The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  Other Canadian prisoners were herded to the Abbaye d’Ardenne. “Why do you bring prisoners to the rear? They only eat up our rations,” Meyer was quoted as saying. “In the future no more prisoners are to be taken.” Prisoners surrendered their paybooks, then were bludgeoned to death or dispatched by a bullet to the brain. On Thursday, June 8, the killings continued. Summoned one by one from a stable used as a jail, each condemned man shook hands with his mates before trudging up a flight of stairs and turning left into the pretty garden, where he was shot. Forty prisoners assembled in a field near the Caen–Bayeux road were ordered to sit facing east; SS troops brandishing Schmeisser machine pistols advanced in a skirmish line and opened fire, killing nearly three dozen. Several who bolted were soon recaptured and sent to prison camps. Now known as the Murder Division, the 12th SS Panzer would be accused of killing 156 defenseless men, nearly all Canadian, in little more than a week, igniting a cycle of atrocity and reprisal that persisted all summer. “Any German who tries to surrender nowadays is a brave man,” said a Scottish soldier. “We just shoot them there and then, with their hands up.” A British platoon commander jotted down his daily orders with a closing notation, “NPT below rank major”: no prisoners to be taken below the rank of major.

  Canadian battle casualties approached three thousand during the first week of OVERLORD, with more than a thousand dead. A witticism inspired by hard experience in Italy held that if “fuck” and “frontal” were removed from the military vocabulary, the Canadian army would have been both speechless and unable to attack. In less than five years that expeditionary army had expanded to more than fiftyfold its prewar strength but still evidenced little professional depth.

  Yet the Canadian 3rd Division, carrying more than double its usual artillery complement, now displayed mettle in a battle described by one corporal as “just a straight shootout, both sides blasting at each other day and night.… They went at it like hockey players.” Beaten back by firepower, the Hitlerjugend found the success at Authie impossible to replicate, even when reinforced by the 21st Panzer and Panzer Lehr Divisions. Clumsy, improvised attacks by the Murder Division were repelled with great gusts of howitzer, tank, and antitank fire; at noon on June 9, a single Sherman Firefly destroyed five Panthers with five 17-pounder antitank rounds. “I could have screamed from rage and grief,” an SS officer wrote. Demonstrating the enduring utility of the fricative, a Canadian artillery commander later commented, “The Germans thought we were fucking Russians. They did stupid things, and we killed those bastards in large numbers.”

  * * *

  Among the bastards watching from Panzermeyer’s perch in the Abbaye turret on June 9 was General Leo Freiherr Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of the Führer’s armored reserve, Panzer Group West. A tall, cosmopolitan cavalryman who had previously served as Germany’s military attaché in London, Brussels, and the Hague, Geyr more than most had embraced the Napoleonic S’engager, puis voir. Having dutifully engaged and then seen as Allied planes and artillery chewed up SS formations, he muttered, “My dear Meyer, the war can only now be won through political means.” The next evening, after conferring with Rommel, Geyr postponed an attack against British troops north of Caen and ordered his tanks to regroup.

  A few minutes later, at 8:30 P.M., Geyr stepped outside his château command post in La Caine, twelve miles southwest of Caen. Trailers, tents, and four large radio trucks filled an adjacent orchard; the destruction of phone lines across Normandy had forced German commanders to rely increasingly on the radio, despite the vulnerability of transmissions to decryption or direction finding. British eavesdroppers alone now intercepted seventeen thousand messages a day, including detailed information on supply levels and troop movements. Twice that morning, in fact, Ultra decrypts had identified La Caine as the Panzer Group West headquarters. The second intercept pinpointed the location precisely.

  Geyr now cocked an ear to the drone of approaching aircraft. Other officers joined their commander, raking the heavens with field glasses as the sound grew louder. Suddenly, forty Typhoons from the RAF Second Tactical Air Force roared over the treetops in three waves, spitting rockets. Moments later, seventy-one Mitchell bombers pummeled the orchard with 436 500-pound bombs, turning La Caine into an inferno.

