The glory of German arms in Normandy – and it was glory, in however evil a cause – was won by the officers and men at divisional level and below who held the line against the Allies under intolerable conditions for more than two months. Colonel Kurt Kauffmann, operations officer of Panzer Lehr, believed that in the first few days a really determined thrust against the Americans could have driven them into the sea. Thereafter, ‘I realized that the situation was hopeless, with more than 40 per cent of our infantry gone and the tremendous Allied shelling and air activity.’24 Yet it was Kauffmann who led the dramatically successful counter-attack into Villers-Bocage on 13 June, and Panzer Lehr which remained one of the formations most respected by their Allied opponents even after it had suffered crippling losses. ‘Should we win this war, Kruger,’ the senior signals officer of 12th SS Panzer Division remarked acidly to one of his lieutenants, ‘I shall write a book about why we should have lost it.’25 Yet no division fought with more fanatical tenacity than the Hitler Jugend, whose soldiers had an average age of 18½. ‘It was a situation for despair, but there was no alternative but to keep one’s nerve,’ said Colonel Heinz-Gunther Guderian, son of the great panzer leader and senior staff officer of 116th Panzer Division. ‘One had to hold before one’s eyes the memory of Frederick the Great, and perhaps also to think of the words of the American general who said that the man who wins a battle is he who can remain standing until the last five minutes.’26 Brigadier Williams said: ‘The Germans adjusted much better to new conditions than we did. By and large they were better soldiers than we were. The Germans liked soldiering. We didn’t.’27 General Quesada of the American IXth Air Force found afterwards that, ‘One’s imagination boggled at what the German army might have done to us without Hitler working so effectively for our side.’28
Fritz Langangke’s Panzer V Abteilung of 2nd SS Panzer Division was posted at St Sauveur-Lendelin in corps reserve early in July, when it was suddenly ordered forward in a crisis move to meet a new American breakthrough. He himself was directed to take his platoon to a point on the road near St Denis, and block any enemy advance along it. He asked for the position of the HKL – the main battle line – and was told that this was unknown. Late in the evening, he led his five Panthers cautiously forward, each commander straining his eyes and ears above the roar of his engine and squealing of the track for a hint of the enemy. At last there was a rattle of small-arms fire against the hull of Langangke’s tank, and he concluded that he had come far enough. The platoon pulled back to deploy on each side of the road, hull down behind a hedge. ‘It was a pretty tight night,’ said the German. The crews sat absolutely silent in their tanks, whispering when it was necessary to report by radio, listening constantly for movement in front of them. At dawn, despite their careful camouflage, one of the ubiquitous American Piper Cubs pinpointed them, and artillery fire began to fall around the position. Towards noon, men of the division’s 3rd Der Führer Panzergrenadiers belatedly arrived and began to dig in around them, while the 6th Parachute Regiment deployed on their left. Conventional wisdom demanded that the tanks should fall back at nightfall and leave the infantry to hold the positions. But Langangke understood that there could be no such refinements here, where the tanks were being employed as strong-points, and their moral support was essential to the infantry, even of an SS division.
The tank platoon held its positions for two weeks, under constant artillery fire, protected by its very proximity to the Americans, which caused the enemy gunners to fire consistently beyond the German line. At night, when the crews risked crawling out of the vehicles for an hour or two of merciful release, they could hear the American convoys moving up with supplies, and hear American voices across the still summer air. Once, the enemy attempted an infantry attack in a fashion which astonished the German veterans. They marched forward in long, leisurely files towards the Panthers,’ ‘as if they were going to a carnival’. The SS opened a withering fire, and the attack crumpled.
