On Wednesday, 14 June, the GMRs – the Groupes mobiles de réserve, effectively the army of Vichy – who were operating in their area had sent word saying they wanted to join the Maquis Surcouf. But should Leblanc believe them, or was it a trap? Then a rumour reached him that his wife and four children, still at home in Pont-Audemer, had been arrested; this, however, later proved to be false. More of his men were killed the following day and then the group moved yet again. Some good news finally reached him on Saturday, 17 June, when they were told to get ready for an arms drop. That night they tramped 6 miles across fields and through woods with their lamps, but on reaching the rendezvous there was no sign of either the liaison team they had been expecting or of any Allied aircraft. Bitterly disappointed, they tramped back again, empty-handed.
On the 20th, the wives of three of his men, ‘La Torpille’, ‘Ramoutcho’ and ‘Henry III’ (they all had noms de guerre), were arrested and taken away; La Torpille’s wife was mother to their seven children. They learned that the arrests were directly the result of betrayal by a local man who had been taken in by the Germans. ‘He thought he would save his life,’ scribbled Leblanc angrily.31 ‘Instead of being killed for the sake of his country, he will be killed all the same, but covered with shame.’ He and his section commanders were beginning to feel ever more cornered and it was putting them in a murderous mood; they now considered executing the several prisoners they were keeping – a German soldier and three female collaborators. They could ill-afford to carry such people, the local farmers in whose barns the Maquis were hiding didn’t want these prisoners anywhere near, and the Germans had not shown any scruples about killing people, so why should they? Not only had plenty of his men – as well as innocent civilians – already been killed, but the swine had now locked up the mother of seven children! ‘All that makes me sick,’ he wrote. ‘I order Bougnat to “lose” him somewhere’ – such as one of the many chalk quarries round about into which the German soldier’s body could be dumped.
Then there was the question of what to do with the three women prisoners. He decided one could be let go. Another, Marie-Thérèse, was, he thought dangerous, but he had no hard proof against her, so he asked ‘Robert 1’, one of his section commanders, to take her off his hands. Then there was ‘XX001X’, as he code-named her in his diary. They had captured her a couple of days before the invasion and found on her a picture of a known Nazi Party official with a dedication to her. She had continued to deny she was a Nazi agent, but Leblanc was convinced the German lover was in the Gestapo. He had no hard proof, however, and no one wanted to take charge of her. Two days later, on 22 June, Leblanc made up his mind. ‘I do not hesitate,’ he jotted in his diary, ‘between our security and the life of a woman who’s always been working with and for the Boche.’32 Robert 1 agreed with this and offered to ‘do the job’.
The travails, trials and tragedies of an ill-trained band of Résistance fighters was of little concern to Montgomery, Dempsey or Bradley, who were battling to get enough supplies unloaded as more German troops also reached the front. While it was true they already had superior numbers, it was not yet at an overwhelming level, and nothing like the 10:1 advantage enjoyed by the Red Army for their new offensive in the East; Operation BAGRATION had thundered into the German Heeresgruppe Mitte –Army Group Centre – on 22 June, three years to the day after the Germans had invaded the Soviet Union. For all the Allies’ fire-power, however, they were still some way short of that kind of numerical superiority.
At 9.30 a.m. on Friday, 23 June, Dempsey issued new orders, bowing to the inevitable; he couldn’t fight the weather. ‘I postponed 8 Corps attack,’ he wrote, ‘until Monday 26 June.’33 This meant an eight-day delay, all told, since Montgomery had originally planned to launch the battle for Caen. It was necessary, though, despite the ticking clock, despite the arrival of more German panzer units around Caen, and despite ever more V-1s falling on London.
