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

by Rick Atkinson

  Grumbling and backbiting intensified within the Allied high command. Would Montgomery be sacked? Rumors flew, agitators agitated. Informed that V-1 launch sites would not soon be overrun, Air Marshal Tedder informed Beetle Smith, “Then we must change our leaders for men who will get us there.” He, Eisenhower, and others “had been had for suckers,” Tedder complained. “I do not believe there was the slightest intention to make a clean breakthrough.” Worse yet, he told Eisenhower, was the failure to exploit an attempt by the German military to kill Hitler with a bomb on July 20; with the Norman battlefield still deadlocked, Hitler could attend to reprisals and to shoring up his regime. The failed assassin, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and at least two hundred others would be executed—shot, hanged, beheaded, poisoned, or garroted, sometimes on film—and thousands more were jailed. Before the month ended, Wehrmacht officers would be required to demonstrate fealty by giving the stiff-armed Nazi Heil rather than the traditional military salute.

  “E is not pleased at progress being made,” Summersby noted. If displeased, he was also determined not to panic or to act rashly. Instead he would pressure his field commanders, directly and indirectly. Awakened one night by a phone call from Churchill, Eisenhower asked, “What do your people think about the slowness of the situation over there?” Perhaps the prime minister could “persuade Monty to get on his bicycle and start moving.”

  To Montgomery, the supreme commander sent a sober, fourteen-paragraph note. “Time is vital,” Eisenhower wrote. “We must hit with everything.”

  I thought that at last we had him and were going to roll him up. That did not come about.… Eventually the American ground strength will necessarily be much greater than the British. But while we have equality in size we must go forward shoulder to shoulder, with honors and sacrifices equally shared.

  He would keep faith—with the battle plan, with his commanders, and with their common cause. Perhaps only to his mother could he reveal how weary he was. “If I could get home,” he wrote Ida Eisenhower in Kansas on July 23, “I could lie down on the front lawn and stay there for a week without moving.”

  The Bright Day Grew Dark

  WEARING the West Point bathrobe he had carried through Tunisia and Sicily, Omar Bradley often stood before dawn at the eight-foot map board that now filled an olive-drab tent in Vouilly, four miles southeast of Isigny-sur-Mer. He too slept badly, despite sedatives at bedtime. Nearly every night he could be found in the small hours pacing the wooden floor of the map tent next to his trailer, contemplating what he had called “the frightful country ahead.” A wet moon drifted over the First Army headquarters encampment, and the nauseating stink of dead cows carried on the night air. Eventually the cock would crow as pearl-gray light leaked from the east, and still Bradley attended his map, sketching boundary lines or penciling in roads. Then, wielding a long beech twig as a pointer, he again rehearsed in his mind’s eye the coming attack that must end the stalemate and win the battle of Normandy. “I want it to be the biggest thing in the world,” he told his staff.

  Operation COBRA, that biggest thing, was Bradley’s plan, although not his plan alone. Montgomery for one had encouraged a sledgehammer blow on a narrower front than the Americans commonly preferred; this was sound advice, deftly delivered. “Take all the time you need, Brad,” the British commander had urged, pressing two slender fingers together against a map. “If I were you, I think I should concentrate my forces a little more.” Joe Collins, whose VII Corps would serve as the point of the spear, had chosen the precise spot to attack: a bocage copse just west of St.-Lô, on the old Roman road to Périers. Fifteen U.S. divisions—six in Collins’s corps alone—would blow through the battlefront to eventually reach Avranches, thirty miles south, opening the route to Brittany and the vital Breton ports. “Pursue every advantage,” Eisenhower had urged, “with an ardor verging on recklessness.”

  That advantage lay mainly in airpower, particularly since artillery ammunition continued in short supply. A single heavy bomber carried the explosive punch of more than one hundred howitzers firing simultaneously, and Bradley wanted fifteen hundred heavies dropping sixty thousand 100-pound bombs within an hour on a rectangular swatch five miles wide and a mile deep—one bomb every sixteen feet. For a week he had made his case to his air brethren, even traveling to Leigh-Mallory’s headquarters at Stanmore in Middlesex on July 19, as GOODWOOD was coming unstitched. The use of small bombs with instant fuzes would prevent the deep cratering that had bedeviled tanks crossing the carpet-bombed terrain at Cassino and at Caen, Bradley argued. To forestall fratricide, the bomber fleets should fly parallel to the front, using the perfectly straight St.-Lô–Périers road for guidance. Army assault battalions would pull back eight hundred yards as a precaution against errant bombs, yet this would leave them near enough to rush forward before the enemy recovered his wits, as apparently had happened in GOODWOOD.

