Hitler disagreed. Cherbourg, he said, would hold. Rommel, tenaciously, disagreed. Cherbourg was a useless fortress and should be abandoned. ‘Cherbourg,’ he said, ‘will fall in a week.’28
Rommel outlined an appreciation of Allied intentions. More Allied troops were arriving daily. At some point, they would punch a hole in the German line and advance south, expand their breakout and then pivot east, towards Paris. His assessment was spot on. The situation, he said, looked grim. He proposed that instead of trying to fight for every yard, they fall back out of range of Allied naval guns, then pull the panzer divisions out of the lines, regroup them and counter-attack at a time and place of their choosing but well clear of the coast and enemy naval guns. He asked for full rein to command as he saw fit, with more panzers and greater support from both the Luftwaffe, especially, and the Kriegsmarine.
Although Hitler became more placatory as the morning wore on, he refused Rommel’s and von Rundstedt’s entreaties to turn the V-1s on the beachheads or to move von Salmuth’s 15. Armee south to Normandy – in case of a second invasion in the Pas de Calais. Rommel, growing increasingly frustrated, pointed out that the Führer’s information was coming via staff officers looking at maps on tables. Not one senior OKW commander had visited the front. ‘There’s no front line knowledge behind them,’ he told Hitler.29 ‘You demand our confidence but you don’t trust us yourself.’ He also pointed out that Churchill had already visited the front, a massive morale boost for the Allied troops. He urged Hitler to consider the same and visit Normandy. Much to everyone’s surprise, Hitler agreed.
Rommel left later that afternoon, buoyed by the prospect and by Hitler’s enthusiastic talk of the Me262 jet, of V-2s and rocket-fuelled aircraft projects. Von Rundstedt, on the other hand, thought the conference had been a complete waste of time. In this, he was right and Rommel wrong. There would be no handing over of complete tactical control to Rommel, no Me262s supporting the front, and no V-2s before the Normandy battle was done. Supplies would remain slow and insufficient. His men would continue to be stretched to breaking point.
Nor did Hitler ever make the trip to the front. Earlier that day, a rogue V-1 had veered off course, crashing and exploding only a few miles from Margival. Hitler was informed later in the day, with General Jodl, chief of staff of the OKW, urging the Führer to return to Bavaria. Just imagine, he pointed out, if another V-1 went astray and actually killed the leader of the Reich. Around the same time, reports of nearby Résistance activities reached Wolfsschlucht II. Suddenly the risks of touring Normandy seemed too great. In any case, with Rommel and von Rundstedt gone, the proposition of visiting a dangerous front over which marauding Allied fighters made any movement unsafe seemed dramatically less appealing. So, instead, the Führer decided to abandon such plans and return to the Berghof. He would never set foot in France again.
CHAPTER 21
The Great Storm
On Sunday, 18 June, Montgomery issued new, revised, plans. Caen remained, like Cherbourg, a key objective, despite the realization five days earlier that it could no longer be taken swiftly or easily. He now ordered Dempsey to seize the city with a series of operations that would begin that day and reach their peak on 22 June with an attack to the east of the town and the River Orne. Bradley’s First Army was to complete the isolation of the Cotentin Peninsula and then drive on Cherbourg, while continuing to try to get the high ground around Saint-Lô. By dusk on the 18th, men of the US 9th Division had reached the west coast of the Cotentin, just as Rommel had feared and forewarned, trapping the enemy forces to the north, including the 77. Division. It was now a matter of how long it would take and how many casualties the four German divisions in the north would inflict on the Americans, but the outcome was no longer in doubt. Before long, those German infantry divisions would be annihilated and Cherbourg would be in American hands. Montgomery, Bradley and Collins intended to begin the drive on Cherbourg the following day.
So far, Eisenhower had shown notable patience, understanding and support to his commanders and men fighting in Normandy. He had even now forbidden the visit of any further VIPs to Montgomery’s headquarters. ‘I won’t have you bothered at this time,’ he wrote to Monty on 18 June, ‘by people who are not in position to help you directly in the battle.’1 The quid pro quo, however, was that Montgomery should now instruct his armies to press forward with no further delay. ‘I can well understand that you have needed to accumulate reasonable amounts of artillery ammunition,’ Eisenhower added, ‘but I am in high hopes that once the attack starts it will have a momentum that will carry it a long ways.’
