Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (42 page)

Without enthusiasm, but also without knowledge of what lay ahead except that a battalion of the Hampshires was in trouble, they advanced in extended line through the cornfields towards the village. They reached an orchard, and suddenly found themselves under intense German DF
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fire. With flame and smoke all around them, they pressed on, to meet machine-gun and tank fire from a screen of Tigers dug into pits covering Maltot. ‘They knocked us down in lines . . .’ Portway and other survivors took shelter for a moment in an empty tank pit, and saw a German glance over the rim and reach back to throw a grenade down on them before a quick-thinking Dorset shot him. They ran from the hole to a house in which they hastily cleared a field of fire. The corporal felt a moment of revulsion about bringing the battle into some unknown family’s home: ‘There we were, wrecking this house, and I suddenly thought – “How would I feel if this was mine?” ’ Then a more pressing problem intervened. A noise upstairs showed that they were not alone. There was a fierce exchange of grenades and small-arms fire with the Germans above. They fought from house to house for some time until, without warning, a devastating artillery barrage began to fall among them. Portway learned later that it came from British guns. The order had been given for the brigade to withdraw from Maltot, but it never reached the survivors of the Dorsets. Portway threw himself into a ditch, and a handful of others fell in on top of him. When the guns at last stopped, he wondered why nobody rose. He heard German voices, and lay motionless until he found one of the men above him being moved, and looked up into the face of the enemy. All the others on top of him in the ditch were dead. He felt a sense of unreality: ‘You imagine being wounded, being killed. But you never think of being captured. You think that when you’ve had a chat, they’ll let you go home. I couldn’t believe that I’d never see the unit again.’ The SS
treated Portway unusually well, ‘much better than we did German prisoners. It was when one got further back that the nastiness started.’

Portway’s experience was almost precisely mirrored by that of Private Zimmer of 12th SS Panzer who was in Eterville the same day. Zimmer, as his narrative makes clear, was cast in a somewhat less heroic mould than some of his colleagues:

It was a battle of shattering intensity even by the standards of Normandy. Brigadier Michael Carver, who had taken over 4th Armoured Brigade at half an hour’s notice a few days earlier, found himself compelled to draw his revolver to halt fleeing infantrymen, including an officer. Amid the blackened, leafless trees on the slopes of Hill 112 itself, the 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry attacked, two companies up, after the Somersets failed to gain the summit. Lieutenant David Priest’s company commander had been killed shortly before, and he found himself leading his company forward. Their vehicles drove to the start-line over the bodies of British infantry spreadeagled across the road. They took a wrong turning and came under fire. The men dismounted and shook out for the advance. Priest had put his own platoon in the rear, but quickly found himself compelled to pass it forward when the point platoons were ravaged by mortar and machine-gun fire. Then he felt a blow. At first, it made him imagine that he had been struck with a pickaxe. Only after a few moments lying shocked on the grass did he
understand that he had been hit in the chest by a machine-gun bullet. He felt somebody undoing his pouches and taking out his grenades. Then he heard the acting battalion commander shouting, before he died, that he could not breathe. Priest lay gazing upwards, watching each side’s mortar bombs soar unhurriedly across the sky. There was more fierce small-arms fire, and he was frightened of being hit again. When darkness came he felt a little better. He managed to drag himself back towards the British line until he was challenged by a Somersets sentry.

Yet still the nightmare was not ended. That night, 12th SS Panzer counter-attacked. Priest was waiting at the rendezvous where the carriers picked up casualties, when a German tank suddenly crashed through the trees almost on top of him. Wounded men screamed as they were crushed beneath its tracks, and flares began to burst overhead as the defenders struggled to pinpoint the threat. The tank blundered away into the darkness, and the stretcher-bearers came. Priest learned that he had a clean entry and exit wound. He felt deeply grateful that he was not maimed or disfigured. Like every rifle company officer, he had long ago accepted the inevitability of being hit somewhere, at some time. It was six weeks before he walked again, and 1945 before he returned to his battalion.

