The Liberation Trilogy Box Set

by Rick Atkinson

  Reporters were told to expect a briefing by British officers at four P.M. in Caen. No such briefing transpired: the 3rd Division spearhead, harassed by mines and heavy gunfire, stalled three miles north of the city. Troops from the Royal Warwickshire Regiment who were issued bicycles and told to “cycle like mad behind the Sherman tanks into Caen” found bikes “not at all the ideal accessory” for crawling under mortar fire. The city and the road linking it to Bayeux remained in German hands, an inconvenience both vexing and consequential.

  Yet the day seemed undimmed. Canadian troops had pressed six miles or more into France, and British soldiers reported reaching Bayeux’s outskirts. Despite sniper fire nagging from a copse nearby, engineers by day’s end began building a refueling airstrip at Crépon with a twelve-hundred-foot packed-earth runway. Prisoners trudged to cages on the beach, holding up trousers from which the buttons had been snipped to discourage flight. French women who emerged from cellars to kiss their liberators found themselves happily smudged with camouflage kettle soot and linseed oil. Inquiries by officers in their public-school French—“Ou sont les Boches?”—often provoked wild pointing and an incomprehensible torrent of Norman dialect. But there was no misunderstanding the scratchy strains of “La Marseillaise” played over and over by a young girl outside her cottage on an antique gramophone with a tin horn. Allons enfants de la Patrie, / Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

  A Conqueror’s Paradise

  AS if in pursuit of the sinking sun, a black Horch convertible raced west across France from the German frontier, threading the Marne valley from Reims, then swinging to the right bank of the Seine north of Paris. Since early May, Allied fighter-bombers had demolished all twenty-six bridges spanning the river from the French capital to the sea, converting the bucolic drive to Normandy into a circuitous annoyance. The sleek Horch, with its winged chrome ornament on the radiator grille and twin spare tires mounted behind the front fenders, provoked stares as the car sped through drowsy villages and farm communes. But it was the German officer in a leather coat in the front seat with a map spread across his knees who drew the eye: the familiar flat face with a narrow, sloping forehead and incipient jowls belonged to Hitler’s youngest but most celebrated field marshal. Even French peasants recognized him, and as the convertible raced past they called aloud to one another: “C’est Rommel!”

  Yes, Rommel. He had driven home to Herrlingen in southwest Germany the previous day with a pair of gray suede shoes from Paris as a surprise fiftieth-birthday present for his wife, Lucie-Maria. He had meant to confer afterward with the Führer in his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden and to complain about shortages of men and matériel for the Atlantic Wall, but had instead been summoned back to France by grave reports of Allied landings in Normandy on Tuesday morning. “Tempo!” he urged the driver. “Tempo!” Turning to an aide in the rear seat, he added, “If I was commander of the Allied forces right now, I could finish off the war in fourteen days.”

  At 9:30 P.M., with little left of the long summer day, sentries in camouflage capes waved the Horch into the red-roofed river village of La Roche–Guyon, forty miles west of Paris. Past the church of St.-Samson and sixteen square-cut linden trees, the car turned right through a spiked wrought-iron gate to stop with a screech in a stone courtyard. The Château de La Roche–Guyon had presided above this great loop of the Seine since the twelfth century and had served since early March as Rommel’s Army Group B headquarters. Clutching his silver-capped baton, the field marshal climbed a flight of steps to the main door, determined to salvage what he could from the day’s catastrophe.

  “How peaceful the world seems,” he had told his diary in late April, “yet what hatred there is against us.” If France proved “a conqueror’s paradise,” as one German general claimed, La Roche–Guyon was Rommel’s secluded corner of that heaven. Brilliant fields of poppies and irises hugged the Seine near the nineteenth-century suspension bridge, now sitting cockeyed on the river bottom. Cézanne and Renoir had painted here together in the summer of 1885, following Camille Pissarro and preceding Georges Braque, who in 1909 made angular studies of the castle in buff and blue. Two hundred and fifty steep steps led to a battlement atop the circular medieval keep, where Rommel, after a hare shoot or a stroll with his dachshunds, sometimes watched barges loaded with fuel and ammunition glide past in the evening.

