All Hell Let Loose (88 page)

The D-Day battle cost only 3,000 British, American and Canadian dead, a negligible price for a decisive strategic achievement. The people of Normandy, however, suffered terribly for their liberation, losing as many dead on 6 June as the invaders. Allied soldiers shocked local people by their contempt for civilian property; a Civil Affairs unit noted in Ouistreham: ‘Looting by troops pretty general. British prestige has fallen here today.’ Similarly, a Frenchwoman described the ransacking of her home in Colombières by Canadians: ‘It was an onslaught throughout the village. With wheelbarrows and trucks, the men stole, pillaged, sacked everything … There were disputes about who got what. They snatched clothing, boots, provision, even money from our strongbox. My father was unable to stop them. The furniture disappeared; they even stole my sewing machine.’ Looting remained a universal practice among Eisenhower’s armies throughout the campaign, almost unchecked by commanders. Meanwhile, Allied bombs and shells killed some 20,000 people in north-west France during the bitter attritional fighting that now began.

Eisenhower and his generals had always recognised that the ‘battle of the build-up’ in the weeks following D-Day would be as critical as the landings: if the Germans could concentrate forces in Normandy more swiftly than the Allies, the invaders might still be evicted – as Hitler hoped and demanded. Deception planners made a vital contribution, by their brilliantly sophisticated Operation
Fortitude
, which convinced the Germans of a continuing threat to the Pas de Calais, where important forces lingered for weeks. But, though Allied air force destruction of rail links and road bridges slowed the arrival of reinforcements, throughout June and July new formations rolled into Normandy, to be hurled piecemeal into the cauldron. The eleven-week campaign became by far the most costly of the western war, and Normandy the only battlefield where casualty rates at times briefly matched those of the Eastern Front. Though D-Day had huge symbolic significance and commands the fascination of posterity, the fighting that followed was much bloodier: for instance, while D Company of the British Ox & Bucks regiment triumphantly seized ‘Pegasus bridge’ across the Caen canal early on 6 June for the loss of only two killed and fourteen wounded, next day it suffered sixty casualties in an inconclusive little action at Escoville.

Montgomery had declared ambitious initial objectives for the British on the eastern flank, including seizure of the city of Caen. Unsurprisingly, however, momentum was lost on 6 June, as troops advancing inland from the beaches were delayed by a maze of German strongpoints and hastily deployed blocking forces. During the succeeding days, dogged fighting consolidated the beachhead and gained some ground, but German formations, notably including 12th SS Panzer Division, prevented a decisive breakthrough. Again and again British troops pushed forward, only to be checked by enemy tanks and infantry fighting with their accustomed energy.

‘The attack entailed crossing about one thousand yards of open cornfield which fell away from Cambes Wood,’ wrote an officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. ‘We had barely crossed the start-line when the enemy reacted fiercely, with well-sited machine-guns and intense mortar fire which enfiladed the companies as they moved forward. It was a situation almost reminiscent of some First World War battlefield … We could see the tracer bullets flicking off the corn.’ Private Robert Macduff of the Wiltshires said: ‘One of the scenes which will live forever in mind is the arms and legs on the roadside covered in maggots. The smell was vile. Someone had been killed, someone had gone forever … There but for the grace of God go I.’ Brigadier Frank Richardson, one of Montgomery’s ablest staff officers, wrote afterwards of the Germans, whom he admired boundlessly: ‘I have often wondered how we ever beat them.’

But the Wehrmacht was also capable of extraordinary blunders, and made many in Normandy, especially before its commanders grasped the significance of the Allies’ power to punish daylight movement. ‘Here we encountered one of the most terrible images of the war,’ wrote a German NCO near Brouay on 8 June. ‘The enemy had virtually cut to pieces units of the Panzer Lehr Division with heavy weapons. [Half-tracks] and equipment had been ripped apart; next to them on the ground, and even hanging in the trees, were body parts of dead comrades. A terrible silence covered all.’ On 9 June a dozen Panthers of 12th SS Panzer Division launched a reckless headlong charge against Canadians emplaced at Bretteville. SS sergeant Morawetz described what followed:

Within minutes seven Panthers were destroyed by anti-tank guns; their commander returned from receiving treatment for wounds inflicted in an earlier action to find his regiment sorely depleted. He was exasperated by the attack’s futility: ‘I could have cried with rage and sorrow.’