Langangke remembered the next attack well, for it came on his birthday, 15 July. For a time amid the shooting, he himself could see nothing from his position closed down in his tank on the left-hand side of the road. At first, he could not understand why the Americans were not attacking in his sector, but he later found that the ground in front was too soft for armour. Then one of his commanders jumped on the hull and shouted: ‘We’ve had it – hit in the turret!’ Langangke ordered him to pull back, and ran across the road to see for himself. Five Shermans were approaching. He dashed back to his own tank, and told the crew: ‘We’ve got to get across that road.’ They felt that there was only the slimmest chance of survival once they moved from their closely camouflaged position into the open. But they had to try. At full speed, the tank roared from cover and crashed across the road in front of the Americans – ‘the longest forty metres I travelled in the war,’ said Langangke. Then the driver was braking the left track to swing to face the enemy. Still undamaged despite some shellfire, they began to engage the Shermans at point-blank range. They glimpsed dead and wounded German infantry around them, and survivors running from their foxholes to shelter in the lee of the Panther. It was obvious that the foot soldiers were close to panic. The crew urged Langangke to fire on the move, but he knew that if they did so, there was little chance of a hit. Most of the Shermans had fired one or even two rounds before the Panther began to shoot, but it was the German tank which now demonstrated its legendary killing power. A few moments later, four Shermans were burning in front of them. The fifth roared backwards into the thick brush. ‘A thing like that puts you on an unbelievable emotional level,’ said Langangke. ‘You feel like Siegfried, that you can dare to do anything.’
The lieutenant jumped down from his tank, to be joined by one of his other commanders, and they ran forward up the ditch by the roadside to discover what the Americans were now doing. It was common practice among tank officers of all the armies in Normandy to resort frequently to their feet, for it was too hazardous to take a tank forward among the hedges without the kind of forewarning that only ground reconnaissance could provide. The Germans found the surviving Sherman still struggling to reverse over a hedge; engine revving, it staggered backwards and forwards on the rim of the obstacle. They retired to their tanks, Langangke cursing when he tripped over an abandoned infantry Panzerfaust that he could have used to good effect had he noticed it on the way forward. Back in the Panther, they fired a few rounds of HE and a long burst of machine-gun fire to clear the foliage obscuring the gunner’s view of the Sherman. Then they hit it once in the turret with an armour-piercing shell. The American tank brewed up in the inevitable pillar of oily black smoke and flame. The surviving German infantry regrouped. The Americans continued shelling the area, but launched no further major attack. Langangke’s platoon had fought one among a thousand similar actions in those weeks in Normandy, demonstrating the remarkable tenacity and skill of the panzer crews and, above all, the superiority of their tanks.
Yet it would be absurd to give the impression that the German soldier found Normandy an easy, or even a tolerable battle. While many men said later that it was a less terrible experience than the war in the east, from which most of them had come, even veterans were deeply shaken by the experience of hurling themselves again and again into action against the great steamroller of Allied resources. 2nd Panzer Division reported in July on the difficulties they faced:
The incredibly heavy artillery and mortar fire of the enemy is something new for seasoned veterans as much as for the new arrivals from reinforcement units. The assembly of troops is spotted immediately by enemy reconnaissance aircraft and smashed by bombs and artillery directed from the air; and if, nevertheless, the attacking troops go forward, they become involved in such dense artillery and mortar fire that heavy casualties ensue and the attack peters out within the first few hundred metres. The losses suffered by the infantry are then so heavy that the impetus necessary to renew the attack is spent.
