‘My God, look at those Germans run!’ called out Smitty Smith’s co-pilot.16
Smith smacked him with a backhand. ‘Watch the Goddam gauges!’ he ordered.
They were the bottom aircraft of a three-plane element, of the bottom flight, of the bottom squadron, of the bottom group – without doubt, the most lonely and vulnerable position to be in any bomber formation when the bombs started falling, which they now were, tumbling in clusters; and when the lead ship in their squadron made an adjustment to avoid the bombs coming down towards him, so too did his wingman, which meant Smith also now needed to bank sharply to avoid being hit. ‘And while we didn’t get hit by a single bomb,’ he wrote, ‘we ended up less than a thousand feet above the ground and naturally, as far away from the group as I could get.’17 Dropping their own bombs, Smith banked again and turned for home, his part in the great bombing over.
Pyle watched them. They seemed slow, steady. ‘I’ve never known a storm, or a machine,’ he wrote, ‘or any resolve of man that had about it the aura of such a ghastly relentlessness.’18 Around him, others had gathered to watch, having climbed out of their foxholes despite orders to the contrary, including Lieutenant Richard Blackburn and some of his men in the 121st Infantry, who were due to attack that day with the rest of the 8th Division. To begin with, the bombs were dropped very accurately, but the wind began to drift the smoke north towards the American lines. With so many explosions, grit and dust, the lines marked on the ground soon disappeared. Pyle had been quite transfixed by this incredible spectacle, but then realized, as they all did with sudden, mounting horror, that the bombs were starting to fall wide. Men were diving for foxholes as the bombs began exploding around them. ‘I had heard my share of exploding artillery shells and bombs,’ noted Blackburn, ‘but none could compare to this barrage of bombs.’19 He dived into a narrow trench, frantically reciting the 23rd Psalm. Not far away, Ernie Pyle found a wagon shed, dived for the ground, then wriggled like an eel to get under a cart. ‘The feeling of the blast was sensational,’ he wrote.20 ‘The air struck us in hundreds of continuing flutters. Our ears drummed and rang. We could feel quick little waves of concussion on the chest and in the eyes.’
Also watching, although safely further back, was Tom Bowles, who, along with the rest of the Big Red One, had moved from Caumont after six largely uneventful weeks there and was now in reserve and primed for the drive towards Coutances. ‘You never saw so much dust,’ said Bowles.21 ‘It was so bad you couldn’t see nothing.’ Lieutenant Orion Shockley had realized what was happening a little earlier than some and had ordered his men to fall further back once the bombing began, although it didn’t stop some of them from getting wounded. Then, after the heavies had gone, it was time for the medium bombers. From where he was sheltering, Shockley had seen General Leslie McNair, the commander of Army Ground Forces who was over in Normandy on an inspection tour, standing about 150 yards away when the B-26s came over. Bombs started to fall, eruptions ripped the ground apart, and smoke and dust covered the scene of where McNair had been standing. He was the most senior American general to have been killed in the war so far. A further 110 others were also dead, while 490 more had been wounded.
When the bombing began again, General Fritz Bayerlein honestly thought his time had come. He had fought in North Africa, on the Eastern Front, in France, but nothing had prepared him for this. ‘The three days by St.-Lô,’ he said, ‘were the worst I have ever experienced.’22 Everything before seemed to have been erased. All communications with the outside world had been destroyed. In the front line, the casualties were considerable: some 1,000 men, 25 tanks and 10 assault guns, which amounted to two-thirds of his entire fighting force, as well as a Fallschirmjäger regiment, which was effectively annihilated. ‘The whole place looked like a moon landscape,’ he said, ‘everything was burned and blasted. It was impossible to bring up a vehicle or recover the ones that were damaged. The survivors were like madmen and could not be used for anything.’ This was true. Men were wandering around, deranged. They had literally lost their minds from the experience.
Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen had been due to move his panzer battalion into reserve on the 24th, but this had been postponed by twenty-four hours, which meant he and his surviving Mk IVs were still based at Saint-Gilles, a mile south beyond the bomb zone, and when the bombing began he and his men all took shelter in the farmhouse being used as their CP. Although a number of cows were killed and shrapnel seemed to rain down on them incessantly, once the bombers had gone they dusted themselves off and were relieved to find their panzers, although a little battered, were all in one piece.
