It was mostly the 21st Panzer Division in front of us. We had fewer tanks than they had, but to kid them we had a lot more we used to stick the barrel through the hedge, stay there for ten minutes, quarter of an hour on watch, pull back and run down the hedge and stick it through somewhere else and kid the Germans there were tanks all along the hedge. Whereas there might have been only two or three.
Panzer Grenadier Regiment 125’s combat team was involved in tough fighting with the British paratroops on 7 June. Feuchtinger could sense that the odds were stacked against his men:
Already at this early date the enemy’s superior weight in men and materiel became obvious. He was constantly being reinforced by sea and air, while the division did not have any reserves worth the name to call on, and those units that were arriving the High Command had to commit northwest of Caen.
He found the 7th very frustrating, adding:
The whole daylong it was difficult to cover the left wing of the division, as the 3rd Canadian Division was trying to envelop it, the 12th SS Division not having arrived yet.
I SS Panzer Corps, to which the division had been subordinated since 2200 on 6 June, had ordered the 21st Panzer Division and the 12th SS Panzer Division to continue their attacks on 7 June with the objective of throwing the enemy into the sea. This attack was never launched, as only one regiment of the 12th SS succeeded in establishing connections with the 21st Panzer Division on 7 June, and that only at 1600 hours.
Allied air attacks were responsible for this delay, only one panzer battalion and one panzergrenadier regiment from the 12th SS managed to reach 21st Panzer’s left wing north of Épron.
On the 8th the division fended off another British attempt on Caen, destroying eighteen British Churchill Armoured Vehicle Royal Engineer (AVRE) tanks in the process. Allied firepower, though, accounted for twenty-five per cent of the panzers and fifty per cent of the infantry committed during this bitter fighting. British naval gunfire also impeded the movement of supplies, particularly ammunition. Soon the local dumps were drained, forcing vulnerable motor vehicles to forage further afield, exposing them to air attack. The complete lack of support by the Luftwaffe did not go unnoticed either.
Montgomery was planning a two-pronged attack. The first involved Major General D C Bullen-Smith’s 51st (Highland) Division and the 4th Armoured Brigade striking toward Cagny from the airborne bridgehead east of the Orne. Werner Kortenhaus and his fellow Panzertruppen of Kampfgruppe von Luck spoiled the Highlanders’ plans with a pre-emptive attack on 9 June, though with some losses:
We rolled through the gap one after the other, the Panzergrenadiers storming on behind us, weapons at the ready, trying to shelter behind their tanks as they deployed into broad front formation on the other side of the attack which was to steamroller us into Ranville. The firing began when we were only 30 yards from the hedge, and the first of the grenadiers dropped groaning to the ground. Panzer 432 was hit, and lost a track. Thirty seconds later Panzer 400 was hit and our company commander, Oberleutnant Hoffmann was staring in horror at the bloody mess which had been his leg, while Panzer 401 exploded, blowing open the hatches and literally flinging the crew out.
General Fritz Kraemer, Chief of Staff I SS Panzer Corps, recalled on the 9th the rising toll inflicted on the division:
An enemy air attack on the Panzer Regiment of the 21st Panzer Division put it out of action for almost one and a half days and a critical situation developed in this sector. Direct damage from the bombing attack was slight, but at least 50 per cent of the sixty tanks were rendered inoperative, in most cases by mechanical damage arising from the tanks being buried in mud.
Montgomery’s other attack was to push Major General G. W. Erskine’s 7th Armoured Division toward Villers-Bocage. If they and the 51st broke through, the 1st Airborne Division was to be dropped into the gap, trapping the German defenders. Things did not go according to plan when 7th Armoured ran into elements of Schwere Panzer Abteilung 503 and the Panzer Lehr Division.
