The OKW rejected this plan out of hand, and in so doing they were, as ever, reflecting their Führer’s take on the matter. Hitler wanted to play for time; he planned to prepare the next line of defence protecting Germany’s western borders. The old Siegfried Line, or West Wall, had been neglected, but work on it was now furiously under way. Hitler reckoned he needed between six and ten weeks, however, to get it ready. The Allies, he surmised, would need ports, so these were to be defended to the last round and the last man, and for as long as possible, tying down Allied forces and denying them the port facilities in the process. In fact, the Allies had already thought of that in Brittany. SHAEF had expected the retreating Germans to wreck harbour installations and so planned to create a new harbour themselves on the Quiberon Peninsula in southern Brittany. Meanwhile, huge amounts of materiel were coming ashore at Mulberry B, and continuing to arrive in landing craft and landing ships on the beaches of Normandy. The Allies had so far conducted the entire campaign without a previously established port.
To von Kluge, this insistence on holding the ‘fortresses’ meant only one thing: the inevitable loss of between 180,000 and 280,000 men, as well as equipment. Since there was to be no withdrawal behind the Seine, the only alternative was some frantic attempts to plug the gaps in the dam. II. SS-Panzerkorps was pulled out of the Odon Valley and was due to be handed over to 7. Armee, but then the British attacked southwards with their BLUECOAT offensive and so they were turned instead to stem the flow of that. Now the south of Caen was vulnerable, with 12. SS the only panzer division in the area and the gap in the line filled with infantry units from 15. Armee. And, of course, all these movements of divisions had to be done at night and in the most difficult possible circumstances.
And then came the bombshell. On 2 August, a directive from Hitler reached von Kluge ordering him to counter-attack towards Avranches, for although all his forces in Normandy were already committed, six infantry and one further panzer division were now all heading to Normandy from both the Pas de Calais and southern France. Whether they would get there in time was a moot point, but it seemed likely that three infantry divisions would be reaching the front within the next few days.
On 3 August, General Walter Warlimont, the head of planning at the OKW, arrived at the front. Again, Eberbach suggested a retreat to the Seine was the only possible course of action, but Warlimont told him that was ‘politically unbearable and tactically impractical.’8 Von Kluge, like Eberbach, told Warlimont there was absolutely no chance of this counter-thrust being successful, especially not with the Allied control of the air. But this fell on deaf ears. Hitler’s perspective was not entirely without logic; after all, the Normandy front was shorter than the Seine, and the river was hardly an ideal defensive line. On the other hand, events were moving very fast, the situation was changing almost by the hour not just the day, and already, by 4 August, that front line in Normandy was rapidly extending southwards and in danger of spreading east like a pool of blood under a man who has been fatally shot. On 4 August, it was still possible to retreat to the Seine using the Caen area as a pivot. Within another day, maybe two, or three at most, it might not be.
If ever there was an example of bad decisions being made far from the front on the evidence of a two-dimensional map rather than taking on board what was happening on the ground – and, more importantly, in the air – then this was it. With von Kluge doubling up as commander of both Heeresgruppe B and OB West, Hitler had now effectively assumed the latter role. Post-bomb-plot, he mistrusted his Wehrmacht generals even more and his insistence on micro-managing had worsened. His mind was made up: von Kluge was to assemble an armoured force using eight of the nine panzer divisions now in Normandy and strike west towards Avranches, supported by a thousand fighters, the Luftwaffe’s entire reserve. It was to be called Operation LÜTTICH.
Meanwhile, Patton’s forces were sweeping through Brittany. Rennes was encircled by 4th Armored Division on 3 August, but it was recognized that some infantry was needed to help them actually get into the town and that was to come from the 8th Division. That same day, Lieutenant Richard Blackburn and his company paused for a rest in the pouring rain, but he managed to find a shed with some straw and get his head down in the dry for a change. He was exhausted; they all were. Over the past few days they had passed through Coutances, Granville and Avranches, following a trail of destruction that he found profoundly depressing. Once he saw a dead cow hanging in the fork of a tree about a hundred feet up. Another time he passed a knocked-out German tank with a crewman hanging half out but burned to a crisp. They also travelled through the wreckage of the Roncey encirclement, past scores of dead and smashed vehicles. One wounded horse was still alive, kicking and struggling, so he took out his pistol and put it out of its misery. Then there was the German soldier he saw running for dear life, but who then suddenly lost his footing and tripped. A moment later he was crushed by a tank. Subsequent tanks went over him too until there was nothing left but flattened pulp. ‘Events like these left me feeling like a limp, wet rag,’ noted Blackburn.9 ‘Seeing human bodies mutilated beyond belief left a huge scar on my memory.’
