Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (29 page)
Read Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Online
Authors: Max Hastings
The Germans resumed their attack on the paratroopers’ position early the following afternoon. Richardson fired only one round from the MI rifle he had picked up before it jammed, and he understood why its original owner had thrown it away. Feeling helpless and nervous, he began to shoot single rounds towards the woods from which the enemy fire seemed to be coming, pausing after each shot to ram home the sticking bolt. As a small boy, he had read a series of splendid children’s adventure stories entitled
American Boys Over There
, which had planted a vivid image in his mind of big-bellied, heavy-booted ‘nuns’ or ‘bosch’ charging across a field in spiked helmets against American doughboys, who eventually prevailed. Now, at each warning of a new German assault, he saw this picture more clearly. And at last, it became a reality. A solitary tank began to rattle slowly across the field towards the Americans, who could confront it only with fierce machine-gun
fire. To their astonishment and delight, suddenly it halted. A plume of smoke rose from its turret. This was no Panther or Tiger, but some French-built makeweight. The paratroopers cheered, ‘like kids at a football game when their team scores’. The tank turned about and lumbered away into the woods. But the defenders’ exhilaration was stillborn. Moments later, very accurate mortar fire began to fall among them. ‘Men I had just lain shoulder to shoulder with began screaming in pain, screaming for help, hysterical helpless screams that made my stomach tighten. Because of the apparent protection of the hedgerow and our greenness, we had not realized the necessity of digging in and few of us had holes which would have saved us from all but a direct hit.’
7
Richardson remembered vividly a photograph that he had seen in a magazine, of a Russian soldier who was captioned as the only survivor of his company. Now, the young American felt that he shared the man’s sensation. When his unit, and the other survivors of the airborne divisions, were withdrawn from the battle at the beginning of July, after 33 days in action, his company numbered 19 men. His division had suffered 46 per cent casualties. Lieutenant Sidney Eichen of the 30th Division’s 120th Infantry was one of the men who relieved the 82nd Airborne. The green, unblooded newcomers gazed in shock and awe at the paratroopers they were to succeed:
We asked them: ‘Where are your officers?’, and they answered: ‘All dead.’ We asked: ‘Who’s in charge, then?’, and some sergeant said: ‘I am.’ I looked at the unshaven, red-eyed GIs, the dirty clothes and the droop in their walk, and I wondered: is this how we are going to look after a few days of combat?
8
The 29th Division’s difficulties continued throughout the first weeks in Normandy. They called for all the leadership and driving power of Brigadier Cota and a handful of other officers to keep the men moving on their push south from the beaches. In the early hours of 10 June, Cota was at the command post of the 175th
Regiment in a field at Lison, when three soldiers walked in from the east and announced they were from the 2nd Battalion, which had been surrounded and wiped out. Despite the Brigadier’s scepticism and efforts to calm them, the sergeant with them insisted that they were the only survivors.
We’d just gotten into our bivouac area when it all started [the sergeant described their collapse in the after-action narrative]. All of a sudden flares went up and burp guns started to fire into the big field where most of the battalion was located. We could hear the Germans yelling. Sometimes they’d yell ‘Surrender! Surrender!’ in English. We tried to fight back but we didn’t have any firing positions. Every time we tried to move the Germans would see the movement in the bushes for flares lit up the whole field, and they’d let loose with machine gun fire. They kept shooting mortars into the field all the time. There were seven or eight of us in the little group near me. We figured a way to get out, but a couple of the boys were hit as they tried to make it.
9
In the hours that followed, more stragglers from the battalion, including its chaplain, arrived and confirmed the NCO’s story. Later in the day, Cota talked forcefully to some hundred men of the battalion who had now been reassembled.
The members of this group were visibly shaken from their experiences of the night before. One medical aid man called ‘Skippy’ just kept repeating over and over, ‘That bayonet charge, that goddam bayonet charge.’ Cota told the group that they were under the wrong impression – that the battalion had by no means been wiped out. General Gerhardt had already appointed Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Sheppe, who had been acting as regimental executive, to take over command. He told them that they would have an opportunity to rest, be re-equipped and would be able to go back and fight the Germans. At the moment this proposition was not accepted too warmly.
