The rumour was they would be heading into Caen, but before they were ordered to move out they watched RAF Bomber Command fly over and lay waste to the northern half of the city. Tout and his mates could hear the heavies coming long before they saw them: a deep drone that grew louder and louder until the thunder seemed to resonate inside their skulls. Even when they first spied them, they appeared like specks, far too small for the enormous noise, which then, incredibly, grew even louder, so that every part of the air seemed to be utterly consumed by this immense thunder. They tried to count, but soon gave up as dozens became hundreds – an enormous, barely comprehensible vision of titanic power. Stabs of tracer began arcing up from the ground, an extraordinary light show in its own right, but the enormous fleet roared on, apparently untroubled. Then the bombs began to fall and from where they waited by their tanks they felt the concussion and shock waves that followed. ‘Give ’em hell, boys!’15 they cheered. Once this wave of gargantuan destruction had passed, they learned they would be attacking the city the following morning alongside the British 3rd Division and the Canadians, part of Operation CHARNWOOD.
‘That’s it then,’ said Tommy Tucker, the crew’s loader.16 ‘All the other buggers in the British and Canadian armies have had a go. Now it’s the NY that has to liberate Caen.’
‘Hope the Jerries have gone home before we get there,’ added Stan ‘Hickie’ Hicken, the driver.
Operation CHARNWOOD, the attack on Caen, was yet again preceded by an immense battering ram of fire-power from naval guns, artillery and the tactical air forces. ‘Our cellar shook at all its corners,’ noted Kurt Meyer, who was sheltering in his CP near the south-west edge of the city.17 ‘Plaster and dust settled on the candlelit map.’ Attacking from the north-west, the Canadians overran Authie and began hammering the Abbey d’Ardenne, Meyer’s first CP and now held by Obersturmbannführer Karl-Heinz Milius and his Panzergrenadier-Regiment 25. By afternoon, all his II. Bataillon company commanders had been killed. On their right, the 16. Luftwaffen-Felddivision was breaking. Meyer gave Milius permission to evacuate the abbey that night, including all the wounded sheltering in a makeshift field hospital in the cellars.
Earlier that morning, the men of 1st Northants Yeomanry had moved up towards Lébisey Wood. Ken Tout marvelled at the sight of several thousand infantry and tanks spread out in attack formation ready to move off, although, disconcertingly, spreadeagled sideways in a hedge near to where they had paused, a British dispatch rider lay dead, as though crucified, flung by a bomb blast, his motorbike hurled even higher.
It was afternoon by the time they rumbled forward, through Lébisey Wood and into open ground with views across the wide valley of the River Orne to the chimneys of Colombelles, the industrial edge of Caen. Infantry parted either side of them.
‘Operator, load 75 with AP,’ the commander, Corporal ‘Snowie’ Snowdon, called out over the intercom. The gunner’s seat was on the right of the turret and the main 75mm gun, with the loader on the far side, and the commander sitting behind, with his head sticking out above the turret. All wore headphones. The Sherman was unique among tanks in Normandy in having a gyro-stabilizer on the gun, which meant it could fire with greater accuracy while on the move than other tanks. Tout, as gunner, and the commander and loader sat in a wire-mesh conical basket that rotated with the turret, while the driver and co-driver sat beyond, to the left and right respectively, their access point a hatch each forward of the turret. They could drive with their heads above these hatches, or could close them, lower their seats and use periscopes instead. From his position next to the gun, Tout used a periscope and had control of the turret and gunsight, which had cross-hairs for aiming. The commander, however, had an override switch with which to traverse the turret rapidly should he need to. At his feet, Tout had two buttons – the right for firing the 75mm gun, the left for triggering the .30-calibre machine gun. Ammunition was stored everywhere, both armour-piercing – AP – which was solid steel, and HE, which had a charge in the tip and exploded either on a delay or on impact. It was stacked upright around the turret and down in the hull beside the driver and co-driver. The proximity of all this explosive charge so close to the heads of the crew and in such a confined space wasn’t something the men wanted to think about too much.
‘Hullo, all stations, Yoke,’ could now be heard over the ‘A’ set frequency but still audible on the intercom.18 This was the C Squadron commander. ‘There are undesirable elements somewhere among those chimneys. See if you can knock them down.’
