A little later, after safely landing back down at A-2, he grabbed his crew chief, Tommy, and a spare Jeep and drove over to the chateau near Bayeux. In the wood they found the Me109 more or less intact. The two men counted around 200 bullet holes in a gratifyingly concentrated area. They cut the swastika out from the vertical stabilizer and, with a few other souvenirs, headed back. ‘There is nothing like a good air fight,’ noted Turner, ‘to keep fighter pilots on their toes and eager to go.’12
While other squadrons could spend whole weeks never seeing another enemy aircraft, Turner and his 356th FS had to wait only another couple of days, because on 30 June, after heading out on a patrol southwards above the Vire–Caen area, they quickly spotted a number of aircraft high above them at some 30,000 feet. Climbing hard, they gave chase, being careful to keep behind them so as not to be spotted. After a quarter of an hour or so, Turner saw to his delight it was a flight of Me109s and, telling his squadron to keep as tight as possible, he closed in.
Turner picked out the 109 on the left but, misjudging the distance and impatience possibly getting the better of him, he opened fire too early. Immediately, the rest of the enemy flight broke to the right, with the Mustangs giving chase, but for some reason Turner’s original target continued on his way and so, allowing for greater drop of his bullets, he opened fire again with a long burst that raked the Messerschmitt. Smoke streamed from the aircraft, but no visible flame, and Turner drew closer and gave him another burst of fire. The 109 wobbled and more smoke gushed from it, but there was no sign of the pilot bailing out or the plane spiralling out of control. Turner closed further to finish him off, hitting him across his wings and fuselage. Now the stricken plane yawed violently and flipped over into a dive. As it got lower, it burst into flames, enveloping the entire aircraft. Turner was watching this when tracers suddenly flashed past, followed by two 109s hurtling by at great speed. Unscathed, and following them down, he opened fire and hit one of them as he pulled out of his dive. Closing in, he fired again and watched the Messerschmitt blow apart mid-air. That was three in three days, and demonstrated the ever-widening gulf between the young, under-trained and inexperienced pilots of the Luftwaffe’s fighter arm and the hardened, veteran Allied aces like Dick Turner. In an engagement there was simply no contest.
The bombers, meanwhile, continued to hammer enemy targets all across Europe. Lieutenant Smitty Smith and his crew in the 385th Bomb Group had flown sometimes two days in a row and at other times every other day, their completed missions mounting and the end of their tour drawing ever closer. On 20 June they had bombed a V-1 factory at Königsborn, their twenty-fourth mission, which should have meant they had just one to go. But then the rules were changed and they had to fly thirty-five before they could be sent home. Smith was disappointed to put it mildly – they all were – but was still grateful not to be a ‘ground-pounder’ down below in Normandy. Their bombardier, however, ‘Eut’ Eutrecht, had something of a breakdown on that flight. Having made the target, they all waited to hear him say ‘Bombs away,’ but there was nothing. Nor did the plane lurch upwards as normal with the release of the bombs. Instead, Eutrecht sat upright, mesmerized and frozen in place, unable to move. ‘Ears’ Moody, the navigator, eventually nudged him into action; their bombs dropped and they opened the throttles and did their best to catch up with the rest of the group. ‘Eutrecht’s subconscious had shut him down,’ noted Smith.13 ‘I knew from my own feelings that everyone of us on our crew, who had been exposed to this terrible virus, were all fighting our own demons and it was only time before it would take each of us, because there has to be a limit to the amount of abuse that can be taken.’
