The Allied tactical air forces were marauding almost entirely freely over Normandy. On this day only around 800 Luftwaffe aircraft were in the west and of those just 120 were fighters. One of them was flown by Leutnant Wolfgang Fischer, who along with eleven others had taken off at around 9.30 a.m. in his Focke-Wulf 190 with a Nebelwerfer rocket – a ‘Moaning Minnie’, or rapid-firing mortar – under each wing, with orders to fire the rockets at the invasion fleet. When they reached the Normandy coast, Fischer was over-awed by the scale of the invasion. They circled around, unmolested by Allied aircraft, then, after carefully aiming off at a large warship, Fischer fired his rockets. It was the first time he had ever done so and it gave him quite a shock. Whether they actually hit or not he couldn’t tell but, now unencumbered, he turned towards the beach and flew over at 900 feet. ‘I let fly at the mass of men and materiel packed below,’ he wrote.31 ‘After the spectacular and noisy fireworks that had accompanied the launch of the two rockets, the thumping of my cannon, drowned out by the roar of the engine, sounded like the harmless popping of a cap pistol.’
This was a very rare foray by the Luftwaffe, however, which flew only around eighty sorties – individual combat flights – all day. In contrast, the Allied air forces flew a staggering 14,674. Gabby Gabreski flew four times that day, while Archie Maltbie flew three. Over Omaha, Maltbie saw the fighting raging below. He even saw blood staining the sea close to the beach. Ken Adam and his flight of 609 Squadron Typhoons were roving further inland when, near Lisieux, they hit a column of Bayerlein’s Panzer-Lehr, which was now on its way. Adam and his crew were not the only Allied fighters to hammer the Panzer-Lehr that day.
Feldmarschall Rommel finally reached La Roche-Guyon at around 9 p.m., by which time the various counter-attacks attempted had all been repulsed. Even Hillman had finally been overrun, although Oberst Krug would not personally surrender from his bunker until the following morning. All along the invasion front, as dusk fell, the Allies had the foothold they needed. The next few days would be crucial, however. The race to get men and supplies to the front was on, and in their efforts to win this particular race the Allied air forces had a vital role.
Casualties among those in the firing line had been considerable, although from the American perspective, perhaps not quite so high as has often been perceived. The 29th Infantry lost 321 dead; the 1st 107; V Corps, including tank crews and Rangers, 349; and the US Navy and Royal Navy 65, making a total of 842 Allied dead at Omaha, which amounted to around 2.8 per cent of all those landed there on D-Day. It was a lot, but nothing like as bad as it might have been or as the narrative has suggested. Total Allied casualties on Omaha – dead, wounded and missing – were higher at 4,725. On the other hand, much of the German crust defending the coastline had been swept away. Exact figures are impossible to determine, but the 716. Infanterie-Division, for example, no longer existed as a fighting unit. Men like Karl Wegner and Franz Gockel, who had somehow managed to survive the carnage, now found themselves among unfamiliar faces, hungry, exhausted and barely able to comprehend what had happened.
South of Juno Beach, Charlie Martin couldn’t help shedding some tears. Half his company had gone – men with whom he had lived and trained for years had been cut down and were now dead or wounded. Towards midnight, a brief firefight broke out and several German prisoners were taken. Soon after, Martin spotted someone lighting a cigarette and bawled at him to put it out. It turned out to be the CO, Lieutenant-Colonel Jock Sprogge. ‘Charlie,’ he said to Martin, after taking his telling-off on the chin, ‘it’s such a sad day.32 We’ve lost so many good men.’
It had certainly been a sad day – a terrible day of scarcely imaginable violence. Yet converging on Normandy were not only many more Allied troops and supplies, but also among the very best troops in the entire German Armed Forces and many more besides. It was Germany’s dilemma that their best-trained and best-equipped units were those that were mobile – the panzer divisions – and so had not been defending the crust of the Atlantic Wall. Had they been, it might have been a different story, but their very nature meant they were deployed inland, and even had Rommel had his way they still would not have been manning the coast itself. Instead, the Allies had come up against the very old and the very young, men recovered from debilitating wounds or dragged into the firing line against their wishes. Once, there had been infantry divisions brimming with young, lean, fit, motivated men, but by this fifth year of the war they had gone, consumed by long years of fighting in far-off lands – in the Soviet Union, in North Africa, in the Mediterranean.