  Very little in Bradley’s vision appealed to airmen. The Army Air Forces’ “Handbook for Bombardiers” included 125 pages on—among other arcane topics—ballistic coefficients, dropping angles, and Williamson’s probability, all of which suggested that the general’s proposed attack route was impossible. Fifteen hundred planes could not funnel into a one-mile corridor in the single hour that First Army allotted before the ground attack began; such a bombardment would take closer to three hours. Other technical problems also obtained, including the difficulties of dropping in the prevailing crosswind and of flying over intense antiaircraft defenses. Only if the planes attacked perpendicular to the front line—approaching from the north, over the heads of American troops—could they drop several thousand tons of bombs in an hour. Moreover, even in daylight and good weather, the margin of safety for dug-in troops was three thousand yards from the bomb line, almost two miles. Anything closer amounted to what one air commander called “bombing between the Army’s legs.”

  Bradley agreed to pull his assault battalions back twelve hundred yards rather than eight hundred, but he balked at further concessions. Warned that 3 percent of the munitions would likely fall awry—some 1,800 bombs in the proposed COBRA payload—he accepted the risk. If GIs died, they were “nothing more than tools to be used in the accomplishment of the mission,” he later wrote. “War has neither the time nor heart to concern itself with the individual and the dignity of man.” As he had once told Ernie Pyle, “I’ve spent thirty years preparing a frame of mind for accepting such a thing.”

  * * *

  Pyle spent Monday night, July 24, in an apple orchard near Pont-Hébert, wrapped in a blanket among tree trunks gashed white with bullet scars. After the Cherbourg campaign he had felt hollow and lethargic, like someone using up “your own small quota of chances for survival.” He drifted to the back of the beachhead, writing about ordnance troops who refurbished rusty M-1 rifles with sandpaper and gasoline solvent. To combat veterans, those in the rear were known as “they” and their world was the “they area.” Pyle felt guilty at lingering in the they area.

  Now he had returned to the front, his inevitable province, and on Tuesday morning he stood behind a stone house in a farmyard lacerated with slit trenches. Officers from the 4th Infantry Division studied mimeographed sketches of the COBRA bombing sequence that showed where the heavy B-17s and B-24s would dump their loads, complemented by medium bombers and by fighter-bombers. Hardly half a mile to the south, red pillars of smoke from artillery canisters fired every thirty seconds rose at one-mile intervals along the St.-Lô–Périers road to delineate the bomb line. Cerise recognition panels covered the ground like flaming throw rugs, and every vehicle had been repainted with the Allied white-star insignia, first adopted two years earlier after tests to determine the geometric design most clearly visible from air and ground.

  At 9:38 A.M., the first of 350 fighter-bombers began raking German positions along a three-hundred-yard corridor parallel to the road. From GIs tucked beneath the trees a throaty roar built to the echo, “like kids at a football game,” a lieutenant
noted. Pyle squinted at the sky, hands cupped around his eyes to block the glare, listening to “the heavy rip of the planes’ machine guns and the splitting screams of diving wings.”

  Not much had gone right with COBRA thus far. Originally scheduled to follow hard on the heels of GOODWOOD, the operation had been delayed by rain and cloud for days while Bradley glumly studied the three barometers he kept in his command post. Leigh-Mallory then ordered the attack for noon on Monday, July 24, rejecting a U.S. Eighth Air Force request to wait another day, or at least until midafternoon, when skies were expected to clear.