  Geyr escaped with minor wounds, but the headquarters had been disemboweled. His chief of staff and more than thirty others were dead, the entire operations staff wiped out, the signal equipment wrecked. Those killed were interred in a bomb crater beneath a huge cross of polished oak, adorned with a swastika and an eagle. Geyr and other survivors fled to Paris for a fortnight’s recuperation, crippling the armored strike force in Normandy.

  Similar decapitations further impaired German battle leadership. Several days later, a British battleship shell exploded in the branches of a shade tree in the Odon River valley, instantly killing the 12th SS Panzer Division commanding general with a steel splinter through the face; Kurt Meyer would succeed him as leader of the Murder Division. Three other division commanders and a corps commander, General Erich Marcks, also were killed by mid-June. Slender and ascetic—he had banned whipped cream from his mess “as long as our country is starving”—Marcks had been disfigured in World War I, losing an eye, a leg, and the use of his right hand. In this war he had lost two sons. Now he lost all. Cautioned against driving in daylight, Marcks told a staff officer, “You people are always worried about your little piece of life.” His wooden leg kept him from scrambling into a ditch when the staff car was strafed near Carentan on June 12. Marcks and the others were among 675 World War II German generals to die, including 223 killed in action, 64 suicides, and 53 who were executed, either by the Reich or by the Allies postwar.

  “The Seventh Army is everywhere forced on the defensive,” the OB West war diary recorded on June 10. Field Marshal von Rundstedt the same day ordered the “thorough destruction of Cherbourg harbor to begin forthwith,” a scorched-earth decree intercepted by Ultra. Before leaving for Paris, Geyr recommended converting one-third of all panzers to antiaircraft gun carriers. Rail traffic had grown so sclerotic that of the 2,300 tons of food, fuel, and ammunition needed daily for Seventh Army, only 400 reached the front. A quartermaster had to borrow fifteen machine guns from the military governor of France for Cherbourg’s defense.

  Rommel too was unnerved. In an assessment for Rundstedt written June 10, even before the calamity at Panzer Group West’s headquarters, he described the “paralyzing and destructive effect” of Allied air dominance from an estimated 27,000 sorties each day. (This was nearly triple the actual number.) He also feared another, bigger Allied landing in the Pas de Calais, and warned that the “material equipment of the Americans … is far and away superior.” During a two-hour stroll through the La Roche–Guyon gardens, he told a subordinate that the best solution would be “to stop the war while Germany still held some territory for bargaining.” Hitler disagreed, demanding of Seventh Army that “every man shall fight or fall where he stands.”

  “The battle is not going at all well for us,” Rommel wrote Lucie on June 13, “mainly because of the enemy’s air superiority and heavy naval guns.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “I often think of you at home.”

  * * *

  Rommel’s lament would have delighted General Montgomery had he been privy to it. The 21st Army Group commander often tried to infiltrate the minds of his adversaries, to see the fight as they saw it. On the walls of his personal caravan, confiscated from a captured Italian field marshal in Tunisia, Montgomery had tacked up not only an invocation from Henry V—“O God of battles! Steel my soldiers’ hearts!”—but photos of prominent battle captains. A visitor to Montgomery’s encampment later counted “three of Rommel, one of Rundstedt, and about thirty of Monty.”

  On D+2 he had come home to Normandy, ancestral seat of the Montgomerys, including one forebear who accidentally killed King Henri II with a lance through the eye during a joust in 1559. His command post was tucked into the grounds of an im
posing manor house with a hip roof and six chimneys at Creullet, four miles inland of Gold Beach. A sign on the twenty-foot iron gate advised “All traffic keep left”—a bit of England imported to France. Montgomery had also brought his beloved “betting book,” a leather-bound volume in which innumerable small-stakes wagers—when Rome would fall, or the war end—had been entered in his tidy hand over the years; those resolved were marked “settled.” And his pets: “I now have 6 canaries, 1 love bird, 2 dogs,” he subsequently wrote, the latter a fox terrier named Hitler and a cocker spaniel named Rommel, both of whom “get beaten when necessary.” The menagerie soon included a cow, ten chickens, and four geese; the fowl gave omelet eggs for his mess. Church services from the Creullet garden were broadcast to Britain, with Montgomery—“slender, hard, hawk-like, energetic,” in an RAF officer’s description—reading scripture to officers sitting in the flower beds.

