On Thursday, 20 July, Oberst Claus Graf von Stauffenberg had managed to bring a briefcase packed with explosives into a meeting with the Führer at Hitler’s Wolf’s Lair headquarters in East Prussia and the bomb had exploded. Miraculously, Hitler had survived with only superficial wounds; really, he had the luck of the devil. The coup had failed, the immediate ring-leaders had been shot and the witch-hunt had begun. Ever since, much speculation has raged over Rommel’s precise involvement, but it seems certain he was not involved at all; perhaps he had heard about a plot to overthrow the Führer, but the approaches made to him were always so heavily laced with non-specific and multiple interpretations that he may very well not even have fully realized what was being proposed. He certainly did not take any bait to join the conspirators. His chief of staff, Speidel, was more involved, although probably less so than his post-war memoirs made out. There was little doubt, though, that Rommel had been suggesting to his senior commanders that it was time to make peace with the Western Allies. Conversations such as the one Kurt Meyer overheard on his arrival at I. SS-Panzerkorps CP on 17 July had been taking place. Had Rommel not been wounded, it is possible he might have surrendered to the Allies, although this would have been considerably less likely after the failed bomb plot just because, to do so, he would really have needed the support of Hausser, Dietrich and Eberbach, and probably of von Kluge. Grumbling and complaining about the conduct of the war and the hopelessness of the OKW – whom everyone hated – was one thing; surrendering, unthinkable in the ideology of the SS, was quite another. But Rommel was wounded and no longer part of the equation in Normandy, and speculation on this score, though interesting, is ultimately pointless.
Hitler, increasingly paranoid even before the attack and his mind already addled by the daily cocktail of drugs, now saw treachery at every turn. Incredibly, the day after the assassination attempt, von Kluge wrote to the Führer, forwarding Rommel’s missive of 16 July. After fourteen days at the front, von Kluge wrote, he had come to the same conclusion as Rommel about their prospects in Normandy. ‘The moment is fast approaching when this overtaxed front line is bound to break up,’ he added.1 ‘And when the enemy once reaches the open country a properly co-ordinated command will be almost impossible.’
Not surprisingly, these reports from the front went down spectacularly badly at Hitler’s headquarters. Von Kluge’s days were now numbered, and there would be no retreat – that was unthinkable. They were to keep fighting and destroy the Allies. Reaction among the troops to the news was broadly one of shock. ‘The terrorist act was rejected equally by all units,’ noted Kurt Meyer.2 ‘The soldiers had no sympathy for the 20 July conspirators.’ Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen, who had known von Stauffenberg when they had both been in 6. Panzer-Division, was also shocked. ‘Although I loathed Hitler,’ he wrote, ‘his death would have been for us, at least temporarily, a disaster and caused such confusion that the enemy would have been confirmed in his goal of the destruction of Germany.’3 Eberhard Beck and his colleagues in 277. Artillerie-Regiment took a somewhat different view, however. ‘His death could bring us a turnaround,’ Beck noted, ‘and we hoped very much that this senseless war would end.’4 His commander, Leutnant Freiherr von Stenglin, visited all his gun crews and told them that not only had the assassination failed, but orders had arrived that from now on they were to use only the Nazi salute, not the more traditional military one. It was clear von Stenglin was appalled. ‘We were all disappointed by the failed assassination attempt,’ added Beck. Soon after, von Stenglin disappeared and no sign of him was ever found again. Leutnant Richard von Rosen found the news deeply unsettling, especially since the perpetrators all seemed to be aristocrats. ‘Young man, don’t let it get to you,’ Hauptmann Fromme told him, ‘we shall protect you.’5 ‘It was a pity that Rommel was out of action,’ added von Rosen. ‘We had great faith in him. A word from him now would have helped us greatly.’ Willi Müller was also ‘unsettled’ by the news, and this seems to have been the overwhelming reaction.6 It was disconcerting at a time of already considerable uncertainty.
