The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (18 page)

Twenty-five miles to the west, the self-described “Unhappy Warrior” from Indiana also pondered the imponderables. Ernie Pyle had come ashore on Omaha early Wednesday, as Bradley’s aide wrote, “looking helpless and insignificant … shading his emotions as he always does.” For several hours he combed the high-water line, compiling an inventory:

Socks and shoe polish, sewing kits, diaries, Bibles, hand grenades. Here are the latest letters from home, with the address on each one neatly razored out—one of the security precautions enforced before the boys embarked. Here are toothbrushes and razors, and snapshots of families staring up at you from the sand. Here are pocketbooks, metal mirrors, extra trousers, and bloody, abandoned shoes.… I picked up a pocket Bible with a soldier’s name in it, and put it in my jacket. I carried it half a mile or so and then put it back down on the beach. I don’t know why.

Pistol belts, canvas water buckets, stationery on which love letters would never be written, oranges, a tennis racket still clamped in its press with “not a string broken”—all formed what Pyle called “this long thin line of personal anguish.” He returned to
LST-353
for the night and more nightmares, looking “very tired and very sad,” an officer noted. To another reporter, Pyle confessed, “I become less used to it as the years go by.”

A Gunman’s World

E
NEMY
soldiers by the tens of thousands converged on Normandy, sweating through their field-gray blouses and black tunics, singing sentimental ballads of the kind beloved by German armies on the march since the Seven Years’ War. By train and by truck they surged west and north, on foot and on bicycle and in ancient French buses upholstered with tree boughs. Dray carts, wagons, and horse-drawn caissons followed in snaking processions moving at a slow clop.

There was not a moment to lose, as Rommel repeatedly urged, yet moments, minutes, hours, and days were lost to disorder, indecision, and marauding Allied airplanes. Traveling by five dusty routes from Chartres, a hundred miles east of the invasion zone, the fifteen-thousand-man Panzer Lehr Division had been harassed from above since Tuesday evening. The burning town of Argentan was described by a German officer as a “fiery cage,” with streets blocked by flaming debris and “bombers hovering above the roads.” Ordered to travel by daylight on June 7 and averaging only six miles per hour—a third of the usual march speed—the division commander reported losses of forty fuel trucks, ninety other lorries, five tanks, and eighty-four half-tracks and self-propelled guns. Not until June 9 would Panzer Lehr join the battle in earnest, piecemeal and already wounded.

Half a dozen flak battalions moving toward the beachhead were mauled, suffering two hundred casualties before firing a shot. No anabasis would be more infamous than that of the 2nd SS Panzer Division, known as Das Reich, ordered north from Toulouse on June 7. To move a German tank division typically required at least sixty trains, but the only surviving rail bridge over the Loire proved so fragile that boxcars were nudged across one at a time. Das Reich matériel and troops traveling by rail would take seventeen days to cover 450 miles, normally a three-day journey.

Troops aboard the division’s trucks moved somewhat faster, even as they were diverted for killing sprees against the maquis of the French Resistance. In Tulle, west of Lyon, ninety-nine men randomly chosen in reprisal for several SS deaths were told by the local abbé, “My friends, you are going to appear before God.” They were hanged from lampposts and balconies, their bodies tossed into the town dump. On June 10 SS troops drove into Oradour-sur-Glane, a village bustling with farmworkers and children receiving vaccinations; the town crier beat his drum to summon one and all to a central square. Women and children were herded into a church, which was set ablaze with grenades and gunfire. Howling soldiers then shot dead the men in barns and garages before burning the town with straw, brush, and saddlery as kindling. More than 640 innocents died in Oradour. Das Reich, as an official British historian wrote, had “carved out for itself a private niche in the book of iniquity.”

Evil also shadowed the 12th SS Panzer Division, crawling the seventy miles from Évreux to the coast at four miles per hour. Nicknamed Hitlerjugend—Hitler Youth—and composed of teenage fanatics led by Eastern Front veterans, the division’s Panther tank battalion arrived near Caen on June 7 too low on fuel to give battle. That fell to the accompanying panzer grenadier regiment, led by Colonel Kurt Meyer, a broad-shouldered former miner and policeman who had joined the Nazi Party in 1930 at age nineteen. Highly decorated in Poland, Greece, and Russia, a motorcycle daredevil who had broken nineteen bones in various spills, “Panzermeyer” had been known to encourage timid troops to advance by tossing live hand grenades behind them. Climbing a spiral staircase in a corner turret of the twelfth-century Abbaye d’Ardenne, two miles northwest of Caen, Meyer on Wednesday afternoon spied Canadian troops from Juno Beach tramping south through the wheat fields and apple trees to nearby Authie.