Yet those men did still exist, in the panzer divisions – divisions bristling with fire-power and the best weapons in the German arsenal. Despite the innumerable problems facing the Germans, these troops still represented a potent threat to anyone taking them on – and especially in the difficult terrain of Normandy. In the weeks to follow, there would never be a greater concentration of panzer divisions anywhere in the war than here in this corner of north-west France. D-Day, for all its awfulness, was only the first of what would stretch out for another seventy-six long, difficult and brutal days until the battle for Normandy was finally done.
Private Vincent Kamolz of the US 26th Infantry, 1st Infantry Division, rubs his eyes in exhaustion.
CHAPTER 15
Bridgehead
Current German strength in Normandy amounted to around 78,000, so about half the number of the Allied troops that landed on D-Day itself. Admittedly, not all these troops were defending the crust, but a rule of thumb of any offensive operation is to have a 3:1 manpower advantage at the point of attack, and the Allies did not have that. It was another reason why there was an urgency to the Allied build-up over the following days. What’s more, within OB West there were some 880,000 men, which was a lot. Most of these could, in theory, be sent to Normandy, although the Allied air forces were doing their very best to make sure that didn’t happen any time soon.
Major Dick Turner had brought his 356th Fighter Squadron, one of three in the 354th Fighter Group, to Christchurch on the south coast of England on the evening of 6 June, but the next day was up again before dawn and soon after was briefing his pilots. The plan was to fly straight to the beachhead to provide air cover across the invasion front for one hour, and at first light they were in their Mustangs, heading across the Channel. Cloud cover had dropped a little and so they flew quite low, at around 4,000 feet, which meant they saw plenty of debris: bits of aircraft, oily patches and other flotsam.
As they neared the coast, Turner saw ships, boats and landing craft spread out for miles – an incredible visible show of strength. Making sure to waggle his wings as they passed over the warships – despite the new invasion stripes – he then led his squadron the length of the beaches. Materiel and vehicles covered the ground and he could even see columns of men and vehicles steadily moving inland; the Allies had a foothold, that was for sure. ‘All looked orderly and peaceful from 4,000 feet,’ he noted, ‘but now and then a half-sunken ship, a burning vehicle or some unidentifiable wreckage would be visible.’1 He kept craning his neck for German fighters but saw only one, which tried to sneak in at low level and was promptly caught in devastating crossfire from two cruisers and fell into the sea trailing a long flame.
The Mustangs of the 354th Fighter Group were far from being the only fighters over the beachhead that morning. For the tactical air forces it was another maximum effort, with protective umbrellas flown over the beach as well as marauding inland: everything possible had to be done to slow and limit the ability of German units to reach the front. Ken Adam of 609 Squadron would fly twice that day, while some squadrons made as many as four or even five trips across the Channel. No wonder the Germans were feeling so utterly oppressed from the air.
Not only fighters were swarming over the Normandy front. Now that the cat was out of the bag, Allied bombers could concentrate on isolating Normandy more specifically. Lieutenant Smitty Smith of 550th Bomb Squadron and his crew had been on lea
ve for a few days and so had missed D-Day, but were back in the air by 9 a.m. on Wednesday, 7 June. Their target was the railway marshalling yard at Niort in France, south-west of Poitiers, but when they got there they discovered others had already beaten them to it, so instead they headed for the secondary target, but that had also been destroyed. On they went to the next, a bridge, a long distance from the Normandy coast. The entire trip lasted the best part of the day. It had been their twentieth mission, which entitled them to add the Oak Leaf Cluster to the air medals they already had and a second Battle Star to their European Theater of Operations Medal. More importantly, it meant they only had five missions left until they finished their tour.
Smith was feeling reasonably upbeat about this when the captain, Moon Baumann, appeared looking morose.
‘They’ve increased the tour to thirty missions,’ he told them.2 ‘Don’t wait up for me. I’m going to the Club … Wanna go and have a drink?’