Despite this, they were packed off to Berlin the following day – Eutrecht included – and to bomb the Standard oil plant near Paris the day after that, so that was three trips in three days. On that trip, Ears Moody was hit by a shard of flak in the parachute, something he never normally wore. When Smith called over the intercom, all he could hear was a raging argument between Ears and Eut over a piece of chocolate – Eut said he had dropped it, Ears claimed he had found it and it was finders keepers. It was silly, unnecessary and another sign that nerves were getting stretched. Another couple of missions followed and then, having flown twenty-eight in less than eighty days, the entire crew was called in and told they were being sent to the ‘flak farm’ for two weeks’ rest and recuperation. These were large English country estates where crew could rest, relax and get away from the war. Smith hated it, though. It was too grand, too formal. When another pilot there wet his bed and bunked off out of shame, Smith decided to join him. Signing himself out, he headed to London and together they took an expensive room at the Savoy, drank, dodged the V-1s and went to the Windmill Theatre, where he picked up two girls, then lost his nerve in the face of their self-confidence. ‘The myth about “You Air Force guys with a gal on each arm and plenty of money” wasn’t as great as it sounded,’ he wrote.14 ‘I was broke, if not broken, and it was time to go back to work.’ He and his crew still had seven more missions to fly.
On 7 July, Eisenhower sent a letter to Montgomery, written in consultation with Tedder, urging him to expand the beachhead and get more room for manoeuvre as quickly as possible. ‘I will back you up to the limit in any effort you may decide upon to prevent a deadlock,’ Ike told him, ‘and will do my best to phase forward any unit you might find necessary.’15 He even offered to send him an extra American armoured division. ‘Please be assured,’ he added, just to really underline the point, ‘that I will produce everything that is humanly possible to assist you in any plan that promises to get us the elbow room we need.16 The Air and everything else will be available.’
By this time, Montgomery was actively moving to get Coningham replaced, while at the same time ignoring him as a channel for requesting air cooperation and instead turning directly to Leigh-Mallory. At the air commanders meeting on 7 July, Leigh-Mallory once again announced he had agreed to support Montgomery’s latest attempt to capture Caen by sending over the heavies of Bomber Command. Operation CHARNWOOD, the attack on Caen, was due to begin the following morning, which didn’t allow very much time for planning. Neither Coningham nor Tedder was at the meeting, although Coningham’s chief of staff reported that Second Army had requested the use of heavies to attack ‘4 aiming points consisting of concrete “hedge-hog” defences’ and that on this occasion Mary had suggested heavies might be used.17 Air Chief Marshal Harris, who did attend, replied that he had 350 bombers standing by and that if the planned CROSSBOW target was abandoned he could up that to 450. Tedder later warned Leigh-Mallory against using Bomber Command; what’s more, what had been an operation to destroy some quite specific German defences had now transformed into something much bigger. Tedder felt the plans had not been properly thought through, nor the limitations of such heavy bombing of the battlefield sufficiently understood. All the concerns about a repeat of Cassino that had been voiced three weeks earlier remained just as valid now.
By the time the 467 aircraft of Bomber Command set off, the original target agreed by Coningham had been changed from the fortified villages just to the north of the city behind the German main lines of defence. There was concern, as there had been on D-Day, that bombs might fall short, even from the comparatively low height of 8,000 feet, and hit their own troops, so the targets were adjusted so that they were closer to Caen itself. This compromise perfectly illustrated the shortcomings Tedder had warned about. Either the heavies were to be used to hit a specific target or they weren’t. If the risks to their own troops of such an operation were too great, then Bomber Command should have been stood down rather than dropping lots of bombs where they weren’t so needed.
The die, though, had been cast. Sergeant Ken Handley and his Australian crew in 466 Squadron were among those assigned to the raid. Another good daylight prang over target at 22.00 hrs,’ noted Handley cheerily.18 ‘Flak bursts against the clouds gave them a spotted appearance. Target was smothered in smoke where
tank concentrations were.’ Except there weren’t any tank concentrations where the bombs struck, only the northern outskirts of the medieval city of Caen, which were ruined by 2,276 tons of bombs, dropped very accurately within 2½–3 square miles, but on a target that achieved little except create huge amounts of rubble, debris and craters across all the roads leading into the northern part of the city. The university was largely destroyed and some 350 civilians were killed. Very few German troops appear to have been hit.
