Normandy '44

by James Holland

  ‘Das Reich’ were desperate to get to the front and into battle as quickly as possible and showed no mercy whatsoever to anyone who got in their way. When a company commander was shot and killed by a Résistance sniper, tempers flared badly. Believing the perpetrator was from a village called Oradour, they moved into Oradour-sur-Glane – an entirely different village – rounded up the women and children into the church and the men into barns, then shot the lot and set the buildings on fire. Some 642 were killed there on 10 June, more than 200 of them children.

  On 12 June, their murderous mood worsened further. Tonkin had sent details of the petrol trains back to England and at 8 p.m. – just six hours after Tonkin’s signal – two squadrons of Mosquitoes flew over, low and fast, dropping 10 tons of bombs and shooting up the trains with their cannons. The entire 100,000 gallons of fuel were destroyed, the fireball reportedly rising more than 8,000 feet into the air. This coordination of Allied effort, one that used special forces, intelligence, air power and improved technology to materially affect the ground war, really was incredibly impressive.

  CHAPTER 20

  The Grinding Battle

  The Allied toehold in Normandy was getting stronger by the day. By Thursday, 15 June, five airfields had been built within the beachhead and in the next five days a further seven would follow. It was, by any reckoning, an astonishing achievement of organization and engineering, especially while under fire for much of the time. Airfield B-2 at Bazenville, near Crépon, was not due to become operational until the 16th, but at around 10.20 p.m. on the 15th, Spitfires of 602 Squadron came in to land there. Among them was a French pilot officer, Pierre Clostermann, who, along with his great friend and fellow Frenchman in the squadron Jacques Remlinger, was the first to be touching back down on French soil; Clostermann had not been in France since before the war. To celebrate, he and Remlinger had decided to forgo their normal RAF battledress and instead were wearing smart French dress uniforms and carrying a flask of French brandy.

  Clostermann had missed the shock of defeat in France in 1940, although he was already a qualified pilot, trained as a teenager by a German, Karl Benitz. The son of a French diplomat, he had been a student at the California Institute of Technology in San Diego. While there, he managed to fly every day, practising aerobatics and building up the hours in his logbook.

  When France fell, however, he decided he could wait no longer. His father had written to his son telling him he was going to Africa to join de Gaulle’s Free French and suggested his only child should join the fight too. Pierre needed little persuading and so had begun his long journey to England and to becoming a fighter pilot in a front-line squadron in the RAF. Four years on, he was highly experienced and flying with 602 Squadron alongside his long-standing friend Jacques. The squadron, once an auxiliary unit of pre-war ‘gentleman fliers’, now had Frenchmen, Canadians, New Zealanders and Australians among their number and had been honed into a very effective and combat-experienced front-line squadron.

  Clostermann and Remlinger landed at Bazenville just behind Squadron Leader ‘Max’ Sutherland, who had immediately whipped up a thick cloud of dust. Clostermann had never seen anything like it, but it was an earthen airfield that had been dry for a couple of days and, stirred up by the slipstream of the propellers, it got everywhere. As Clostermann finally came to a halt and jumped down off the wing, he met two British soldiers whose eyes were only visible under a layer of dust and sweat. ‘Well, Frenchie,’ one of them said, ‘you’re welcome to your blasted country!’1 Remlinger came over, a handkerchief covering his mouth, and the two shook hands, back in their homeland at last, although rather than savouring this wonderful moment Clostermann was mostly consumed by feelings of regret that he had worn his finest uniform. He felt more like a circus clown than an officer of the French Armée de l’Air.

  The pilots were quickly given some ground rules by a Canadian captain. They were not to stray from the airfield, nor cross from one side of the track to another. Nor were they to touch anything. ‘The Huns have left mines everywhere,’ he told them, ‘and only half an hour ago a man was killed and two others wounded by a German sniper.’2 They were taken to a mobile canteen set up behind a hedge and given tea, biscuits and marmalade, liberally sprinkled with dust. At least there were plenty of anti-aircraft guns, each one surrounded by empty shell cases. The pilots were startled by this – they had barely seen any Luftwaffe at all since the invasion. A sergeant told them to wait until later that night, then they would understand.

  It was around half past eleven and by now quite dark when Clostermann and Remlinger were sharing a smoke with a couple of Canadians. All seemed quiet, then suddenly they heard the faint whirr of aero-engines. They looked up, trying to locate the aircraft.