  Flying from Stanmore to Bradley’s headquarters at Vouilly, Leigh-Mallory arrived on Monday at 11:20 A.M. to find clouds still smothering Normandy, bombers already on the wing, and no way to contact the pilots except by a frantic cancellation order radioed to England. Too late. Although many pilots chose to abort their drops because of poor visibility and explicit orders “not to bomb short as the penetration route is directly over friendly troops,” some bombed by mistake—one startled bombardier accidentally tripped the toggle switch when a chaff bundle smacked the nose of his plane—and others took a chance on dropping through the thinning overcast. Of 350 heavies disgorging nearly a thousand tons, only 15 percent hit the target; several medium bombers also missed by as much as seven miles, and P-47s attacked misidentified targets four miles short of the bomb line. Twenty-five GIs were killed and 131 wounded, nearly all in the 30th Infantry Division, whose assistant commander told First Army, “As a fiasco this operation was a brilliant achievement.”

  Bradley’s fury knew no bounds: Leigh-Mallory flew back to England with accusations of duplicity and bad faith ringing in his ears. At 10:30 P.M. he phoned Bradley to confirm that the attackers had flown perpendicular to the target box rather than parallel, and that many bombs heavier than 100-pounders had been dropped. Bradley had evidently misconstrued what had been agreed to at the Stanmore conference on July 19, and Leigh-Mallory had left that meeting early for another appointment before all details of the mission were clarified. A full COBRA bombardment could be launched again on Tuesday morning, Leigh-Mallory now added, but only by flying the same perpendicular route from the north. With more marginal weather predicted, Bradley agreed, grumbling bitterly, and Collins worked all night to get his bewildered corps repositioned to try again.

  From his farmyard redoubt, Pyle watched for half an hour as fighter-bombers dipped and darted. The black blossoms of German antiaircraft shells spattered the sky. Then a new noise intruded, “a sound deep and all-encompassing with no notes in it—just a gigantic faraway surge of doomlike sound.” From the north the B-17s and B-24s drew near, roofing the heavens with a stately procession of tiny silver cruciforms three miles up, “plowing their way forward as if there was no turmoil in the world.” Gawking soldiers leaned back until their helmets fell off.

  The first detonations to the south reminded Pyle of “the crackle of popcorn.” Smoke and dust rolled back through the orchards, and “the bright day grew slowly dark.” Then, inexplicably, the bomb loads drew ever closer, with a terrifying rattle of wind over tail fins, and the ponderous footfall of explosions stomped through the trees. Pyle dove beneath a heavy wagon behind the stone house, “waiting for darkness” as concussion waves hammered his chest and eyes in what he would describe as “the most sustained horrible thing I’ve ever gone through.” At length the howling passed and a colonel staggered through the swirling dust, snapping his fingers and muttering “Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit.”

  For others it was worse. The star-crossed 30th Division took more casualties from the Army Air Forces (AAF) on this Tuesday forenoon than from the enemy on any day in the war. “Then came that awful rush of wind,” a regimental history recorded, “that awful sound like the rattling of seeds in a dry gourd.” Bombs entombed men in their trenches or split them open like deer carcasses. Bombs obliterated command posts, tossed cows into trees, and raised the dead from local cemeteries. The concussion “felt as if someone was beating you with a club,” one officer reported, while another was whacked in the buttocks by what proved to be a body part. Men screamed for medics and raged against the “American Luftwaffe.”

  Just over fifteen hundred heavies dropped two thousand tons of high explosives and an even larger payload of fragmentation bombs; of those aircraft, three dozen bombed American troops, joined in the fratricide by forty-two medium bombers. High clouds had forced some planes to descend several thousand feet, loosening the formations and requiring crews to hurriedly recalculate data for their bombsights. Red marking smoke was easily confused with artillery muzzle flashes, and the St.-Lô–Périers road was soon hidden by dense bomb smoke carried on a five-knot southerly breeze. Two percent of all bombs had fallen short by a mile or more, killing 111 soldiers and wounding 490, this in addition to the casualties from the previous day. Among the dead was Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the commander of Army Ground Forces, who was visiting from Washington and had rashly inserted himself into an assault battalion of the 30th Division; a search detail with picks and shovels combed the crater where he was last seen without finding a trace. Eventually his corpse was spotted sixty-five feet away, beyond recognition but for his dog tags, shoulder flash, and rank insignia. “I warned him time and again about unnecessary risk,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall. A manifest listed all the personal effects left for his widow: “6 Lt. Gen. stars, tarnished, and clasp missing from 2 stars.”

