Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (49 page)

Corlett had been pressing Bradley for a role for his XIX Corps in the offensive. Now he gained his point. As his men began to advance on the left of VII Corps, they encountered the first German reinforcements reaching the west. West of Tessy-sur-Vire,
between the 28th and 31st, they collided with 2nd Panzer and then with the newly-arrived 116th Panzer in the fiercest fighting since COBRA began. On the 30th, Brigadier-General Rose’s CC A of 2nd Armored, recently attached to Corlett’s command, approached the town of Percy and was attacked in the rear by German tanks and infantry.

Percy lay in a hollow surrounded by hills. At about 4.30 p.m., a cluster of Rose’s tank commanders and infantry officers were at the bottom of the hill preparing to advance, ignorant of the powerful opposition in the area. Some of the tank crews were out of their vehicles, cheerfully milking cows in a field. Men of 4th Infantry lay on their backs under a hedgerow, smoking. Without warning, the entire area erupted under German mortar fire. Wounded and dying GIs lay scattered in the grass as the Americans hastily deployed to move up the hill, the tanks crawling forward at walking pace to allow the infantry to keep with them. As they paused to breast a hedge, two tanks were hit and burst into flames. The gunners poured fire into every hedge in front of them, but from his Sherman Lieutenant Phil Reisler could see infantry dropping around him:

They placed two careful rounds through Percy clock tower and church and the mortaring stopped. But all that night they stood on the hill under heavy German fire, the tank crews listening unhappily to the moans and screams of wounded American infantrymen. The scene was lit by flames from the wrecked tanks, which burned through the darkness. On the radio net, they heard
the infantry company commander asking repeatedly for medical support, until his unit ordered: ‘Quit calling. We can’t get to you.’ At intervals, the little infantry medical corporal would run to Reisler and beg him to call through again for aid, and the tank officer pretended to do so, without pressing his transmission switch. Once the corporal laid a blanket over a man who had gone. A few hours later, the men on the hill were appalled to see the figure beneath it sit up and scream. In the morning, the six surviving American tanks out of the 15 that had driven up, together with what was left of the infantry, withdrew from the hill, the Shermans coasting in neutral so that the Germans would not know that they had gone. Later Figurski, the gunner, had to pull human remains from their bogie wheels. Reisler said: ‘We never did get to see any krauts. Only dead ones.’

After more fierce fighting, Rose’s men and the other divisions of XIX Corps threw back the Germans, inflicting heavy losses of men and tanks. Some Sherman crews kept their engines running almost continuously for seven days. In the course of the entire battle, from 26 July to 12 August, one tank battalion – the 2nd/66th – lost 51 per cent of its combat personnel and 70 per cent of its tank strength. By 31 July, after fighting off repeated German assaults, the 743rd Tank Battalion was reduced to 13 Shermans.

But the Americans could afford losses of this kind far better than 2nd and 116th Panzer. Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian, 116th’s senior staff officer, described the desperate frustration of seeking to concentrate the division for its attack on 29 July amid incessant American fighter-bomber activity. They were expecting to go in with direct support from 2nd Panzer, but they did not receive this, for the other division had problems of its own. Their assault was postponed from the night of the 29th until the morning of the 30th, but they still had had no chance to probe the American front. On their left was relatively good tank going. Ignorant of this, they attacked with maximum weight on their right, and immediately found themselves plunged into thick
bocage
. All the frustrations that the Allies had endured in the
preceding weeks overtook 116th Panzer. Unable to move across country and largely restricted to the roads, their hesitant advance struck an enemy exhilarated by success, at last gaining confidence in his own powers on the battlefield. Only one German infantry company reached the St Lô road on the 30th, and the vital tanks were still struggling far behind. By noon that day, the Germans knew that their attack had failed. From the bus which served as divisional headquarters, Guderian and the staff struggled to switch the axis of advance to the west, but they were now informed that their tank battalions were being transferred elsewhere under the direct command of LXXXIV Corps. They were being pounded remorselessly by American air and artillery. The next morning, the 31st, they were not surprised when a renewed attack failed. Their only concern now was to disengage, as the Americans began to push forward again in front of them. On the night of 1 August, they were successful. Thereafter, reduced to little more than the effective strength of a battle-group, they were moved south to support the sagging German left. Guderian confessed his own disappointment in the performance of some of the division throughout the battle: ‘Without proper artillery and armoured support, the panzergrenadiers would not hold. These were not the men of 1941–42.’
²⁸

