All Hell Let Loose

by Hastings, Max

  Mass, generalship and the institutional effectiveness of armies chiefly influence battlefield outcomes, and so they did in Normandy. But the quality of rival weapons systems, especially tanks, also played an important role. The British and US armies had excellent artillery. The Americans equipped their infantry with a good automatic rifle, the M1 Garand, but a poor light machine-gun, the BAR. Their 2.36? hand-held ‘bazooka’ anti-tank rocket – named for a weird wind instrument invented by American comic Bob Burns – lacked adequate penetration. The British Army boasted a reliable rifle, the .303 Mk IV single-shot Lee-Enfield, and the much-loved Bren light machine-gun.

  The Germans had better weapons; in particular, they could generate extraordinary violence with their belt-fed MG42 machine-gun, known to the Allies as the ‘spandau’, of which some 750,000 were produced. On the battlefield, the MG42’s rasping 1,200-rpm rate of fire sounded far more lethal than the slow hammer of the Bren’s or BAR’s 500 rpm. The British and Americans also had Vickers and Browning heavy machine-guns, but the MG42, easily manufactured and capable of changing barrels in five seconds, was a key factor in the German army’s tactical performance. So too was the panzerfaust hand-held anti-tank projector: deadly at close range – much more so than the US bazooka or British PIAT – and produced at the rate of 200,000 a month, the Faust played an important part in checking Allied armour in 1944–45, when the Wehrmacht was short of anti-tank guns. The 88mm dual-purpose gun and nebelwerfer multi-barrelled mortar were also used to formidable effect.

  All the European armies had sub-machine-guns for close-quarter fighting. The British 9mm Sten was an adequate weapon produced in millions at a cost which fell to under £3. The US Army’s .45 Thompson was valued for its reliability, but cost £50 apiece to manufacture. Most American units in 1944–45 used the cheaper and simpler M3 ‘grease gun’. Allied soldiers were envious of the German MP38 and MP40 machine-pistols. They called these Schmeissers, though that designer had nothing to do with their creation – they were made at the works of Berthold Geipel. Towards the end of the war, the Germans also acquired small numbers of an excellent assault rifle, the MP43, forerunner of a generation of European infantry weapons thereafter.

  But the Allies’ most serious problem was the inferiority of their tanks: numerical advantage counted for little when British and American shells often bounced off well-armoured German Panthers and Tigers, while a hit on a Sherman, Churchill or Cromwell was almost invariably fatal. ‘A sheet of flame licked over the turret and my mouth was full of grit and burnt paint,’ wrote a shocked British tank officer after his Cromwell was hit by an 88mm shell from a Tiger. ‘“Bail out,” I yelled and leaped clear … There were my crew, hiding under a currant bush, miraculously all safe. Joe, the driver, white and shaking, crouched with drawn revolver. He looked like a cornered rat … The Tiger drove off undamaged, its commander waving his hat and laughing … Our hands shook so much that we could hardly light our cigarettes.’ Though Allied tanks were infinitely replaceable, it is hard to overstate the impact of German tank superiority on the morale of Allied units. Captain Charles Farrell wrote: ‘There was, I think, no British tank commander who would not happily have surrendered his “fringe benefits” for a tank in the same class as the German Panther or Tiger.’

  ‘We were all rather frightened,’ wrote a British tank officer about a night spent on the Bourgebus ridge during one of the most bitter armoured clashes, ‘and two men from my troop corporal’s tank came up and said they would rather face a court-martial than go on. I explained that we all felt much the same but were not given the option.’ Two days later, when one of this officer’s tanks was hit, the crew bailed out. ‘I never saw the gunner and wireless operator again. They were cases for the psychiatrist and the M.O. sent them away. Those fellows had been in nearly every battle the regiment fought, and each had bailed out at least twelve times before.’

  Peter Hennessy was ordered to investigate the fate of another tank of his Sherman squadron which had halted immobile a few yards ahead. His driver dismounted, clambered up the hull, glanced into the turret and ran hastily back. ‘Christ!’ he said, ‘they’re all dead in there. What a bloody mess.’ An 88mm round had ricocheted around the interior, killing the entire turret crew and terminating in the co-driver’s back. A few moments later a shocked and emotional figure lifted the driver’s hatch of the stricken tank and emerged, the sole survivor.