The following day, Friday, 4 August, half of the 8th were sent to clear Rennes, while the rest, including the 121st Infantry, paused before turning towards Saint-Malo, the weak hinge that so troubled Bradley and Middleton. To the relief of all the men, however, and not least Lieutenant Blackburn, a mobile shower unit had been brought up, along with fresh, clean uniforms. Blackburn threw away his old set – he had been wearing them solidly for a month.
By the beginning of August, First Army had also driven deep to the south, with General Joe Collins’s VII Corps striking towards the small town of Brécy. Orders that day from General Hodges, the new First Army commander, directed his men to wheel towards the south-east. The Big Red One, and specifically Tom Bowles and the 18th Infantry Combat Team, had just taken Villedieu, and Collins now urged the men of the 1st Division to push on towards the town of Mortain, some 14 miles south of Vire. On 3 August Collins met Major-General Clarence Huebner, the 1st Division commander, at a crossroads south of Brécy and pointed to a feature on his map, Hill 317, which dominated the surrounding countryside.
‘Ralph,’ Collins told him, ‘be sure to take Hill 317.’10
‘Joe, I’ve already got it,’ Huebner replied, grinning.
The following day a gap was developing between VII Corps and XV Corps on their right, so Collins ordered the Big Red One to push south and fill the hole, while 30th Division was brought in to take over the Mortain area. This left 9th Division now on their left near the village of Saint-Pois and the 29th Division immediately on their left to the north at Vire, converging on the town with the British striking from the north as part of BLUECOAT. The 116th Infantry were clearing the hills around the town, having taken the village of Moyen on 1 August.
A few days later, on 6 August, it was the 1st Battalion’s task to take Hill 203, and Sergeant Bob Slaughter had a feeling it was going to prove a tough one to crack. As they jumped off that morning, they immediately came under mortar and shell fire and then, to make matters worse, Company D realized they had to get over a crossroads where German artillery had clearly already zeroed their guns. The men had to calculate how long it took between salvoes then make a dash for it, but the trouble was, they were carrying heavy equipment such as machine guns and mortars; running with this was no easy matter. Sergeant Crawley timed his sprint well and made it across, only to get hit in the thigh by shrapnel some 50 yards further on. Bob Slaughter then got across but paused to help his buddy, who was already losing considerable amounts of blood. Having tied a tourniquet and given him a shot of morphine, Slaughter then hurried to join the rest of the platoon as they picked their way down beside a rocky stream. Hill 203 lay just up ahead. When he finally caught up with the rest of the men, he was out of breath and didn’t hear the swish-sh-sh of the mortar bomb coming in until it was too late. Landing some 8 feet behind them, it killed one man and wou
nded two others, including Slaughter, who felt a red-hot fragment hit him just above his right kidney. To begin with it didn’t hurt too badly, but he was struggling to stand. A lieutenant helped patch him up, but by then Slaughter was in difficulties. Crawling to the safety of some rocks near the bed of the little stream, he remained there until eventually, at dusk, a corpsman arrived in a Jeep, patched him up, put him on a stretcher on the bonnet and took him back to the 45th Evacuation Hospital. Bob Slaughter’s time in the Normandy firing line was over.