  “The way to fame is a hard one,” he would write soon after the war. “You must suffer and be the butt of jealousy and ill-informed criticism. It is a lonely matter.” Lonely he was, but fame’s fruits pleased him: the newborns named Bernard, the marriage proposals from strange women, the beret craze in New York, and the fact that his Eighth Army flag from the Mediterranean had brought 275 guineas at auction, proceeds to the Red Cross. He was “Master” to his aides, “this Cromwellian figure” to Churchill, “God Almonty” to the Canadians, “the little monkey” to Patton, and, to a fellow British general, “an efficient little shit.” Churchill’s wife considered him “a thrilling and interesting personage … with the same sort of conceit which we read Nelson had,” while the prime minister’s physician concluded that “Monty wants to be a king.” Eisenhower came to believe that “Monty is a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over.” That maxim would tidily sum up the Allied high command in Europe.

  He had arrived for the second time in this war to direct a battle that simply had to be won—Alamein was the first—and as leader of what one historian called “the last great field army imperial Britain would send into battle,” a force officially anointed as the British Liberation Army. His command included an equal measure of Americans, but parity would soon yield to a threefold Yankee preponderance on the Continent; the imbalance was fraught with tension and grievance.

  Few could gainsay his virtues: “the power of commanding affection while communicating energy,” a quality also attributed to Marlborough; a conviction that gratuitous casualties were unpardonable; a sense that he knew the way home. Omar Bradley, who would later grow to detest him, believed Montgomery in Normandy to be “tolerant and judicious,” a model of “wisdom, forbearance, and restraint.” If “tense as a mousetrap,” in Moorehead’s image, he could be charming, generous, and buoyant. George Bernard Shaw admired how “he concentrates all space into a small spot like a burning glass.”

  “I keep clear of all details, indeed I must,” Montgomery told his staff. “I see no papers, no files. I send for senior staff officers; they must tell me their problems in ten minutes.” When pressing for a decision, he leaned in with jaws snapping: “Do you agree, do you agree, do you agree?” His shrewd intelligence officer, Brigadier Edgar T. Williams, later wrote, “One was impressed by his sheer competence, his economy, his clarity, above all his decisiveness.” A man of habit and discipline, Montgomery had been awakened after his usual bedtime of 9:30 P.M. only twice during the war, both occasions in Africa, and he did not intend to be roused again. He had not come to France to lose the battle, to lose the war, or even to lose sleep. Certainly he had not come to lose a reputation earned at the cannon’s mouth, a reputation to which he was now chained.

  Alas, “too many of his best qualities were matched by folly or misjudgment,” as his biographer Ronald Lewin would write. He was “a man made to be misunderstood,” one of those “whose qualities intensify rather than expand during the course of their lives.… Like Bottom, he could play the ass while unaware of his metamorphosis.” His bumptious, cocksure solipsism already had infuriated sundry generals in the Mediterranean, both American and British. If, as Churchill posited, a gentleman was “someone who is only rude intentionally,” then Montgomery was disqualified. Knowing and unknowing, he could offend, rankle, enrage. Hardly a fatal flaw for a subaltern brawling in the trenches, this defect proved near mortal in coalition warfare, when political nuance and national sensitivities could be as combustible as gunpowder.

  He remained “very small-boyish,” in the phrase of the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart, scarred by the cold, shrewish mother who was forever saying, “Find out what Bernard is doing and tell him to stop.” (He would refuse to attend her funeral.) A bully boy at St. Paul’s and Sandhurst, he never quite outgrew the athlete who could be disruptive and fractious unless he was made team captain. “As long as 51 percent of your decisions are right,” he had recently told Shaw, “you’ll succeed.” In truth his generalship reaped a far higher winning percentage, but by his account all too often the brilliant plan was his, the brilliant victory was his, the golden laurels were his, his, his. Brigadier Williams proposed a motto for Montgomery: “Alone I done it.”

  “Enjoying life greatly,” he wrote to his rear headquarters in Portsmouth on June 13, “and it is great fun fighting battles again after five months in England.” Several thousand men were dead, and thousands more had been maimed. Here was a man made to be misunderstood.