They loaded the gun with HE and Tout peered through the telescope, his forehead resting against the rubber cushion, and fired a ranging shot, the whole tank shuddering from the recoil. He could follow his own stab of tracer as the shot sped towards the target but fell short.
‘Short! Up two hundred,’ called out Snowdon.
Tout fired again as an enemy shell hit the ground uncomfortably close by, then fired some more, as did the others in the battalion, but the concrete chimneys remained intact, apparently immune at that range. Soon they disappeared entirely, screened by smoke.
Around the same time, Standartenführer Kurt Meyer was nearly buried alive when his command post building was hit by bombers of Second TAF. Fortunately for him, he had already taken to the cellar, although the blast had blown out the candles and the air had been so thick with dust that he and his staff had barely been able to breathe. One young soldier, knocked down the cellar entrance by the concussion wave, had become hysterical. All their radio vehicles up above had been destroyed.
It was dark by the time C Squadron, 1st Northants Yeomanry, moved off towards the city ruins. Ken Tout’s tank was leading. One moment they were trundling through grassy fields and the next they were grinding over rubble, the Sherman lurching up, then down, as they manoeuvred over craters and mounds of brick and stone. ‘For what’s it worth,’ said Corporal Snowdon, ‘we are now in Caen.’19 They were all shocked. Caen – or at least its northern part – had gone. A wilderness of ruin remained, made worse by the appalling, cloying stench of death. They climbed up a steep mound of rubble, then slid and rocked down the other side. Tout couldn’t see anything through his scope and told the commander.
‘That’s OK,’ Snowdon replied.20 ‘It’s just as bad up here. If we need to, just blast away regardless with the seventy-five and hope it scares them more than they scare us.’
They climbed another mountain, tipped over the top, then Hicken, the driver, lost control and the tank stalled. Tucker began singing the old nursery rhyme ‘The Grand Old Duke of York’.
Snowdon jumped down and told Tout to keep watch while he went to confer with the Ulster Fusiliers and the squadron commander, Lieutenant Bobby McColl. Eventually he returned and clambered back up to the turret.
‘No way forward,’ he said.21 ‘Bobby agrees. Ulsters say no use staying here. We came. We saw. We conquered. And a fat lot of use it was.’ Certainly, no enemy was firing. Not a soul appeared to be living in the wreck of Caen apart from them.
They still had to get out of the crater in which they now found themselves but, having started the tank, Hicken managed to reverse them back. ‘We scrunch around in the ruins of people’s lives and homes,’ wrote Tout, ‘and follow back the way we came.’22
Late that night, Kurt Meyer had once again appealed to Dietrich to allow him to evacuate the city and once again his request had been turned down. This time, however, Meyer decided to disobey and issued orders for his men to start pulling out – that is, what men he had left. Milius’s regiment had been all but destroyed. Not only had the II. Bataillon lost its officers, so now had the III. Bataillon, which had been reduced to little more than a hundred men, 15 per cent of its fighting strength. ‘The soldiers of 12. SS Panzer Division were at the end of their physical endurance,’ wrote Meyer.23 ‘They had gone to war weeks before with fresh, blooming faces. At this point, camouflaged, muddy steel helmets cast shade on emaciated faces whose eyes had, all too often, looked into another world. The m
en presented a picture of deep human misery.’ As it happened, General Hans Eberbach, Geyr von Schweppenburg’s replacement, also ordered the withdrawal from Caen that night, to the eastern side of the Orne.
After five days of sitting precariously in a foxhole at one end of the airfield, Sergeant Charlie Martin, for one, was mightily relieved when the SS men at last pulled back. It had not been good for the nerves. They had finally emerged and crossed the open ground to the south; the battle for the airfield had cost the battalion another seventy men, including Martin’s mate Frank Mumberson, who lost an arm. He headed off to the field hospital on the back of a Carrier, his stump heavily bandaged, smoking a cigar. ‘See you in Blighty!’ he called out as he left. Martin watched him, exhausted, filthy and shattered by his first month of battle.