‘No,’ Smith replied. ‘I think I’m gonna have a cigarette and puke.’ He was utterly poleaxed by the news. ‘I felt as if I were somehow dead,’ he wrote. ‘There was to be no future.’
Another bomber man not feeling particularly bright about the future was Lieutenant Joe Boylan of the 391st Bomb Group. They had been briefed late on D-Day to bomb a marshalling yard at Briouze, some miles south of Caen. Intelligence suggested the Germans would unload fifty tanks there the following morning; their job was to make sure they got no further. They would be flying their B-26 medium bombers at low altitude, a prospect that made Boylan feel heavy-hearted all night; he slept little, imagining the intense flak they would probably face at Briouze. Breakfast was a sombre affair, with no one talking much. At the briefing, nothing had changed from the previous evening. ‘So all the negatives were in place,’ wrote Boylan.3 ‘This was going to be one hell of a mission.’
Soon after crossing the coast at just 1,500 feet, they approached the target. The town was small and the railway yard obvious, but of the unloading panzers there was no sign. Over the radio there was a brief discussion: should they look for another target or hit the station anyway? Someone pointed out that the train might be late and that by bombing the place they could still put it out of action, which might be just as effective. ‘One could hardly argue with that,’ noted Boylan.4 ‘So we bombed the hell out of the rail yards and the train.’ Much to his relief, he and his crew made it back safely, although one plane was shot down over Caen. ‘Not too bad and this being the second day of the invasion!’ he noted.5 ‘We were scared to hell but we were coming out of this in pretty good shape.’
German reinforcements were reaching the front, however. Oberleutnant Cornelius Tauber had managed to escape the horror of being nearly grilled alive and had run into a group of Waffen-SS men. These had been from the reconnaissance battalion of the 12. SS ‘Hitlerjugend’ and Tauber had been immediately struck by the difference in mentality between these young, aggressive, confident men and those he had led in the bunkers. He had also watched agog as they calmly knocked out two Canadian Shermans with their Panzerschreck – hand-held rocket launchers – then shot all the crew. The SS men had been the advance guard, sent forward without permission, but the rest were on their way.
Standartenführer Kurt Meyer had reached the Caen–Villers-Bocage road at about eleven the previous evening, having witnessed a number of Typhoons attacking a column of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 25. Vehicles were burning, while up ahead in the distance Caen could be seen on fire. ‘A soldier was lying on the road,’ wrote Meyer, ‘a jet of blood shooting from his throat.’6 An ammunition lorry had then exploded. A refugee column had also been hit. Much to Meyer’s delight, an old Frenchwoman was shouting, ‘Murder! Murder!’
By midnight, he was standing before Generalmajor Wilhelm Richter, commander of 716. Division and one of the least talented of German generals, getting an apprisal of the situation. During the briefing, Oberst Krug rang and explained that British troops were standing on top of his bunker and he wondered what he should do. Richter was silent for a moment then told him to do whatever he thought best and put down the phone. Krug surrendered early that morning and was taken into British captivity. The 716. Division had ceased to exist. General Feuchtinger was also present and gave a picture almost as bleak: 21. Panzer wasn’t in great shape either and it was rumoured the enemy were now at Carpiquet.
