Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (41 page)

Every infantryman feared falling victim to a TOT – Time On Target, an artillery shoot carefully synchronized to concentrate the fire of an entire battery or regiment at a precise moment. Major Randall Bryant of the US 9th Division was walking across an orchard near St Lô to a battalion Orders Group, his closest friend, Captain Charles Minton, beside him: ‘Suddenly everything was exploding. There was blood all over me, and a helmet on the ground with a head inside it. It was Minton’s. Three young 2nd lieutenants had just joined us, straight from the beach and Fort Benning. I had told them to sit down and wait to be assigned to companies. They were dead, along with six others killed and 33 wounded in a shoot that lasted only a matter of seconds.’

The ambitions of most men in Normandy were pathetically simple: to survive, to finish the job, and to go home. ‘Everything is okay here,’ wrote Private Verrier to his parents in Stoke Newington on 24 July:

Early in August, John Hein of the US 1st Division came upon three unposted letters written by German soldiers in Normandy. He never knew which unit their authors came from, what rank they held, what fate overtook them. But the densely penned scrawls seem to reflect the equally simple, troubled emotions of all but the fanatical SS, now losing ground in Normandy against appalling odds.

‘It was quite against logic to suppose that you were destined to survive the war,’ wrote Andrew Wilson. ‘All the appearance of things was against it. You saw a pair of boots sticking out from a blanket, and they looked exactly like your own; there was no ground for thinking that the thing that had come to the owner of these boots was not going to come just as casually to you . . . So before going into action he would utter a phrase articulately beneath his breath: “Today I may die.” It was a kind of propitiation; and yet he could never quite believe in it, because that would have defeated its purpose . . .’
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The fall of Caen

By early July, the struggle for Normandy was inflicting almost equal misery upon the German, British and American armies – the first having by far greater cause for it. The defenders knew that their forces were being inexorably ground down, and that they could not hope for tolerable replacements. Many of their difficulties of manpower, armour, supplies and ammunition were known to the Allies through Ultra. Yet it was small comfort to read the Germans’ gloomy signals about their predicament when, on the battlefield, the force and effectiveness of their resistance seemed quite undiminished. Meanwhile, the men of the invading army were growing weary. The summer was slipping away, and the disturbing prospect of autumn weather in the Channel lay ahead. The safe refuge of the Brittany ports still seemed many miles and many battles away. What if FORTITUDE abruptly collapsed, and Rommel brought down powerful reinforcements from Fifteenth Army? What if the German flying bomb campaign, already causing so much alarm in England, intensified and gave way to new and more deadly secret weapons? The problem of infantry casualties, a matter of concern to the Americans, had become a crisis for the British. Sir Ronald Adam, the Adjutant-General, paid a personal visit to Montgomery to warn him about the shortage of replacements. Already battalions had been broken up to fill the ranks of others in the line; now came the possibility that entire divisions might have to be disbanded.

After the excitement of the capture of Cherbourg and the northern Cotentin, on 3 July the American VIII Corps, along with a division from VII Corps, began a new southward offensive in driving rain, mist and low cloud. Within the first days, it became bogged down in the mire of now-familiar difficulties: green formations, and stubborn defensive tactics which destroyed momentum. If British commanders were too slow to sack incompetent subordinates, their American counterparts were almost too swift. Now, there was a new spate of dismissals of divisional and regimental commanders in Bradley’s army. The Americans were to discover in north-west Europe that it was easier to remove officers than to find more effective newcomers to replace them. As the months went by, their enthusiasm for purges declined, and they concluded that it was more profitable to give commanders time to settle down and learn their business than to remove them immediately after their formation’s first failure. Eisenhower wrote to Marshall about the stagnation of First Army’s push south: ‘The going is extremely tough, with three main causes responsible. The first of these, as always, is the fighting quality of the German soldier.’
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The others he identified as the terrain and the weather, which was hampering air support.