CHAPTER 26
Living Like Foxes
‘Felt too ill and tired to write this for a few days,’ Mary Mulry wrote in her diary on 9 July.1 ‘Len had his bandages removed this morning. He can identify objects with his left eye although there is a great deal of blurring. It is good news. Everybody is happy for him.’ Considering the appalling state Len had been in when he arrived, it was little short of miraculous that he was still alive let alone could see. It was a credit to Mary and all the doctors and nurses at the hospital, but also down to rapidly improving surgical techniques and the introduction of penicillin, the wonder drug that was so effectively combating bacterial infections. This was new medical science and something the Germans did not have. American hospitals were even better; one in four cases reaching US field hospitals in Normandy would be made fit again to head back into the line. By the standards of the war, this was a remarkable achievement, especially since these tented hospitals were operating in alternating conditions of mud and terrible dust.
The variety of wounds was extraordinary and Mary found herself having to deal with non-physical injuries too, another area where huge strides had been made. One officer, Lieutenant Martin, was just twenty years old, newly passed out of the military college at Sandhurst, but, although unscathed, was completely withdrawn and could no longer speak. ‘This young man needs far more time than we can give him,’ noted Mary.2 ‘He needs sedation, reassurance and speech therapy.’ On the other hand, she was touched to see how others on the ward were reacting to him with compassion and warmth. Lieutenant Martin could not stop shaking, so some of the ‘up’ patients were helping him to eat.
Plenty of cases, however, were beyond anything modern medicine could do to help. One day, a convoy of young Canadians from the Carpiquet battle reached the hospital, all charred from a terrible friendly-fire incident when they had been mistaken for Germans and torched by flame-throwers. Stretchers of charred bodies filled the tent, some men quietly dying, others screaming. ‘Their bodies were black, their appearance horrific,’ wrote Mary.3 ‘We gave them morphia and more morphia and watched helplessly as they died. We moved the dead out of the ward and got on with trying to save the living. They were all so young and frightened.’
A generation earlier, millions of young men had been slaughtered along the Western Front, but even those men had been regularly rotated in and out of the front line, while between the big offensives – and any individual would be unfortunate to take part in more than one a year – not a huge amount happened. There was relentless shelling, and night patrol work, and there were snipers too, but these hazards were familiar to anyone fighting in Normandy. Now, though, men could be in the line for weeks at a time. Those like Bob Slaughter and the boys in the 116th Infantry, or the 4th Infantry, or the Canadians of 8th Brigade or the tank men of the Sherwood Rangers had been in the thick of it almost without let-up. And what was true of the Allies was doubly so for the Germans; Karl Wegner had been on the hoof since D-Day. So too had Hans Heinze and Kurt Meyer. Heinze’s 5. Kompanie was suffering from desertions, especially from the Volksdeutsche – ethnic German troops from outside Germany. Deserting was a risky thing to do – if caught they would be summarily executed. None the less, Heinze could understand why they might hand themselves in. ‘Our star was setting,’ he said, ‘so who could really blame them?’4
Sergeant Charlie Martin and those of his mates in A Company who had survived intact were finally moved into a rest area on 12 July, although they were still in range of enemy shellfire. Here a mobile bath unit was set up where the men could get a shower for the first time since boarding their ships in England before the invasion. Martin had not changed his underwear since then either and, having stripped off, threw it away. The men were supposed to swap their dirty underwear for a new set, but the quartermaster running the bath unit told Martin that since he didn’t have any to hand in he couldn’t claim a new set. At this, Martin saw red and, picking up a Bren gun and still naked, chased him through the camp yelling at him. ‘When I went back to the mobile bath,’ he noted, ‘there was no trouble about getting my new underwear.5 It had suddenly become quiet, in fact, so I helped myself to a spare set.’
The Germans suffered great shortages of water. For much of the time around Tilly, Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen and his men simply couldn’t get near the River Seulles. ‘Undressing and bathing were excessive luxuries,’ he noted, ‘but one took every opportunity to shave.’6 The long summer days, often quite warm even when overcast, combined with the strain on the nerves meant he and his men were always thirsty. Because of the lack of water, they took to drinking local cider, calvados, wine and even cognac, although for some reason this rarely made any of them drunk. They also smoked as many cigarettes as they could get their hands on. One of the great perks of overrunning British troops was the resultant bounty of food and especially cigarettes. Their own rations only ever came up at night and were generally pretty unpalatable.
