My Irmi-love,
. . . It doesn’t look very good, that would be saying too much, but nonetheless there is no reason to paint too black a picture. You know the high spirits with which I face things, which allow me to stroll through difficult situations with some optimism and a lot of luck. Above all there are so many good and elite divisions in our near-encirclement that we must get through somehow. The most difficult thing has been and remains the enemy air force . . . it is there at dawn, all day, at night, dominating the roads. Sadly my dog was pinched yesterday by soldiers passing through. I should so like to have taken him back to Germany, but it was not to be. The last three days we have had the most wonderful summer weather – sun, warmth, blue skies – so utterly in contrast to everything else around us. Ah well, it must turn out alright in the end. Don’t lose heart, I’ll get through this somehow as I always do. A thousand loving kisses to you and the children, your FERD.
My darling wife,
Yet another day. Nowadays I am grateful to the good Lord for every dawn he lets me wake. When I listen to the guns at night, my thoughts wander back home to you, my dearest, and I wonder whether I shall ever see you again. You will have to be prepared not to receive any letters from me for some time. I shall have to cope with great difficulties. May the good Lord be always with me as he has been! I long for you all! How much I would now like to look at your dear pictures, but my kit is far away and I am unlikely to get it back. Should I not return home then you, my treasure, will have to bear this lot too with courage. I leave you our dear boys, in them you will have me too. Your dear little Ortwin and our little Wilfried will be your dear Karl to you. I would so like to go with you after our victory into a lovely and happy future. Many thousands of loving greetings and kisses to you, my dear, good, loyal little wife and to my dear children from your dear Daddy! Farewell! God bless you! KARL
My dear Heather-love,
Do my letters still reach you? Nonetheless I will talk to you rather than mourn to you. One day the light of truth and clarity will shine over this time of humiliation. I just went for a walk in the hot sun to Bagnoles. I did not get there. On the way, I picked a sprig of heather and wore it on my breast. All nature’s creatures were out – how high and low the bees, bumblebees, insects hummed, just like in 1926. Today there is another accompaniment as well, spreading death and destruction. I am constantly surprised how calmly I take it all. Is it because of the rocklike certainty of your love? I have written a letter which you should open later, if I don’t return. I don’t know if it will reach you. But you know what I have to say to you and the children. I have left my affairs in order. What love can express I have already done. The children are on their way, already independent, and will find a path through whatever befalls them. It will not be easy in this chaos, but life is never handed to us on a plate.
Last night we had a little ‘soldier’s hour’ and sang our soldiers’ and folk songs into the night. What would a German be without a song? The evening sky glowed with fire and explosions. One always thinks the earth brings forth new life, but now it is death. What new order will emerge from this devil’s symphony? Can a vision, strong in faith, be born into a new world? The social order rooted in National Socialism cannot be delayed for ever.
Enough of that . . . What remains is great love and loyalty, the acknowledgement of the eternal source of life. I take you and the girls in my arms in gratitude for all you have given me, your FRITZ.
‘It was quite against logic to suppose that you were destined to survive the war,’ wrote Andrew Wilson. ‘All the appearance of things was against it. You saw a pair of boots sticking out from a blanket, and they looked exactly like your own; there was no ground for thinking that the thing that had come to the owner of these boots was not going to come just as casually to you . . . So before going into action he would utter a phrase articulately beneath his breath: “Today I may die.” It was a kind of propitiation; and yet he could never quite believe in it, because that would have defeated its purpose . . .’8
8 » CRISIS OF CONFIDENCE
The fall of Caen
By early July, the struggle for Normandy was inflicting almost equal misery upon the German, British and American armies – the first having by far greater cause for it. The defenders knew that their forces were being inexorably ground down, and that they could not hope for tolerable replacements. Many of their difficulties of manpower, armour, supplies and ammunition were known to the Allies through Ultra. Yet it was small comfort to read the Germans’ gloomy signals about their predicament when, on the battlefield, the force and effectiveness of their resistance seemed quite undiminished. Meanwhile, the men of the invading army were growing weary. The summer was slipping away, and the disturbing prospect of autumn weather in the Channel lay ahead. The safe refuge of the Brittany ports still seemed many miles and many battles away. What if FORTITUDE abruptly collapsed, and Rommel brought down powerful reinforcements from Fifteenth Army? What if the German flying bomb campaign, already causing so much alarm in England, intensified and gave way to new and more deadly secret weapons? The problem of infantry casualties, a matter of concern to the Americans, had become a crisis for the British. Sir Ronald Adam, the Adjutant-General, paid a personal visit to Montgomery to warn him about the shortage of replacements. Already battalions had been broken up to fill the ranks of others in the line; now came the possibility that entire divisions might have to be disbanded.