CHAPTER 22
EPSOM
Standartenführer Kurt Meyer was a troubled man on the evening of Saturday, 24 June. Driving back to the 12. SS divisional command post, he looked down from the Rauray Ridge and saw trucks still burning on the Caen–Villers-Bocage road, lighting up the sky. They had been full of ammunition for his men but had been caught by the dreaded Jabos. Back at his CP, he listened to a situation update and saw only worried faces. ‘Without talking about it openly,’ he noted, ‘we knew we were approaching a catastrophe.’1 His division was being chewed up. Panzer divisions were designed for movement, but instead they had been holding the line, largely static, as the Allies poured air, naval and artillery fire on to them. It had already cost the blood of some of Meyer’s best men and had destroyed much of their precious equipment. ‘We were already feeding on ourselves,’ he added.2 ‘Up to that point we had not received a single replacement for our wounded or killed soldiers or a single tank or artillery piece.’
In contrast, Stanley Christopherson, the still-new commander of the Sherwood Rangers, was now back up to scratch with replacement troopers and officers. He was happy enough to have these new boys, but worried that they lacked experience and knowledge of operating Sherwoods. They would have to sink or swim.
The regiment, rapidly becoming one of Second Army’s main fire-fighting units, was back in action on Sunday, 25 June. At daybreak, with low cloud, mist and drizzle, Operation MARTLET began, with two brigades of British infantry from XXX Corps leading the attack, supported by 250 field guns. The brunt of the attack was directed at 12. SS. MARTLET and the main event, EPSOM, which would be launched at dawn the following day, might have been separate operations for Second Army, but as far as the Germans, and Standartenführer Meyer, were concerned, they were really one and the same. Meyer himself had managed to snatch just a few hours’ sleep before being roused by this renewed British onslaught and immediately hurried forward to Fontenay where the remnants of his panzer-grenadiers were desperately trying to hold firm. The place was already pulverized; he could hardly recognize it, nor could he see much forward for all the smoke. Shells continued to crash into the village and around, and Meyer took cover in a crater as enemy tanks and artillery knocked out one after another of his anti-tank guns. He was still there when his I. Bataillon tank commander jumped in beside him to tell him he was preparing to counter-attack. Soon after, as the leading British tanks, the Sherwood Rangers included, began targeting the panzer-grenadiers, so the 12. SS panzers rumbled forward through the smoke. A comparatively rare tank-versus-tank duel erupted. Tanks on both sides were knocked out, filling the battlefield with thick, oily smoke. Then the leading company commander’s tank was hit and turned a few metres to the left. The hatches opened and Obersturmführer Ludwig Ruckdeschel somehow clambered out, jumped down and staggered towards Meyer before collapsing. Some men rushed forward to pull him to safety; only then did Meyer realize Ruckdeschel had lost an arm.
Soon after, Meyer was told about a dangerous gap in the line to his left, between his troops and Panzer-Lehr. He hurriedly plugged it with his exhausted reconnaissance troops, the only men he could spare; he was being forced to commit his division piece by piece in precisely the way he knew to be fatal. Despite the best efforts of his worn-out men, Fontenay fell later that day. The key British objective, however, the Rauray Ridge, remained in German hands. Dempsey had hoped to possess this high ground, from which the entire battle front west of Caen could be surveyed, before EPSOM was launched, but it was not to be. Certainly, though, MARTLET had ground down 12. SS yet more, inflicting casualties they could simply no longer afford.
‘All the luck in the world to you and Dempsey,’ signalled Eisenhower that day to Montgomery.3 ‘Please do not hesitate to make major demands for air support of any kind which could possibly be helpful to you. Whenever a justifiable opportunity offers itself, we must destroy the enemy with everything we have.’ EPSOM would finally begin at dawn the following morning, Monday, 26 June.
For all the Allied fire-power and the long tail of support tro
ops, it was still the infantry and armour, with a few engineers besides, who had to cover the hard yards. It was these men who had to emerge from their slit-trenches and their cover, get up and advance. The moment they did that, they exposed themselves to a mass of withering machine-gun fire, mortars and artillery. Machine guns and mortars especially were comparatively low cost for the enemy; they definitely punched above their weight in terms of the damage they caused per cost of weapon and of ease of getting them to and manoeuvring them around the battlefield. The most basic mortar was essentially a portable tube, a couple of legs and a plate on which the tube stood, and could be manhandled without further need for truck, horses or mules.
