Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (21 page)

Meanwhile the KSLI had been pressing on alone down the road to Caen, fighting a brisk battle for possession of Hill 61, whence Major Hof had telephoned Schaaf and asked him to bring his self-propelled guns to the aid of regimental HQ. Schaaf duly advanced across the cornfields. He saw the heads of the Shropshires peering at him over the standing corn, rapidly disappearing again when he opened fire. But by now, a squadron of the Staffordshire’s Shermans had caught up. When Schaaf spotted these, he determined that for self-propelled guns to engage tanks was beyond the call of duty. He beat a hasty retreat. When he next found a telephone line and tried to contact regimental HQ an English voice – presumably one of the victorious KSLI – answered the call.

The Shropshires approached Biéville later in the afternoon, having fought a succession of tough little battles against moderate German opposition. They encouraged strong enemy fire from the village. ‘The civilians refused to evacuate themselves,’ one of their company commanders, Captain Robert Rylands, wrote later, ‘and at that early stage we were too soft-hearted to shell their homes – a proceeding which might have facilitated our advance considerably.’ W Company’s commander, Major Slatter, was hit in the shoulder by a sniper, but walked decisively forward to the house from which the shot had come and lobbed a grenade through its window before returning, grinning broadly, to have his wound dressed. The battalion now attacked from the flanks, sending one company forward east of the village, another west. After a fierce firefight in which they suffered heavy casualties, the Shropshires’
leading Y Company approached the commanding feature of Lebisey wood. They were told that there was little more opposition ahead. They were just three miles short of Caen.

Yet it was here that the KSLI first met panzergrenadiers of 21st Panzer Division, and here, late on the evening of 6 June, that Allied hopes of reaching Caen finally vanished. Y Company’s advance was stopped in its tracks, the company commander killed. At 6.00 p.m., the battalion halted under fierce German fire and the rear companies dug in for the night. Under cover of darkness, Y Company disengaged and retired into the battalion position. ‘We were not unpleased with ourselves,’ wrote Captain Rylands of W Company,
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and indeed, at a cost of 113 men killed and wounded, their achievement had been remarkable. But a single infantry battalion with limited tank and artillery support had not the slightest hope of generating sufficient violence to gain a foothold in Caen.

From the outset, the British 3rd Division’s objectives for D-Day were the most ambitious, and their achievement would have had the most far-reaching consequences. 6th Airborne, east of the Orne, was expected to gain and hold a perimeter. This it did with immense courage and determination, for in addition to the static German units in their area, they found themselves facing heavy counter-attacks from elements of the 125th and 192nd panzergrenadiers of 21st Panzer. West of the Orne, however, lay the road to Caen, where, above all, Montgomery had demanded dash and determination from his commanders to carry them to the city. The first of 3rd Division’s three brigades, the 8th, expended much of its strength and energy in the early operations beyond the beaches, the seizure of ‘Morris’ and ‘Hillman’, and the securing of Hermanville, Coleville and Ouistreham. Among 185th Brigade, which was to play such a critical role in the dash for Caen, the KSLI’s advance has already been described. The 1st Norfolks and 2nd Warwicks began to move south only at around 3.00 p.m., on the left of the KSLI, and the Norfolks were severely mauled in their movement
past ‘Hillman’. By nightfall on 6 June, they were between Beuville and Bénouville. 9th Brigade, in reserve, came ashore and assembled too slowly to be sent immediately forward with the 185th. By the time they were ready to move Rennie, their divisional commander, concluded that the most urgent priority was to reinforce the bridges across the Orne and Caen canal, which were under heavy German pressure. It is no great exaggeration to say that the sole determined thrust made by 3rd Division against Caen that day was that of the KSLI, with energetic support from the self-propelled guns of 7th Field Regiment RA, and some tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry.

The obvious absentees from this roll-call of British units are the remaining units of 27th Armoured Brigade. Each independent armoured brigade contained 190 Shermans and 33 light tanks, giving it a greater tank striking power than many German armoured divisions. It was never realistic to imagine that the British infantry battalions could march through Caen on their feet on the same day they had landed. The only possibility of dramatic success lay in a concentrated, racing armoured thrust by 27th Brigade. Crocker had written before D-Day: ‘As soon as the beach defences have been penetrated, not a moment must be lost in beginning the advance inland. Armour should be used boldly from the start.’
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Yet two-thirds of 27th Brigade’s strength – the tanks of the 13/18th Royal Hussars and the 1st East Riding Yeomanry – were too deeply entangled in the fighting on the beaches and immediately inland to be available for the movement south. The entire burden of the push for Caen therefore lay with the Staffordshire Yeomanry, whose tanks were rapidly dispersed to support British infantry in difficulty against objectives inland. The unit concentrated only towards evening, in the face of the sudden threat from 21st Panzer. If it is true that the British plan underestimated the difficulty of overcoming ‘Hillman’, and failed to take sufficient account of the known presence of panzergrenadier elements north of Caen; neither of these factors alone explains the failure to reach the city. Had the KSLI, by some miracle, reached Caen on D-Day with their
few supporting tanks, they would have been crushed within hours by 21st Panzer. There was nothing like enough hitting power in the vanguard of 3rd Division to occupy and organize the defence of a city against strong enemy armour, especially with 12th SS Panzer Division already on its way to reinforce. Once any hope had vanished of spearheading the British advance with strong tank forces, any British infantry who somehow made their way forward must have been pushed back with crippling loss. It is possible to criticize the lack of drive by Rennie and his brigade commanders, and a certain loss of urgency by some units after the landing. But the failure to gain Caen on D-Day was chiefly the fault of over-optimism and sloppy thinking by the planners, together with the immense difficulty of organizing a major all-arms attack in the wake of an amphibious landing.