The Panzer-Lehr had by now long completed their move and were in the line to the west of Saint-Lô, with 17. SS on their left and 2. SS-Panzer next to them, which meant for the first time the Americans were confronted by two panzer and one SS panzer-grenadier divisions. That they had got there pretty much unscathed was largely because of the poor weather, which had prevented the usual amount of air cover. Helmut Ritgen’s II. Panzer-Regiment 130 had arrived on the night of 10 July and were immediately thrown into a counter-attack early the following morning. Fighting on unfamiliar ground with no time for reconnaissance was a recipe for disaster, and so it proved. ‘As feared,’ noted Ritgen, ‘the division attack failed completely, with frightful losses.’7 By 15 July, Ritgen had lost fifteen officers.
Opposing them were the veteran US 9th Division and, as the 47th Infantry counter-attacked in turn, Lieutenant Orion Shockley and his men bypassed an orchard although mortars and small arms were coming from its direction. No sooner had they gone past than Thunderbolts swooped over, turned and headed back towards them. Shockley and his men thought they were going to be attacked, but instead the P-47s fired and dropped bombs on the orchard, driving a number of tanks out from their cover. Shockley watched all this in amazement, then suddenly several tanks rumbled past. As the last ones went by, one of Shockley’s men jumped out and fired a bazooka, which hit the tank but didn’t stop it. A German soldier, badly wounded, fell off on to the road. Shockley walked up to him and the man raised an arm as if asking for help. ‘I saw that there was no hope for him,’ noted Shockley, ‘and felt a pang of regret for the whole war and what it did to people.8 I had seen many of my buddies wounded and killed, but somehow this incident got to me.’
Shockley and his men managed to advance three-quarters of a mile that Wednesday, 12 July, and over the days that followed it was the same, with more of his men getting wounded and killed along the way. One man was hit in the stomach by shrapnel. ‘Lieutenant, I’m going to die, ain’t I?’9 he said, a statement of fact, rather than a question. His stomach had been sliced open and he was holding his intestines with both hands. Shockley called for a medic and tried to help; the man was taken to hospital but died a few days later. The following day, 16 July, Shockley’s good friend Captain James Cameron was killed when his Jeep went over a mine. They had been together since fighting through North Africa. The day after that, another friend, Lieutenant Paul Buffalo, was also gone, killed by shell fragments. By the 20th, Shockley was given command of the company.
Shockley had already seen enough violence to last a lifetime, but now at Esglandis, while they waited for the launch of COBRA, a company commanders’ meeting was called. No sooner had they arrived at the battalion CP than the enemy began sending over shells. The first landed nearby, so they all ran for cover. First out of the tent were Captain Minton and Lieutenant Roger Murray, to whom Shockley had just been talking. A second shell whistled in and a fragment sliced off Minton’s head while a second hit Murray.
‘Ow, I’m hit,’ he said as he was neatly cut in half just a few feet in front of Shockley.10 He was dead by the time he hit the ground. Knowing shells dispersed more in distance than to the side, Shockley dived into a foxhole away from the incoming blasts as a further one hit a tree, showering the two men in the trench below and killing them too. It had not been a good few days.
‘The hedgerows were terrible,’ said Lieutenant John Rogers, a platoon commander in Company E of the 67th Armored Regiment, part of the US 2nd Armored Division.11 The division was known as ‘Hell on Wheels’ and it was a kind of hell in that country. ‘We were there for eighteen days and eighteen nights,’ he said, ‘just slugging it out.’12 They all found it deeply frustrating, but they just could not penetrate – not in any depth. The dozer he had fixed on to the front of his Sherman helped, but it seemed to him like a particularly brutal slugging match in which neither side was gaining much.
Both sides confronted t
hat third week of July with morale at a low ebb. Desertions were on the rise. The grinding violence of the campaign was so debilitating. Death lay everywhere, covering the once beautiful countryside with a pall of putrefaction. Every field, it seemed, held the carcasses of cattle and horses blasted by the war. Most would fill up with gases, which made a carcass roll over with its legs sticking in the air. One day, Reg Spittles was peering through his binoculars and spotted a German machine-gunner sitting in his slit-trench enjoying the sunshine. Ahead of him, though, was a dead cow, already swollen in death. Spittles and his crew were several hundred yards away and safe in their tank, so Spittles asked his machine-gunner to fire a burst at the cow, which he did. The reaction from the German was everything Spittles had hoped for. Swiftly gathering his weapon and ammunition belts together, he looked around, then hopped out of his foxhole. ‘Finally taking a cigarette from his mouth,’ noted Spittles, ‘he looked to the direction of where the firing had come from and with a big smile shook his fist in our direction.’13
Just as often, the stench was from those killed in action and left on the battlefield. It seemed to infuse everything. Equally bad were the appalling sights of what could happen to the body of a once strapping young man. Near Tilly, along a lane that was continually used by the Sherwood Rangers, Stanley Christopherson noticed a dead German soldier protruding on to the track. Every time a tank passed, his arm was crushed, over and over until there was nothing left but mashed bone and flesh, like constantly run-over road-kill. Reg Spittles also repeatedly passed a knocked-out Panzer IV. One of the crew was hanging out of the turret, dead, and with every day his rotting corpse changed – the skin swelled, then darkened, until eventually the head and arm fell off completely.