  Formations which had previously served in the Mediterranean were not the only ones to find the conflict in France a ghastly experience: some men who had never before seen action recoiled from this ferocious initiation. ‘There were a lot of problems in Normandy and some of the units of the British Army, bluntly, were not in very good shape,’ wrote Lt. Michael Kerr. ‘[They] had had many years in Britain before going into battle.’ Some green units seemed slow to treat their task with the absolute commitment necessary: a Waffen SS officer was baffled to observe British infantry advancing behind their tanks on 18 June, ‘strolling, hands in pockets, rifles slung on their shoulders, cigarettes between their lips’.

  Lt. Tony Finucane felt that the doctrine of reliance upon artillery and air support corroded proper infantry spirit. His own unit advanced, he said, ‘knowing that with the first burst of spandau everyone would go to ground and that would be it for the day. So much for dash, verve and pursuit – those who tried such antics were usually caught by our own 25-pdrs.’ Finucane believed responsibility for many of the problems properly rested with senior officers at brigade and divisional level, some of whom had no more experience of battle than did their men. ‘It was not necessarily the training of the army in UK which was wrong. Rather was it that many senior officers were inexperienced and may have viewed themselves as “above” training.’

  It is hard to exaggerate the strain imposed upon every man by responsibility to join the spearhead of an attack. Ken Tout described the laborious progress of a typical armoured advance: ‘The front tanks are venturing slowly and agonisingly towards the first blank, savage corners. Their caution filters slowly back along the column, dictating a snail’s pace … The morning drags slowly by, the sluggish progress of the clock accentuated by our jolting, ten-yards-at-a time advance as we wriggle about in our tight coops, like battery hens, trying to restore circulation in legs, buttocks and shoulders.’ A Lancers officer edged his Sherman forward into a wood, ordering his squadron to follow him. The commander of the next tank forgot to switch off his set before speaking into the intercom, and thus the entire unit heard him order, ‘Driver left, driver left.’ The reply came, ‘But he’s gone right, sergeant.’ The tank commander said, ‘I know bloody well he’s gone right, but I’m not following that f—ing c—t, it’s too f—ing dangerous.’

  ‘It was a hell of a day,’ wrote a British company commander describing his unit’s experiences on 25 June with a frankness unusual among Allied soldiers:

  The first shock was that this advance was supposed to be protected by smoke, but we were utterly exposed … Two members of the company couldn’t stand it and shot themselves in the foot in quick succession … Off we go, the blast from a shell knocks me over, but only one little flesh wound … Where are the boys? Not here. I go back – ‘Come on.’ Through the hedge again, still no boys. Back again – “COME ON.” They came, through more hedges … Bloody murder; people dropping dead. Hitlerjugend prisoners … During the attack one of my platoons ran away and was brought back at pistol-point by Tug Wilson, my second-in-command … We were being counterattacked by infantry and two tanks. The same platoon ran away again … Eventually it all died down. The enemy retired, leaving two knocked-out tanks and quite a lot of dead.

  Soldiers who fought on foot and those who rode on tracks were almost unfailingly sceptical of each other’s tactics. ‘We discussed the forthcoming advance with the delicate, genteel bargaining that always took place between tank and infantry,’ wrote British infantryman Lt. Norman Craig of an exchange with an armoured officer. ‘Myself, hoping to persuade the tanks
to go in front; he politely determined that they should not. The infantryman considered the tank an overpowering leviathan, which should be hurled indiscriminately into the assault; the tank man looked on the infantry as a convenient expendable mass, useful for neutralising anti-tank guns.’

  Throughout the north-west Europe campaign, Allied senior officers vented frustration at infantrymen’s insistent thraldom to artillery. Forrest Pogue recorded some American commanders’ comments: ‘They kept saying that the infantry failed to take cover, failed to take advantage of artillery preparation, failed to advance boldly, failed to dig in properly. [Under heavy fire] it was digging in which saved them, yet in basic [training] we dug only one foxhole. Artillery is used very extensively. I have been in many [command posts] when somebody would say they saw two or three Germans several hundred yards away. 5–30 rounds were frequently dropped on them.’