  ‘Don’t worry, Pierre,’ said Remlinger, ‘if it was a Hun the ack-ack would already have opened fire.’3

  Moments later they heard the whistle of bombs falling. The Canadians vanished and the two French pilots dived under a lorry, and then a bomb exploded, pulse-waves quivering across the ground, followed by a burning gust of air and splinters spattering the trees, lorry and tents around them. Then the ack-ack opened fire and the sky was suddenly full of moving tracer, making it appear as light as day. A Spitfire caught fire and more Junkers 88s thundered over, dropping a mixture of 1,000-pounders and smaller bombs while a Bofors gun continued firing. The ground shook, shrapnel, grit and dust spattered all around them, and the air seemed torn apart by the immense din. ‘Deafened, battered,’ wrote Clostermann, ‘we crouched under our lorry, shivering with funk.’4

  The following morning, they finally emerged after their night under the lorry, grimy, cold and exhausted, with tongues as dry as sand, and were horrified to discover the truck was full of ammunition. Still reeling, they made their way to the field kitchen and queued for some tea, only to see their two Canadian friends. Clostermann had thought they had been killed by the bombs. ‘Oh, you know,’ said one of them, ‘we are now pretty hot at sprinting.5 We’ve been here a week and we’re unbeatable.’ Moments later, three Focke-Wulf 190s screamed over at hedge height firing as they went, then were gone. By lunchtime, 602 Squadron was back at Ford, their base in southern England, where, despite not being France, things were considerably more comfortable and less dangerous.

  The vast majority of people who fought in the Normandy campaign did not land on D-Day; most arrived days, if not weeks, later. Most Allied troops, however, reached those shores the same way as those who had splashed through the water on Tuesday, 6 June: by crossing the Channel by sea. On Thursday, 15 June, it was the turn of the 6th Battalion, the King’s Own Scottish Borderers – or 6 KOSB for short – part of the 44th Lowland Infantry Brigade, which was in turn part of the 15th Scottish Division. Like so many units reaching Normandy – on both sides – they were new to combat and so untested in battle. They were, however, long in training, well equipped and, on paper at any rate, as ready as any to be flung into the fray.

  Commander of 7 Platoon in A Company was Lieutenant Robert Woollcombe, just twenty-two years old and born and raised in London, rather than Scotland. Serving in the KOSB was, however, something of a family tradition. His grandfather had been colonel of the regiment in the last war and had even ended up commanding a corps at the Battle of Cambrai, while his uncle had also served with the regiment, although tragically had been killed in action in 1914 in the first months of the war. Robert had joined in 1941, although by 1944 few regiments remained true to their roots. Cornishmen served in Yorkshire regiments, Scots in London battalions, and men from Hampshire served with the Lancashires. Stanley Christopherson, for example, had never lived in Nottingham – he had spent much of his childhood in South Africa and had been living and working in the City of London when he joined the Sherwood Rangers. The war was mixing people up in a way that had been unthinkable beforehand.

  The 6 KOSB had come ashore at Gold Beach and Woollcombe was amazed neither to hear nor see even the remotest sign of any fighting. ‘At first
sight,’ he wrote, ‘it looked like a methodical unflustered chaos that might have been some fantastic novelty at Blackpool.’6

  Also now landed and in Normandy were the 1st Battalion, the Northamptonshire Yeomanry, part of the 33rd Independent Armoured Brigade. Twenty-year-old Lance Corporal Ken Tout, a tank gunner in C Squadron, had felt quite intoxicated by the sight of the coastline. ‘All through my young life,’ he wrote, ‘my hopes had simmered slowly up to this boiling, spilling delight of foreign adventure.’7 He had been brought up in the medieval market city of Hereford by parents who were devout members of the Salvation Army, so revival meetings and the strict, rather Jesuitical, code of living that went with them were part and parcel of his upbringing. ‘You couldn’t go to the cinema,’ he said, ‘you couldn’t go to the dancehall, you didn’t smoke, didn’t drink, didn’t do anything really, because it was a sin.’8

  As a result, the army was something of an escape, while the discipline seemed far from excessive. ‘Comparative to my life at home,’ said Tout, ‘my life in the army was physically uncomfortable but psychologically good.’ And he’d done well – so much so that he had been put forward for officer training just before D-Day, although after learning it would take nine months and that at the end of it he might not even return to the 1st Northants Yeomanry, he decided to stay put as an NCO; he neither wanted to leave his mates nor miss out on the chance to serve in the invasion.

  Meanwhile, the battle continued. There was no major all-out offensive by the Allies nor counter-attack by the Germans, but bitter fighting none the less, marked by hard-fought-for local objectives, furious digging and cowering in foxholes as mortars and artillery banged and crashed back and forth. On 15 June Stanley Christopherson was promoted to lieutenant-colonel and given formal command of the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry. On the 16th, they were back in action supporting the infantry of 69th Brigade. As so often happened, however, keeping in communication with the infantry amid the smoke and heat of battle was difficult, yet tanks and infantry both added up to more than their individual parts when they managed to operate effectively side by side. Christopherson was frustrated by the problem, but was not sure where the solution lay. Then 69th Brigade was pulled back and a new division, the 49th, moved into the line and for the next three days they were supporting an entirely new infantry brigade as the Panzer-Lehr counter-attacked and pushed them back north of Fontenay. ‘Some very unpleasant fighting took place around Cristot,’ noted Christopherson, which from an understated fellow like him meant it was hellish.9 They had been holding the high ground when the infantry of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment cut and ran under the heavy weight of enemy fire. The Germans overran the positions, capturing abandoned guns and leaving the Sherwood Rangers to hold some wooded ground on their own. ‘For a day,’ noted Christopherson, ‘the Regiment felt very naked.’10 The casualties continued to mount too.