The Americans fought a series of hard battles to secure the Cherbourg peninsula, where the small fields, steep banks and dense hedges of the
bocage
country enabled the defenders to inflict heavy losses for every small gain. ‘We had to dig them out,’ said a US infantry officer. ‘It was a slow and cautious business, and there was nothing dashing about it. Our men didn’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges … They did at first, but they learned better. They went in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They crept a few yards, squatted, waited, then crept again.’ Soldiers of the US airborne divisions, who had expected to be withdrawn from combat after D-Day to prepare for another assault, instead fought on in Normandy for five weeks; they displayed an energy and commitment lacking in some infantry formations, and made a vital contribution. An operational report from the US First Army highlighted ‘the urgent need for the development of an aggressive spirit in the infantry soldier … Many units do not acquire this attitude until long after their entry into combat and some never acquire it. On the other hand units containing specially selected personnel such as Airborne and Rangers exhibited an aggressive spirit from the start.’

Whenever the Germans attempted to attack, they were devastated by artillery, fighter-bombers and anti-tank guns; but the strategic imperative to advance rested upon the Allies. The British lost vast numbers of tanks in a series of unsuccessful attempts to break through to Caen and beyond. Local successes were often undone by enemy counter-attacks. ‘We were essentially defensive and the Germans essentially both attacking by nature and also fighting for their existence,’ wrote Major Anthony Kershaw. ‘We are not very dashing soldiers and the English cavalry has never been very good.’ Allied infantry assaults were unimaginative, coordination with armour poor.

Mass, generalship and the institutional effectiveness of armies chiefly influence battlefield outcomes, and so they did in Normandy. But the quality of rival weapons systems, especially tanks, also played an important role. The British and US armies had excellent artillery. The Americans equipped their infantry with a good automatic rifle, the M1 Garand, but a poor light machine-gun, the BAR. Their 2.36? hand-held ‘bazooka’ anti-tank rocket – named for a weird wind instrument invented by American comic Bob Burns – lacked adequate penetration. The British Army boasted a reliable rifle, the .303 Mk IV single-shot Lee-Enfield, and the much-loved Bren light machine-gun.

The Germans had better weapons; in particular, they could generate extraordinary violence with their belt-fed MG42 machine-gun, known to the Allies as the ‘spandau’, of which some 750,000 were produced. On the battlefield, the MG42’s rasping 1,200-rpm rate of fire sounded far more lethal than the slow hammer of the Bren’s or BAR’s 500 rpm. The British and Americans also had Vickers and Browning heavy machine-guns, but the MG42, easily manufactured and capable of changing barrels in five seconds, was a key factor in the German army’s tactical performance. So too was the panzerfaust hand-held anti-tank projector: deadly at close range – much more so than the US bazooka or British PIAT – and produced at the rate of 200,000 a month, the Faust played an important part in checking Allied armour in 1944–45, when the Wehrmacht was short of anti-tank guns. The 88mm dual-purpose gun and nebelwerfer multi-barrelled mortar were also used to formidable effect.

All the European armies had sub-machine-guns for close-quarter fighting. The British 9mm Sten was an adequate weapon produced in millions at a cost which fell to under £3. The US Army’s .45 Thompson was valued for its reliability, but cost £50 apiece to manufacture. Most American units in 1944–45 used the cheaper and simpler M3 ‘grease gun’. Allied soldiers were envious of the German MP38 and MP40 machine-pistols. They called these Schmeissers, though that designer had nothing to do with their creation – they were made at the works of Berthold Geipel. Towards the end of the war, the Germans also acquired small numbers of an excellent assault rifle, the MP43, forerunner of a generation of European infantry weapons thereafter.