By 11 June, 21st Panzer had lost about forty per cent of its manpower killed, wounded or missing, it had also lost fifty per cent of its tanks and thirty per cent of its guns. In total it could field about thirty or forty Panzer IVs and Vs. By mid-month the division had suffered 1,864 casualties, by 11 July this had risen to 3,411 and by the end of July stood at 4,703. Crucially, replacements for this entire period amounted to only 2,479 men, some of which are believed to have come from the 16th Luftwaffe Field Division. During the second week of June, the 21st Panzer was transferred to 15th Army’s LXXXVI Corps; Kampfgruppe von Luck had already been under this Corps’ control since the 6th.
The 21st Panzer was thrown into the attack again, making some headway. Kortenhaus remembered a particularly bizarre moment during the fighting:
I can paint you a strange picture which stays with me still. On 28 June we mounted an attack west of Caen and succeeded in getting through the British line. The battle lasted a very long time, from ten in the morning until five in the afternoon, but around midday there was a lull in the battle. Suddenly the battlefield was filled with dance music. Some infantrymen had gone and played with an English radio set, and dance music had come on, filling the air. It was a little unusual.
Stopping Goodwood
The 21st Panzer Division stayed in the line until 5 July when the 16th Luftwaffe Field Division finally relieved it. Within just over a week it was back resisting Goodwood launched on 18 July. The British offensive, employing the 7th, 11th and Guards Armoured Divisions, was intended to seize the high ground south of Caen and stop the panzers switching west before the Americans could launch Operation Cobra.
In the path of the British lay a series of stone-built villages amidst hedge-lined fields and orchards. General Eberbach and Field Marshal Rommel exploited these to the maximum. General von Obstfelder’s LXXXVI Corps consisted of three infantry divisions supported by the 21st and 1st SS Panzer Divisions, while the 12th SS at Lisieux constituted I SS Panzer Corps reserve. In addition, Tigers of the 503 and 101 SS heavy tank battalions were also available.
The British assessed the German defences to be to a depth of three miles (5km). Rommel and Eberbach had in fact built five defensive zones covering 10 miles (16km). The first consisted of the infantry, then sixty tanks from 21st Panzer and thirty-nine Tigers; next a chain of fortified villages and then the artillery on a gun line including the Garcelles-Secqueville woods and the Bourguébus ridge, supported by Panzergrenadiers and Panther tanks from the 1st SS. The final zone comprised two kampfgruppen from the 12th SS.
The German defences were not as formidable as they appeared, in fact the best defensive weapons in the Main Line of Resistance (MLR) were just seventeen Pak 43s, the dedicated tank-killer version of the 8.8cm flak gun, belonging to Becker’s Panzerjäger Abteilung 200. Just eight 8.8cm flak guns from the division’s Flak Abteilung 305 supplemented these. Divisional artillery was a hotchpotch of captured French and Russian guns deployed on the reverse slopes of the Bourguébus ridge.
Werner Kortenhaus recalled Goodwood’s preliminary bombardment: ‘It was a bomb carpet, ploughing up the ground. Among the thunder of the explosions we could hear the wounded scream and the insane howling of men who had been driven mad’.
Panzer IVs of Panzer Regiment 22, along with Tiger tanks from Schwere Panzer Abteilung 503, were caught in the Allied saturation bombing near Château de Manneville, 16 miles (10km) east of Caen. The effects were devastating with tanks simply tossed upside down like they were toys. From a force of about fifty panzers over half were lost, many others suffered mechanical problems. At least three Tigers were caught.
Hans von Luck arrived from leave in Paris just in time to help rally the situation; ironically it had been Feuchtinger and Dietrich who had persuaded him to celebrate his birthday and visit his girlfriend. He returned just after 0900 to his kampfgruppe drawn from the battered 21st Panzer and the 16th Luftwaffe Field Division. Driving from his Frénouville HQ toward le Mesnil-Frémentel he saw th
at Cagny, off to his right, had been destroyed, but could not reach his men.
