Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (39 page)

The tankmen pitied the infantry, their bodies naked to every form of high explosive, just as most foot soldiers preferred the comfort of their slit trenches to facing the enemy in a vast, noisy steel box which seemed to ignite instantly when hit. Tank crews could carry all manner of private comforts and extra rations with them, and despite strict orders against cooking inside the tanks in action, all of them did so, brewing up on the floors of the turrets. The chief handicap was the poor visibility through their periscopes with the hatches closed. Many of the best tank commanders were killed by small arms, standing up in their turrets for a wider view of the battlefield. Their greatest fear was of breakdown or throwing a track under fire, which would compel them to dismount. Corporal Bill Preston of the US 743rd Battalion had been in action for 32 days when his crew came upon another Sherman bogged down in a hedgerow ditch. He was peering out of the turret watching his commander and wireless operator hitch a cable to the casualty when two German mortar rounds dropped in their midst. Of the two men on the ground, one was killed and the other wounded. Preston himself fell to the bottom of the turret paralysed – his neck broken by a hit in the spine. ‘Dad’s not going to like this,’ he thought through his coma. He spent the next six months in hospitals, and reflected more pragmatically: ‘Thank God I’m out of it.’
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Every forward unit suffered a steady drain of casualties from snipers, mortaring and artillery fire, which both sides employed daily to maintain pressure upon each other, the Allies in greater volume since they possessed greater firepower. 2nd Panzer reported in July that they were receiving an average of 4,000 incoming artillery and 5,000 mortar rounds a day on their front, rising dramatically during British attacks to a total of 3,500 rounds in two hours on one occasion. It is important to remember that throughout the campaign, even in sectors where neither side was carrying out a major offensive, there were constant local attacks. To emphasize the staggering weight of firepower that the Allies employed in support of their movements, it is worth citing the example of a minor operation near Cristot on 16 June. Throughout the night of the 15th, the German positions to be attacked were subjected to harassing fire. In the early morning of the 16th, from H-35 to H-20, naval guns bombarded the objectives. From H-15 to H-Hour, Typhoons rocketed and strafed them. A squadron of tanks provided covering fire for the assault from a hull-down position on the flank. An entire armoured regiment carried out a diversionary manoeuvre just north of the intended thrust. A company of heavy 4.2-inch mortars stonked selected German positions from H-15 to H-Hour. The operation itself was supported by seven field regiments of 25-pounders, and four regiments of medium guns. At H-Hour, noon on the 16th, the battalion of 49th Division making the attack advanced two companies forward, at the normal infantry assault pace of 25 yards a minute; a troop of tanks accompanied each company. The tanks led across the open fields beyond the start-line, then, as they approached an orchard, allowed the infantry to overtake them and sweep it for anti-tank guns, before the tanks once again took over. At 1.15 p.m. the battalion passed through Cristot, where it reorganized. They found 17 German dead in the village and two armoured cars and one soft-skinned vehicle destroyed. The British had lost three killed and 24 wounded, almost all by enemy mortars. A few hundred yards of fields and ruins had been gained, at uncommonly small cost in British life.
But the extraordinary firepower that had been deployed to make this possible readily explains why the Allies in Normandy suffered chronic shortages of artillery ammunition.
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Every German unit reported ceaselessly on the agonizing difficulties caused by constant Allied air surveillance, even when there were no incoming air strikes. The mere presence in the sky of Allied spotting aircraft frequently reduced every nearby German gun to silence. Anti-aircraft fire was discouraged by bringing down an immediate Allied barrage upon its source.

Snipers were detested and feared as much for the strain that they caused to men’s routine movements in forward areas as for the casualties that they inflicted. Their activities provoked as much irrational resentment as the killing of baled-out tank crews or parachutists in mid-descent. Both sides habitually shot snipers who were taken prisoner. ‘Brad says he will not take any action against anyone that decides to treat snipers a little more roughly than they are being treated at present,’ wrote the First Army commander’s ADC in his diary: ‘A sniper cannot sit around and shoot and then capture when you close in on him. That’s not the way to play the game.’
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It is important to distinguish here between the work of the specially-trained, superbly-camouflaged marksmen who worked with telescopic-sighted rifles between the lines during periods of static warfare, and the universal habit of describing any man hit by a small-arms round as ‘shot by a sniper’.

