by Jon E. Lewis
Our staff car was a gutted heap of metal on the road; it was smouldering and smoking. Corporal Kartheus lay dead in the ditch. As if by a miracle General Bayerlein got away with a few cuts and shrapnel wounds. As for me, I was saved by the culvert.
There was nothing unusual in what happened to Hartdegen. His staff car was only one of thousands of German vehicles shot up by Allied aircraft. On 17 July Rommel’s Horch found itself in the gunsight of Canadian Spitfires from 412 Squadron:
Captain Helmuth Lang, adjutant to Marshal Erwin Rommel
At about 4 p.m. Marshal Rommel started on the return journey from General Dietrich’s headquarters. He was anxious to get back to Army Group B headquarters as quickly as possible because the enemy had broken through on another part of the front …
About 6 p.m. the Marshal’s car was in the neighbourhood of Libarot. Transport which had just been attacked was piled up along the road and strong groups of enemy dive-bombers were still at work close by. … The driver, Daniel, was told to put on speed and turn off on to a little side road to the right, about 300 yards ahead of us, which would give us some shelter.
Before we could reach it, the enemy aircraft, flying at great speed only a few feet above the road, came up to within 500 yards of us and the first one opened fire. Marshal Rommel was looking back at this moment. The left-hand side of the car was hit by the first burst. A cannon-shell shattered Daniel’s left shoulder and left arm. Marshal Rommel was wounded in the face by broken glass and received a blow on the temple and cheek-bone which caused a triple fracture of the skull and made him lose consciousness immediately. Major Neuhaus was struck on the holster of his revolver and the force of the blow broke his pelvis.
As the result of his serious wounds, Daniel, the driver, lost control of the car. It struck the stump of a tree, skidded over to the left of the road and then turned over in a ditch on the right. Captain Lang and Sergeant Holke jumped out of the car and took shelter on the right of the road. Marshal Rommel, who at the start of the attack, had hold of the handle of the door, was thrown out, unconscious, when the car turned over and lay stretched out on the road about twenty yards behind it. A second aircraft flew over and tried to drop bombs on those who were lying on the ground.’
Immediately afterwards, Marshal Rommel was carried into shelter by Captain Lang and Sergeant Holke. He lay on the ground unconscious and covered with blood, which flowed from the many wounds on his face, particularly from his left eye and mouth.
In order to get medical help for the wounded, Captain Lang tried to find a car. It took him about three-quarters of an hour to do so. Marshal Rommel had his wounds dressed by a French doctor in a religious hospital. They were very severe and the doctor said that there was little hope of saving his life. Later he was taken, still unconscious, with Daniel to an air-force hospital at Bernay, about 25 miles away. Daniel died during the night, in spite of a blood transfusion.
A few days later Marshal Rommel was taken to the hospital of Professor Esch at Vesinet, near St Germain.
After seven and a half weeks in Normandy the Allies had drawn the bulk of German armour and men to the eastern end of the front, in and around Caen. On 26 July the Americans, at the western end of the line, began to drive south, finding little in front of them except two Panzer divisions, and one division of Panzer grenadiers. Generals Patton – whose forces were in the lead – Bradley, and Montgomery began to encircle large numbers of the German Army at Falaise. Hitler unwittingly helped the Allies by ordering a counter-attack westwards towards Mortain, pushing more troops into the ‘pocket’ the Allies were about to close. General Crerar’s 1st Canadian attacked from the north towards Falaise, reaching it on 16 August. The Canadians in the north and the Americans in the south were then only fifteen miles apart. The gap between Falaise and Argentan was closed on 20 August. Fifty thousand German troops were trapped in the Falaise pocket. A few remnants of the German Army escaped, but had to leave their equipment behind. The Allies had not only broken the siege but captured their besiegers. The Battle of Normandy was over – and with it any chance that Germany could win the war. There would still be fighting ahead – Arnhem, the Ardennes – but the defeat in Normandy spelt the end for Nazi Germany. It was now only a question of when.