Among the Allied high command there was mounting concern that the British and American armies were getting bogged down in a stalemate from which there was no obvious escape. The V-1s, those harbingers of death and destruction, were still droning over southern England, while in the East the Red Army was smashing huge swathes from German Heeresgruppe Mitte, contrasting starkly with the tiny movement forward in Normandy. The East, however, was not of such great strategic importance to Hitler; no vengeance weapons were being directed towards the Soviet Union, for example. Only in Normandy could Nazi Germany bring to bear its army, navy and Luftwaffe, even if these last two armed services were making little contribution. New generation U-boats were on their way, but once those Atlantic bases had gone, there could be no turning back to them, while once the Allies had established an even firmer foothold on the Continent, then stemming their flow would become almost impossible. Even Hitler understood this.
A sit-down of all the major Allied commanders might now have been time well spent, despite the distraction from the battlefield this would have caused Monty and Bradley. They could have taken solace from this appraisal of the differing strategic picture between the Eastern and Western Fronts, while a calm, measured assessment of the situation would have assured them that, while they appeared to be making little headway, the Germans were in a desperate situation which would, eventually, lead to their collapse. But Allied leaders were in a hurry, and allowing their increasing impatience to be fuelled by pre-invasion presumptions that had proved to be misconceived. So, instead, further assaults were ordered as the battering ram was pulled back for another shove. The ill-conceived bombing of Caen was part of this renewed bludgeoning.
CHAPTER 25
Bloody Bocage
There was now absolutely no let-up in the fighting as the Allies lined up along a broad front to try to hammer their way through the German lines. The casualties were enormous. All along the ridge line around Saint-Lô, new set-piece attacks were launched, while further west, now that the Cotentin Peninsula was finally, completely in American hands, Bradley could turn Collins’s VII Corps south. His men were in for a torrid time, for while the focus had been on the battle northwards to clear the Cotentin and capture Cherbourg, the Germans holding the line to the south, on the other side of the flooded area stretching west from Carentan to Périers and beyond, had been digging in and strengthening their defences.
Among them had been Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 6, who in the second half of June had been making the most of the lull in their sector. They were now attached to the 5. Fallschirmjäger-Division, which had arrived from Auxerre in central France. Oberst von der Heydte was somewhat sniffy about his new division. Hardly any had received jump training and not more than 20 per cent of their officers had either proper infantry training or combat experience; most were drawn from disbanded Luftwaffe units elsewhere. ‘Weapons and equipment were neither complete nor uniform,’ he wrote, his despair all too obvious.1 ‘Only 50 per cent of the units were equipped with machine guns; one regiment had no steel helmets; no heavy anti-tank weapons were available and there were no motor vehicles.’ The Fallschirmjäger were proud to consider themselves elite troops, but this rabble were a sorry lot indeed. On the other hand, von der Heydte had received over 800 replacements by the end of June to help rebuild his battered companies, while into the line had also arrived several anti-tank battalions of assault guns and Panthers. ‘Never before, either in Russia or in North Africa,’ he added, ‘had the troops of the 6. FS Regiment witnessed on the German side such an accumulation of materiel and troops for purely defensive purposes.’2 While the panzer divisions were massing around Caen, more units were arriving into the western half of the Normandy front; and while Cherbourg and the Cotentin might have fallen, the German 7. Armee meant to fulfil the Führer’s orders to the letter. The Americans could expect a tough, bloody battle in the bocage, a landscape that unquestionably favoured the defender.
Fallschirmjäger 6 were now dug in just to the south of the small village of Méautis, only 4 miles south-west of Carentan; here the front line had not moved at all in nearly three weeks and the paratroopers meant to make the Americans pay for that still-painful loss. Oberleutnant Martin Pöppel, no longer in bad odour with Oberst von der Heydte, had been given back command of his old 12. Kompanie, the III. Bataillon’s heavy weapons unit, and, although still under strength, had been given a new 150mm howitzer and a couple of 80mm mortars. ‘Excellent progress is being made on the consolidation of our positions,’ he noted on 22 June.3 ‘The individual holes are now connected by trenches to create a unified line, and well-disguised observation holes have been driven through the earthen walls. The roads have already been mined, and each night our engineers are at work mining the land in front of our positions. Barbed wire, prepared by our supply men, is also being put into position.’