Our soldiers enter the
battle in low spirits at the thought of the enemy’s enormous superiority of matériel. The feeling of helplessness against enemy aircraft operating without hindrance has a paralysing effect; and during the barrage the effect on the inexperienced men is literally soul-shattering. The best results have been obtained by platoon and section commanders leaping forward uttering a good old-fashioned yell. We have also revived the practice of bugle calls.29
Hitler’s armies had always adopted the policy of fashioning some elite divisions to provide the smashing combat power at the tip of their spear, while others – including most of the infantry formations – were equipped and manned principally to hold defensive positions between major battles. The 276th Infantry Division was a typical, moderate line formation, stationed at Bayonne on 6 June, made up to strength by combing Germany for over-age men – including many miners, who had hitherto been excused military service. Corporal Adolf Hohenstein had spent much of the war building bridges with a labour unit in Russia until he was transferred to the 276th. A 22-year-old former student mining engineer, he was much younger than most of the men around him. He found the division ‘already pretty weak. We spent too much time doing old Prussian exercises rather than field training.’ On 16 June, they entrained for Le Mans, where they offloaded in pouring rain on the 19th. Thereafter, they marched by night to the front, advancing some 20 miles at a time, passing the days feeding the horses – upon whom they were overwhelmingly dependent for transport – among the cornfields where they halted. They loved their horses, and later were deeply depressed by the terrible casualties the animals suffered.
On 2 July, they took over a sector of the front near Villers-Bocage from 12th SS Panzer, and spent their first days in the line laying mines and attempting to clear up the appalling wreckage of battle around them – dead men of every nationality, abandoned equipment, shattered vehicles. Harassing fire from British artillery taught them very quickly about the Wehrmacht’s desperate shortage of medical supplies. Hohenstein watched his friend Heinz Alles bleed to death when an artery was severed by a bullet in the leg: ‘A man was lucky if he could get an injection. The doctors could only try to do something for those with a chance of life.’ Some men’s nerve cracked very quickly. After 20 July, they convinced themselves that the shortages of supplies and ammunition and the breakdowns of administration were the fruits of treachery within their own army. In reality, of course, the entire creaking logistical machinery sustaining the German forces in Normandy was collapsing under the strain of air attack and attrition. Morale among the soldiers of the 276th ebbed steadily: ‘The lack of any success at all affected the men very badly. You could feel the sheer fear growing. We would throw ourselves to the ground at the slightest sound, and many men were saying that we should never leave Normandy alive.’
It is important to cite the example of formations such as the 276th Infantry, indifferent soldiers, to emphasize that by no means the entire German front in France was in the hands of elite formations. Many German infantrymen were happy to seize an opportunity to be taken prisoner. They developed what they themselves called sardonically ‘the German look’, ever craning upwards into the sky, watchful for fighter-bombers. While the Tommies played brag in their slit trenches, the Germans played ‘skat’ in their foxholes a few hundred yards away, and listened to Lili Marleen on Radio Belgrade. They were as grateful as their Allied counterparts when, for a few days or even weeks, their sector of the. front was quiet, and they endured nothing worse than harassing fire and patrols. They prayed for rain and cloud to keep the Jabos – the Jagdbombers – away from them. Their greatest luxury was the capture of a few American soup cubes or tins of coffee. They pored earnestly over the English cooking instructions, and were jealously scornful of the Allies’ material riches. Few German soldiers, even of moderate units, felt great respect for the fighting qualities of their enemies. Sergeant Heinz Hickmann of the Luftwaffe Parachute Division said: ‘We had no respect whatever for the American soldier.’ Colonel Kauffmann of Panzer Lehr remarked wryly that, ‘the Americans started not too early in the morning, they liked a little bit too much comfort.’ Corporal Hohenstein reported that his men were constantly puzzled by the reluctance of the Americans to exploit their successes: ‘We felt that they always overestimated us. We could not understand why they did not break through. The Allied soldier never seemed to be trained as we were, always to try to do more than had been asked of us.’ Here was one of the keys to German tactical success on the battlefield. Colonel Brian Wyldbore-Smith, GSO I of the British 11th Armoured Division, said: ‘The Germans were great opportunists. They were prepared to act – always.’
