Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (22 page)

Other men endured a much more disturbed night. Major Frank Colacicco of the 3rd/18th Infantry was in the battalion command post when it suffered a sudden night attack by the Germans, in the course of which he was taken prisoner. After a few minutes, he managed to take advantage of the confusion to leap a gully and make his escape. Back among his unit’s riflemen, he began to move among them, urging the confused soldiers to bring down fire on the Germans. After 45 minutes the enemy withdrew, taking some American prisoners with them. Some manner of quiet returned to the positions.

The German battalion commander of the 3rd/716th infantry told Lieutenant Schaaf that he had been told to pull back to Caen with his 30 or so surviving men. Without orders since the fall of his regimental headquarters, Schaaf decided to do likewise. Driving south-eastwards, he lost one gun, which threw a track and became bogged down in a ditch. The drive continued without incident, until he glimpsed ahead a crude roadblock of farm implements manned by British soldiers. He ordered his men to take off their helmets, and laid a tarpaulin over the side of the hull to conceal the German black cross. As they roared past the roadblock, they could see that the British had identified them but were too
surprised to intervene. They saw no more troops of any nationality until three miles on, at the outskirts of Caen, where they encountered German infantry. A stream of stragglers and survivors, men and vehicles, were making their way back into the perimeter from the coast. When Schaaf reported to the divisional artillery headquarters, he was told that his was the only battery, among 11 in the regiment, to make contact since morning. They pressed him for information about the situation forward, about which there was still terrible confusion. Then he was ordered to take up position near Épron, just north of the city. They remained in action there until, weeks later, ceaseless use had reduced their guns to wrecks.

Along 60 miles of front, men lay over their weapons peering out into the darkness lit up by occasonal flares and tracer, then slept the sleep of utter exhaustion in their foxholes or ruined cottages. Some soldiers of the British and American airborne divisions were still probing warily through the darkness miles from their own lines, wading streams and swamps on the long march from their ill-aimed dropping points. A few thousand men lay dead, others wounded in the field dressing stations or positions from which they could not be evacuated. There were already Allied stragglers and deserters, who had slipped away from their units, skulking in villages the length of the invasion coast.

In England and America, the newspapers were being printed.
The Times
for 7 June carried the headlines: ‘The Great Assault going well; Allies several miles inland; Battle for town of Caen; Mass attacks by airborne troops’. A leading article proclaimed: ‘Four years after the rescue at Dunkirk of that gallant defeated army without which as a nucleus the forces of liberation could never have been rebuilt, the United Nations returned today with power to the soil of France.’ D-Day provoked
The Times
, along with many politicians, to a breathless torrent of verbosity. On the Letters page, a Mr R. B. D. Blakeney reminded readers that William the Conqueror had embarked for England from Dives. The
Daily Express
, characteristically, plunged into sensation: there were tales of Allied
paratroopers treacherously shot in mid-air, of the glider pilot who cried as he shot up a German staff car: ‘Remember Dunkirk when you drove me off!’ There was a photograph of a triumphant glider pilot carrying a German helmet with the words HE’S DEAD chalked upon it.

Corporal Adolf Hohenstein of the 276th Infantry Division, billeted at Bayonne, many miles from the battlefield, wrote in his diary: ‘A beautiful day. In the evening we hear the long-expected but still surprising news that the invasion has come. The civilians will have to pay the most dearly, and the French around here have suddenly become very quiet. They will become even quieter when this country has been devastated by Allied bombs and German shells, when they experience the full horror of war.’
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No disappointment or setback could mask the absolute Allied triumph of establishing themselves ashore on D-Day. But the failure to gain Caen was a substantial strategic misfortune. Bradley wrote: ‘In subsequent days, after I had had an opportunity to study Dempsey’s D-Day operation, I was keenly disappointed.’
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There is overwhelming evidence that with greater drive and energy Second Army could have ‘staked out claims’ deeper inland on 6 June. But with 21st Panzer solidly established around Caen, it is impossible to believe that the British could have reached the city without running into deep trouble. The German coastal defenders may not have been the cream of the Wehrmacht, but they fought extraordinarily well in many places, given their isolation, the poverty of their manpower and the paucity of their equipment. Too little credit has been granted to German garrisons for their struggle with the best that the Allies could throw against them. They achieved all that Rommel could reasonably have expected – a delaying action which deprived the British advance of the momentum that it needed to reach Caen. The city was only a realistic objective for Dempsey’s army if the coastal crust crumbled immediately the Allies landed. It did not. Whatever the
sluggishness of some British units, Bradley was to discover ample difficulties of this kind among his own divisions in the days to come.