The self-propelled 17-pounder M10s of E Troop, 129th Battery, left the start-line with the Hampshires and the supporting Churchill infantry tanks at 5.30 a.m. They had landed in France ten days before, and this was their first action of the war. German mortar and artillery fire began to fall amongst them soon after they set off, and the infantrymen of the Hampshires huddled behind the Churchills and E Troop’s tank destroyers as they crawled forward through the barrage. Sergeant Burnell’s gun was hit a few yards beyond Eterville by a mortar bomb which landed directly in its open turret; just two of the crew escaped wounded. The troop commander’s gun received a direct hit from an 88 mm shell a few
yards short of Maltot. Only he himself and an NCO were able to leap down and escape alive. A third gun’s turret was jammed by fire and its aerial shot away. The crew baled out, expecting it to ‘brew up’. When it failed to do so they remounted, with the exception of the wireless operator, who declined to leave the slit trench in which he had taken refuge. Then it became obvious that the attack had failed. The two surviving guns withdrew, bringing back the survivors of the other ruined M10. Of 20 men in the guns which had gone forward, six were dead, four wounded, one missing. Sergeant Jim Stephens, who had served with the battery since 1939, was heartbroken to have been left behind with the echelon, when the troop of which he was so proud went forward for the first time. Now, he looked appalled at the return of the survivors, and the blank and shocked face of the young troop commander, Lieutenant Wimpey. The adjutant had recovered the gun whose turret had received a direct hit. Wimpey told Sergeant Stephens that they must bury its crew. Stephens never forgot the experience.

It was a little scene played out a hundred times daily on both sides of the Normandy line. Hill 112 was held briefly by Priest’s shattered battalion of the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry, only to be lost to a German counter-attack.

Montgomery was now compelled to endure a crisis of confidence in his leadership which would have cracked the nerve of a more sensitive man. He had always been the object of animosity within the huge headquarters staff at SHAEF in England, and unloved by many of Bradley’s Americans. The tensions now broke into open criticism. Commander Butcher, the embodiment of all gossip-ridden staff officers, wrote after his first visit to France on 1 July: ‘Some of the people I talked to venture that Monty has been too slow to attack and thus permitted the Germans to get set in fixed positions and to bring up reserves.’
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Patton, an unconcealed enemy, wrote venomously in his diary after a trip to Montgomery’s Tactical Headquarters on 7 July: ‘Montgomery went to great lengths explaining why the British had done nothing.’ Eisenhower, himself under intense pressure from Washington and his own staff, frustrated by his own inability directly to influence the events for which he bore the huge responsibility, wrote an unhappy letter to the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group that day expressing his concern about the German build-up: ‘It appears to me that we must use all possible energy in a determined effort to prevent the risk of a stalemate or of facing the necessity of fighting a major defensive battle with the slight depth we now have in the bridgehead . . . We have not yet attempted a major full-dress attack on the left flank supported by everything we could bring to bear . . .’
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The American press had become openly impatient with the lack of progress in France, causing a degree of concern in Washington that, as always, far outweighed the worry the British press
could cause any British government. It was being suggested that the western Allies were content to mark time while the Russians did the hard fighting to defeat Hitler’s armies. Even more dangerous to Montgomery’s position was Churchill’s growing impatience. The Prime Minister was at pains to remind Eisenhower, a few days after the landings, that the Supreme Commander had only to express his dissatisfaction with any British officer, ‘no matter what his rank’, for him to be removed. Churchill had convinced himself that if there was no rapid breakthrough after D-Day, it might be a year or more before the Allies reached the Seine. His memory of Flanders haunted all his visions of the battle for France in 1944, especially as he read the infantry casualty lists. On the night of 6 July, Churchill furiously denounced Montgomery to Brooke. He had never warmed to his cold, awkward commander: now, remembering Montgomery’s bold declarations at the St Paul’s briefing about rapid armoured thrusts and the urgent need to ‘peg out claims inland’, he felt that these intentions had been betrayed. Brooke was driven to defend his protégé with equal anger: ‘I flared up and asked him if he could not trust his generals for five minutes instead of continuously abusing them and belittling them.’
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The air chiefs divided their ill-will between Montgomery and the hapless Leigh-Mallory. Tedder felt a persistent lack of confidence in the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group, which he displayed with all the force of his personality. ‘It seemed clear to me that Montgomery did not attach sufficient importance to the pressing time factor. Few weeks of summer remained. Our urgent need was to get across the Seine.’
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Tedder was a man of genuine stature, and it is impossible to saddle him with the personal malice and small-mindedness that afflicted some of his subordinates. He sincerely believed that he possessed an understanding of the priorities of the land campaign which Montgomery lacked. But as Deputy Supreme Commander, he suffered all the handicaps and frustrations that are the lot of a second-in-command in any military organization: he was privy to all debate but lacked executive
power. If Leigh-Mallory was not permitted to exercise executive authority, Tedder showed a marked reluctance to do so. He was invariably consulted and frequently intervened in the air debate, but he never accepted full responsibility for air operations. His intelligence and force of personality were not in doubt, but it is questionable whether he was able to employ these to best effect as Eisenhower’s deputy, and whether his understanding of the ground campaign was sufficient to justify his chronic disloyalty to Montgomery, and his promise to Eisenhower of personal support if the Supreme Commander saw fit to sack his ground-force commander.