The war reporter Ernie Pyle was touring through the newly captured part of the central Cotentin and thought the countryside truly lovely. ‘Everything was a vivid green,’ he wrote, ‘there were trees everywhere, and the view across the fields from a rise looked exactly like the rich, gentle land of eastern Pennsylvania.2 It was too wonderfully beautiful to be the scene of war.’ None the less, he thought the ride was rather eerie because they drove for miles without seeing a soul. ‘It was as though life had taken a holiday and death was in hiding,’ he added.3 ‘It gave me the willies.’ They eventually stopped at a schoolhouse now being used as a POW collection point. More groups of German prisoners were arriving even while Pyle was there. He talked to one, a German doctor, who spoke English and appeared to be in good humour. ‘I’ve been in the army four years,’ he said, beaming, ‘and today is the best day I have spent in the service.’4 Ahead, to the north, the Americans were continuing their drive on Cherbourg, but elsewhere French civilians were trying to carry on with their lives. Pyle’s party drove on to Barneville, which had mercifully escaped the fighting. People quickly gathered around, asking questions and looking for instructions about what they should do and expect. One elderly man in blue denim overalls invited them to his café for a drink and gave them a concoction called ‘eau de vie’ – it was all he had left, as the Germans had drunk all his stocks of wine. They chinked their glasses, vived la France and knocked it back. Pyle and his companions found tears running down their cheeks – not from the emotion of it all but from their efforts not to choke and cry out in anguish as the searing hooch went down their throats. ‘This good-will business,’ noted Pyle, ‘is a tough life and I think every American who connected with a glass of eau de vie should have got a Purple Heart.’5
Along the invasion front, meanwhile, the flow of traffic continued across the Channel. The veteran US 9th Division, who, like the Big Red One, had seen combat in North Africa and also Sicily, had arrived in the Cotentin. Among the officers was 26-year-old Lieutenant Orion Shockley from Jefferson, Missouri, who had fought through much of the Tunisian and Sicily campaigns as an officer in Cannon Company, 47th Infantry Regiment, but then, after the battle for Sicily ended, had managed to get himself arrested and very nearly court-martialled. It was a ridiculous incident. General George S. Patton, commander of the Seventh Army in Sicily, was a stickler for spit and polish, which meant wearing ties at all times and having all buttons fastened. One day in Palermo, Shockley saw a soldier being admonished for having a shirt pocket button undone after handing a base section captain a note. The soldier pointed out that he had just given the captain the missive, but was told he should have immediately buttoned it up again. Infuriated, Shockley walked over and said, ‘Maybe you ought to take my name since my pocket is unbuttoned.’6 The officer did just that. Shockley immediately forgot all about it but was later hauled over the coals and was still officially under arrest when the 9th Division was posted to England. Once at sea and out of Patton’s area, that was the end of the matter and Shockley was let off with a verbal reprimand, but it meant that once they were in England he was reassigned to the Service Company as special service officer. One of his tasks was to liaise with the USO – United Service Organizations – which provided entertainment for the troops. It gave him the chance to meet Hollywood stars like James Cagney and boxing champion Joe Louis – so the button incident turned out quite wel
l for him in the end.
Now, however, he was in Normandy as XO in Company B, 2nd Battalion, 47th Infantry Regiment, and had been part of the fighting to cut the peninsula. After that, the battalion had been turned north and was now closing in on Cherbourg. A little under a year earlier, in Sicily, Shockley had been sweating buckets he’d been so hot. Here in Normandy it was often wet and cold. Once, he’d jumped a stream but the cliff on the other side had then collapsed and he slipped down into the water. Because the Germans were still shooting at them, he’d then spent over an hour crawling downstream until he could scramble out again. ‘It was cold enough to make me very uncomfortable,’ he wrote.7 ‘It was night before I got into dry clothes.’
On 18 June, Lieutenant Mary Mulry was finally on her way to France. The previous day, she and her fellow QAs and medical staff of the 101st Military Hospital had been sent to an American transit camp in the New Forest, just outside Southampton. Much to their delight, the camp had a PX, an American services store, where they could stock up on chocolate, chewing gum and cans of fruit.