The Germans also had Nebelwerfers, which were much larger and came in different forms, but the most common by 1944 was the Nebelwerfer 42, which was a six-barrel rocket-launched mortar that looked rather like a giant rotating chamber on a revolver pistol but which required transport of some kind to move into position. They were fiendishly effective, and could fire a 21cm or 30cm mortar shell some 8,580 yards, which was about 5 miles. They had an added psychological effect, in that they screamed as they hurtled over, which was why the Allies called them ‘Moaning Minnies’ or ‘meemies’. The combination of mortars of varying kinds, machine guns and even limited artillery – and the Germans still had quite a lot – could very easily make short work of any infantry and tank advance.
In many ways, it was not so very different from getting up out of the trenches along the Western Front in the First World War and walking across no-man’s-land. Infantry had to hope their accompanying armour could knock out targets such as machine-gun nests and mortar positions before being hit by the variety of anti-tank guns the Germans had available, and both armour and infantry had to hope that the combination of artillery, naval guns and air power could fulfil a combination of roles: knock out enemy gun positions and suppress fire-power, and keep the heads down of those Germans not hit by the barrage – which was most of them, because foxholes were very effective against shelling; usually only a direct hit would wound or kill anyone. No matter how effective the fire support, infantry and armour still had to take that leap of faith, get up and walk or trundle across open and inevitably exposed land. There was simply no way around it.
Nor was the number of infantry available ever quite as large as it might seem on paper. For EPSOM, the newly arrived VIII Corps would be leading the assault. This contained three divisions, although only one of infantry, the 15th Scottish Division, which was to be leading the advance. This division, like all British infantry divisions, had three brigades of around 3,500 men each, which in turn had at their core three battalions each of around 845 men. Every battalion, such as Robert Woollcombe’s 6th King’s Own Scottish Borderers, had four rifle companies of 120 men each, plus a support company of mortars and anti-tank guns and engineers. Each rifle company was in turn divided into three platoons of thirty-seven men and a company headquarters. Woollcombe was commander of one of the three platoons in A Company, and this was divided again into the smallest infantry unit in the British Army, the section, ten men strong and commanded by an NCO, usually a corporal. The remaining seven men of the platoon made up platoon headquarters, which included the commander and the platoon sergeant, and a mortar team, plus runner.
The company commanders were briefed at O Groups by the battalion CO and his staff, and it was then their job to brief platoon commanders and so on down the chain. Battalions would be given an objective: a village, a stream, a wood, or ridge – generally something that was challenging but achievable. Companies would then also be given specific objectives – the church in the village, or the farmhouse on the right-hand side of the village, for example. Maps were standardized, 1:25,000 in scale and blocked into a grid, an inch to each block and with each block numbered laterally and longitudinally, so objectives would be marked up in pencil or crayon on the map with a six-figure reference. Platoon commanders and platoon sergeants would both have such maps. Company HQ – which would be on the move during an attack – would be equipped with a radio set with a frequency tuned in to battalion headquarters, which would in turn be linked to brigade headquarters. Making contact during the heat of battle could sometimes prove difficult as airwaves quickly became clogged.
The average rifleman would be told what his specific objective was, but how much of the bigger picture was explained would depend on what the platoon commander told him and how much the platoon commander himself had been briefed in the first place. Most soldiers had very little idea of the wider battle or of what was happening more than a few hundred yards – if that – either side of them. Once the platoons were out in the open, communication with the company headquarters was dependent on runners. The closer the attacking infantry drew to the enemy, the more smoke there would be. As the battle progressed, tanks, vehicles, guns and buildings would inevitably get hit and burn, which produced more smoke – often thick, choking smoke, which cloyed the throat, got into the lungs and made visibility hard, but which could also thin out and disappear incredibly quickly once troops were past it. Smoke hid targets, but the benefits of that could cut both ways. Battle could be incredibly confusing.