For Operation LÜTTICH, von Kluge had managed to assemble only four panzer divisions, not eight, along with the remnants of 17. SS. This force was to be commanded by General Hans Freiherr von Funck, who had recently arrived in Normandy to lead one of the new formations coming into the battle, XLVII. Panzerkorps. He was a competent, highly experienced panzer commander, although not much liked by his peers, and it would have made more sense for Eberbach to command the attack as he had been in Normandy for over a month and knew the ground; also, the men involved had all been in Panzergruppe West, now renamed 5. Panzerarmee. In fact, four hours before LÜTTICH was due to begin, Hitler ordered Eberbach to take over from Funck, although it was far too late to insist upon such changes of command. Perhaps, though, since it was doomed to failure, who was in charge was, frankly, neither here nor there.
Throughout the Normandy campaign, the moment German troops assaulted they tended to be absolutely hammered as the full weight of Allied fire-power rained down upon them. The danger to the Allies had always been a coordinated full-strength counter-thrust by multiple panzer divisions bristling with weaponry and fresh, gung-ho troops, but that danger had long ago passed as these elite Wehrmacht and SS divisions had been ground down. The only one of Funck’s divisions that was in good shape was the newly arrived 116. Panzer, but its commander had been so pessimistic about the operation he had not even got his regiments ready in time. In all, Funck had around 300 tanks for this attack, although because of the usual difficulties of moving troops and the excessively complicated switch around of various units on narrow roads, watched constantly through daylight hours by the Jabos, the support tail for LÜTTICH was nothing like sufficient.
While it was true that they were at long last out of range of Allied naval guns, there were now many more Allied air forces operating over Normandy and, with improved weather, the movement of the LÜTTICH force, kicking up dust, made them an obvious target, even though the operation was launched amid heavy ground mists in the early hours of Monday, 7 August. Even worse for the Germans was the fact that Bradley knew the assault was coming. Given Ultra clearance, he was able to see decrypts of German Enigma-coded radio traffic decoded at Bletchley Park throughout 5 August, revealing troop movements that seemed to indicate the Germans were planning some kind of counter-attack. By 2 p.m. on the 6th, it was revealed they would be attacking westwards, with further details of the attacking force just before 8 p.m. Another decrypt at eleven minutes past midnight on 7 August was passed on to Bradley, reporting a German attack towards Mortain. As a consequence of this invaluable information, Bradley had brought up several divisions in case a crisis developed, including Third Army’s XX Corps. None the less, Mortain was swiftly overrun by 2. SS, although the key piece of high ground, Hill 317, was not. Here, the men of 2nd Battalion of the 120th Infantry Regiment, part of the American 30th Division, had dug in and could not be budged despite a hellish rain of fire.
In the afternoon, as the mists began to clear, 2. Panzer joined in, striking further to the north. The Luftwaffe had been ordered to support LÜTTICH with a maximum effort. The thousand fighters Hitler had earmarked did not materialize, although several hundred took off from forward airfields around Paris. Some did get through to harass American lines of supply, but these were few and far between. Most were pounced upon before they had even taken off, while many of the rest were forced away by marauding Allied fighters some way short of the Mortain area. ‘In fact,’ said Generalmajor Rudolf-Christoph Freiherr von Gersdorff, Pemsel’s replacement as chief of staff at 7. Armee, ‘not a single German airplane reached the ordered operational area.’11
Major Dick Turner and his fighter squadron of Mustangs had had a fruitless mission in the morning, but in the afternoon were sent up a second time to scout for German airfields and any sign of the Luftwaffe around their known landing grounds in the Paris area. ‘We had hit the regular airfields used by the Germans so much,’ noted Turner, ‘they were abandoning them for open fields, highways or almost any level area close to forests which would provide camouflage.’12 After circling over Chartres, he led them east and, after a short while, spotted something down below in a large field bordered on two sides by woods. Diving down to 3,000 feet, he saw wheat sheaves in the fields but could also make out the familiar shape of Me109s underneath. Telling the rest of the squadron of his discovery, he made a pass on one of the 109s, opening fire as he did so, and was pleased to see strikes and then the aircraft explode and burn. ‘For the next five minutes,’ wrote Turner, ‘we gave the concealed airdrome a good working over.’13
Turner didn’t spot any ground fire, but one of his men was hit all the same, although he managed to nurse his P-51 most of the way back and then bailed out over an American tank formation, who gave him a ride; he was back at their airfield later that day. On that sweep alone, Turner reckoned he and his squadron destroyed at least nineteen Messerschmitts on the ground. It had been a good haul, and while they had been shooting up Luftwaffe airfields, Thunderbolts and Typhoons, including the P-47s of the 388th Hell Hawks, had been attacking the leading panzer units as they tried to advance, unhindered by the threat of the Luftwaffe, peeling off and diving repeatedly on to the armoured columns, dropping bombs, firing rockets and hammering them with cannons and machine guns. ‘The absolute air supremacy of the Allies,’ noted Gersdorff, ‘made any further movement by the attack units impossible.’14 Already by noon, 1. SS-Panzer had stopped short of Juvigny-le-Tertre, some 16 miles east of Avranches, because of the loss of tanks and the impossibility of advancing under the weight of Jabos hammering them. Around 1 p.m., they were forced to pull off the roads and take cover.