  It was hardly much of a picnic for the Germans either. After the sunshine, the rain returned and although that meant fewer Jabos, even when there was low cloud the Germans were not immune from enemy artillery. The slightest movement, it seemed, prompted a ferocious barrage within moments. Once, near Tilly, Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen and a number of his tanks were in a sunken lane when shells began falling all around. Although they weren’t hit directly, shrapnel clattered about them, damaging periscopes and radio antennae, so essential for communication. Ritgen’s driver completely lost his nerve and broke down, crying for his mother, and in his distraught state managed to get their Panzer IV stuck. When the firing briefly stopped, Ritgen and his gunner had to jump out, tie their tow cable to the tank behind and get pulled out. ‘We were fortunate,’ noted Ritgen, ‘that Tommy waited until our hatches were sealed before starting the next barrage.’11 From the outside, their panzers looked a mess and with their antennas damaged they had no choice but to pull back.

  Already, after ten days at the front, Ritgen recognized that the British had a completely different method of war. Germans always wanted to attack, but for the Tommies the priority was ‘to do harm to their enemies and take care of themselves.’12 Despite the slight tone of condescension, destroying the enemy while saving the lives of one’s own side was really quite a sensible approach to war, while Pavlovian counter-attacking and incurring large numbers of losses in the process perhaps was not always the right approach. Ritgen, however, believed – like almost every fighting German – that a swift counter-attack against the British enabled them to quickly regain ground lost. The catch, though, as he admitted, was that this always incurred losses, ‘which we could not adequately replace, while the British received replacements during the night.’13 The military machine that could both look after its men and equipment better, and effectively make good its losses swiftly, however, was always going to be superior to the one that could not. Ritgen, like so many of his contemporaries, still believed in their aggressive tactical superiority, but this was largely because they had little else to offer and simply could not compete with the complete war effort of the Allies. It was, of course, why they were losing so badly and failing to gain any significant ground. The fighting against the Sherwood Rangers at Cristot was a case in point: they had made some progress, but not significant strides, and even though the British infantry had run, the attackers had still not been able to wrest the important high ground. In the process they had also lost yet more men. It was this aggressive tactical spirit, led first and foremost by the officers and senior NCOs, that was causing so many debilitating casualties – and not least among the Panzer-Lehr.

  Further to the west, the Americans were pressing forward to the ridge line just to the north-east of Saint-Lô, which was being determinedly held by the Germans and which was the next main line of defence, as prepared before the invasion. Already the Americans had tried to hustle their way through the sparse German lines on 12 June, but through lack of heavy fire support had been unable to make any headway. It was along here that the shattered remnants of the 352. Infanterie-Division had retreated.

  By Monday, 19 June, Leutnant Hans Heinze and the survivors of his 5. Kompanie, Grenadier-Regiment 916, had reached Le Mesnil-Rouxelin, just a few miles to the north of Saint-Lô. All his men were exhausted, filthy and hungry, having been in continual action since the invasion. They’d had almost no sleep, had been under fire almost constantly and many had bloody feet from all the marching they had done in worn-out boots. Soon after digging in, Heinze had been ordered to report to Oberst Ernst Goth, the regimental commander, at his command post in the nearby chateau. Heinze looked a sight as he presented himself and saluted: almost bearded, tattered uniform, mud, blood and grime on his face and hands. Goth berated him, yelling at him that a German officer should always look clean and presentable when reporting to a superior, regardless of the situation. He dismissed Heinze, telling him he had ten minutes to clean himself up. An orderly took his light summer jacket for a quick clean and also gave him a razor, mirror and basin of water. The razor, however, was blunt, the water cold and the soap non-existent. ‘I put the razor against the skin of my cheek,’ said Heinze, ‘and began to scrape the blade down my face, taking hair and skin.’14 When he presented himself back in front of Oberst Goth, standing stiffly to attention, he could feel small drips of blood from where he’d cut himself running down his face and neck.

  Karl Wegner and his comrades in Grenadier-Regiment 914, meanwhile, had reached the village of Saint-Clair-sur-l’Elle and had dug in around the road leading north, just south of the River Elle, which ran across their path. Because they were now so woefully understrength, they were widely spaced apart, but well positioned, with mortars and machine guns and well dug in along hedgerows. As previous fighting in Sicily and Italy had shown, well-placed machine guns and mortars, augmented by mines and snipers, could prove an effective barrier to Allied infantry. Even so, Wegner and his comrades were surprised the Americans didn’t press them harder. ‘One concentrated attack,’ he said, ‘would sweep us aside like toy soldiers.’15

  I
t was, however, more than the leading American troops could manage for very good reasons. Most had barely slept more than a few snatched hours, had been in heavy action, had had to cross flooded areas, dodge mines and snipers, and lacked artillery support. By the time they had attacked, the 352. Division had actually received some replacements and some support on their flanks. Among these was the 3. Fallschirmjäger-Division, now holding the line a little to the east around the key feature marked on Allied maps as Hill 192, between the villages of Couvains and Saint-Germain-d’Elle. Despite the reputation of all Fallschirmjäger units as superior troops, 3. Fallschirmjäger, like most other parts of the Luftwaffe, were severely under-trained and equipped.