Generally, companies would move in platoons, which would in turn move in sections, the ten men usually spread 5–10 yards apart, one Bren-gun team per section. A report written after the Sicilian campaign noted that very rarely did British and German machine guns fire at the same time, which suggests machine-gunners would fire a burst, then get their heads down while the opposition fired back. Suppressing machine-gun and small-arms fire therefore helped, but if a mortar landed near where a section was advancing, it was quite possible for half or all of the section to be killed or wounded. Just like that. When attacking it was easy for both infantry and armour to take truly appalling numbers of casualties very quickly, and among those parts of the army casualties were proportionally every bit as high, and frequently higher, than they had been on the Western Front in 1914–18.
EPSOM was to be launched by two of the 15th Scottish Division’s brigades moving forward supported by Churchill tanks of the 31st Armoured Brigade. Again, on paper, two brigades sounds quite a lot: six battalions, 5,400 men and three armoured regiments of fifty tanks each. However, a brigade would only ever attack with two of the three battalions – one would always be in reserve – so there were only four battalions attacking, not six. On top of that, 10 per cent would always be ‘LOB’ – left out of battle – in case the worst happened and the battalion was destroyed. This meant there would still be a cadre from the battalion around which it could be re-formed. Battalions adopted the same policy, with three companies forward and one in reserve, which meant that the lead elements of an attacking infantry division had, in fact, been whittled down to about 2,000 men, not 5,400, which wasn’t very many from a division of 15,000. The same principle applied to the armoured regiment, so that instead of having 150 tanks in support there would be more like 80.
Reserve battalions and companies might still be introduced swiftly into the battle, but leading elements could easily be rapidly reduced by 50 per cent or more, with, as a very rough rule of thumb, a third of that number killed and the rest wounded or taken prisoner. The aim was to get to the German positions and grind them down in turn before the lead infantry and armoured units were too badly mauled themselves. Leading infantry battalions in a major set-piece battle would usually be relieved within twenty-four hours and replaced by follow-up brigades. Any major assault therefore needed strength in depth and preferably support on the flanks.
Nor should it be forgotten that, no matter how well trained or led the lead infantry units were, most were conscripts who had no desire whatsoever to be there and whose chances of living or being wounded or killed by a shard of flying shrapnel were, for the most part, entirely random. Whether soldiers were from a Western democracy or a totalitarian militaristic state, their commanders expected a lot of them. Any criticism directed at the fighting prowess of either side has to be
tempered by acknowledging this, and also by understanding the terrain over which they were fighting, because advancing over the wide open fields to the west of Caen, with German eyes on literally every movement, was going to be no picnic whatsoever, no matter how many guns, warships and aircraft the Allies had in support. Marching towards the enemy as one of the lead infantry companies or in a leading Churchill tank was a very lonely place to be.
Monday, 26 June, around 3 a.m. Incessant, drizzling rain filled the pitch-black air as the 6th King’s Own Scottish Borderers reached forward assembly area just beyond Secqueville and began digging shallow pits against the threat of enemy counter-battery fire. Lieutenant Robert Woollcombe huddled in his hastily dug scrape alongside his batman – his soldier-servant – covered in a gas cape against the rain. Two hours later, they were called to get up. A petrol cooker was blowing in a nearby barn and breakfast was being prepared for the men of A Company. Inside, the men huddled, not saying very much. This was the day. In a few hours’ time they would finally be going into battle. Outside, it was getting light and the rain had finally stopped, although the landscape beyond, over which they would soon be advancing, was covered in mist. They cursed it; mist and low cloud were no good for the tactical air forces. Green camouflage paint was liberally handed out, weapons were checked and rechecked, magazines loaded and bayonets fixed to the end of rifles. Extra rations – tins of bully beef – were loaded into the smaller haversacks they carried, cigarettes put into top pockets. ‘Everyone admirably controlled,’ wrote Woollcombe, ‘but an air of tension about them.’4 No one really knew what to expect.
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