  * * *

  The OVERLORD plan was largely his, and now he sought to make it work. Since early May, Montgomery had intended to lure as much of the enemy’s weight as possible to the British and Canadian divisions on his left wing, allowing the American right to capture Cherbourg and then thrust south of the Cotentin Peninsula. He reiterated the scheme to Field Marshal Brooke in London on June 11: “My general policy is to pull the enemy on to Second Army so as to make it easier for First Army to expand and extend the quicker.” To gain maneuver room in the beachhead, he had called for “powerful armored force thrusts” on both left and right, beginning on D-Day afternoon, and he had been ready to sacrifice four tank brigades in an exchange of metal and men for space.

  Yet after a week the beachhead remained pinched and crowded. Thirty-four Allied armored battalions and more than 300,000 troops had landed, with two thousand tanks, but they had nowhere to go. On the left, Second Army had blunted the German counterattack without building momentum or gaining elbow room. The feeble direct assault on Caen had failed, and a proposal to drop British airborne troops behind the city found no favor with Eisenhower’s air chief, Leigh-Mallory, who feared heavy aircraft losses. “He is a gutless bugger who refuses to take a chance,” Montgomery fumed to his chief of staff on June 12. “I have no use for him.”

  A flanking attack from west of Caen began with promise on June 13 when the British 7th Armored Division—the famed Desert Rats from Africa—captured Villers-Bocage, guided through the village streets by gendarmes and baying civilians. Then calamity: on the far side of town, Tiger tank fire raked the lead column; within fifteen minutes, more than a dozen British tanks and as many trucks had been gutted, most by a single audacious panzer commander, SS captain Michael Wittmann. Winkled out of Villers-Bocage, with losses exceeding fifty armored vehicles, the clumsy British attack collapsed. The chastened Desert Rats drew back behind the massed fires of 160 Anglo-American guns and 1,700 tons of RAF bombs that turned the village into a smoking hole.

  “The whole show on land is bogged up,” Leigh-Mallory told his diary on June 14. “The Hun has kicked us out of Villers-Bocage and there is no sign of any forward movement, or a chance of it.” With the front lines static—Tommies would not tramp the rubbled streets of Villers-Bocage again until August—the battle soon turned into an attritional struggle of snipers and artillery barrages in what Moorehead called “a gunman’s world.” “Bloody murder, people dropping dead,” a company commander wrote. “One of my platoons ran away and was brought back at pistol-point.… The same platoon ran away aga
in.” A British corporal’s diary entries for three consecutive days in mid-June:

  June 18: Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

  June 19: Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

  June 20: Day of Hell. Advanced. Counter-attacked.

  For the Americans in the west, progress was a bit more heartening. The V and VII Corps, heaving inland from Omaha and Utah respectively, merged into a single front after the capture of Carentan and the repulse of a ragged counterattack by the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division on June 13. “Lousy & undersized & scurvy & dirty,” a combat engineer wrote in describing a gaggle of prisoners, “with greasy hair & flat mouths & short necks.” A four-day struggle by the 82nd Airborne to secure a bridgehead over the Merderet finally won through, although more than one thousand paratroopers remained missing, and the 101st Airborne could not account for nearly three thousand more. Here too the landscape was wrecked—“When I first saw Isigny, with walls toppling and everything afire,” an officer reported, “I thought of Carthage”—but most civilians seemed agreeable even amid the ruins. “The people are friendly & called us Libirators,” a sergeant from the 18th Infantry wrote in his diary.

  Bradley late on June 13 halted V Corps’s drive toward St.-Lô; with the British stalled around Caen, he feared vulnerable flanks if the American salient grew too frisky. He also amended his original plan to simply bash on toward Cherbourg. Instead, he chose to first cut the Cotentin Peninsula by shoving three divisions west to the sea, blocking German reinforcements and sealing escape routes. The 4th Division, with Ted Roosevelt, would continue hammering northward toward the port.

  “I’m sitting in a little gray stone Normandy château,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor from a grim encampment fifteen miles southeast of Cherbourg. Rough Rider stood outside beneath a camouflage net, a sunburst hole in the windshield from a shell fragment.