In the evening, they boarded their ship wearing tin helmets and battledress rather than starchy frocks and bonnets, and set sail at around 11.30 p.m. ‘There was fear and anticipation,’ she noted in her diary.8 ‘What will it be like over there?’ Out at sea there was even a mine alert and the engines were cut. Mary gripped her rosary beads and prayed, but eventually the all-clear was given and they continued on their way, by which time the weather was rapidly deteriorating. Everyone felt seasick, Mary included. As they neared the coast, a Luftwaffe air raid was in progress, the sky alight with flares and tracer and explosions. At around 4 a.m. a neighbouring vessel hit a mine and blew up, which shocked the nurses deeply. Landing craft were now trying to draw alongside, battling against the rising swell. Eventually Mary volunteered first to clamber down the net slung over the side of the ship, less from bravery than from a desire to get on to land as quickly as possible.
‘Hold on until the exact moment I say,’ said a voice behind her from the landing craft, ‘and then jump backwards.’9 Already soaked, cold and frightened, she did as she was told and made the leap of faith. As promised, they caught her. ‘Matron was the last to come down,’ added Mary, ‘which she did without too much loss of dignity.’10 Not too long after, they were coming ashore at Courseulles on Juno Beach. Temporarily given some stretchers to lie on in a barn, they grabbed some much-needed sleep, then later that morning clambered on to lorries and headed to Bayeux past broken tanks, black with burning, dozens of them with charred crew members hanging from them, half out of the turrets and escape hatches. ‘There was mile after mile of destroyed armoured cars, trucks of all kinds,’ Mary scribbled later, ‘and stench of decaying maggot-ridden bodies.’11 After passing through Bayeux and heading down the road to Caen, they pulled into an orchard where in the days to come they would erect and begin operating their new field hospital. They would be much in demand.
Meanwhile, Lieutenant Yogi Jenson and the crew of HMCS Algonquin had been shuttling back and forth between Normandy and Portsmouth, carrying out fire-support, then anti-U-boat patrols as well. On the 19th they were off the mouth of the Orne providing fire-support for the beleaguered Commandos still dug in near the coast; they had barely moved since D-Day. That evening they came under fire from German 155mm guns, although their shells dropped short. The weather, however, was starting to whip up. ‘The weather was too rough for efficient patrol,’ noted Jenson, ‘so we and three other destroyers anchored well to seaward.’12
‘Dark, cold and rainy day for our attack,’ noted Chet Hansen in his diary that day, ‘and air is hampered giving Germans additional days to stack up supplies to our V Corps front.13 Great break for him when air ceases to operate.’ This was true enough, although it didn’t stop the British finally capturing Tilly-sur-Seulles from the Panzer-Lehr. The exhausted Sherwood Rangers might have been taken out of the line briefly, but not so the panzer crews of SS-Panzer-Regiment 12. For Kurt Meyer, it was a constant juggling act: on his right he needed to keep the Canadians at bay, while on the left he had to support the right flank of the Panzer-Lehr. The panzers counter-attacked again, but failed to make any headway and so, on the night of 18/19 June, pulled back on to the higher ground south of the town. By that time the rain was pelting down, the ground turning to mud. Tilly and the villages around were utterly wrecked; just one house was left standing in Tilly. It was a miserable part of the world to be that Monday.
This left Panzer-Regiment 12’s left flank a little vulnerable, however, and among the troops sent forward to shore up the Panzergrenadiers still holding on to Fontenay was Obersturmführer Hans Siegel and his 8. Panzerkompanie. They moved their Panzer IVs into the northern section of the village, hiding them as well as they possibly could and then staying there in an anti-tank role for more than twenty-four hours without a break. ‘This was a never-before experienced extremely difficult physical burden,’ noted Siegel.14 ‘Always on the look-out, not speaking to anyone. The crews isolated, not knowing what was happening elsewhere.’ Tanks were not comfortable places; they were cramped and smelly and claustrophobic, yet Siegel allowed his men out only to answer the call of nature, fearing that the threat from shrapnel blast and small arms was too great. And so they stayed put, watching, straining their eyes, limbs turning stiff in the narrow confines of the turret and driving compartment. Siegel’s draconian measures paid off, however. Their presence was not discovered. Nor did he lose a single man.