With the bombers gone, the American infantry began moving forward, picking their way across the scarred landscape. Lieutenant Orion Shockley’s 47th Regiment was among the hardest hit by the American bombing, although none of his men in Company B was killed. The 3rd Battalion was so badly cut up, however, that 1st Battalion had to take over the lead in cutting the road, and that meant Company B was now in the van of the COBRA attack. They crossed the road, moving cautiously. The German dead were everywhere, as were the wounded, most of whom swiftly surrendered. Shockley noticed a number of them were bleeding from the nose, ears and mouth. Then the attackers came under heavy fire from Ritgen’s tanks and from the surviving German artillery. There was a fury and intensity to the firing unlike anything Shockley had ever experienced. ‘Shock, if we survive this barrage,’ Lieutenant Klauz, his XO, said to him as they huddled in a bomb crater, ‘I think we will make it through the war.’23
In the middle, 8th Division also got going, Lieutenant Richard Blackburn and his men crossing the road and cautiously pushing forward across the battle-scarred landscape. He had not lost any men either, but the death of General McNair and the tentative push of the infantry meant that, by evening, there was an air of profound disappointment among the senior American commanders. Eisenhower, for one, was done with using strategic air forces in this way. ‘I don’t believe they can be used in support of ground troops,’ he groused to one of Bradley’s aides.24 ‘That’s a job for artillery. I gave them a green light on this show but this is the last one.’
The following morning, Wednesday, 26 July, it looked even more as though COBRA was failing. The Germans appeared to have recovered. Artillery fire and mortars were stalling the advance of the three infantry divisions, which were continuing to make only very slow progress. The worry was that they would soon become completely bogged down in yet more inching-forward, attritional fighting and that the Germans would regain some kind of balance. None the less, Collins, as corps commander, reckoned the Germans must still be reeling from the previous day. ‘I sensed that their communications and command structure,’ he wrote, ‘had been damaged more than our troops realized.’25 He was quite right; chaos reigned. Bayerlein was unable to communicate with anyone except by foot; he had no link at all to von Choltitz or Hausser and no real idea of the enemy’s precise aims or intentions. The breakthrough was now within the Americans’ grasp after all.
With this in mind, late on Tuesday, 25 July, Collins had ordered up his armour. The mounted infantry of the Big Red One was to strike hard for Coutances that morning, Wednesday, 26 July, alongside Combat Command B of the 3rd Armored, while 22nd Infantry of the 4th Division was to mount up and join the 2nd Armored Division in a strike south. What he wanted was mounted infantry and armour to strike hard and swiftly. Among those now rumbling southwards were Carl Rambo and the tanks of 70th Tank Battalion, using dozers and Rhinos to smash through the hedgerows beyond, and also Lieutenant John Rogers and the 67th Tank Regiment, who were advancing with the men of the 22nd Infantry sitting on the back of their Shermans.
That Wednesday was also the first day of Quesada’s Armored Column Cover and Rogers had a pilot with him in his tank. Later that day, as the advancing VII Corps came up against the hastily cobbled together armour of Panzer-Lehr, the P-47s were quickly called down and soon stopped the panzers in their tracks. ‘It really worked wonderfully,’ s
aid Rogers.26 ‘It was constant, constant, constant, just one flight after another.’ Saint-Gilles, where Helmut Ritgen had had his CP, was cleared, then so was Canisy. Fighters flew cover constantly. ‘We’d have call letters and call signs for them on their radio,’ remembered Lieutenant Archie Maltbie, still flying with the 388th Hell Hawks, ‘and our pilot on the ground would call us in.27 He’d say, “Hey, we got some tanks in this forest over here, we’re gonna put a pink shell in there and you guys go in and take them out.”’ At other times it would be a roadblock or some other specific target.
‘Everyone is overjoyed with the rapidity of their movements,’ noted Chet Hansen on Thursday, 27 July.28 ‘The 2nd Armored spearheaded towards the south in great sweeping advances, while the 3rd Armored broke down the road towards Coutances, rocking the German back on his heels, confounding him with their movement.’ That day, Bradley issued new orders. There was to be a full-on advance towards Avranches, the hinge into Brittany. After the disappointments of COBRA’s launch, it seemed the dam had finally burst. This was the breakthrough the Allies had all been hoping for.
The endgame in Normandy had begun.