After the depressing reports from Richter and Feuchtinger, Meyer rejoined his men. Obergruppenführer Fritz Witt, the 12. Waffen-SS commander, ordered them to attack from the western side of Caen at noon, but already Meyer was discovering the difficulties of doing so. His driver had traded his normal armoured car for a smaller, less conspicuous Kübelwagen, but they had hardly started off before they were in a ditch after swerving to avoid bullets and cannons from fighters overhead. ‘Where was our Luftwaffe for God’s sake?’ Meyer wondered.7
He felt better once installed in the old abandoned Abbey d’Ardenne with its thick stone walls. There was also a church with two towers for observation. By the early hours most of his men were ready and in position to attack on the northern outskirts of Caen, but they were still missing their tanks. They did not start to appear until 10 a.m.; relentless fighter-bomber attacks had slowed them considerably, but by midday he had some fifty Panzer Mk IV tanks, although now they were being shelled by offshore naval guns. Climbing the church tower, Meyer looked out towards the coast and saw the sea thick with ships, and enemy tank formations near the town of Douvres. ‘The whole expanse looked like an anthill,’ he noted.8 ‘And what was going on behind us – smoking rubble, empty roads and burning vehicles.’ Then fighter-bombers came over and attacked the monastery, but although the men swore at this plague, little damage was caused on this occasion. Later that afternoon, they would counter-attack, and hard. Obergruppenführer Witt had told Meyer and all his units they must be ready to strike at 4 p.m. Meyer remembered General Guderian’s great motto: ‘Klotzen nicht kleckern!’ Strike hard, not softly.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower was a relieved man. He had prepared a note to announce the failure of OVERLORD in case of that eventuality, but in fact he had cause to be very pleased. Some 75,215 British and Canadian troops had been landed on D-Day alongside 57,500 Americans and more than 23,000 airborne troops. Rommel’s Atlantic Wall had not prevented more Allied troops from penetrating into Normandy and, despite the violence and brutality of battle, they had done so with fewer casualties than had been expected or prepared for, even with the losses at Omaha. It was true they had not achieved all their objectives, but by 7 June Omaha was no longer threatened; at Utah, the 4th Division was well inland and hooking up with the airborne troops; while along the British and Canadian beaches, troops were now between 4 and 7 miles inland. Even with the unexpectedly stubborn resistance at Hillman, the British 3rd Division had managed to get more than halfway to Caen, while the Canadians were within spitting distance. Had Hillman succumbed as had Morris – and other strongpoints along the invasion front – then Caen would have been taken and seventy years of wise-after-the-event criticism would never have happened.
At any rate, soon Eisenhower would be on French soil himself. That morning, the 7th, he had been up early and, with Admiral Ramsay, set sail from Portsmouth in the fast minelayer HMS Apollo, which could speed across the Channel at 40 knots. Also now in Normandy was General Montgomery, who had boarded the destroyer HMS Faulknor the previous evening at ten, leaving Major-General Freddie de Guingand, his chief of staff, holding the fort in England, while he headed off with his Tactical HQ. Monty was a stickler for a good night’s sleep – he argued, quite sensibly, that he needed proper rest so that his mind was always clear – and so had retired to his cabin with instructions not to be disturbed until 6 a.m.
On board Augusta, meanwhile, Captain Chet Hansen was woken at 4.40 a.m. with the warning that Monty would be alongside at around six. Having only got to bed at 1 a.m., he was exhausted. General Bradley, on the other hand, seemed as chirpy as ever. In fact, Faulknor got
a little lost on the way over, but managed to get back on track and avoid any mines, and on cue joined them in the waters off Omaha, so Bradley, with Hansen in tow, crossed over to confer with Montgomery at around 6.30. ‘Decision made in view of difficulty in establishing initial beachhead,’ scribbled Hansen in his diary, ‘that immediate effort be made to join Utah and Omaha at all possible costs as quickly as possible.’9 This was essential, and the build-up of forces also needed to continue without let-up and with the greatest of speed. Montgomery and Bradley were expecting a concentrated counter-attack on probably D plus 4 or D plus 5 – so around 10–11 June. Continued rough seas, however, were hampering the unloading process.
Right away, Montgomery wanted to see General Miles Dempsey, who was aboard HMS Scylla, but Faulknor couldn’t immediately locate her. Furious signals were sent and soon after the British Second Army commander was tracked down and came aboard. It was now around 9 a.m. Dempsey had better news. Caen had not been taken, but his troops were progressing well. The opposition so far had been varied and had, in places, been stubborn, but there was no sign yet of a major coordinated counter-attack. On the other hand, it was evident that 21. Panzer-Division was organizing itself and that 12. SS-Panzer-Division was also moving up to the west of Caen – a prisoner from a reconnaissance unit of that division had been captured and interrogated. What was concerning Dempsey was the speed of unloading men and materiel. He had talked to Admiral Philip Vian, the commander of the Eastern Task Force, who had promised to do everything in his power to improve the situation, including bringing landing ships directly on to the beach – something that was already under way at Omaha. ‘Unless the wind drops and the sea moderates,’ noted Dempsey, ‘the build-up is going to be very difficult.’10
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