After the excitement of the capture of Cherbourg and the northern Cotentin, on 3 July the American VIII Corps, along with a division from VII Corps, began a new southward offensive in driving rain, mist and low cloud. Within the first days, it became bogged down in the mire of now-familiar difficulties: green formations, and stubborn defensive tactics which destroyed momentum. If British commanders were too slow to sack incompetent subordinates, their American counterparts were almost too swift. Now, there was a new spate of dismissals of divisional and regimental commanders in Bradley’s army. The Americans were to discover in north-west Europe that it was easier to remove officers than to find more effective newcomers to replace them. As the months went by, their enthusiasm for purges declined, and they concluded that it was more profitable to give commanders time to settle down and learn their business than to remove them immediately after their formation’s first failure. Eisenhower wrote to Marshall about the stagnation of First Army’s push south: ‘The going is extremely tough, with three main causes responsible. The first of these, as always, is the fighting quality of the German soldier.’1 The others he identified as the terrain and the weather, which was hampering air support.
Meanwhile, on the eastern flank, Second Army was fighting the tough, slow-moving battle that at last gained its men a large part of the ruins of Caen. For almost a month since the landings, the British and Canadian 3rd Divisions had endured the frustrations of static warfare around Cambes wood, Carpiquet and other landmarks that they first beheld on 6 or 7 June. On the night of 7 July, 450 heavy aircraft of Bomber Command attacked Caen, principally with delayed-action bombs, in an operation designed to clear the way for an assault by I Corps the following morning. Hundreds of thousands of men of Second Army watched in awe as the waves of bombers droned steadily over the city, letting loose their loads and turning away, some bleeding smoke and flame as they slipped from the sky. Amid the rumble of constant explosions from the city, a great pall of smoke and dust rose upwards, shrouding the houses and factories. The use of the heavy bombers reflected the belief of Montgomery and the Allied high command that they must now resort to desperate measures to pave the way for a ground assault. Afterwards, this action came to be regarded as one of the most futile air attacks of the war. Through no fault of their own, the airmen bombed well back from the forward line to avoid the risk of hitting British troops, and inflicted negligible damage upon the German defences. Only the old city of Caen paid the full price.
About a quarter of the citizens of Caen had departed before the bombers came, urged
by both the Germans and the local prefect. Many more remained, fearful for their homes and possessions, and arguing that ‘to evacuate is only to escape Germans to meet other Germans, to avoid bombs and shells to meet other bombs and shells.’2 Nothing had prepared them to expect the devastating rain of explosives from the massed air attack. As the sound of the bombers faded, ‘a great silence fell over the town, broken only by the cries of the wounded and the sound of falling masonry from burning buildings.’3 The Palais de I’Université was in flames, the initial fires in its chemistry department having spread in minutes to other parts of the building. Hopeless little groups of firemen struggled to draw water from the Odon, since the mains had been blasted in a hundred places. 38 civilians died in one cellar, 50 were killed and wounded in a single street. The survivors were so terrorized by the destruction around them that, even as the Germans at last began to withdraw through the streets, most inhabitants clung to the shelter of their cellars.