The last important action on the British left on 6 June was the battle against 21st Panzer’s armoured thrust, an action which went entirely the way of the invaders. General Marcks, on his hill above Lebisey, told 22nd Panzer Regiment’s commander: ‘Oppeln, if you don’t succeed in throwing the British into the sea, we shall have lost the war.’
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The armoured officer, a former Olympic equestrian champion, saluted and mounted his vehicle. Marcks himself drove forward from the startline with the command group of 1st/192nd Panzergrenadiers. The tanks raced north towards the sea across the open ground, driving headlong into the gap between the British and Canadian perimeters.

British troops reported several tank formations advancing towards their positions. The Germans recoiled westwards on meeting fierce fire. When at last they encountered the heavily-gunned Sherman Fireflies of the Staffordshires on Hill 61, the consequences for the Germans were devastating. 13 tanks were immediately destroyed. Only a handful of 21st Panzer’s tanks and infantry reached the surviving strongpoints of the 716th Division around Lion-sur-Mer. By a dramatic coincidence, only minutes after they did so, the fly-in began of 250 gliders of 6th Airborne Division to a landing zone eastwards, around St Aubin, near the Orne bridge.
This was too much for the Germans. 21st Panzer was a sound enough formation, but lacked the ruthless driving force of an SS armoured division. Arguing that the glider landings threatened them with encirclement, they withdrew up the hill towards Caen. By nightfall, they were strongly emplaced around the city with the support of their 24 88 mm guns. But they had lost 70 of the 124 tanks with which they had begun the day. For all the dash with which Marcks and von Oppeln urged 22nd Panzer Regiment into action, its belated attack had been pushed home without determination or subtlety. A gesture had been made, no more.

The leading elements of the Canadian assault force on the right of the British 3rd Division almost reached Carpiquet on the evening of D-Day. Two troops of the 1st Hussars, leaving their infantry far behind, pressed on through Bretteville along the Bayeux–Caen road until they found their loneliness too alarming and turned back. They were two miles ahead of the rest of their formation. The Canadians suffered the universal problems of congestion on their beaches, and the need to fight hard to clear isolated strongpoints. But by the night of D-Day, they had established themselves strongly up to five miles inland. Upon the Canadians, in the days that followed, would fall the principal weight of 12th SS Panzer, perhaps the most formidable of all the German units now on their way to Normandy. Having set out from Lisieux, 65 miles from Caen, late in the afternoon, its leading elements were across the Odon, south of Caen, by nightfall, and moving to take up position on the left of 21st Panzer.

50th Division, moving inland from Gold beach, had fought a succession of hard battles against elements of the 352nd Division. By evening, troops of the British 151st Brigade had reached the Bayeux–Caen road, and tanks of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards were reporting little in front of them. Though the 50th was also short of most of its D-Day objectives, it was solidly established in the Norman hedges and fields, with only limited German forces on its
front. Among fields and villages all along the coast, British and American soldiers were settling into positions for the night, mopping up stragglers, herding prisoners to the rear, pausing for the first time to absorb their surroundings. Private John Price of the 2nd Ox & Bucks was one of the men who had landed by glider to join the 6th Airborne that evening. His aircraft bucked and bumped across a field until it came to a stop in high-standing corn within reach of the sea. Price jumped down from the fuselage, and was at once confronted by three ineffectual-looking Germans, who rose at his feet and put up their hands. One had thick pebble glasses, the others looked very young and frightened. He felt somehow disappointed. These men did not look in the least like specimens of the master race. He handed them over to a nearby group of Devonshires, and walked away towards the Orne bridge in search of his own unit, past a dead German lying alone at a crossroads, and a frightened-looking French family craning out of a cottage window.

Private Len Ainslie of the 5th King’s had been one of thousands of awed spectators of the airborne landing. He, and the others who had been compelled to swim the last yards to the beach, were now dug in around their anti-tank guns, seeking to dry their boots. Just beyond their position near Hermanville, they found the body of a large German officer. The platoon sergeant said off-handedly: ‘Just get him out of the way,’ and having had no previous dealings with corpses, they threw him over a nearby hedge. One man had already been injured seeking to clean his gun. It exploded beside his face, blackening and scorching him. As darkness came, all of them began to curse the plague of mosquitoes. It was the first time that he and many other men had set foot on foreign soil. They found it very strange.

James Phillips, one of the American crew of an LCVP which had been shuttling men to and from the fleet off Utah beach all day, was chiefly preoccupied by exhaustion and hunger. Most of the landing craft ran out of rations on D-Day, and their crews had to survive by scrounging and begging from bigger ships. A British
minesweeper gave Phillips’s craft some stew and a canteen of brandy around midday. But at nightfall, when they closed alongside the vast battleship
Texas
, they were brusquely ordered to get back about their business. For the landing-craft crews, there was less glory, more discomfort and more acute danger than for any other men in the seaborne task forces. Even when the battle moved
on, the weather and chronic collisions gave them little respite for many weeks.

Private John Hein of the American 1st Division was deeply impressed to find himself bivouacked for the night in the very orchard, by a crossroads above St Laurent-sur-Mer, where he had been briefed to expect to be. Following an afternoon of alarming shelling on Omaha, he moved up the dirt track through the village with his unit, and at last begun to dig in around the divisional CP. The darkness was interrupted by German bombing activity and some shelling of the beach. Hein reassured himself by digging his own foxhole next door to that of the chaplain, where he felt that nothing very serious could happen to him. Whatever acute alarm the events on Omaha had caused to his commanders, Private Hein felt that the plan had worked out pretty well in the end.