by Jon E. Lewis
By the fall of night, 100,000 Allied troops had landed in France. More than 12,000 of them had become casualties of war. A similar number of Germans had died or been wounded trying to stop them. Now, over 60 miles of front, soldiers tried to snatch some sleep, planned their next moves, or nervously scanned the darkness. And the diarists among them made their last entries of the day.
General Matt B. Ridgway, US 82nd Airborne Division
I was in fine physical shape, but never in all my life have I been so weary as I was at the end of that first day in Normandy. Just before midnight, tottering on my feet as was many another soldier who had fought there on that day, I rolled up in a cargo chute and lay down for the first sleep I’d had in forty-eight hours. I crawled into a ditch, for the town of Ste Mère Eglise was only a short distance away, and all that night German airplanes were overhead, dropping five-hundred-pounders, and German artillery was shelling the city heavily.
Captain Albert H. Smith, US 1st Infantry Division
At about midnight we thought we would be able to get a little sleep. You know the hours were such that daylight lasted almost until 11 p.m., 23.00 hours? We were dead tired then. Everyone was dead tired. I said that I was walking around like a zombie. It got very cold, it went down to about 30 to 40 degrees Fahrenheit. Two of us, another officer and myself, got under his raincoat and tried to get some sleep leaning against the hedgerow. It was a very bad physical feeling, but nevertheless we knew we had landed and were going to hold our position on the bluffs, and troops were moving inland. So it was a feeling of cold, miserable tiredness, but mentally we were feeling, ‘God, we did it.’
Corporal G.E. Hughes, 1st Battalion, Royal Hampshire Regiment
Diary, 6 June
06.00 Get in LCA. Sea very rough. Hit the beach at 7.20 hours. Murderous fire, losses high. I was lucky T[hank] God. Cleared three villages. Terrible fighting and ghastly sights.
Able Seaman R.E. Hughes, aboard HMS Glasgow
Diary, 6 June
23.30. Bombs are dropping near us now and everyone standing to. Several enemy planes fly low over the ships – terrific reception for them.
Major F.D. Goode, Gloucestershire Regiment
It was now night, my servant Private Morris had blown up my Lilo and put it in a farm cart that sloped slightly and was under an open shed. It faced north towards the beaches. Here I set up my company HQ and being by this time very tired settled down on my Lilo … there was a steady noise of aircraft going to and coming from the beaches. It was a clear night and the beaches represented a fantastic firework display as the Germans tried to bomb them and all the ships and AA opened up with coloured tracers. Watching this I fell asleep.
Lieutenant-General Edgar Feucthinger, CO, 21st Panzer Division
About midnight, Kurt Meyer arrived at my headquarters. He was to take over on my left and we were to carry out a combined operation the next morning. I explained the situation to Meyer and warned him about the strength of the enemy. Meyer studied the map, turned to me with a confident air and said, ‘Little fish! We’ll throw them back into the sea in the morning.’
D-Day was over, and the Allies had secured a bridgehead. The Battle of Normandy, however, was only just beginning.
Soldiering On
Combat, Life and Death in the
Battle of Normandy,
7 June – 20 August 1944
Sometimes I wondered if the battles would ever end. We seemed to be fighting all day, every day. We couldn’t see an end to it.
Trooper Peter Davies, 1st East Riding Yeomanry
Everyone who took part in the Battle of Normandy that summer was struck by the particular loveliness of the countryside they marched and fought through. Its hedges, orchards and meadows were almost a painful reminder of home for the men from England’s shires, while Americans were struck by its verdancy.
Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
29 June 1944
All the American soldiers here are impressed by the loveliness of the Normandy countryside. Except for swampy places it is almost a dreamland of beauty. Everything is green and rich and natural looking.
There are no fences as such. All the little fields are bordered either by high trees or by earthen ridges built up about waist-high and now after many centuries completely covered with grass, shrubbery, ferns and flowers.
Normandy differs from the English landscape mainly in that rural England is fastidiously trimmed and cropped like a Venetian garden, while in Normandy the grass needs cutting and the hedgerows are wild, and everything has less of neatness and more of the way nature makes it.