  By the time the last medium bomber flew off at 12:23 P.M., nearly 2,500 planes had dropped five thousand tons of bombs plus heaps of white phosphorus and a new jellied-gasoline agent called napalm. In the pinched target box, where the Army’s armored breakout was to burst forth, each square mile absorbed more than eleven thousand bombs, among the greatest concentrations of killing power in the history of warfare. As for the dead and dying GIs on the wrong side of the line, Pyle wrote with the laconic fatalism that now bleached his bones, “Anybody makes mistakes.”

  * * *

  Eisenhower flew to see Bradley at Vouilly for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon, then returned to England, dejected and vowing never again to use heavy bombers in a tactical attack. “That’s a job for artillery,” he snapped. “I gave them a green light this time. But I promise you it’s the last.” Bradley continued to fume, at Leigh-Mallory and others, obfuscating his own role in putting troops danger close.

  By early that afternoon the COBRA ground attack was well under way. Assault columns initially made meager progress: a 30th Division column butted into enemy resistance after only four hundred yards, including Panther tanks. “Good God,” a GI in a light tank cried over the radio, “I fired three rounds and they all bounced off.” Panzer return fire dismasted a platoon sergeant. “Just his legs and hips were there,” a comrade wrote. “One arm, with the wrist watch on it, lay near the house.” By nightfall, VII Corps had gained no more than a mile beyond the St.-Lô–Périers road and fewer than three hundred prisoners had been bagged. German shells rained down, leading an intelligence officer to conclude that “enemy artillery was not touched by our bombing.”

  Africa veterans like Eisenhower and Bradley should have recalled two lines of Kipling popular in Tunisia: “Man cannot tell, but Allah knows / How much the other side was hurt.” In truth, German defenses had been blown to smithereens: the enemy was profoundly hurt, mortally hurt. The main opponent confronting VII Corps, the Panzer Lehr Division, had earlier been described as “worn out” by the German high command after six weeks of fighting; Tuesday’s “conveyor belt bombing” had devastated the weakened division, flipping tanks, smashing radios, and obliterating headquarters. The division commander, General Fritz Bayerlein, former chief of staff for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, described “half-crazed soldiers jumping out of the craters of a lunar landscape, running in circles.… Everything was burned and blasted.” He calculated that 70 percent of his men were dead, wounded, or inert with “a feeling of helplessness, weakness, and inferiority.” Orders could be transmitted onl
y by motorcycle couriers nosing a path through drifted debris. When Field Marshal Kluge passed word that the St.-Lô–Périers corridor must hold, Bayerlein replied, “Tell the field marshal that the Panzer Lehr is destroyed. Only the dead can still hold.”

  Unaware of the size of the American host and lulled into complacency by Monday’s aborted attack, German commanders had been caught out. As Montgomery intended, two-thirds or more of Seventh Army’s panzers still faced the British in the east, and reserves in the German Fifteenth Army remained pinned to the Pas de Calais, awaiting the thirty Allied divisions still believed to be assembling in England for a second invasion. Seventh Army failed to keep a sufficient armored reserve to plug any breach in the Cotentin, and battlefield leadership proved wanting. Kluge’s headquarters informed Berlin late Tuesday night: “The front has, so to speak, burst. There is a penetration of two to five kilometers deep on a front seven to eight kilometers wide. It has not yet been possible to seal this off.”

  Nor would it be possible. Collins had massed 120,000 troops on a five-mile front along the St.-Lô–Périers road, plus fifteen thousand engineers to lift mines and bury dead livestock. His six hundred artillery tubes, with 140,000 rounds stockpiled, exceeded the firepower of the other three First Army corps combined. Most Sherman tanks were now fitted with hedge cutters for slashing through the bocage—rugged tusks designed by GIs and fabricated with angle-iron salvaged from German beach obstacles. Welders and virtually all of the oxygen acetylene cylinders in England had been flown to Normandy, where an assembly line in St.-Jean-de-Daye turned out three hundred cutters in two days, all kept secret before COBRA. No less innovative was a decision by Major General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, the tactical air commander, to position liaison officers with VHF radios in each tank column for direct communication with fighter-bombers overhead, a collaboration that proved priceless in what airmen called “hazing the Hun.”