Both sides were exhausted and the British immediately went on to the defensive while they regrouped before the next planned attack. Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen pulled back his own tanks of II. Panzer-Lehr-Regiment 130 and for a change switched his CP from a hole in the ground under his panzer to a smashed farmhouse that had lost all its windows but which otherwise offered some shelter. Everyone was feeling the strain. ‘The only consolation was that the Tommies had it no better,’ he wrote.15 ‘Unfortunately, they would be relieved after a short duration, and we would not.’
In fact, a major storm was now whipping up in the Channel, which would throw all the Allied plans into disarray. At Arromanches, the Mulberry B harbour was almost complete, as was the American one, Mulberry A, at Port-en-Bessin. Lieutenant-Commander Ambrose Lampen and his team had managed to plant four more Phoenixes the previous day, the 18th, despite rising winds and despite them being ‘A2s’, which were some 50 feet high, the largest of the caissons, and also despite having to plant along the western breakwater and sideways to the tidal stream. They were getting good at it, though, the initial hiccup with the Alynbank now a distant memory, and they planted all four perfectly.
With gale-force winds howling across the coast, building waves up to 10 feet high on top of a heavy swell, the Mulberries were about to be tested to the full. Huge waves crashed against the blockships and over the Phoenixes, not just that day but all through the 20th and 21st as well. Amazingly, at Mulberry B the Phoenixes and the expensive Spud pierheads also held, while the piers had been sited where protection was greatest and so also weathered the tempest. ‘We were all proud to observe,’ noted Lampen, ‘that the unloading of stores continued uninterrupted throughout the storm.’16 That was true, but no new shipments could arrive during that time, while other vessels and craft hurriedly came inside to seek greater shelter so that the entire Mulberry was rammed with vessels. The misplaced Alynbank played a part in ensuring their safety as it lay across the direction of the wind. ‘Under her lee,’ noted Lampen, ‘there was not a square yard of water unoccupied.’17
There had been trouble enough, however: two Phoenixes at the western end had been badly damaged, while five others had developed gaps in their walls and a couple more had moved, but all in all Mulberry B had fared well, which was more than could be said for Mulberry A. Of the thirty-five Phoenixes that had been planted there, only ten remained intact, while two piers had also been wrecked. A week later, on 29 June, the decision would be made to abandon this entire harbour, built, transport
ed and constructed at such enormous cost and effort, leaving just Mulberry B. The Gooseberry off Utah had largely been destroyed, while Rhinos and other landing craft the length of the invasion front had been smashed and broken against the shore.
Lieutenant Yogi Jenson had been aboard HMCS Algonquin throughout and had been shocked by the damage. It had reminded him of being in mid-Atlantic, and the scene of ships in great numbers rolling and tumbling on the surf brought to mind an eighteenth-century painting of a stormy seascape. ‘Now was revealed flotsam of all kinds from that disastrous weather,’ he wrote.18 ‘Land craft had foundered and the occasional dead body floated by.’
The weather all across Europe during the war really had been terrible. The winter of 1942/3 had been pretty brutal, but that of 1943/4 had been even worse. It had set back Allied efforts in Italy, had massively hampered air operations and cast a terrible shroud of gloom over everyone unfortunate enough to experience it. Now, after a wonderful May, the month for which OVERLORD had originally been planned, France was experiencing the worst June in anyone’s memory.
The effects of what quickly became known as the Great Storm were enormous. Some 800 vessels, most of them landing craft, were lost – a huge number, which could not be immediately replaced. The Allied build-up, already badly lagging primarily because of the poor weather earlier in the month, was put further awry. The number of troops landing was reduced by three-quarters and vehicles and other equipment by 50 per cent. By 22 June, British Second Army was three entire divisions short of the pre-invasion target. That was a lot. ‘The strong north wind and low cloud continued all day,’ General Dempsey recorded in his war diary.19 ‘It prevented landing of stores and vehicles and the Air Force could not fly. It is proving a serious handicap to us as a large part of 8 Corps’ vehicles have not been landed, and there is still insufficient ammunition for the operation.’
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