Like hornets the grenadiers swarmed across almost a mile of open ground before naval guns and field artillery could range them; Canadian forward observers were trapped in traffic near the beach. Orange sheets of gunfire ripped through the North Nova Scotia Highlanders, and at 5:30
P.M.
a white flare signaled German possession of Authie. Survivors scuttled away under a drifting loom of battle smoke while panzer crews rooted through twenty-one demolished Canadian tanks for chocolate, peanuts, and corned beef.

Belated salvos from the warships offshore and an armored counterattack took a toll on Meyer’s men, who would lose more than thirty panzers on Wednesday. But the Canadians had been smacked back more than two miles, losing ground not to be recouped for a month. “Mortar and artillery fire almost continuous day and night. Noise so great we can only communicate with hand signals,” a Cameron Highlander recorded. “No one dares to stand up, we crawl.” Artillery spotters in trees or on roofs “last a couple days, couple hours, couple minutes.” Platoons nipped from jugs of Jamaican rum while officers fortified themselves with gin or Teacher’s Highland Cream. Caen burned, still in German hands.

Yet Panzermeyer lacked the strength to exploit his winnings. By nightfall, his troops remained six miles from the sea, and more than one hundred SS casualties in Authie made his regiment splenetic. The first murder may have been that of a wounded Canadian private, bayoneted by an SS trooper who shouted curses at his victim as he impaled him. Eight more prisoners were told to remove their helmets in Authie, then shot. Their bodies were dragged into the road and crushed beneath tank tracks; a French villager collected the remains with a shovel. Six others were frog-marched through a kitchen and shot in the head. The Sherbrooke Fusiliers chaplain was stabbed through the heart.

Other Canadian prisoners were herded to the Abbaye d’Ardenne. “Why do you bring prisoners to the rear? They only eat up our rations,” Meyer was quoted as saying. “In the future no more prisoners are to be taken.” Prisoners surrendered their paybooks, then were bludgeoned to death or dispatched by a bullet to the brain. On Thursday, June 8, the killings continued. Summoned one by one from a stable used as a jail, each condemned man shook hands with his mates before trudging up a flight of stairs and turning left into the pretty garden, where he was shot. Forty prisoners assembled in a field near the Caen–Bayeux road were ordered to sit facing east; SS troops brandishing Schmeisser machine pistols advanced in a skirmish line and opened fire, killing nearly three dozen. Several who bolted were soon recaptured and sent to prison camps. Now known as the Murder Division, the 12th SS Panzer would be accused of killing 156 defenseless men, nearly all Canadian, in little more than a week, igniting a cycle of atrocity and reprisal that persisted all summer. “Any German who tries to surrender nowadays is a brave man,” said a Scottish soldier. “We just shoot them there and then, with their hands up.” A British platoon commander jotted down his daily orders with a closing notation, “NPT below rank major”: no prisoners to be taken below the rank of major.

Canadian battle casualties approached three thousand during the first week of
OVERLORD
, with more than a thousand dead. A witticism inspired by hard experience in Italy held that if “fuck” and “frontal” were removed from the military vocabulary, the Canadian army would have been both speechless and unable to attack. In less than five years that expeditionary army had expanded to more than fiftyfold its prewar strength but still evidenced little professional depth.

Yet the Canadian 3rd Division, carrying more than double its usual artillery complement, now displayed mettle in a battle described by one corporal as “just a straight shootout, both sides blasting at each other day and night.… They went at it like hockey players.” Beaten back by firepower, the Hitlerjugend found the success at Authie impossible to replicate, even when reinforced by the 21st Panzer and Panzer Lehr Divisions. Clumsy, improvised attacks by the Murder Division were repelled with great gusts of howitzer, tank, and antitank fire; at noon on June 9, a single Sherman Firefly destroyed five Panthers with five 17-pounder antitank rounds. “I could have screamed from rage and grief,” an SS officer wrote. Demonstrating the enduring utility of the fricative, a Canadian artillery commander later commented, “The Germans thought we were fucking Russians. They did stupid things, and we killed those bastards in large numbers.”