CHAPTER 32
BLUECOAT
The same day as COBRA, Tuesday, 25 July, the newly operational Canadian First Army launched Operation SPRING, using the infantry of II Corps and with armour support from the British 7th Armoured and Guards Divisions to drive south from Caen. On the map, they were up against seven enemy divisions arrayed to the south of Caen, of which five were panzer: the 116. Panzer-Division, almost full strength, had now reached Normandy, although was not yet in the line. However, directly confronting the Canadians were just two divisions, one a low-quality infantry unit and the other the 1. SS-Panzer, less depleted than some others. In defence, and well dug in, this still made them quite an obstacle and the Canadians’ initial attack made little headway. Lieutenant-General Guy Simonds, the II Corps commander, was in tears at SPRING’s failure, but Montgomery had never viewed it as much more than a holding operation and that was what it proved to be. Instead, he now turned to how he could best support the American breakthrough. SPRING had shown the bulk of the surviving German armour was still rooted in the area to the south and south-east of the city, whereas the enemy line seemed weaker further west around Caumont, now held by the 15th Scottish Division.
It was Dempsey who came up with the plan for a thrust from the Caumont area towards Mont Pinçon, the highest point in Normandy. This objective was to be given to XXX Corps under Lieutenant-General Gerard Bucknall, while on his left flank would be General Dick O’Connor’s VIII Corps, recovered from GOODWOOD. Having spent much of the campaign fighting through open terrain around Caen, they would be heading for the rolling hills and dense bocage of what was known as ‘la Suisse Normande’. British armour had not cottoned on to the idea of hedge-cutters and dozers – there had been no need – but now would be driving south into the kind of countryside that had so beleaguered the Americans in the Cotentin and before Saint-Lô. But there could be no shirking such challenges. The line here was held by infantry divisions and elements of 10. SS-Panzer; it was unquestionably currently a weaker part of the line and, with the Germans reeling further to the west, this plan, Operation BLUECOAT, seemed like the best chance of capitalizing on US First Army’s success and possibly driving in at the sides of the ring of panzer divisions south of Caen. BLUECOAT would jump off on 30 July.
In the western half of the line, the Germans were now flooding back as the Americans poured through the breach in the dam. By 26 July, it was clear to Hausser that his front was collapsing. Marigny, 12 miles south of the COBRA start line, fell to the Big Red One and the 3rd Armored, while 2nd Armored advanced 7 miles. On the German left flank, the American VIII Corps also began their drive south, taking the ruins of Périers. ‘The centre and the left wings,’ recorded Hausser, ‘had to be withdrawn.1 The only remaining difficulty was that of obtaining Army Group’s permission.’ Even von Kluge, however, realized that unless these forces, which included not only 17. SS but also the comparatively intact 2. SS ‘Das Reich’, were urgently pulled back, then they would all be encircled and annihilated.
Word of the collapse on their right reached the Pionier-Bataillon of 17. SS shortly after 9 a.m. that morning and by 4.45 p.m. they had received the order to withdraw due south as quickly as possible and to head for Roncey, about 18 miles away and south-east of Coutances. ‘Impossible due to enemy action,’ noted Willi Müller in his diary, but by 9.20 p.m. they had managed to fall back.2 ‘Dissolving out without enemy action,’ he wrote at 3 a.m. the following morning, 27 July. Also falling back was Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen, whose panzer battalion had now been attached to the Panzergrenadier-Lehr-Regiment 901. Every road of retreat seemed to be patrolled by Thunderbolts. ‘One had to play Russian roulette,’ noted Ritgen, ‘by trying to outwit the pilots while they rose back into the air after descending to attack.’3 It didn’t work for long, however. First all radio communications were lost, then his panzer was hit and he had to abandon it, although all his crew were safe. Heading south on foot, they spotted American tanks up ahead but managed to dodge them and make good their escape.
Willi Müller and his fellow pioneers were also marching on foot, and no longer only by night; if planes came over, they jumped into the ditches beside the roads or fled to the nearest cover, whether it be a hedge or a wood. By 8 p.m. they had reached the village of Belval, a few miles east of Coutances. At 8.22 p.m., they received orders to make contact with 3. SS-Panzer-Regiment, from ‘Das Reich’. Two of their Panthers were just a kilometre away and a further four were a little beyond that, but they couldn’t locate them so kept going. At 5 a.m. the following day, Friday, 28 July, they were told to head to Cerisy-la-Salle to try to link up with the ‘Das Reich’ men. By 9 a.m. they finally reached the Panzer-Regiment 3 command post, where they found the Panthers. At least they now had something to ride on and could stop marching.