The Allied command of the air was plainly decisive on 6 June: ‘The Anglo-American air forces did more than facilitate the historic invasion,’ wrote the American official historians, ‘they made it possible.’
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The Luftwaffe put less than a hundred fighters into the sky on D-Day, and mounted only 22 sorties against shipping late that evening. Given the difficulties that the invaders suffered against the Atlantic Wall, it is difficult to imagine that they could have pierced it at all had their assault been subject to serious air attack. As it was, they were ashore. But they were still gasping to regain breath after the vast strain of getting there.

Closing the lines

There was never any doubt in the minds of either German or Allied commanders that, in the immediate weeks of the invasion, the vital strategic ground lay in the east, where the British Second Army stood before Caen. Here, for the Germans, the threat was 50 miles closer to the heart of France, and to Germany. Here, for the British, glittered the opportunity to break into the open tank country to the south-east, freeing airfield sites and gaining fighting room before the mass of the German army could be committed to battle. By securing their beachhead ashore, the first great Allied hopes for OVERLORD had been fulfilled. Yet on the Second Army front in the weeks that followed, their second hopes – their prospects of a quick breakthrough from Normandy – died stillborn. They did so in a fashion that raised serious questions about the fighting power of the British army that had landed in France, and which demonstrated decisively the genius of the German soldier in adversity.

Between 6 June and the end of the month, Montgomery directed three attempts, first, to seize Caen by direct assault – on 7 and 8 June – and then to envelop it – the Villers-Bocage operation of 13 June, and EPSOM on 25 June. The initial operations were merely the continuation of those undertaken on D-Day. On 7 June, 185th Brigade’s renewed attempt to force the direct route to the town through Lebisey, with powerful fire support, broke down after heavy casualties. 9th Brigade’s battle for Cambes was at last successful after the Royal Ulster Rifles had fought their way across
1,000 yards of open ground under punishing enemy fire. But they could go no further. When the 3rd Canadian Division began to push forward, its men encountered the leading elements of 12th SS Panzer, newly arrived on the battlefield, and bent upon breaking through to the sea. Colonel Kurt ‘Panzer’ Meyer, commanding the division’s armoured regiment, directed his tanks’ first actions from a superb vantage point in the tower of the Ardenne Abbey on the western edge of Caen. To cope with the immense difficulties of moving forward adequate supplies of fuel, Meyer organized a shuttle of jerry cans loaded aboard Volkswagen field cars. Throughout the 7th and 8th, the Canadians and the fanatical teenagers of the SS Hitler Jugend fought some of the fiercest actions of the campaign, with heavy loss to both sides. Lieutenant Rudolf Schaaf of the 1716th Artillery was at Corps headquarters in a mineshaft outside Caen when a swaggering colonel from 12th SS Panzer arrived to announce his intention not to halt anywhere before the sea. This, of course was the legendary Meyer, who assumed command of the division a few days later. Only 33 years old, tall and stiffly handsome, he was the archetype of the Nazi fanatic. Even as a prisoner in 1945, he told his interrogator: ‘You will hear a lot against Adolf Hitler in this camp, but you will never hear it from me. As far as I am concerned he was and still is the greatest thing that ever happened to Germany.’
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‘The SS showed that they believed that thus far, everybody had been fighting like milkmaids,’ said Schaaf.
²
He watched the bleak young men of the Hitler Jugend Division riding forward into their attack, and saw some of them return that night, utterly spent, crying tears of frustration for their failure to reach their objective. ‘It was a very sad chapter for them.’ But it had also been less than happy for the Canadian 3rd Division. By the night of 7 June, as their official historian described the situation, when the Division’s forward elements had been pushed back up to two miles:

This was scarcely an encouraging omen for rapid progress inland. While the Germans co-ordinated armour, infantry and artillery superbly, the Canadians did not. While 9th Brigade was facing 12th SS Panzer, 8th Brigade spent the day preoccupied with mopping up strongpoints in the rear which had not been taken on D-Day. The following morning, 8 June, 7th Brigade came under heavy attack; the positions of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles were overrun, and the Canadian Scottish were compelled to mount a major counter-attack to recover the lost ground, at a cost of 125 casualties. That night, Panthers of 12th SS Panzer, led personally by Kurt Meyer on his customary motor-cycle, hit the Canadian 7th Brigade yet again. As fires and flares lit up the area, the Regina Rifles at one stage reported 22 Panthers around their own battalion headquarters. In the confusion of the night battle, the Germans began to believe that they had broken through. A panzer officer halted a Volkswagen field car immediately outside the Reginas’ command post, which was blown up seconds later by a PIAT bomb. The Canadians lost contact with all but one of their companies. ‘It is hard to picture the confusion which existed,’ said their commanding officer.
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Six Panthers were destroyed by the Canadian anti-tank guns and PIATs before Meyer broke off the attack, and his armour squealed and clattered away into the darkness.

The Canadians were unbowed, but shaken. Corporal Dick Raymond and a draft of replacements for their 3rd Division closed on Juno beach late in the afternoon of 7 June. The landing craft dropped its ramp a hundred yards offshore, at which point the replacements flatly refused to disembark. At last, after an absurd argument, the officer in charge jumped into the chest-high water, and the men straggled ashore after him. The beach was
quiet, littered with wreckage, stinking of oil. When the group had marched a little way inland, Raymond found himself suffering pains and, with his accustomed independence, fell out by the roadside. He found two drunken Canadian engineers, and joined them by a vast wine cask in a cellar. Then a half-track took the other men away, and Raymond was alone again. Having slept where he lay beside the wine cask, the next morning he met a Scottish major who had been on the landing craft with him. He learned that a random bomb from a Luftwaffe nuisance raider during the night had landed in the midst of his group of replacements, killing some 20 and wounding as many again. Still alone, he walked forward until he encountered a field artillery battery, shooting furiously in support of two infantry battalions locked in the struggle against 12th SS Panzer. Raymond spent the remainder of that day helping a gun team. At last the gunners told him to go and report to his own unit. Late that night, near Les Buissons, he found his Vickers machine-gun platoon, supporting a battalion of the Stormont, Dundas and Glengarry Highlanders. They were utterly exhausted after the battles of the day. No questions were asked about his movements – he was simply given a shovel and told that he was with C Company. That night, the battalion was reduced to some 200 men, although more straggled in later. The next morning, Raymond found himself plunged into the bitter struggle that persisted through the days that followed: ‘It was just a straight shoot-out, both sides blasting at each other day and night. We used to joke about “last man, last round”. Watching infantry advancing across those open corn fields may not have been quite as terrible as the battle of the Somme, but at times it seemed to come pretty close to it.’
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Raymond was touched by the courage of the Royal Naval gunfire forward observers, declining to wear steel helmets, being steadily killed: ‘They seemed to have the David Niven touch.’ But he was even more surprised and impressed by the performance of the Canadians. In months past, he had often been scornful of their indiscipline and doubtful of their quality, above all sceptical about their leadership: ‘But the strength of that
Canadian army was as close-in fighters. They went at it like hockey players.’