One of the chronic preoccupations of Allied commanders in Normandy was the need to persuade attacking infantry to keep moving, not to cause incessant delays by taking cover whenever small-arms fire was heard in their area. For most infantrymen, when a shot came from an unseen gun – and almost every gun fired in Normandy was unseen – it was a reflex action to seek cover until the danger had been pinpointed. No habit caused greater difficulties and delays to Allied movement, nor proved more difficult to overcome when those junior leaders who resisted it and pressed on were so frequently killed. ‘It is a natural tendency for inexperienced troops to think that every bullet that comes over
their heads is fired from about a hundred yards away,’ stated an acerbic British report after the early fighting in France, ‘whereas in fact it is probably fired from a much greater range.’
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Many units in defensive positions habitually sprayed the surrounding area – above all, nearby woods – with random gunfire at dawn to shake out any enemy who had infiltrated during the night. Commanders sought in vain to discourage this practice, which almost invariably provoked an unwanted exchange of shooting.

Casualties

There was a brutally self-evident hierarchy of risk among the armies: naturally this was lowest among lines-of-communication troops and heavy artillery, rising through field artillery and armoured units and engineers, to reach a pinnacle among infantry. Of the British forces in Normandy by August 1944, 56 per cent were classified as fighting troops rather than service elements. Just 14 per cent were infantrymen, against 18 per cent gunners, 13 per cent engineers, 6 per cent tank crews, 5 per cent signallers. Even within an infantry battalion, a man serving heavy weapons with the support company possessed a markedly greater chance of survival than his counterpart in a rifle company. It was here that the losses, turnover of officers and men, became appalling, far more serious than the planners had allowed for, and eventually reached crisis proportions in Normandy for the American, German and British armies. Before D-Day, the American logisticians had expected 70.3 per cent of their casualties to be among infantry. Yet in the event, of 100,000 American casualties in June and July, 85 per cent were infantry, 63 per cent riflemen. The British forecast casualties on the basis of staff tables known as the Evetts’ Rates, which categorized levels of action as ‘Intense’, ‘Normal’ and
‘Quiet’. After the army’s early experiences in Normandy, it was found necessary to introduce a new scale to cover heavy fighting: ‘Double Intense’. Vision, for the men in the front line, narrowed to encompass only the immediate experience of life and death. ‘One was emotionally absorbed by the question: “Am I going to get through tomorrow?” ’ said Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs. ‘I really believed each time I went into action that I was going to get killed.’ For all his fear, Wilson was one of those young Englishmen who found the experience of war deeply fulfilling:

A close friend of Wilson’s, commanding another flamethrowing tank troop, was shot along with his crew when he was captured because the Germans considered that the Crocodile somehow transcended the legitimate horrors of battle. Much has been made of the shooting of prisoners – most notoriously, Canadian prisoners – by 12th SS Panzer and other German units in Normandy. Yet it must be said that propaganda has distorted the balance of guilt. Among scores of Allied witnesses interviewed for this narrative, almost every one had direct knowledge or even experience of the shooting of German prisoners during the campaign. In the heat of battle, in the wake of seeing comrades die, many men found it intolerable to send prisoners to the rear knowing that they would thus survive the war, while they themselves seemed to have little prospect of doing so. Many British and American units shot SS prisoners routinely, which explained, as much as the fanatical resistance that the SS so often offered, why so few appeared in POW cages. The 6th KOSB never forgave or forgot the action of a
wounded SS soldier to whom Major John Ogilvie leaned down to give water. The German drank, then shot the British officer.