It was also their turn to try to knock down a troublesome church tower they were aware the Americans were using as an OP. On 1 July, one of their self-propelled guns, a 105, rumbled forward and fired no fewer than eight rounds but still failed to destroy the tower. The following day, Pöppel was told to try again with his 150mm. The first shot was too high, but the second tore a hole clean through from one side to the other. ‘Eight shots,’ noted Pöppel, ‘each one better than the one before, but the monster just won’t fall.’4 On the other hand, it seemed pretty unlikely the enemy could now make much use of it. Meanwhile, his best sniper had racked up a growing score of dead Americans. As if to show there were no hard feelings, they prepared a large white card with naked ladies drawn on it inviting the American commander and staff to a variety show called ‘Parisian Women’ on 6 July. During the night, a patrol planted it on a stake just before the American lines. ‘The Americans,’ noted Pöppel, ‘will scarcely be able to believe their eyes when they see our little joke.’5
The American infantry of the 83rd Division, now in Normandy and facing Fallschirmjäger 6, clearly had no intention of taking them up on the offer, instead opening their attack with a powerful artillery barrage in the early hours of Independence Day, 4 July. By 6 a.m. they had penetrated between II. and III. Bataillons and so Pöppel, instinctively inclined to an immediate counter-attack, suggested leading his reserve platoon to rectify the situation. Under the cover of their own mortars, they got up out of their trenches and hurried forwards, past bodies of dead Americans, until they reached a sunken road. Shells screamed overhead, bullets pinged and hissed. Then they heard English voices coming closer and, warning his men to get hand grenades ready, Pöppel raised his head and saw an American charging towards him with his Tommy gun at the ready. Snatching his MP40 sub-machine gun, Pöppel fired and cut him down, only to see another American emerging through a gap in the hedgerow. Raising his weapon, Pöppel fired again, but at the same moment so did the American and a bullet tore through his arm just above his right elbow. ‘Damn it,’ noted Pöppel, ‘but at least the American has gone down as well.’6 Falling back into the cover of the sunken lane, he looked at his wound. It hurt like hell. His men had all moved on and he now lay there, listening to the sounds of battle, gripping his pistol in his left hand. Eventually the fighting quietened down and some of his men reappeared, including his batman, who helped him back to the field dressing station. He had been lucky – the wound was not fatal nor would he lose his arm. His time in Normandy, however, was over.
Now neighbouring the 83rd Division were the 4th Infantry, who had barely had time to draw breath before being sent south to attack through the fl
ooded swampy area south-west of Carentan. Still attached to the 4th were the 70th Tank Battalion. On 6 July, before Collins’s VII Corps had even really begun their attack, Sergeant Carl Rambo’s Company A were flung against the bocage. They had a new platoon commander who, in Rambo’s view, seemed keen to get himself wounded or killed in quick order. Attached to the platoon was a Sherman dozer tank. Only with this could the Shermans actually get through the high mounds and hedges of the bocage; ordinary Shermans simply rose up, exposing their weaker undersides, and were then unable to push on through. The dozer, on the other hand, could ram the hedgerow, punching first one and then a second gap through which the others could follow. The new platoon commander, ignoring Rambo’s warning, went through first, telling the others to follow, and was promptly knocked out by an anti-tank gun hidden behind the hedge of the next field. Rambo’s tank followed, his machine-gunner spraying the hedges up ahead and firing HE shells from the main gun, while from the turret he gave directions to the driver to keep moving. One crew stopped to try to rescue the first crew as they were bailing out, only to be knocked out as well.
Rambo kept calling his driver to move left, then right, but an 88mm shell still hit the corner next to the co-driver, knocking off a big chunk but fortunately otherwise not penetrating the main hull, stuffed as it was with ammunition. They now began backing off, firing all the time as one of the escaped crew clambered on to the back and was promptly shot in the leg. The dozer tank now turned to go back but was hit square in the side and caught fire. Although the commander began to clamber out, the flames got the better of him and he fell back inside, incinerated with the rest of the crew. Using the flaming tank as cover, Rambo backed out and took cover behind the comparative safety of another hedgerow. ‘The maddest I ever got during the war was now,’ recalled Rambo.7 The 2nd Platoon was waiting in reserve behind them and he called them to ask for help.
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