10
The 29th Division’s narrative of an action south of Lison on 11 June, when two companies of the 175th Infantry advanced across the Vire, perfectly reflects the experience of scores of units in those painful, bitter weeks in the
bocage
when every yard of ground was gained with such painful slowness:
It was with difficulty that Major Miller managed to get his heavy machine-guns up to a base-of-fire position to sweep the hedges of the suspected road. Radio channels within the company were not functioning, and the ‘pass-it-back’ method of requesting the weapons to come forward was slow. The entire command weight of the company at this point rested upon small unit leadership. Could the sergeant make his men do what he wanted? Was the sergeant a leader? Some exemplified all the finer qualities, about one-third fell down in this respect. All were handicapped by a general lack of understanding of the situation that confronted them. The enemy never presented himself as a target in this phase, and the fire of the company had, seemingly, little effect on him. On Gen. Cota’s insistence the other weapon of the infantry – movement – paid off well. Our troops continued to move into the fire by rushes, by creeping, by crawling, by ever moving forward. Result – enemy fire diminished and then stopped.
. . . Cota had advanced only 25 yards when the crisis broke. One or two burp guns, which seemed to be located behind the high hedge that bordered the left side of the road, opened up with their excited chattering. The column on both sides of the road immediately dropped into the ditch – but this ditch was a shallow affair, about 4 or 5 inches deep, and offered no natural concealment of any kind. The suddenness with which the fire started, after the intense quiet of the last 20 minutes, stunned every member of the company. They dropped there and lay still. Several men were hit by the bullets spraying along, ricocheting off the road and nipping the shrubbery. Someone yelled ‘Return the fire! Shoot back at the bastards!’ At intervals men would rise from the ditch and try to escape from the
entrapment by either scurrying to the rear, or trying to vault over the hedges. One man attempting to cross the left hedge received a blast of burp gun fire that shoved him crashing back into the road – dead . . . Shea [Cota’s aide] worked his way back through the culvert to the road. Gen. Cota was standing in the shelter of a corner of the hedgerow at the road junction opposite the culvert. He was smiling. ‘What’s this, “Cota’s Last Stand”?’ he quipped. ‘One minute I’m surrounded by a rifle company – those birds started to shoot – and I looked around to find myself all alone.’
11
Most or all of the German 243rd, 709th, and 91st Divisions were in the Cotentin, reinforced by the 6th Parachute Regiment, the 206th Panzer Battalion, and the Seventh Army Storm Battalion. Despite the vast weight of Allied air power interdicting communications, the 77th Division was also able to reach the area virtually unscathed, and VII Corps was in consequence obliged to pay dearly to enlarge the Utah perimeter across the swamp-ridden ground northwards. Major Harry Herman, executive officer of the 9th Division’s 2nd/39th Infantry, described the struggle to overcome the huge concrete casemates of Fort St Marcouf, even after it had been subjected to heavy air attack:
Not a shot is fired taking our first objective. We walk upright into the bunker through one of the doors of twisted steel, throw in a hand grenade just for luck, and rush in on the ready to be greeted only by dead jerries strewn around inside 20-foot-thick concrete walls like so many loaves of bread – concussion. It feels rather strange and eerie, all very quiet, the sea beyond the fort looking cool and green. Have the Germans pulled out? Where is the 4th division? Where is our heavy weapons company? We worm our way to the top of the bunker, get careless, stand up, loll around, planning the next jump.
While we are discussing this possibility, the entire party is suddenly lifted up and sat down hard by a blast that wounds Colonel Lockett in the head and arm. It is direct frontal fire,
amazing because it gives no whistle and you find yourself out in the open with a tight expression around the eyes when the thing hits. At dusk, we open up: a tremendous sight. The entire strip of beach being combed and raked by sixteen cannon, 3 and 4 inch naval guns, 8 mortars, 16 machine-guns for fifteen minutes. Then we jump off, being greeted with very heavy enfilade fire on our 15-foot wide front. The 155 mm barrage had only bounced off the fort. I send G Company on a flanking mission to the left in an effort to either divert or knock out the resistance there which is preventing any forward movement. G reports that they are up to their chests in water and can go no further. We, the remainder of E Company, start forward again after laying in that damn water for a day and a half. We inch up the road along with a tank destroyer while the first battalion is engaged in heavy rifle fire. It seemed that we would finally get to the church which was our first phase line, but sweeping machine-fire tears the road. Men will not move and finally we have to withdraw. We have taken a beating.Several hours later, we start out again, this time with no barrage. We meet the first battalion which, in spite of mines and heavy fire, is coming up the beach. Walking ‘at the ready’ behind our TDs, they absorb most of the hail of fire that greets us. We get to the first bunker, Sergeant Hickey with a crowbar forces open the vent and we plant a 5 lb TNT block inside, which opens a hole about the size of a man’s body. Through this the TD fires 5 rounds of HE. That was that. Like killing flies with a sledgehammer. We have lost only 14 men, but the first battalion is in trouble. They lost Colonel Tinley who was first hit by a rifle bullet in the chest then while being carried on a stretcher, the litter bearers stepped on a mine. So he was buried later at St Mère Eglise. We gain the front part of the church, but jerry has the rear part and the cloisters. It is point-blank firing for a good hour until we have to get out because they got up in the rear and threw potato mashers down the belfry onto the altar where we are entrenched.