While 2nd Armored’s CC A was fighting around Percy, the rest of Corlett’s XIX Corps were struggling to gain ground further east. On 31 July, Sergeant Bill Walsh of 102nd Cavalry was with a mixed team of tanks and assault guns which fought a characteristic action to clear the bridge across the Vire and the high ground dominating it at the little town of Torigny, south-east of St Lô.

The American armour rattled up the ruined main street of Torigny, watched in silence by clusters of frightened French civilians, hugging their doorways. One out of three bridges across the river remained intact, and across this the vehicles rolled one by one, under fire from small arms and artillery from Germans on the ridge above, Hill 204. The Americans turned and began to advance steadily up the hill towards the enemy, dug in behind the
inevitable hedgerow. To their horror, Walsh’s crew found their assault gun sagging, losing grip and sinking sideways into a small swamp. They baled out hastily and ran for the shelter of a cluster of trees. As they caught their breath and watched shells bursting around the crippled gun, Walsh suggested to the driver that he might try again to unstick it. He declined. Walsh ran across, started the engines, accelerated and braked in vain for a moment or two, then fled back to the trees.

He heard an officer shout for all dismounted men to follow the tanks up the hill. He began to run with the infantry, clutching his carbine. Beside him a big, walrus-moustached mechanic called Cerbeck, who had joined the battle because he said that he wished to see what combat was like before he went home, was killed by small-arms fire along with the man beyond. Walsh made a desperate grab to clamber up on a Sherman as it paused, tracks grinding and throwing up clods of earth and stones, to smash a hedgerow with its ‘Rhino’ prongs. He fell off as the tank broke through, and looking around saw that it was the only American vehicle to have survived the drive. Propped against the reverse bank of the hedge, he found a bareheaded German soldier sitting bleeding badly from a stomach wound, muttering feebly: ‘
Bitte, bitte
.’

Walsh now saw the solitary Sherman reversing hard through the hole that it had cut, evidently pulling back. He ran desperately alongside until infantrymen clinging to the hull dragged him up. They withdrew to a safer distance from the German positions, and lay down around the tank waiting for reinforcements. Walsh saw a little cluster of unhappy men gathered around a soldier he knew from B Troop, who was lying footless after stepping on a
Schuhmine
. The doctor appeared and dressed the clean amputation while the others fed the man cigarettes and tried to force themselves to chat easily to him as he lay in the calm of acute shock. Exhausted and drained soldiers lay all along the hedgerow, roused to life only for a few moments of heavy firing when an officer shouted that some Germans were trying to counter-attack ahead. Then the battle seemed to peter out, the Germans disappearing beyond the reverse
slope of the ridge. American vehicles clattered forward nose-to-tail across the bridge below, on the road to Vire, amid ineffectual enemy artillery fire. The word came that the division had decided to bypass the Germans on the ridge rather than continue a direct assault upon them. Two days later, with the enemy long gone as the advance reached far ahead of their flanks, Walsh returned with an armoured recovery vehicle and rescued his abandoned gun. The sharp, bitter little afternoon at Torigny had cost the Americans 33 casualties, three tanks and a clutch of trucks and half-tracks.