Pursuing them was the American 9th Division, although they were following behind the main armour spearheads; Lieutenant Shockley and his men still found themselves mopping up rearguards and having to stop to take cover from enemy shelling. Further to the west, Lieutenant Richard Blackburn and the men of the 8th Infantry Division reached Coutances on 28 July, although too late to encircle the SS divisions and remnants of German infantry. Because of the swiftness of the advance, some of the towns through which they passed remained largely untouched, but others were completely and utterly wrecked. In some areas he found it difficult to walk properly for all the dead and rotting corpses of soldiers and their horses. ‘There were scores and scores of dead Wehrmacht soldiers everywhere,’ he wrote, ‘with their skin turned a sickly green in death.’4 And not only were the dead left in Coutances – the Americans also discovered 66 tanks, 204 other vehicles and 11 guns completely wrecked and burned out, and a further 56 tanks and 55 vehicles abandoned. It was a considerable haul.
Avranches fell on 27 July. The following day, the commander of 2. SS ‘Das Reich’, Obersturmbannführer Christian Tychsen, was killed in a firefight with American troops, while Obergruppenführer Hausser, the corps commander, was fired at and had to throw himself into a ditch to escape. Von Kluge blamed Hausser for the collapse but couldn’t – or wouldn’t dare – sack an SS general, so fired Max Pemsel, Hausser’s chief of staff, instead and relieved von Choltitz, commander of LXXXIV. Korps, replacing him with Generalleutnant Otto Elfeldt. None of these command changes was the remotest bit helpful, because suddenly new men, unfamiliar with the terrain, situation or units involved, were being flung into situations of utter mayhem and expected to get an immediate grip on the reins – an impossible task. But it was increasingly the German way; the number of command changes in Normandy was astonishing. By contrast, the Allies were unquestionably benefiting from the continuity of command being exercised in their campaign. Allied sackings were not unknown, but they were rare.
By that day, Friday, 28 July, Helmut Ritgen had safely made it to Saint-Denis
-le-Gast. All his panzers had been lost, as had most of those in the entire Panzer-Lehr. He did, however, now have a motorbike and sidecar, which he shared with his dispatch rider, and was heading to see Bayerlein at a commanders’ conference when they were pounced on by Thunderbolts. It was too late to dismount, but they swerved left, the bullets of the Thunderbolts missing them by inches.
By Saturday the 29th, Willi Müller and his Pionier-Bataillon were travelling as passengers on Panther tanks, heading south towards Saint-Denis-le-Gast from Roncey. Word then reached them that they and the remainder of LXXXIV. Korps had been encircled. Desperately, Müller’s column tried to find a route out; it seemed there was a road that had not yet been cut that led to Saint-Denis-le-Gast. Soon after, however, up ahead Müller could see the Jabos descending on a crossroads at the edge of a village, their engines screaming as they dived. ‘It horrified us,’ he wrote.5 ‘We also had to cross this intersection.’ They were saved by the weather. Before long, the cloud thickened and it began to rain; suddenly the Jabos had gone and Müller and his companions moved on, over the crossroads and beyond, clear of the encirclement. Others, however, were not so lucky. In their desperation to flee the entrapment, horse-drawn and motorized vehicles were stacked up nose to tail for some 3 miles. To begin with, just one fighter group had attacked this mass of vehicles, but as soon as General Quesada heard what was happening he diverted others. In all, a further 100 tanks, 250 vehicles and other horse-drawn wagons were left in flames. It was mayhem for Germany’s 7. Armee, which was very rapidly disintegrating. Not one division could now muster more than a Kampfgruppe in strength.
That same day, Hauptmann Alexander Hartdegen, General Bayerlein’s aide, was captured and brought to see General Bradley. He spoke quite openly about Rommel’s battles over the use of the panzers and where they should be positioned before the invasion. He also told them about the Führer’s order to defend every inch. ‘General Bayerlein and Rommel felt this was useless murder,’ Hansen noted, hastily writing down Hartdegen’s testimony.6 ‘Bitter about Stalingrad and Caucasus, bitter about SS with pick of replacements and officers.’ Hartdegen also told them he hated Hitler and would do anything to end the war quickly. ‘Felt Hitler was committing suicide with the German people,’ recorded Hansen.7 They took him outside and showed him a park stuffed full of trucks, tanks and mountains of equipment. Hartdegen broke down and wept. ‘If only we Germans had this,’ he said.8
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