When I Corps jumped off on Operation CHARNWOOD the next morning, the troops were heartened by the memory of the air attack. But they quickly discovered that the Germans were resisting as tenaciously as ever. Meyer’s men of 12th SS Panzer remained the core of the defence, apparently indestructible even though their ranks had been decimated by weeks of heavy fighting without replacements. Two days of desperate battle cost some British infantry battalions 25 per cent of their strength. They won through to the northern bank of the Orne, in the middle of the utterly desolated city, but could go no further. The Germans still held the critical high ground of the Bourguébus Ridge to the south and, nearer at hand, the steelworks of Colombelles, from which their observation posts could mark every British movement. Too much blood had been shed and too many weeks had elapsed for possession of the shattered ruins to offer any more to most thoughtful British commanders than a ghastly echo of other ruins, other empty victories, almost 30 years before. From CHARNWOOD, there was not even the compensation of having ‘written down’ significant German forces.
While the British and Canadian 3rd Divisions painfully battered their way into Caen, further west 43rd Wessex and its supporting armour suffered 2,000 casualties in two days of renewed fighting for Hill 112, the commanding position beyond the Odon which had been lost in the last stages of EPSOM. Once again, the formidable fighting power of 12th SS Panzer forced Thomas’s men into bloody difficulties. Like so many other British assaults, that of 10 July began well in the wake of the huge bombardment, with the leading units reaching Eterville and well up the slopes of 112 by 8.00 a.m. Corporal Chris Portway was a 21-year-old section commander in the 4th Dorsets: ‘They plod along and do the job – not death or glory boys like the paratroops,’ the sort of comment which might be made about many solidly dependable British county regiments. Urged on by their colonel’s hunting horn, they reached Eterville without serious casualties. Portway fought a fierce little private battle in its churchyard, pursuing two Germans between the gravestones until he reached them with a grenade in the church itself. He was dismayed to meet his commanding officer among the ruins, asking helplessly: ‘What’s happening, corporal?’ The colonel appeared to have lost all grip on events. But the day’s work had been done at tolerable cost. They were digging in around Eterville, pleased to find themselves alongside a château painted with huge red crosses, ‘because the Germans were usually quite good about trying not to hit hospitals,’4 when they were suddenly summoned to a new Orders Group and told that they must press on to the next village, Maltot.
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 DF5 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:
The 88 mm dual-purpose gun was the decisive force in the German destruction of many Allied tank attacks in Normandy, above all in the open country on the British flank, where its long reach could be exploited to best effect. It was, quite simply, the best gun produced by any combatant nation in the war, with a formidable killing power against all Allied tanks.
From 6.30 to 8.00 a.m. again heavy machine-gun fire. Then Tommy attacks with great masses of infantry and many tanks. We fight as long as possible but we realize we are in a losing position. By the time the survivors try to pull back, we realize that we are surrounded. In our sector, we had driven back the British infantry attack, but they had bypassed us to left and right. I moved back as fast as I could under the continuous firing. Others who tried to do the same failed. When the small-arms fire stopped our own guns got going. I lay there in the midst of it all. I still cannot understand how I escaped, with shelling falling two or three metres away, splinters tearing around my ears. By now I had worked my way to within 200 metres of our own lines. It was hard work, always on my stomach, only occasionally up on hands and knees. The small-arms fire began again, and the English infantry renewed their attack. My hopes dwindled. The advancing Tommies passed five or six paces away without noticing me in the high corn. I was almost at the end of the my tether, my feet and elbows in agony, my throat parched. Suddenly the cover thinned out and I had to cross an open field. In the midst of this, wounded Englishmen passed within ten metres without seeing me. Now I had to hurry. There were only ten metres to go to the next belt of corn. Suddenly three Tommies appeared and took me prisoner. Immediately I was given a drink and a cigarette. At the concentration point for prisoners I met my Unterscharführer and other comrades of my company . . .6
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 t
he 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.
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 31