Yet, if it was beautiful, the Normandy landscape was also deadly. The bocage, with its medievally small meadows and high farm hedges, was the perfect defensive country, where every hedge could hide a tank, every roadside ditch a heavy machine gun. The bocage was perhaps densest in the American sector, the Cotentin and the western half of Normandy. To fight in the hedgerows took a special kind of combat.
Anonymous US Infantry Officer
I want to describe to you what the weird hedgerow fighting in northwestern France was like. This type of fighting was always in small groups, so let’s take as an example one company of men. Let’s say they were working forward on both sides of a country lane, and the company was responsible for clearing the two fields on either side of the road as it advanced. That meant there was only about one platoon to a field, and with the company’s understrength from casualties, there might be no more than twenty-five or thirty men.
The fields were usually not more than fifty yards across and a couple of hundred yards long. They might have grain in them, or apple trees, but mostly they were just pastures of green grass, full of beautiful cows. The fields were surrounded on all sides by the immense hedgerows – ancient earthen banks, waist high, all matted with roots, and out of which grew weeds, bushes, and trees up to twenty feet high. The Germans used these barriers well. They put snipers in the trees. They dug deep trenches behind the hedgerows and covered them with timber, so that it was almost impossible for artillery to get at them. Sometimes they propped up machine guns with strings attached so that they could fire over the hedge without getting out of their holes. They even cut out a section of the hedgerow and hid a big gun or a tank in it, covering it with bush. Also they tunnelled under the hedgerows from the back and made the opening on the forward side just large enough to stick a machine gun through. But mostly the hedgerow pattern was this: a heavy machine gun hidden at each end of the field and infantrymen hidden all along the hedgerow with rifles and machine pistols.
We had to dig them out. It was a slow and cautious business, and there was nothing dashing about it. Our men didn’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges such as you see in the movies. They did at first, but they learned better. They went in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They crept a few yards, squatted, waited, then crept again.
If you could have been right up there between the Germans and the Americans you wouldn’t have seen many men at any one time – just a few here and there, always trying to keep hidden. But you would have heard an awful lot of noise. Our men were taught in training not to fire until they saw something to fire at. But the principle didn’t work in that country, because there was very little to see. So the alternative was to keep shooting constantly at the hedgerows. That pinned the Germans to their holes while we sneaked up on them. The attacking squads sneaked up the sides of the hedgerows while the rest of the platoon stayed back in their own hedgerow and kept the forward hedge saturated with bullets. They shot rifle grenades too, and a mortar squad a little farther back kept lobbing mortar shells over onto the Germans. The little advance groups worked their way up to the far ends of the hedgerows at the corners of the field. They first tried to knock out the machine guns at each corner. They did this with hand grenades, rifle grenades and machine guns …
Usually, when the pressure was on, the German d
efenders of the hedgerow started pulling back. They would take their heavier guns and most of the men back a couple of fields and start digging in for a new line. They left about two machine guns and a few riflemen scattered through the hedge to do a lot of shooting and hold up the Americans as long as they could. Our men would then sneak along the front side of the hedgerow, throwing grenades over onto the other side and spraying the hedges with their guns. The fighting was close – only a few yards apart …
This hedgerow business was a series of little skirmishes like that clear across the front, thousands and thousands of little skirmishes. No single one of them was very big. Added up over the days and weeks, however, they made a man-sized war – with thousands on both sides getting killed. But that is only a general pattern of the hedgerow fighting. Actually each one was a little separate war, fought under different circumstances. For instance, the fight might be in a woods instead of an open field. The Germans would be dug in all over the woods, in little groups, and it was really tough to get them out. Often in cases like that we just went around the woods and kept going, and let later units take care of those surrounded and doomed fellows. Or we might go through a woods and clean it out, and another company, coming through a couple of hours later, would find it full of Germans again. In a war like this everything was in such confusion that I never could see how either side ever got anywhere.