The 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion of 2nd Armored suffered a similar shock on the afternoon of 2 August, as it moved fast south-eastwards at the head of CC B. Led by a Sherman, its column drove up a steep winding hill through the thickly-wooded forest of St Sever towards the town of Calvados beyond. In their haste to reach their objectives, they had dispensed with infantry flank protection or advance patrols. As the lead vehicle emerged from the wood, it was halted by a road block of trees felled across the road. The commander, a Pennsylvanian named Sergeant James Maser, dismounted to inspect the trees seconds before fire from two Tiger tanks, hull-down covering the road, destroyed his Sherman. German infantry in the woods began to bring down machine-gun and mortar fire the length of the column. Americans ran from their vehicles to try to pinpoint their attackers, but could see nothing through the trees and thick scrub. Within a few minutes, one of the survivors wrote, ‘it became a nightmare of embarrassing, disorganized rout.’ 25 Americans died in a few minutes of furious German firing, before the rest of the battalion could make their escape. Half their NCOs were lost, and two more became casualties in accidents in their assembly area that night. It was a brutal, stinging reminder of the punishment that the Germans could still inflict upon tactical carelessness. It was 7 August before 2nd Armored cleared St Sever and advanced to St Hilaire and Barenton.

As von Kluge’s exhausted men at last recoiled further east, the Allies were pressing forward. On 30 July, the British VIII Corps launched Operation BLUECOAT south from Caumont towards Vire and Mont Pinçon, while the US V Corps advanced on their right. V Corps’ official task was merely to protect the flank of COBRA, but General Hodges told Gerow that there was nothing to stop him making all the ground that he could in the process. There was some confusion between the British and Americans about rights of access to roads, and mutual irritation when British reconnaissance vehicles found Vire empty and claimed its liberation, only to find the Americans occupying the town before British main elements could reach it. For the British, any satisfaction at the extraordinary loosening of the front that had now begun was soured by the discovery that, once again, XXX Corps and 7th Armoured Division were performing feebly. Montgomery’s patience was finally exhausted: Bucknall and Erskine were sacked. The US First Army’s diary for 31 July reported:

The disappointments on Gerow and Corlett’s fronts could not mar the exhilaration of the vast success of COBRA to the west, the personal triumph of Collins, who played a pre-eminent role in the achievement. This passionate, intolerant, impatient soldier had once again demonstrated his outstanding qualities as a corps commander. All the American virtues of speed and energy had at last come into play on the battlefield. The plan and the army had found their moment. It is highly doubtful whether an operation resembling COBRA could have been launched earlier in the
campaign. Its prerequisites were, first, a degree of battle wisdom that First Army only attained after weeks of painful experience; and second, an erosion of German strength that had taken much hard fighting to bring about. Against an army of such supreme professionalism, a premature American dash deep into the German front might have resulted in a crushing defeat for the attackers; the Allies needed first to cripple the fighting power of the enemy and crumble their resources. Having done so, they now reaped rich rewards.

At this pivotal moment in the Allies’ fortunes, the long-scheduled shift in the American command structure took effect: Lieutenant-General Courtney Hodges assumed command of First Army; Patton’s Third Army formally came into being; Bradley stepped up to exercise overall command of the American forces, now designated 12th Army Group. The stage was set for one of the most dramatic American strategic movements of the war.

The limits of air power

It has become an historical cliché of the Normandy campaign to assert that Allied air power was decisive in making victory possible. This is a half-truth. Overwhelming Allied air superiority enabled the ground troops to operate with almost total freedom from Luftwaffe interference. This was the battle chiefly won by Spaatz’s Mustang fighters in the sky over Germany during the first months of 1944, and maintained until the end of the war by the vast numbers of Allied interceptors over the battlefield. A second factor, of which more will be said below, was the fighter-bombers’ ability to smash German attempts to concentrate for a decisive armoured thrust. Thanks to the bombing of communications and constant fighter-bomber sweeps over the German rear areas, German
daylight movement became hazardous, and was often impossible. In the first weeks of the campaign, while the air forces’ claims about the level of destruction that they had inflicted upon German units advancing to the front were exaggerated, the delay and anxiety that they caused were of critical importance. The infantry suffered much more than the armoured units, since they possessed few vehicles and were almost entirely dependent upon horses for divisional transport.