  Much depended on local junior leadership, and too many brave junior leaders died. ‘The spirit of human aggression has a magical tendency to evaporate as soon as the shooting starts,’ wrote Norman Craig, ‘and a man then responds to two influences only – the external discipline that binds him and the self-respect within him that drives him on … Courage is essentially competitive and imitative.’ The commanding officer of a British infantry battalion said: ‘On an average, in a platoon of twenty-five, five will do their best to fight … and fifteen will follow a lead. The rest will be useless. This applies to the whole infantry corps, and if the junior officers and NCOs will not go, the situation is pretty bad.’

  Tank officer Michael Rathbone wrote: ‘I have drawn my revolver to halt fleeing infantrymen; they came running by my tank when we were repairing a track damaged by a mine. I prayed we should never have to fight again with the 59th Division.’ Likewise another armoured officer, Peter Selerie: ‘We were often critical of the infantry … I remember that an infantry battalion melted away after incredibly heavy mortaring together with “air burst” salvos. They had unfortunately neglected to dig in properly and had lost their officers and the bulk of their NCOs. The Kensingtons machine-gun battalion held the line supported by our tanks.’ Riflemen always suffered far heavier casualties than did tank crews, and well the riflemen knew this.

  Most soldiers going into battle for the first time were less frightened than they became once they had experienced its reality. When American infantryman Royce Lapp landed in France, ‘None of us were too scared then, because we didn’t know what we were getting into.’ Likewise men of a US cavalry unit clustered curiously around the first corpse they saw, that of a German officer. Their commander Lt. Lyman Diercks, a twenty-eight-year-old postal worker from Bryant, Illinois, harangued his soldiers. ‘I told them it was very likely some of us wouldn’t survive the war. We had to be like a family. I didn’t expect them to be heroes, but if they became cowards they’d have to live with it all their lives. And while I was talking to them, I was really talking to myself.’

  When a shell landed close to a Canadian sergeant in Normandy, he exclaimed, ‘Shit and shit some more!’ A newly arrived replacement asked if he was hit. The NCO said no, ‘he had just pissed his pants. He always pissed them, he said, when things started and then he was okay … Then I realized something wasn’t quite right with me, either. There was something warm down there and it seemed to be running down my leg. I felt, and it wasn’t blood. It was piss … I said, “Sarge, I’ve pissed too” … he grinned and said, “Welcome to the war.”’ Fear afflicted other men in other ways. A Canadian prisoner was led into a Waffen SS regimental headquarters, under intense Allied bombardment. To his amazement, the staff were sheltering under map tables while singing a rousing chorus of ‘O Beautiful German Rhine’ to the accompaniment of a mouth organ. The Canadian shook his head and mumbled in confusion, ‘War is a merry thing!’ Some unglamorous tasks imposed disproportionate risks: ‘The first men to die in most battles were the phone linesmen,’ said Waffen SS gunner Captain Karl Godau. Field telephone communications were vital when few units had tactical radios: linesmen were constantly obliged to expose themselves under fire to repair breaks caused by shelling or passing vehicles, and many were killed doing so.

  A panzer staff-sergeant, captured by the Americans, offered his interrogators a comparison between the Eastern and Western Fronts: ‘The Russian won’t let you forget for one moment … that you are fighting on his soil, that you represent something he loathes. He will endure the greatest hardships … True, the average soldier lacks the resourcefulness of the American, but he makes up for it with a steadfastness I have never seen matched. If nine men get killed in an attempt to cut through wire, the tenth will still try – and succeed. You Americans are masters of your equipment, and your equipment is very good. But you lack the Russians’ tenacity.’

  Yet if both sides suffered terribly in Normandy, German losses were worse, and irreplaceable. As early as 16 June Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division was weakened by 1,149 casualties and its tank strength was halved; during a briefing at his command post, Meyer wrote: ‘I see worried faces … Without talking about it openly we know we are approaching a catastrophe … Faced with the enemy’s enormous naval and air superiority, we can predict the breakdown of the defensive front … We are already surviving on subsistence level. Up to now we have received neither a single replacement for comrades wounded or killed, nor one tank or gun.’