Anonymous US Infantry Officer
There were just three ways that our infantry could get through the hedgerow country. They could walk down the road, which always makes the leading men feel practically naked (and they are). They could attempt to get through gaps in the corners of the hedgerows and crawl up along the row leading forward or rush through in a group and spread out in the field beyond. This was not a popular method. In the first place, often there were no gaps just when you wanted one most, and in the second place the Germans knew about them before we did and were usually prepared with machine-gun and machine-pistol reception committees. The third method was to rush a skirmish line over a hedgerow and then across the field. This could have been a fair method if there had been no hedgerows.
Usually we could not get through the hedge without hacking a way through. This of course took time, and a German machine gun can fire a lot of rounds in a very short time. Sometimes the hedges themselves were not thick. But it still took time for the infantryman to climb up the bank and scramble over, during which time he was a luscious target, and when he got over the Germans knew exactly where he was. All in all it was very discouraging to the men who had to go first. The farther to the rear one got the easier it all seemed.
Of course the Germans did not defend every hedgerow, but no one knew without stepping out into the spotlight which ones he did defend.
In truth the Allies were badly prepared for fighting in the bocage. Somewhat naively they had expected to punch through the Atlantic Wall and simply march on Paris. The bocage would not be a problem because the Allies would not be in it long enough for it to be a problem. As this American infantry officer points out, ironically enough the Allies had prepared for the invasion amid countryside uncannily like that of Normandy.
Captain Albert H. Smith, US 1st Infantry Division
We did our training in the middle of beautiful British hedgerows. And if somebody had said, ‘You’re going to run into this sort of thing’ – narrow roads, with high mounds of dirt on either side and all – we’d have practised and found a way through them without casualties. But that wasn’t done as part of our training. We were trained to eliminate pill-boxes, we were trained to eliminate bunkers, to get out of landing craft and move quickly – that we could all do.
It was not just the Normandy landscape which encouraged a long, slow war of hard fighting. It became official Wehrmacht policy.
War diary, Wehrmacht 7th Army
10 June 1944
The Chief-of-Staff Army Group ‘B’ presents the views of the Supreme Commander of the armed forces (Hitler) … that there should be neither a withdrawal, fighting to the rear, nor a disengagement rearward to a new line of resistance, but that every man will fight and fall, where he stands.
This order, the diametric opposite of the Fuhrer’s usual insistence on counter-attacks to destroy the enemy, was occasioned by brutal necessity. On 7 and 8 June, the two days following the Allied landing, Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division (Hitler Youth) tried to drive the British and Canadians into the sea. Meyer’s Panzers and fanatical teenage soldiers – the members of the 12th SS were as young as 16 – drove back the Canadians for two miles, but failed to break through. In turn, the British and Canadians tried to take Caen but were unable to breach the line held by the 12th SS, although they did manage to seize the village of Cambes on 9 June. These three days saw some of the fiercest fighting of the war.
Emil Werner, 25th Panzergrenadier Regiment, 12th SS Panzer Division
Until Cambes, everything went well. So far as we were concerned, the village looked fine. But on the outskirts we came under infantry fire and then all hell broke loose. We stormed a church where snipers had taken up positions. Here I saw the first dead man from our company; it was Grenadier Ruehl from headquarters platoon. I turned his body over myself – he’d been shot through the head. He was the second member of our company to die. Dead comrades already; and we still hadn’t seen any Englishmen. Then the situation became critical. My section commander was wounded in the arm and had to go to the rear. Grenadier Grosse from Hamburg leapt past me towards a clump of bushes with his sub-machine gun at the ready, screaming ‘Hands up! Hands up!’ Two Englishmen emerged with their hands held high. As far as I know, Grosse got the Iron Cross, second class, for this.