Captain Albert H. Smith, US 1st Infantry Division
Operation Cobra was preceded on 25 and 26 July by heavy bombing by thousands of planes, and it was done also in front of the other US divisions and in front of the British divisions. Then we attacked, broke out of the beachhead, broke out of the lodgement area as some people called it – that was a very, very wonderful operation. Not that it proceeded without casualties, but once we broke through the German crust we started to move by miles rather than yards. And before we knew it we were in the small city of Mayenne. There we stopped heading south and we headed for Paris – all this took place in the last couple of days of July, and the first week of August. I still recall the drive for Paris – it was wonderful, it was exhilarating. The troops loved it. We took some casualties but at the same time we knew things were going our way.
Wing Commander ‘Johnnie’ Johnson, RAF
When the Spitfires arrived at Falaise, over the small triangle of Normandy bordered by Falaise, Trun and Chambois, the Typhoons were already hard at work. One of their favourite tactics against the long streams of enemy vehicles was to seal off the front and rear of the column by accurately dropping a few bombs. This technique imprisoned the desperate enemy on a narrow stretch of dusty lane, and since the transports were sometimes jammed together four abreast, it made the subsequent rocket and cannon attack a comparatively easy business against the stationary targets. Some of the armoured cars and tanks attempted to escape their fate by making detours across the fields and wooded country, but these were soon spotted by the Typhoon pilots and were accorded the same treatment as their comrades on the highways and lanes.
Immediately the Typhoons withdrew from the killing ground the Spitfires raced into the attack … [back at base] ground crews worked flat out in the hot sunshine to rearm and refuel the aircraft.
The Times war correspondent, in the Falaise pocket
Nearly every yard of ground must have been pin-pointed by batteries of all calibres: coming down from Trun there is hardly a yard of the road, along which sporadic fighting was still going on yesterday, that does not tell its grim tale. The ditches are lined with destroyed enemy vehicles of every description, the green verges have turned blue-grey with German uniforms and equipment, and up on the banks or at the fringes of cornfields the dead lie as they fell in a blind attempt to get away.
For four days the rain of death poured down, and with the road blocked with blazing tanks and trucks little can have escaped it. Nothing can describe the horror of the sight in the village of St Lambert sur Dives, an enemy graveyard over which his troops were struggling yesterday in an effort to break through the cordon hedging them off from the seeming escape lanes to the Seine. Within an area of about a square mile hundreds of tanks and armoured cars, great trucks and guns and horse-drawn wagons, lie burned and splintered in hideous disarray.
This was no organized formation but a collection of oddments from several divisions which had been mad enough to pack themselves tightly into what they thought were hidden lanes and orchards. They must have been spotted from the air, for before dark the guns caught them with merciless accuracy. The lanes were jammed with vehicles, crammed with loot from French villages, nosing their way towards the exit; horses and wagons had crashed down into a narrow stream, and when the Canadians came in this morning the hospital on the hill and the few undamaged houses were full of bewildered German wounded, many of them no more than boys, who asked only to be taken away from the place.
On the Chambois road to-day, Canadian troops, dog-tired from days and nights of fighting, lay asleep in the sun; the hills and valleys were silent save for the rare splutter of a fanatic’s machine gun, and all manner of enemy vehicles that had escaped destruction were being dr
iven back to our own lines under white flags or hastily designed white stars. Everywhere one felt the reaction that comes after battle, the sudden loosening of taut nerves. A group of American soldiers were mounted, with the air of Texas rangers, on sleek German horses round whose necks were tied vivid strips of crimson cloth, probably used by the enemy as air recognition signals.
Untersturmfuhrer Herbert Walther, 12th SS Panzer Division, in the Falaise pocket
My driver was burning. I had a bullet through the arm. I jumped on to a railway track and ran. They were firing down the embankment and I was hit in the leg. I made 100 metres, then it was as if I was hit in the back of the neck with a big hammer. A bullet had gone in beneath the ear and come out through the cheek. I was choking on blood. There were two Americans looking down at me and two French soldiers, who wanted to finish me off.