German treatment of prisoners was as erratic as that of the Allies. Sergeant Heinz Hickmann of the Luftwaffe Parachute Division was holding a crossroads with a 12-man rearguard early one morning, when he was nudged out of a doze by an urgent whisper: ‘Tommy’s here!’ They shot up the lead jeep of a convoy of 12 lorries, from which a procession of rudely-awakened British supply personnel tumbled out with their hands up. Embarrassed by the burden of 34 prisoners, Hickmann had them locked in a nearby barn, and left them there when his squad pulled out: ‘In Russia, we would have shot them.’ Some men had special reasons for fearing capture: Private Abraham Arditti of the US 101st Airborne could never forget the H for Hebrew imprinted on his dogtags. But although there were well-documented instances of SS units murdering their captives, overall it seems doubtful whether this was done on a greater scale by one side than the other. Lieutenant Philip Reisler of the US 2nd Armored watched infantrymen of the 4th Division carelessly shoot three wounded Germans. One of his fellow officers echoed a common sentiment in the unit: ‘Anything you do to the kraut is okay because they should have given up in Africa. All of this is just wasted motion.’ Patton described how a German soldier blew a bridge, killing several GIs after their leading elements had passed: ‘He then put up his hands . . . The Americans took him prisoner, which I considered the height of folly.’ Lindley Higgins of the US 4th saw a lieutenant shout impatiently to a soldier moving off with a prisoner: ‘You going to take that man to the rear?’, and simply pull out his pistol to shoot the German in the head. Once a definable atrocity had been discovered – as with the bodies of the Canadians killed by 12th SS Panzer – and the conscious decision taken to respond in kind, it is difficult with hindsight to draw a meaningful moral distinction between the behaviour of one side and the other on the battlefield.

Corporal Topper Brown of the 5th RTR never even knew where his tank was hit when his squadron commander in the turret said
quietly: ‘Bale out.’ He found himself alone in a ditch with his mate Dodger Smith, the gunner. They could hear the Germans digging in quite close to hand, and saw some tracer overhead. But they felt desperately tired, and after lying listening for a time, fell asleep. They woke in bright sunshine to hear only birdsong around them. Cautiously they explored, and found an abandoned Cromwell. They climbed onto the hull to find its commander dead inside, and tried in vain to use the radio to contact their own unit. Then they began to walk up the road until they heard voices, and found themselves face to face with a file of Germans. They put up their hands: ‘We couldn’t have got them no higher.’ Even when shells began to land nearby and the Germans took cover, the frightened young Londoners remained standing in the road with their hands in the air.

At last they were stripped of their revolvers and watches and marched to a farmhouse, where they marvelled at the superbly-camouflaged Tiger tank dug in outside. They were led down to a cellar where they were sharply questioned by an English-speaking German who said finally: ‘You aren’t very intelligent for a British NCO, are you? You know you’re not going to win, don’t you?’ Then they were marched round a hedge in front of their escort. Brown said nervously, ‘They’re going to shoot us, Dodge.’ A moment later, overcome with relief, they saw a lorry filled with men of the Queen’s and the DCLI, shouting cheerfully: ‘Come on, you silly buggers!’ and they were driven away into captivity. Brown thought a little about escaping, but he did not feel inclined to try it alone. Most of the others seemed to take the view: ‘Well, that’s me f——, ing finished, then’, without great remorse. He remained in a POW camp until 1945.

Beyond those who left the battlefield as prisoners, or never left it alive at all, hundreds of thousands of men were more or less seriously wounded. Indeed, it became an exceptional achievement for an infantryman who had landed on D-Day to remain with his unit uninjured until July. The doctors and medical teams, who handled hundreds of cases each day – aided by facilities of unprecedented quality, and above all by the miracle of penicillin – found
that many lightly-wounded men were deeply relieved to have escaped the battlefield with honour. ‘No
Heim ins Reich
for you, Langangke,’ sympathized the German doctor who patched up an SS panzer lieutenant after a shell fragment had hit him in the forearm – the wound was not sufficiently serious to give him the coveted ticket home. When Corporal Bill Preston was evacuated with serious wounds, his principal sensation was relief that he had done his job without disgracing himself. For most men, the need to continue the job, to sustain their own self-respect, was the principal motive force upon the battlefield.