  On the chalk cliffs overhanging the river’s north bank and the castle’s peppermill roofs stood a bristling array of antiaircraft batteries; deep tunnels had been blasted to house German troops without damaging the ducal orangery or the crypt crowded with dead seigneurs. The current duke, a spindly Nazi sympathizer, remained in residence without evident discomfort, and the duchess had donated four bottles of a luscious 1900 claret to commemorate the Führer’s birthday on April 20. The chateau’s timber-ceilinged Hall of the Ancestors, hung with family oils, had been consigned to Rommel’s staff as a table-tennis room. From the field marshal’s bedroom, with its canopied four-poster, fifteen-foot windows gave onto a fragrant rose terrace and another river vista.

  Clacking typewriters and snatches of Wagner from a phonograph could be heard as Rommel ascended the grand staircase and hurried through the billiards room to the salon that now served as his office. Pegged parquet floors creaked beneath his boots. Four magnificent tapestries depicting the Jewish queen Esther had recently been shunted into storage, but fleecy painted clouds still drifted across the twenty-five-foot ceiling, and the inlaid desk on which the revocation of the Edict of Nantes had been signed in 1685 remained for Rommel’s personal use. He stood instead, hands clasped behind his back, listening as staff officers sought to make sense of the sixth of June. “He’s very calm and collected,” an artillery officer wrote. “Grim-faced, as is to be expected.”

  There was much to be grim about. Thanks to Allied jamming and downed phone lines, little was known with certainty. Somehow thousands of ships had crossed the Channel undetected. No Luftwaffe reconnaissance planes had flown for the first five days of June, and naval patrols on June 5 were scrubbed because of the nasty weather. A decoded radio message—intercepted about the time the 101st Airborne launched from England—suggested a possible invasion within forty-eight hours. But an advisory on Monday evening from OB West, the German headquarters for western Europe, declared, “There are no signs yet of an imminent invasion.” Besides Rommel, two of the top four German commanders in the west had been away from their posts on Tuesday morning, and several senior field officers in Normandy had driven to Rennes, in Brittany, for a map exercise. The Fifteenth Army, near the Pas de Calais, was placed on full alert before midnight, but the other major component of Rommel’s Army Group B, the Seventh Army occupying Normandy, sounded no general alarm until 1:30 A.M. despite reports of paratroopers near Caen and in the Cotentin. Even then, OB West insisted at 2:40 A.M.: “It is not a major action.”

  Not until that fantastic armada materialized from the mist had the truth struck home. In subsequent hours the German navy remained supine; so too the air force. Luftwaffe pilots were supposed to fly up to five daily sorties each to disrupt any invasion, but German aircraft losses in the past five months exceeded thirteen thousand planes, more than half from accidents and other noncombat causes. Air Fleet Three, responsible for western France, had just 319 serviceable planes facing nearly 13,000 Allied aircraft; on D-Day, they would fly one sortie for every thirty-seven flown by their adversaries. Of the mere dozen fighter-bombers that reached the invasion zone, ten dropped their bombs prematurely. German soldiers now bitterly joked that American planes were gray, British planes black, and Luftwaffe planes invisible.

  Still, Seventh Army asserted through much of the day that at least part of the Allied landing had been halted at the water’s edge. “The enemy, penetrating our positions, was thrown back into the sea,” the 352nd Infantry Division reported at 1:35 P.M. That soap-bubble delusion soon popped: at six P.M. the division acknowledged “unfavorable developments,” including Allied troops infiltrating in
land and armored spearheads nosing toward Bayeux.

  Rommel’s grim face grew grimmer. Here, in Normandy, he had first made his name as “the fighting animal,” in one biographer’s phrase, driving his 7th Panzer Division more than two hundred miles in four days to trap the French garrison at Cherbourg in June 1940. Soon after, in Africa, the fighting animal took vulpine form as the audacious Desert Fox, although even he could not forestall the Allied triumph in Tunisia. Now, he told a comrade, he hoped “to re-win great fame in the West.”