Meanwhile, on the eastern flank, Second Army was fighting the tough, slow-moving battle that at last gained its men a large part of the ruins of Caen. For almost a month since the landings, the British and Canadian 3rd Divisions had endured the frustrations of static warfare around Cambes wood, Carpiquet and other landmarks that they first beheld on 6 or 7 June. On the night of 7 July, 450 heavy aircraft of Bomber Command attacked Caen, principally with delayed-action bombs, in an operation designed to clear the way for an assault by I Corps the following morning. Hundreds of thousands of men of Second Army watched in awe as the waves of bombers droned steadily over the city, letting loose their loads and turning away, some bleeding smoke and flame as they slipped from the sky. Amid the rumble of constant explosions from the city, a great pall of smoke and dust rose upwards,
shrouding the houses and factories. The use of the heavy bombers reflected the belief of Montgomery and the Allied high command that they must now resort to desperate measures to pave the way for a ground assault. Afterwards, this action came to be regarded as one of the most futile air attacks of the war. Through no fault of their own, the airmen bombed well back from the forward line to avoid the risk of hitting British troops, and inflicted negligible damage upon the German defences. Only the old city of Caen paid the full price.

About a quarter of the citizens of Caen had departed before the bombers came, urged by both the Germans and the local prefect. Many more remained, fearful for their homes and possessions, and arguing that ‘to evacuate is only to escape Germans to meet other Germans, to avoid bombs and shells to meet other bombs and shells.’
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Nothing had prepared them to expect the devastating rain of explosives from the massed air attack. As the sound of the bombers faded, ‘a great silence fell over the town, broken only by the cries of the wounded and the sound of falling masonry from burning buildings.’
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The
Palais de I’Université
was in flames, the initial fires in its chemistry department having spread in minutes to other parts of the building. Hopeless little groups of firemen struggled to draw water from the Odon, since the mains had been blasted in a hundred places. 38 civilians died in one cellar, 50 were killed and wounded in a single street. The survivors were so terrorized by the destruction around them that, even as the Germans at last began to withdraw through the streets, most inhabitants clung to the shelter of their cellars.

When I Corps jumped off on Operation CHARNWOOD the next morning, the troops were heartened by the memory of the air attack. But they quickly discovered that the Germans were resisting as tenaciously as ever. Meyer’s men of 12th SS Panzer remained the core of the defence, apparently indestructible even though their ranks had been decimated by weeks of heavy fighting without
replacements. Two days of desperate battle cost some British infantry battalions 25 per cent of their strength. They won through to the northern bank of the Orne, in the middle of the utterly desolated city, but could go no further. The Germans still held the critical high ground of the Bourguébus Ridge to the south and, nearer at hand, the steelworks of Colombelles, from which their observation posts could mark every British movement. Too much blood had been shed and too many weeks had elapsed for possession of the shattered ruins to offer any more to most thoughtful British commanders than a ghastly echo of other ruins, other empty victories, almost 30 years before. From CHARNWOOD, there was not even the compensation of having ‘written down’ significant German forces.

While the British and Canadian 3rd Divisions painfully battered their way into Caen, further west 43rd Wessex and its supporting armour suffered 2,000 casualties in two days of renewed fighting for Hill 112, the commanding position beyond the Odon which had been lost in the last stages of EPSOM. Once again, the formidable fighting power of 12th SS Panzer forced Thomas’s men into bloody difficulties. Like so many other British assaults, that of 10 July began well in the wake of the huge bombardment, with the leading units reaching Eterville and well up the slopes of 112 by 8.00 a.m. Corporal Chris Portway was a 21-year-old section commander in the 4th Dorsets: ‘They plod along and do the job – not death or glory boys like the paratroops,’ the sort of comment which might be made about many solidly dependable British county regiments. Urged on by their colonel’s hunting horn, they reached Eterville without serious casualties. Portway fought a fierce little private battle in its churchyard, pursuing two Germans between the gravestones until he reached them with a grenade in the church itself. He was dismayed to meet his commanding officer among the ruins, asking helplessly: ‘What’s happening, corporal?’ The colonel appeared to have lost all grip on events. But the day’s work had been done at tolerable cost. They were digging in around Eterville, pleased to find themselves alongside a château painted
with huge red crosses, ‘because the Germans were usually quite good about trying not to hit hospitals,’
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when they were suddenly summoned to a new Orders Group and told that they must press on to the next village, Maltot.