfect defense system for the German army. Also much of this area had been flooded by Rommel as an added defensive measure.

  American soldiers trapped on country lanes flanked by hedgerows saw only a few yards in any direction and were limited to moving forward or backward. Small breaks in this bocage allowed entry into enclosed fields. But hidden German machine gunners were in perfectly concealed positions to decimate American infantry as they groped their way along the roads and wagon trails or crawled to attack in these fields.

  Fig. 7.2. Bocage/hedgerows of Normandy. (Archives Normandie 1939–1945)

  Tanks were of little help. This was appalling tank country. The hedgerows were perfect for concealing defending German panzers, antitank guns, and mortars until an American Sherman tank was at point-blank range. Moreover, the tanks were not able to smash through these earthen dikes. They had to go over them, making their undersides easy prey for close-range antitank weapons, such as the German Panzerfaust (a bazooka-type device). Tank mobility was further limited by the numerous streams, rivers, steep hills, and valleys in this area.

  The Wehrmacht called it a schmutziger b
uschkrieg, a “dirty bush war.” The Germans had learned on the Russian front how to make up paucity in troops, artillery, and most importantly the Luftwaffe. Every position was meticulously camouflaged.

  Fig. 7.3. A British Universal Carrier drives through a gap made in a hedgerow. (© Imperial War Museums [B 7582])

  The battle of the bocage became a slow, plodding hell. It was a head-on slugfest on a microscale, fought over and over again. For almost two months the Americans were trapped in this maze with seemingly no way out.31

  Bradley and the rest of the American command had grossly underestimated the significant difficulty of fighting in the bocage. Bradley knew there were hedgerows in Normandy. But training exercises in English hedgerows thought to be similar was like comparing Bunker Hill outside Boston to Mount Everest in the Himalayas. A 1943 First Army report had advised that special tactics for fighting “through bocage country should be given considerable study.” Obviously this was not done.32

  Even General George C. Marshall, US Army chief of staff, pleaded ignorance of the deadly hedgerow. “We had to pay in blood for our lack of knowledge.”33

  Fig. 7.4. German tank concealed in a hedgerow. (Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-738-0275-09A /photo: Arthur Grimm)

  The Allied planners of NEPTUNE were preoccupied with the difficulties of securing the beachheads and the armored advance to the Caen-Falaise plain. They never seriously considered how unpromising the bocage terrain was for an American offensive. They might have had second thoughts about their choice of invasion beaches had they realized this.

  The most important reason why the Americans failed to plan sufficiently for fighting in the bocage was because in Montgomery's original campaign plan, much of the bocage was to be bypassed. The Allies were to pivot southeastward by taking Caen on D-Day. There the Falaise plain offered many more and better roads and wide-open fields for armor deployment. Of course, Montgomery did not take Caen on D-Day or soon thereafter.34