  Hitler’s decision in November 1943 to reinforce the Atlantic Wall against “an Anglo-Saxon landing” offered him that chance. As commander of half a million men in Army Group B, with responsibility for the coast from Holland to the Loire, the field marshal had flung himself into building the “Rommel Belt.” All told, 20,000 coastal fortifications had been constructed, 500,000 foreshore obstacles emplaced, and 6.5 million mines planted in what he called “the zone of death.” To Lucie he wrote on May 19, “The enemy will have a rough time of it when he attacks, and ultimately achieve no success.” Hitler agreed, declaring, “Once defeated, the enemy will never try to invade again.”

  If confident enough to travel home for his wife’s birthday, Rommel harbored few illusions. He had never forgotten the endless acres of high-quality American war matériel he had inspected at Kasserine Pass; the battered U.S. Army was reeling then, but he knew it would be back in killing strength. Two years of campaigning in Africa gave him great faith in land mines, but he wanted 200 million of them, not 6 million. Some divisions were composed of overage troops, as well as many non-Germans—paybooks had been issued in eight different languages just for former Soviet citizens now serving the Wehrmacht. Army Group B relied on 67,000 horses for locomotion; across the entire front, fewer than 15,000 trucks could be found. A corps commander in Normandy complained, “Emplacements without guns, ammunition depots without ammunition, minefields without mines, and a large number of men in uniform with hardly a soldier among them.”

  Worse yet was the Anglo-American advantage in airpower and seapower, a frightful imbalance that Rommel knew firsthand from the Mediterranean. German officers with battle experience only against the Soviets misjudged the enemy edge in the west. “Our friends from the East cannot imagine what they’re in for here,” Rommel had warned in mid-May; battling a foe with air superiority was like “being nailed to the ground.” Moreover, 71,000 tons of Allied bombs had already eviscerated the German transportation system in the west. Train traffic in France had declined 60 percent since March—a testimony to those spavined Seine bridges, almost half of which were rail spans—and even more in northern France. Allied fighter sweeps proved so murderous that German daytime rail movement in France was banned after May 26. Beyond the 45,000 armed railwaymen already transferred from Germany to forestall saboteurs, almost 30,000 workers were seconded from the Atlantic Wall to rail repair duties. Some field commanders, Rommel grumbled, “do not seem to have recognized the graveness of the hour.” Six weeks earlier he had warned subordinates:

  The enemy will most likely try to land at night and by fog, after a tremendous shelling by artillery and bombers. They will employ hundreds of boats and ships unloading amphibious vehicles and waterproof submersible tanks. We must stop him in the water, not only delay him.… The enemy must be annihilated before he reaches our main battlefield.

  In this injunction lay what one German general called “a cock-fight controversy.” For months the high command had bickered over how best to thwart an Allied invasion. Rommel argued that “the main battle line must be the beach,” with armored reserves poised near the coast. “If we can’t throw the enemy into the sea within twenty-four hours,” he told officers in Normandy, “then that will be the beginning of the end.” In March he had proposed that all armored, mechanized, and artillery units in the west be bundled under his command, and that he assume some control over the First and Nineteenth Armies in southern France.

  This impertinence found little favor in Berlin or Paris. The OB West commander, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, who called his brash subordinate “an unlicked cub” and “the Marshal Laddie,” argued that to disperse counterattack forces along seventeen hundred miles of exposed Atlantic and Mediterranean coastline would be foolhardy. Better to concentrate a central mobile reserve near Paris, able to strike as a clenched fist whenever the invaders committed themselves. Better to follow Napoléon’s dictum, as one panzer commander urged: “S’engager, puis voir.” Engage the enemy, and then we shall see.