12
The Americans gained the fort at last after blasting their way inch by inch through the defences in the manner described by Herman. The 9th Division found such fighting tolerable after all their experience in North Africa and Sicily, but already other, greener American formations were proving sluggish in action. Herman and his men watched the first actions of the 79th Division with deep dismay: ‘They were almost a cruel laugh. They had one regiment attacking through our assembly area whose commander could not read a map, and they lost more men than I’ve ever seen through damn recruit tricks. It is quite evident that they are not prepared for combat – a shameful waste of good American lives.’
13
Major Randall Bryant, executive officer of the 1st Battalion of the 9th Division’s 47th Regiment, found his unit summoned into action to relieve the 90th Division, a formation whose record was almost disastrously unsatisfactory throughout the Normandy campaign. Bryant and his men marched past the 90th’s infantry, lying by the roadside behind the line: ‘They looked awful – unshaven, dirty, pitiful.’
14
Carentan fell only on 12 June, and it was the 13th before the two American beachheads were at last in firm contact across the great flat sweep of wetlands dividing them. That day, Taylor’s paratroopers fought off a determined counter-attack by 17th SS Panzergrenadiers. Ultra intercepts had provided Bradley with warning of this German movement. Without explanation, he ordered Gerow immediately to move elements of 2nd Armored Division into the area in time to support the Airborne, and subsequently to push back the SS. In the two weeks that followed, although Gerow’s V Corps progressively pushed its perimeter southwards to Caumont, American attention focused squarely upon the drive for Cherbourg, the critical OVERLORD objective of gaining the Allies a major port. Already, the American commanders were profoundly conscious that time was slipping away, that more and more German forces were arriving on the battlefield, that ground was
only slowly being gained. There was concern about the quality of infantry leadership. A forceful directive from First Army reminded all officers that they must wear badges of rank. Many had removed them, for fear of snipers. When on 14 June Gerow of V Corps told General Hodges, with some satisfaction, that his men had achieved all their objectives, Hodges reminded him with a quiet smile: ‘Gee, the objective of Berlin.’
15
Yet the chronic shortage of supplies – above all, of artillery ammunition – was such that First Army could sustain only one major thrust at a time.
16
Despite Collins’s eagerness to strike hard and fast for Cherbourg, Bradley concluded that the risk would be intolerable unless the peninsula was first cut, to isolate the port from German reinforcements. In the first days after 6 June, the American airborne divisions fought their way forward inch by inch to consolidate the tenuous footholds they had gained in their drop, and to defeat dangerous German counter-attacks such as that on 7 June against Ste Mère Eglise. Then, led by the 9th and 90th Divisions and elements of 82nd Airborne, V Corps launched its drive westward, completed at the little coastal holiday resort of Barneville on 18 June. For many of the Americans, it was an exhilarating dash, infantry clinging to the hulls of the Shermans and tank destroyers as they bucketed across the countryside, meeting only isolated pockets of resistance. Parties of fugitive Germans or half-hearted counter-attacks on American positions were ruthlessly cut down, although 1,500 men of the German 77th Division were able to escape southwards across country, surprising men of the 90th Division guarding a bridge over the river Olande, and taking more than 100 prisoners. The 77th was one of the few formations of reasonable quality in the Cotentin. Most of the German static units were undertrained, poorly-equipped, demoralized. Hodges’s First Army diary for 16 June recorded that, ‘the Boche artillery extremely weak, and G-2 [intelligence] reports an increasing demoralisation because of lack of ammunition and supply.’ Such tanks as the Germans possessed were almost invariably captured French or Czech models. ‘We knew that we were not facing the
top panzers,’ said Corporal Preston of the 743rd Tank Battalion.
17
The German units proved capable of stubborn resistance when defending prepared positions against direct assault, but lacked the will or the means to interfere with major American units manoeuvring in open country.