Walter Caines and the men of the 4th Dorsets managed to do some washing in the line on 4 July. The sun came out, strong and warm, so they washed their clothes in a stream and were even issued some clean underwear there and then. This had also been Caines’s first set since leaving England. Digging in, though, was a large part of daily life. Caines found himself in the front line, digging in, then pulled back a short distance, then back up at the front again. It was relentless and, as a senior NCO in the Signals Platoon, he also had to set up the signals equipment and break it down again every time. They got good at it, though. Wherever possible they would use old smashed doors, bits of wood or branches as extra cover. Charlie Martin reckoned the best kind of foxhole was L-shaped, with one man on watch in the shorter part and the other trying to get some sleep in the longer length.
Bob Slaughter was back in the line four days after being shot in the head – his only days out of the line since D-Day – and joined a slit-trench with a young prep-school boy from Maryland, called Private Lewis Cass. Slaughter, despite being only nineteen, called him ‘Junior’. Their foxhole was covered with wood and topped with piled earth. Here they lived, like rats in the ground. ‘Junior and I were a pitiful sight,’ wrote Slaughter.7 ‘Fine yellow dust sifted through the cracks of the roof and stuck to our sweaty skin and eyes.’ Their eyes were bloodshot and swollen and, when nature called, they simply lay down and did their business into a receptacle of some kind in their trench. Although replacements were coming in all the time, Slaughter reckoned anyone who survived a week could consider themselves an old-timer. Mostly they were living off K-rations, boxes of cold food – processed meat, chocolate, hard biscuits, candy – which came in slightly different versions for breakfast, lunch and supper. They were designed to give troops enough daily energy, but men soon lost weight. Slaughter noticed their ribs, shoulder blades and Adam’s apples all starting to stick out. Their uniforms were filthy, as were their hands, ingrained as they were with oil and mud. Nor was young Lieutenant Martin the only one to be tipped over the edge. Stanley Koryciak was a teenage soldier in Slaughter’s Company D. Having landed on D-Day and fought well through the hedgerows, he had none the less lost several close friends. He suddenly started acting strangely and crying a lot; during heavy she
lling he even became hysterical. It was clear he was suffering from combat stress and so was sent back to the kitchen area for a break; it was hoped that a couple of days out of the line, a few hot meals and some rest would see him right as rain. Instead, he blew his brains out.
‘In general,’ noted Helmut Ritgen, ‘we lived in the ground like foxes.’8 They were under fire much of the time – by day from Jabos and also artillery, mortars and offshore naval guns, while by night artillery and mortars continued to rain down. Ritgen reckoned he could sleep through a barrage so long as it was not directly heading towards him, although sleep was never very deep. Major John Semken, commander of A Squadron, the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, was so exhausted during the battle for Tilly that he slept right through an artillery barrage even though the guns were firing from only a couple of hundred yards away. For the most part, Ritgen spent the night sleeping in a slit-trench underneath his panzer. He even set up the II. Bataillon command post under a panzer. In spite of the close, stale air, fumes and oil stains, it was felt this was a better option than risking living above ground.
So too did Ken Tout and Reg Spittles, who would often dig a hole in the ground and then drive their tanks over it for extra protection. Once during EPSOM, Reg Spittles and his squadron were pulled back for the night and ordered to leaguer up in an area already occupied by the infantry. Spittles was out of his tank and just about to tell his driver to switch off when a voice said, ‘Do you think you could put your tank just a bit forward?’ It was raining and the two men occupying the slit-trench wanted the Cromwell over them to keep them dry. Spittles was happy to oblige, because he and his crew intended to try to snatch a few hours’ dozing inside the tank.
Being in a tank crew was exhausting, because manning such beasts was physically demanding and then, at the end of each day, there were maintenance checks to carry out, as well as refuelling and restocking of ammunition. This all took time and no one could get any rest until it was finished. Eating tended to be done on the fly. ‘You were totally independent for eating and sleeping purposes,’ said Ken Tout.9 ‘You just ate as and when.’ When on the move or out of the line, it was possible to barter for food from local farmers. Lots of tank crews kept chickens in a box either on the back or even in the hull as a supply of eggs. The whole of Normandy was strewn with dead animals, and as long as the beast hadn’t already begun to rot, soldiers would readily cut them up. ‘We were able to add to our rations,’ said Tout, ‘not an immense amount but enough to tip the scale.’10
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