  Hitler dithered, then ordered a compromise that pleased no one. Frontline forces on the coast were to fight “to the last man”—that phrase so easily uttered by those far from the trenches—and Army Group B would command three armored divisions among the ten on the Western Front. Three others went to southern France. The remaining four, controlled by Berlin, were clustered near Paris in a strategic ensemble called Panzer Group West. Neither Rundstedt nor Rommel could issue orders to air or naval forces, who were vaguely advised to cooperate with ground commanders. “In the East there is one enemy,” an officer in Paris complained. “Here everything is so complicated.” Just a few days earlier, Hitler had shifted troops from OB West to Italy and the Eastern Front. Perhaps predictably, when frantic pleas to release the armored reserves had arrived in Berlin and Berchtesgaden this morning, more than eight hours passed before the panzers were ordered to begin the long, tortuous journey toward Normandy. Rommel denounced the delay as “madness,” adding, “Of course now they will arrive too late.” S’engager, puis voir.

  * * *

  Dusk sifted over the Seine valley. Swallows trawled the river bottoms, and the day’s last light faded from the chalk cliffs above the château, where antiaircraft gunners strained for the drone of approaching bombers. Telephones jangled in the salon war room, and orderlies bustled across the parquet with the latest scraps of news.

  In Berlin it had been whispered that Rommel suffered from “African sickness”—pessimism—to which he answered, “Der Führer vertraut mir, und das genügt mir auch.” The Führer trusts me, and that’s enough for me. He remained “the Führer’s marshal,” in one colleague’s phrase, loyal in his own fashion and as beguiled by Hitler as steel filings by a magnet. War and the Nazis had been good to him: he was a stamp collector not above adding looted issues to his album, and the handsome villa in leafy Herrlingen where he delivered Lucie’s shoes had been confiscated from Jews after the occupants were sent to Theresienstadt. Hitler was a bulwark against bolshevism, he had told staff officers; if the invasion was repelled, perhaps the West would “come round to the idea of fighting side by side with a new Germany in the East.” The onslaught against the Atlantic Wall would be “the most decisive battle of the war,” he had predicted a few weeks earlier. “The fate of the German people itself is at stake.” His fate, too.

  The struggle in Normandy would depend in large measure on the only armored unit within quick striking distance of the invasion beaches, the 21st Panzer Division. A stalwart from Africa, the division had been obliterated in Tunisia, then rebuilt with sixteen thousand men—some still wearing oddments of tropical uniforms—and 127 tanks. Even while racing back to France this afternoon, Rommel had stopped midway to confirm by phone that the unit was hurrying into action. Now the harsh truth came clear: orders, counterorders, and disorder had plagued the division almost as much as marauding Allied planes and scorching field-gun fire. Not least among the 21st’s troubles was the temporary absence of the commanding general, who reportedly had spent the small hours of June 6 in a Parisian fleshpot. The division’s antiaircraft battalion had been pulverized by naval gunfire north of Caen, and the tank regiment gutted from the air and by British gunners. This evening a panzer grenadier regiment knifing toward Sword Beach in the two-mile gap between Canadian and British troops had nearly reached the strand. Then, just before nine P.M., almost 250 more British gliders escorted by fighters swept into the Orne valley, doubling British airborne combat power in Fra
nce and threatening to pin the grenadiers against the sea.

  At 10:40 P.M., General Friedrich Dollmann, who had commanded Seventh Army since 1939, phoned La Roche–Guyon with baleful news. The “strong attack by the 21st Panzer Division has been smothered by new airborne landings,” Dollmann reported. The counterattack had failed. Nearly two-thirds of the 21st Panzer’s tanks were lost. Swarming enemy aircraft impeded movement, even at night. Grenadiers skulked back from the coast to blocking positions with two dozen 88mm guns in the hills around Caen.

  Rommel returned the receiver to its cradle. Hands again clasped behind his back, he studied the wall map. The critical crossroads city of Caen remained in German hands, and nowhere did the Anglo-American penetration appear deeper than a few kilometers. The 12th SS Panzer and the Panzer Lehr Divisions were finally moving toward Normandy despite fighter-bombers flocking to the telltale dust clouds like raptors to prey. “We cannot hold everything,” he would tell his chief of staff. The first critical twenty-four hours was nearly spent, yet perhaps the coastal battle could still be saved. He turned to an aide and said, as if reminding himself, “I’ve nearly always succeeded up to now.” He was, as ever, the Führer’s marshal.