Anonymous Allied Intelligence Officer: Interrogation of German soldiers from Wehrmacht Anti-Tank Battalion, 716th Infantry Division
Three P[risoners of] W[ar] interrogated. Feldwebel [Sergeant-Major] of 1st Co[mpan]y age 27, believed in German victory. Unteroffizier [Sergeant] 2nd Coy age 28, very intelligent peasant. Said his t[roo]p’s 7.5 cm guns were all destroyed by bombardment and his s[er]g[ean]t said it was more reasonable to surrender since they could not fight any more (captured 7 June near Caen). Some Volksdeutsche [ethnic Germans] in his coy. Third, an Obersoldat [German army rank] 2nd Coy age 38, a Polish cobbler, tells the following story: ‘At 2 o’clock one morning the Alarm Stufe 2 was given and he was sent forward to Craye-sur-Mer (presumably Graye-sur-Mer) to a gun section. He had been trained as an infantryman and had no anti-tank experience. When the Allies appeared off the beach his platoon commander, a Stabsfeldwebel [Staff Sergeant], a very decent fellow in PW’s opinion, said “This is it, boys. We give up now,” and the platoon never fired a shot.’ PW stated that 1st Coy was composed entirely of Germans, 2nd Coy had about 80 Poles in a total strength of 150.
Lieutenant-Colonel J.M. Meldram, report No. 1, Canadian War Crimes Investigation Unit
Some [German] tanks continued forward to Bretteville to within about 300 yards of battalion headquarters. There they remained for one and a half hours shelling and machine-gunning the town. About midnight two Panthers entered the town. One came opposite battalion headquarters and was struck by a PIAT bomb fired from behind a low stone wall at 15 yards range, safe from the tank’s huge gun. It halted for a moment, started again and after 30 yards was hit again by a second PIAT bomb. It stopped, turned around and headed out of town. A third PIAT hit finished it off so that it slewed around, out of control, running over a necklace of No. 75 grenades which blew off a track. The crew dismounted and attempted to make off, but were killed by small-arms fire. During this incident the second Panther had remained further up the road. Seeing the fate of its companion it commenced to fire both 75 mm and MG [machine gun] wildly down the street, ‘like a child in a tantrum’, doing no damage whatsoever except to set fire to the first Panther. Altogether twenty-two Panthers circled about battalion headquarters and A Company’s position during the night, and it is hard to picture the confusion which existed. Contact with all
but D Company was lost. Fires and flares lit up the area, and the enemy several times appeared to be convinced that opposition had ceased.
Sergeant Leo Gariepy, 3rd Canadian Division
The morale of the men was very low indeed. So many of their long-time comrades had stayed behind on the battlefield, the battle itself had been so savage, so furious, that every man felt that the 12th SS Panzer had a personal grudge against our tanks. Silently, grimly, we were looking at each other, knowing exactly what was in the other man’s mind. They simply lay there, not sleeping, eyes opened, just staring into space. A poet or a writer would have found the proper words to describe this vacant look and what was going through their minds, but other than a few comforting words from the padre, Major Creelman, not much was said. Mostly, everyone was rather vindictive, and silently swearing revenge.
War Diary, 14th Canadian Field Ambulance (serving 3rd Canadian Division)
Colonel H.S. Gillies, King’s Own Scottish Borderers
The attack entailed crossing a distance of about one thousand yards of open cornfield which fell away from Cambes Wood. We had barely crossed the start-line when the enemy reacted fiercely, with well-sited machine gun and intense mortar fire which enfiladed the companies as they moved forward. It was a situation almost reminiscent of some First World War battlefield … We could see the tracer bullets flicking off the corn. Casualties began to mount as we pressed forward, but the grave situation in which we found ourselves was suddenly retrieved by the decisive action of my company second-in-command, who organized a very effective 2-inch mortar smoke screen to cover our open flank. This allowed us to complete the remainder of our advance without prohibitive casualties and to establish contact with the Royal Ulster Rifles. After a sharp battle at close quarters, the village was cleared at dusk, but we were then subjected to an intense barrage of gun and mortar fire, which caused many more casualties. At best, it was only possible in the pitch darkness to establish a tentative defence system and we fully expected the enemy to launch a counter-attack at the first opportunity. They had now been identified as the notorious 12th SS (Hitler Youth) Panzer Division.