But the Allies’ most serious problem was the inferiority of their tanks: numerical advantage counted for little when British and American shells often bounced off well-armoured German Panthers and Tigers, while a hit on a Sherman, Churchill or Cromwell was almost invariably fatal. ‘A sheet of flame licked over the turret and my mouth was full of grit and burnt paint,’ wrote a shocked British tank officer after his Cromwell was hit by an 88mm shell from a Tiger. ‘“Bail out,” I yelled and leaped clear … There were my crew, hiding under a currant bush, miraculously all safe. Joe, the driver, white and shaking, crouched with drawn revolver. He looked like a cornered rat … The Tiger drove off undamaged, its commander waving his hat and laughing … Our hands shook so much that we could hardly light our cigarettes.’ Though Allied tanks were infinitely replaceable, it is hard to overstate the impact of German tank superiority on the morale of Allied units. Captain Charles Farrell wrote: ‘There was, I think, no British tank commander who would not happily have surrendered his “fringe benefits” for a tank in the same class as the German Panther or Tiger.’

‘We were all rather frightened,’ wrote a British tank officer about a night spent on the Bourgebus ridge during one of the most bitter armoured clashes, ‘and two men from my troop corporal’s tank came up and said they would rather face a court-martial than go on. I explained that we all felt much the same but were not given the option.’ Two days later, when one of this officer’s tanks was hit, the crew bailed out. ‘I never saw the gunner and wireless operator again. They were cases for the psychiatrist and the M.O. sent them away. Those fellows had been in nearly every battle the regiment fought, and each had bailed out at least twelve times before.’

Peter Hennessy was ordered to investigate the fate of another tank of his Sherman squadron which had halted immobile a few yards ahead. His driver dismounted, clambered up the hull, glanced into the turret and ran hastily back. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘they’re all dead in there. What a bloody mess.’ An 88mm round had ricocheted around the interior, killing the entire turret crew and terminating in the co-driver’s back. A few moments later a shocked and emotional figure lifted the driver’s hatch of the stricken tank and emerged, the sole survivor.

Formations which had previously served in the Mediterranean were not the only ones to find the conflict in France a ghastly experience: some men who had never before seen action recoiled from this ferocious initiation. ‘There were a lot of problems in Normandy and some of the units of the British Army, bluntly, were not in very good shape,’ wrote Lt. Michael Kerr. ‘[They] had had many years in Britain before going into battle.’ Some green units seemed slow to treat their task with the absolute commitment necessary: a Waffen SS officer was baffled to observe British infantry advancing behind their tanks on 18 June, ‘strolling, hands in pockets, rifles slung on their shoulders, cigarettes between their lips’.

Lt. Tony Finucane felt that the doctrine of reliance upon artillery and air support corroded proper infantry spirit. His own unit advanced, he said, ‘knowing that with the first burst of spandau everyone would go to ground and that would be it for the day. So much for dash, verve and pursuit – those who tried such antics were usually caught by our own 25-pdrs.’ Finucane believed responsibility for many of the problems properly rested with senior officers at brigade and divisional level, some of whom had no more experience of battle than did their men. ‘It was not necessarily the training of the army in UK which was wrong. Rather was it that many senior officers were inexperienced and may have viewed themselves as “above” training.’

It is hard to exaggerate the strain imposed upon every man by responsibility to join the spearhead of an attack. Ken Tout described the laborious progress of a typical armoured advance: ‘The front tanks are venturing slowly and agonisingly towards the first blank, savage corners. Their caution filters slowly back along the column, dictating a snail’s pace … The morning drags slowly by, the sluggish progress of the clock accentuated by our jolting, ten-yards-at-a time advance as we wriggle about in our tight coops, like battery hens, trying to restore circulation in legs, buttocks and shoulders.’ A Lancers officer edged his Sherman forward into a wood, ordering his squadron to follow him. The commander of the next tank forgot to switch off his set before speaking into the intercom, and thus the entire unit heard him order, ‘Driver left, driver left.’ The reply came, ‘But he’s gone right, sergeant.’ The tank commander said, ‘I know bloody well he’s gone right, but I’m not following that f—ing c—t, it’s too f—ing dangerous.’