The Americans took pity on Walther and carried him to a casualty station. Thirteen bullets were removed from Walther’s leg. He was one of the handful of the 12th SS to survive Normandy. The Division had fought itself to annihilation.
Letter home, Wehrmacht Soldier
[Late August, 1944]
I was in the Argentan-Falaise pocket and I still don’t know how I got out of it. We were running in wild fiery circles with artillery and aerial bombs dropping around us. After I got out of there I had to fight partisans and our own soldiers to get on the ferry across the Seine.
War diary, Algonquin Regiment
18 August, Trun
Nos 1 and 2 Squadrons took over forty prisoners and had a wonderful time searching through the captured vehicles. Captain Greenleaf captured a coupe and a motorcycle in running order … Everyone captured some trophy or another. A huge red flag with a black swastika on a circular white background was taken with the intention of hanging it in the armoury in Montreal.
Lance-Corporal RM Wingfield, Queen’s Royal Regiment
Hundreds of men were coming towards me. They were German. They were from the Falaise Gap.
I never want to see men like them again.
They came on, shambling in dusty files. Every few yards there was a single British infantryman. Even that guard was unnecessary. The shuffling wreck just followed the Bren carrier in the lead. They were past caring. The figures were bowed with fatigue, although they had nothing to carry but their ragged uniforms and their weary, hopeless, battle-drugged bodies.
Aftermath
Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
Dispatch, summer 1944
I took a walk along the historic coast of Normandy in the country of France.
It was a lovely day for strolling along the seashore. Men were sleeping on the sand, some of them sleeping forever. Men were floating in the water, but they didn’t know they were in the water, for they were dead.
The water was full of squishy little jellyfish about the size of your hand. Millions of them. In the centre each of them had a green design exactly like a four-leaf clover. The good-luck emblem. Sure. Hell yes.
I walked for a mile and a half along the water’s edge of our many-miled invasion beach. You wanted to walk slowly, for the detail on that beach was infinite.
The wreckage was vast and startling. The awful waste and destruction of war, even aside from the loss of human life, has always been one of its outstanding features to those who are in it. Anything and everything is expendable. And we did expend on our beachhead in Normandy during those first few hours.
For a mile out from the beach there were scores of tanks and trucks and boats that you could no longer see, for they were at the bottom of the water – swamped by overloading, or hit by shells, or sunk by mines. Most of their crews were lost.
You could see trucks tipped half over and swamped. You could see partly sunken barges, and the angled-up corners of jeeps, and small landing craft half submerged. And at low tide you could still see those vicious six-pronged iron snares that helped snag and wreck them.
On the beach itself, high and dry, were all kinds of wrecked vehicles. There were tanks that had only just made the beach before being knocked out. There were jeeps that had burned to a dull gray. There were big derricks on caterpillar treads that didn’t quite make it. There were half-tracks carrying office equipment that had been made into a shambles by a single shell hit, their interiors still holding their useless equipage of smashed typewriters, telephones, office files.
There were LCTs turned completely upside down, and lying on their backs, and how they got that way I don’t know. There were boats stacked on top of each other, their sides caved in, their suspension doors knocked off.
In this shoreline museum of carnage there were abandoned rolls of barbed wire and smashed bulldozers and big stacks of thrown-away lifebelts and piles of shells still waiting to be moved.
In the water floated empty life rafts and soldiers’ packs and ration boxes, and mysterious oranges.
On the beach lay snarled rolls of telephone wire and big rolls of steel matting and stacks of broken, rusting rifles.
On the beach lay, expended, sufficient men and mechanism for a small war. They were gone forever now. And yet we could afford it.
We could afford it because we were on, we had our toehold, and behind us there were such enormous replacements for this wreckage on the beach that you could hardly conceive of their sum total. Men and equipment were flowing from England in such a gigantic stream that it made the waste on the beachhead seem like nothing at all, really nothing at all.