The constant shelling, the violence, the stench, the discomfort – it was relentless. Even while GOODWOOD was going on, the British were still attacking around Hill 112 and the neighbouring Hill 113 to the south of the Odon. Lieutenant Robert Woollcombe had been there with the 6th KOSB and the 15th Scottish Division on and off since the end of EPSOM. He had been certain he would be killed there, although so far that frequently self-fulfilling prophecy had not come to bear; he had been lucky, though. Some seventy-five men in his A Company had gone up Hill 113, but only thirty-two had come back down again. He had learned that only by huddling in his foxhole did he have much chance of survival, but as an officer he would often be summoned to Battalion HQ. ‘The journey back to this vicinity was a rather cat-like procedure,’ he wrote.14 ‘It entailed the usual walk-run, the periodic halts in order to listen, the agonising pause before the swift shrill hiss of another “stonk” coming over; hollow-eyed, stubbly-chinned men bolting for cover, the clatter of rifles, spades and trench headboards being knocked over – and your landing with a bump on top of somebody in a strange trench for momentary refuge. The hard, heavy explosions and the trench shaking tiny rivulets of dislodged earth over you, the whirr of spinning metal, dust flying, and silence.’ The battalion lost nine officers on Hill 113. Just a month earlier, Woollcombe had been one of the junior subalterns. Now he was the senior one.
Just across the valley, partly responsible for the shelling Woollcombe was trying to dodge, was Kanonier Eberhard Beck. Ammunition restrictions meant their firing was limited, while they were still in range of British counter-battery fire and were losing friends and comrades as a result. His friend Paumann was killed instantly by a shrapnel fragment; Fritz Arnold, due to be heading to Kriegsschule, was wounded; Kanonier Ludwig Gröger, with whom Beck had trained, suffered a breakdown and was taken to hospital. Beck never saw him again. Then Leutnant von Senglin disappeared. Beck missed his mother and even contemplated giving himself a ‘home shot’ – a wound that would get him out of there. ‘I just wanted to get out of this misery,’ he wrote.15 It also bothered him that he had never been with a woman.
The British weren’t the only ones getting over a troublesome ridge line. Following the fall of Hill 192 on the high ground to the north-east of Saint-Lô, the whole of the American line was pushing further south, inexorably, while by 17 July the 29th Division was finally closing on the town itself. Sergeant Bob Slaughter had rejoined his platoon in time for the assault and, by the time the 29th finally entered the shattered remains of the town, they had been in the line for forty-two days straight. Slaughter could scarcely get his head round the number of friends he had lost; just in the past couple of days on the Martinville ‘Ridge of Death’, less than 2 miles to the north-east of Saint-Lô, his good buddy Sergeant ‘Ajax’ Browning had been killed, as had his trusted machine-gunner, PFC ‘Fats’ Williams. Slaughter reckoned a part of him had died with those two on that ridge. ‘Hearing the news of who had gotten hit was always hard,’ he noted, ‘and every day, new faces replaced seasoned infantry men.’16
Obergrenadier Karl Wegner and his Gruppe in Grenadier-Regiment 914 were among those defending the ruins of Saint-Lô and had been holding out on Hill 122, just to the north of the city. For the past six weeks, since the trauma of D-Day, he had stuck close to Obergefreiter Kalb and his friend Willi. A bond of deep comradeship had been forged. Overnight, in the darkness of 17/18 July, they had tramped back along with the remnants of their company, now just a few dozen men, past discarded equipment and wreckage in the ditches by the track. ‘Karl, any fool can see that we’re beaten,’ Kalb told him.17 ‘There is no hope of holding this lousy French ruin.’ But those were General Kraiss’s orders: the town, although completely wrecked, was to be defended. Wearily, they had begun digging in yet again.