Everywhere, the German advance was faltering under the weight of aggressive counter-attacks by the Americans and continued attacks from the air. By evening 7. Armee was repeatedly asking von Kluge for a decision about what they should do: continue attacking until they were annihilated, or withdraw and pull back? The answer eventually arrived at around 10 p.m., and came via Hitler and the OKW. They were to keep attacking and 12. and 10. SS were to be moved in support of them.
By then, however, 12. SS was already embroiled in another battle to the south of Caen. The endgame was beginning to be played out in Normandy. Almost surrounded, the German forces in Normandy now faced not only defeat but annihilation.
CHAPTER 34
Tank Battle at Saint-Aignan
On 7 August, the British prime minister visited the front and made a point of seeing General Bradley. ‘I came to tell you,’ Churchill said as he greeted him, ‘how magnificently we believe you are doing.’1 It was gracious of him and his praise entirely justified; it was precisely the kind of gesture that did much to further Allied relations. The PM charmed them all with his enthusiastic interest and grasp of the situation. ‘Good God,’ he said, looking at the mass of divisions now plotted on his map, ‘how do you feed them?’ Bradley laughed and explained they had cleared two roads south and that these were used twenty-four hours of every day in supplying the front.
Operation ANVIL, now renamed DRAGOON, was about to be launched in the south of France; Eisenhower had insisted on it and had got his way, although such was the emerging success in northern France that Churchill still wondered whether it was worth the effort. ‘Why break down the back door,’ he said to Bradley, ‘when the front is already opened by the American Army?’2 There was also a brief discussion about the German counter-attack, but Hansen, observing these conversations, noted that no one was very worried about it.
Nor did they need to be. LÜTTICH was merely serving to hasten the end in Normandy, not extend the campaign as Hitler hoped.
There was a noted feeling in Normandy that the British and Canadians weren’t doing as well as the Americans – something that reflected the attitude to Montgomery rather than to the British and Canadian troops under his charge. Yet whatever antipathy there might have been towards this unquestionably difficult fellow, actually the British and Canadians had done considerably better than the advances on the map suggested. In two months they had ground down seven of Germany’s very finest divisions to the point of collapse, pushing them back bit by bit and learning important lessons as they went along. No other force in the entire war to date had achieved that against such a concentration of armour and with only three armoured divisions of their own. Their efforts should in no way be belittled.
The plan now, however, was to finish the job by finally striking south to Falaise, a task given to Canadian First Army, and more specifically II Corps, under General Guy Simonds, who after the setback of Operation SPRING was keen to prove his mettle and that of his men. Simonds was just forty-one and, although he had been born in England, his parents had moved to Canada when he was still a young boy. From a long line of generals and East India Company men, the military was very much in his blood. A gunner, he had attended staff colleges in England and Canada and, despite SPRING, was highly rated by Montgomery. Bright, imaginative and an innovator, he was certainly not a man to rest on any laurels but instead was constantly striving for tactical improvements, which was very much to his credit. Lean, with dark eyes and a trim moustache, Simonds cut rather a dashing figure. For Operation TOTALIZE, as the push for Falaise was named, Simonds wanted to try something different.
Normandy '44 Page 64