A few hundred yards back on the beach is a high bluff. Up there we had a tent hospital, and a barbed-wire enclosure for prisoners of war. From up there you could see far up and down the beach, in a spectacular crows-nest view, and far out to sea.
And standing out there on the water beyond all this wreckage was the greatest armada man has ever seen. You simply could not believe the gigantic collection of ships that lay out there waiting to unload.
Looking from the bluff, it lay thick and clear to the far horizon of the sea and on beyond, and it spread out to the sides and was miles wide. Its utter enormity would move the hardest man.
As I stood up there I noticed a group of freshly taken German prisoners standing nearby. They had not yet been put in the prison cage. They were just standing there, a couple of doughboys leisurely guarding them with tommy guns.
The prisoners too were looking out to sea – the same bit of sea that for months and years had been so safely empty before their gaze. Now they stood staring almost as if in a trance.
They didn’t say a word to each other. They didn’t need to. The expression on their faces was something forever unforgettable. In it was the final horrified acceptance of their doom.
If only all Germans could have had the rich experience of standing on the bluff and looking out across the water and seeing what their compatriots saw.
Alexandre Reynaud, Mayor of Ste Mère Eglise
Before returning to Ste Mère Eglise, the captain stopped along the coast, near the former village of La Madeleine, in the commune of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont. A few years earlier, this little Normandy village was living a peaceful existence. It included several comfortable properties, half farm, half vacation home. A few hundred metres to the back, in the cemetery where no one had been buried for years, stood a very old chapel. It had a small openwork belfry in which a bell slept as though in a cage. It was surrounded by large trees: yews, oaks and elms, which almost hid it from view. It was an old, unused sanctuary which seemed to have retired there like an old woman behind her windowpanes.
Now, nothing remained of the village, not even ruins. The ground had been turned up, and the few stones that hadn’t been pulverized by shells and bombs had been used first by the Germans, then by the Americans, to pave the roads. The chapel was still standing, but it had been hit in several places and the belfry was awry.
In front of the village, on the dunes overlooking the sea, which were fairly high in this area, the Germans had built a blockhouse. It had been hit by Navy shells. We could still see the
threatening mouths of the cannons sticking out of the loopholes facing the sea. Inside the enormous mass of reinforced concrete were several compartments separated by armoured doors. A metal ladder was embedded into the wall, to enable the lookout to climb to the top from inside and see the horizon with a minimum of danger.
Odette Lelanoy, Vire
Ruins. You might say that Normandy had been ravaged. The country houses, the hamlets hadn’t been touched, but we had been caught in the shell fire, the gun fire from the planes, the bombs. As soon as lorries grouped around a farm to find water or provisions, like hens, they took the horses to pull their lorries which had run out of petrol. There were houses and barns on fire. The towns had been damaged, all those which had been in the battleground during those long weeks while the Germans were holding out. All those villages, such as Tinges Bre, Condé sur Noireau, Falaise, had been destroyed. We returned home to find our house hadn’t been touched. It had been taken over. Only a small part of the building had been destroyed. But it had been used as a command post and when we returned to the house there was nothing left inside. We found bits and pieces in the dining room and the cellar which indicated that our house had been taken and used as a command post. Anyway, they’d driven us out by saying, ‘You must leave. If we find you here tomorrow we’ll shoot you.’ That’s what they said all the way through the war. They slipped into our midst in order to be able to retreat. But the house was untouched.
Friedrich Gadecke, Wehrmacht
Letter, France, 27 August 1944
Dear Parents,
A time of uncertainty, apprehension and fear is now beginning for you as well. I pray sincerely that God gives you courage each day, and that you don’t sink into worry but hold onto the certainty that your prayers will be heard. Rest assured and be happy! That is my wish and my plea to you. Don’t be afraid, even during the days when you hear nothing and can know nothing about how things are for me. Everything that I experience and am permitted to live through in these times reassures me that I will be kept safe for you, for God does nothing by halves. I shall come through these dangers. God granted me life through you. For that I am always grateful to you.