It is striking to contrast the manner in which Allied units which suffered 40 or 50 per cent losses expected to be pulled out of the line, even disbanded, with their German counterparts, who were merely reassembled into improvised battlegroups – the Kampfgruppen – which were an essential ingredient of so many of the German army’s victories, and of its very survival for so many weeks in Normandy. Cooks, signallers, isolated tank platoons, stray Luftwaffe flak units, were all grist to the mill of the Kampfgruppen, which proved astonishingly cohesive and effective in action. When Sergeant Hans Stober of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers found the Flakabteilung in which he served destroyed by air attack, he saw nothing remarkable in being transferred, with his surviving men, to Kampfgruppe Ullrich. A few weeks later, after the collapse at Falaise, he was serving with the remnants of 116th Panzer in Kampfgruppe Fick. In the middle of the Normandy battle, 116th Panzer’s engineer battalion was drafted to fight as infantry and called upon to mount major ground attacks. The US First Army were surprised to discover that one of their German prisoners in mid-July was a pay corps clerk, who had been given a week’s infantry training and thrust into the line. No one could suggest that this manner of organizing an army or fighting a battle was a proper substitute for the maintenance of balanced and fully-equipped formations. But it was a critical factor in the German army’s ability to avoid utter collapse even when most of its armoured and infantry formations had been battered into ruin.
The American Colonel Trevor Dupuy has conducted a detailed statistical study of German actions in the Second World War. Some of his explanations as to why Hitler’s armies performed so much more impressively than their enemies seem fanciful. But no critic has challenged his essential finding that on almost every battlefield of the war, including Normandy, the German soldier performed more impressively than his opponents:
On a man for man basis, the German ground soldier consistently inflicted casualties at about a 50% higher rate than they incurred from the opposing British and American troops UNDER ALL CIRCUMSTANCES. [emphasis in original] This was true when they were attacking and when they were defending, when they had a local numerical superiority and when, as was usually the case, they were outnumbered, when they had air superiority and when they did not, when they won and when they lost.30
It is undoubtedly true that the Germans were much more efficient than the Americans in making use of available manpower. An American army corps staff contained 55 per cent more officers and 44 per cent fewer other ranks than its German equivalent. In a panzergrenadier division in 1944–45, 89.4 per cent of the men were fighting soldiers, against only 65.56 per cent in an American division. In June 1944, 54.35 per cent of the German army consisted of fighting soldiers, against 38 per cent of the American army. 44.9 per cent of the German army was employed in combat divisions, against 20.8 per cent of the American. While the US army became a huge industrial organization, whose purpose sometimes seemed to be forgotten by those who administered it, the German army was designed solely as a machine for waging war. Even the British, who possessed nothing like the reserves of manpower of the Americans, traditionally employed officers on a far more lavish scale than the German army, which laid particular emphasis upon NCO leadership.
Events on the Normandy battlefield demonstrated that most British or American troops continued a given operation for as long as reasonable me
n could. Then – when they had fought for many hours, suffered many casualties, or were running low on fuel or ammunition – they disengaged. The story of German operations, however, is landmarked with repeated examples of what could be achieved by soldiers prepared to attempt more than reasonable men could. German troops did not fight uniformly well. But Corporal Hohenstein’s assertion that they were trained always to try to do more than had been asked of them is borne out by history. Again and again, a single tank, a handful of infantry with an 88 mm gun, a hastily-mounted counter-attack, stopped a thoroughly-organized Allied advance dead in its tracks. German leadership at corps level and above was often little better than that of the Allies, and sometimes markedly worse. But at regimental level and below, it was superb. The German army appeared to have access to a bottomless reservoir of brave, able and quick-thinking colonels commanding battle-groups, and of NCOs capable of directing the defence of an entire sector of the front. The fanatical performance of the SS may partly explain the stubborn German defence of Europe in 1944–45. But it cannot wholly do so, any more than the quality of the Allied armies can be measured by the achievements of their airborne forces. The defence of Normandy was sustained for 10 weeks in the face of overwhelming odds by the professionalism and stubborn skills of the entire Wehrmacht, from General of Pioneers Meise, who somehow kept just sufficient road and rail links operational to maintain a thin stream of supplies to the front, to Corporal Hohenstein and his admittedly half-hearted comrades of 276th Infantry.
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 25