The following day, though, the defence of Saint-Lô quickly unravelled. By late afternoon word reached them that the Americans were actually behind them, and then shells started coming in – shells fired by their own artillery. If they were surrounded, which it seemed they were, then it was clearly time to scarper. Kalb and his small Gruppe now got up out of their foxholes and began skirting through the city, peering round corners, then making a dash for it. Then, while taking a quick peek, Kalb was shot in the hand. Wegner fired a burst from the machine gun, then they bolted down another alley, but around the next corner they ran straight into some American armoured vehicles. As they tried to turn back, Willi slipped, knocked into Kalb, but was then hit by a volley of bullets. Kalb pulled him back out of the firing line, but Willi was badly shot up, and screaming in pain and panic. Cradling his head and holding his hand, Wegner looked down at his dying friend while Kalb desperately tried to dress the wounds. Willi’s screams faded away and the colour drained from his face. He began to cry softly. ‘Karl,’ he mumbled, looking up at Wegner, ‘through all this just to die in the rubble, it makes no sense.’18 Then he was gone.
Kalb took Willi’s things – his photos of his wife, his wedding ring and identity disc – wrapped them in a handkerchief, then replaced his own helmet with his cap and told the others that he would go first and, if everything was all right, they should follow. Holding his arms up above his head, he stepped out. Glancing one more time at his dead friend, Wegner followed. ‘Thank God,’ he said, ‘it was all over.’19
It was almost over for Leutnant Hans Heinze too. Also trapped in Saint-Lô, he and his last few men had suddenly seen American tanks bearing down upon them. Caught in the open, Heinze now tried to buy his men some time by taking a Panzerfaust, running into the centre of the road and firing it at the lead tank. The blast of a shell knocked him to the ground and when he came to he realized he was lying on the ground with his right arm and side badly wounded. Curiously, his first thought was that he’d never be able to play tennis again. His second was that he needed to move quickly or be crushed by the Sherman bearing down on him. Pulling out a handkerchief, he frantically waved it and, to his amazement, the American tank commander stopped and allowed Heinze’s men to grab him and pull him clear. Even in the midst of this hell there were still, it seemed, moments of humanity.
Not only was Heinze’s life saved, he was taken to an aid post and then put on an ambulance and taken south, out of the ruins of the city. Lyi
ng in the van, he looked up to see a mass of bullet holes in the roof. Groggily, he asked the driver how many times he’d been shot at. ‘Almost every time we drive we are strafed,’ the driver told him.20 He explained the Allies believed they were using ambulances to deliver ammunition and supplies to the front. For the Germans there really was no escaping the ever-present dominance of Allied air power. Heinze, though, did make it in one piece to the field hospital. His Normandy campaign was over.
Wednesday, 19 July was a busy day for General Omar Bradley. In the morning at his HQ encampment he conferred with his corps commanders for COBRA, having already briefed his generals on 12 July. Key to the plan was to attack on a narrow front, rather as Pete Quesada had been urging him to do, though it went against the instincts of most American commanders, who tended to prefer a broad-front approach so that they could exert pressure all along the line and make the most of materiel advantage. With the air assault key to the whole operation, however, greater focus was needed for COBRA. Joe Collins’s VII Corps would take the lead, his armour surging forward the moment the bombers had cleared a path.
Then it was a short flight to England to discuss the air plan. At 1.30 p.m. Bradley and Quesada, with Chet Hansen in tow, took off in thick fog, but touched down at Northolt near London in better conditions. Brereton and Coningham were there to meet them, Brereton looking small and trim behind his wire spectacles, Coningham big and red-faced. They headed off to Bentley Priory in a convertible Buick, where Leigh-Mallory, lean, curt and with few smiles, was waiting. Spaatz too – calm, confident and bristling with shrewd intelligence – and also Tedder, wiry and small, chewing on his pipe and ‘quivering with alertness’.21
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