*   *   *

Among the bastards watching from Panzermeyer’s perch in the Abbaye turret on June 9 was General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of the Führer’s armored reserve, Panzer Group West. A tall, cosmopolitan cavalryman who had previously served as Germany’s military attaché in London, Brussels, and the Hague, Geyr more than most had embraced the Napoleonic
S’engager, puis voir.
Having dutifully engaged and then seen as Allied planes and artillery chewed up SS formations, he muttered, “My dear Meyer, the war can only now be won through political means.” The next evening, after conferring with Rommel, Geyr postponed an attack against British troops north of Caen and ordered his tanks to regroup.

A few minutes later, at 8:30
P.M.
, Geyr stepped outside his château command post in La Caine, twelve miles southwest of Caen. Trailers, tents, and four large radio trucks filled an adjacent orchard; the destruction of phone lines across Normandy had forced German commanders to rely increasingly on the radio, despite the vulnerability of transmissions to decryption or direction finding. British eavesdroppers alone now intercepted seventeen thousand messages a day, including detailed information on supply levels and troop movements. Twice that morning, in fact, Ultra decrypts had identified La Caine as the Panzer Group West headquarters. The second intercept pinpointed the location precisely.

Geyr now cocked an ear to the drone of approaching aircraft. Other officers joined their commander, raking the heavens with field glasses as the sound grew louder. Suddenly, forty Typhoons from the RAF Second Tactical Air Force roared over the treetops in three waves, spitting rockets. Moments later, seventy-one Mitchell bombers pummeled the orchard with 436 500-pound bombs, turning La Caine into an inferno.

Geyr escaped with minor wounds, but the headquarters had been disemboweled. His chief of staff and more than thirty others were dead, the entire operations staff wiped out, the signal equipment wrecked. Those killed were interred in a bomb crater beneath a huge cross of polished oak, adorned with a swastika and an eagle. Geyr and other survivors fled to Paris for a fortnight’s recuperation, crippling the armored strike force in Normandy.

Similar decapitations further impaired German battle leadership. Several days later, a British battleship shell exploded in the branches of a shade tree in the Odon River valley, instantly killing the 12th SS Panzer Division commanding general with a steel splinter through the face; Kurt Meyer would succeed him as leader of the Murder Division. Three other division commanders and a corps commander, General Erich Marcks, also were killed by mid-June. Slender and ascetic—he had banned whipped cream from his mess “as long as our country is starving”—Marcks had been disfigured in World War I, losing an eye, a leg, and the use of his right hand. In this war he had lost two sons. Now he lost all. Cautioned against driving in daylight, Marcks told a staff officer, “You people are always worried about your little piece of life.” His wooden leg kept him from scrambling into a ditch when the staff car was strafed near Carentan on June 12. Marcks and the others were among 675 World War II German generals to die, including 223 killed in action, 64 suicides, and 53 who were executed, either by the Reich or by the Allies postwar.

“The Seventh Army is everywhere forced on the defensive,” the OB West war diary recorded on June 10. Field Marshal von Rundstedt the same day ordered the “thorough destruction of Cherbourg harbor to begin forthwith,” a scorched-earth decree intercepted by Ultra. Before leaving for Paris, Geyr recommended converting one-third of all panzers to antiaircraft gun carriers. Rail traffic had grown so sclerotic that of the 2,300 tons of food, fuel, and ammunition needed daily for Seventh Army, only 400 reached the front. A quartermaster had to borrow fifteen machine guns from the military governor of France for Cherbourg’s defense.

Rommel too was unnerved. In an assessment for Rundstedt written June 10, even before the calamity at Panzer Group West’s headquarters, he described the “paralyzing and destructive effect” of Allied air dominance from an estimated 27,000 sorties each day. (This was nearly triple the actual number.) He also feared another, bigger Allied landing in the Pas de Calais, and warned that the “material equipment of the Americans … is far and away superior.” During a two-hour stroll through the La Roche–Guyon gardens, he told a subordinate that the best solution would be “to stop the war while Germany still held some territory for bargaining.” Hitler disagreed, demanding of Seventh Army that “every man shall fight or fall where he stands.”