  SS panzergrenadier Fritz Zimmer recorded in his diary at the end of June that his company was reduced to eighteen men; a week later, on 8 July, he fought the last action of his own war:

  From 6.30 to 8 a.m. again heavy drum fire. After this Tommy attacks with great masses of infantry and many tanks. We fight as long as possible, but realise we are in a hopeless position. When the survivors try to pull back, we find ourselves already surrounded … I crawled back under continuing fire as fast as possible. Some comrades tried to do the same, unsuccessfully. I still cannot understand how nothing happened to me, with shells falling two or three metres in front, behind and beside me. Splinters whizzed about my ears. I worked my way to within about two hundred metres of our lines. It was hard work, always on my stomach, only occasionally on hands and knees, for three or four kilometres. Attacking Tommies passed me five or six paces away without noticing me in the high corn. I was nearly at the end of my tether, my feet and elbows incredibly painful and my throat parched with thirst, but I rolled on. Suddenly the vegetation thinned and I had to cross an open field. I was only ten metres from the next cornfield when three Tommies suddenly appeared and took me prisoner. I was immediately given a drink and a cigarette. At the collection point I met my Unterscharführer and other comrades from my company.

  By 22 July Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel lay in hospital, recovering from wounds inflicted in Normandy and increasingly fearful for the future of his nation’s cause. ‘How did the poor buggers at the front and the exhausted civilian population at home deserve to be so badly led? We have many anxious questions about the future and our prospects in this long war. Even the most confident among us have doubts.’ Another soldier wrote to his wife on 12 August: ‘My darling Irmi, it doesn’t look too good – that would be saying too much – but you know the cheerfulness with which I go about life … Man is a creature of habit. The roar of gunfire and explosion of bombs, which at first are hard on the nerves, lose their terrors after two or three days … The last three days we have had the most wonderful summer weather – sun, warmth and blue skies – so utterly at odds with everything else we see around us. Oh well, it will turn out all right in the end. Just have as much faith in my luck as I do and everything will look brighter, a thousand kisses to you, my darling Irmi and the children, your Ferd.’

  A comrade wrote likewise to his family on 10 August: ‘My darling wife and darling children … the rumble of gunfire comes ever closer. When I hear it my thoughts wander back to you, my dearest, and the question of whether I shall ever see you again rises before me. The battle could reach me any time now. What will be my fate? …
Last night I was with you in my dreams. Ah, how beautiful it was! Can you imagine, my darling, how it feels to wake from such an idyll to the thunder of guns? I carry your image in my heart. It is such a heavy feeling. I should like to fly home to you my dearest! What will be my fate? How good it was to be allowed a few wonderful days with you in Fallingbostel, my dear loyal wife!’ Both the letters quoted above were found by an American soldier on their authors’ corpses.

  Through those summer months, the British and American peoples thought of little save their armies’ struggle in Normandy. But in Berlin, Hitler confronted an even graver threat: less than three weeks after the landings in France, in the east the Soviets launched Operation Bagration, the greatest offensive of the war and the last to be launched from Russian soil. Hitler’s refusal to allow a strategic retreat during the spring left his forces defending a 1,400-mile front, with few reserves. Two-thirds of the entire German army was still deployed against the Russians, but this was not enough to meet an assault by 2.4 million men and more than 5,000 tanks, deploying twice the firepower committed to the Soviets’ 1943 assaults.

  Stalin said in a speech to his people on May Day 1944: ‘If we are to deliver our country and those of our allies from the danger of enslavement, we must pursue the wounded German beast and deliver the final blow to him in his own lair.’ The Russian word for ‘lair’ is berloga. Thus, armoured crews painted on their tanks not ‘On to Berlin!’ but ‘On to berloga!’ On 22 June three Soviet fronts under Zhukov’s command struck at the 700,000 men of Army Group Centre. Simultaneously, a partisan offensive in the German rear almost severed Field Marshal Ernest Busch’s lines of communication. The Russians concentrated four hundred guns a mile for their preliminary bombardment, along a front of 350 miles. They had total air superiority, thanks in large measure to the Western Allies’ destruction of the Luftwaffe over Germany.