The bombardment had severed all communications and von Luck could not raise any of his units, so he rumbled off down the Vimont–Caen road in his Panzer IV:
I approached the village of Cagny which lay exactly in the middle of my sector and was not occupied by us. The eastern part as far as the church was undamaged; the western part had been flattened. When I came to the western edge of the village, I saw to my dismay about twenty-five to thirty British tanks, which had already passed southward over the main road to Caen… where my number I Abteilung ought to be, or had been, in combat positions. The whole area was dotted with British tanks, which were slowly rolling south against no opposition.
Discovering a dazed Luftwaffe captain with four 8.8cm flak guns by Cagny church, von Luck drew his pistol and forced him to redeploy them in a nearby apple orchard, where they claimed sixteen British tanks. General Wolfgang Pickert’s III Flak Corps had been placed under Panzergruppe West’s control upon the latter’s activation on 10 June; however, this did not mean that all of Pickert’s batteries were immediately released for frontline duty with the Panzergruppe. Although the 8.8cm flak gun also made an effective anti-tank weapon, it was normally against standing orders for flak artillery to be used in the ground fighting. In fact, as late as the end of August Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, Chief of Staff OKW, repeated this directive.
The 16th Luftwaffe Field Division was incapable of withstanding the bombardment and enemy tanks, and in reality was little more than a sacrificial lamb. The 21st’s Panzergrenadier Regiment 192 was in danger of being overrun and I Abteilung Panzergrenadier Regiment 125 was cut off at le Mesnil-Frémentel; to the east, though, II Abteilung was holding on at Emiéville and Guillerville. Irritatingly the divisional reconnaissance and pioneer battalions were tied up at Bourguébus screening the anti-tank battalion.
The village of le Mesnil-Frémentel lay right in the middle of the British line of attack in this area. Major Becker’s five batteries from his assault gun battalion were deployed at Démouville, Giberville, Grentheville and the farms of le Mesnil-Frémentel and le Prieuré, supported by von Luck’s Panzergrenadiers.
On the eastern half of the battlefield they represented the Germans’ only mobile tactical reserve. These forces attempted to hold up the British advance, but those guns at Cuverville and Démouville were lost in the opening bombardment and the battery at Giberville withdrew northwest of Bras and, along with those at Grentheville, shelled British tanks to the east and west. The two batteries at the farms, lacking infantry protection, were also soon forced back by the relentless tide of tanks.
The assault gun battalion engaged the British 29th Brigade’s lead regiment, the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry, destroying more than twenty Shermans before conducting a fighting withdrawal towards the 1st SS ‘stop line’ on Bourguébus ridge. By the end of the day most of Becker’s so-called assault guns were wrecks.
Just after 0930, determined to hold Cagny and the vital Bourguébus ridge, the Germans threw the 21st Panzer and Abteilung 503 at the Guards and 11th Armoured Divisions with orders to regain the Caen-Troarn road. The Panthers of the 1st SS also rolled down from Bourguébus ridge, driving back the British. In the process of trying to drive them back to Caen-Troarn, the two panzer divisions lost 109 tanks, while by the end of the first day the British had suffered 1,500 casualties and 200 tanks destroyed for the gain of just six miles (10km) beyond the Orne. However, the north-south line from Frénouville to Emiéville held and, with the commitment of the 1st SS, Goodwood came to a grinding halt over the next few days. The remnants of the 16th Luftwaffe Field Division were attached to 21st Panzer on 19 July.
The sector east of Troarn held by 21st Panzer was taken over by the 272nd Infantry Division in late July. The division was then transferred to the LXXIV Corps and the II Abteilung Panzer Regiment 22 was sent to Mailly-le-Camp and was still there in mid-August.
Final days
The division’s final days in Normandy were spent fighting alongside the 1st SS and 12th SS trying to prop open the northern shoulder of the Falaise pocket. In particular with the remaining elements of the 89th Infantry Division it struggled to hold back Major General R K Ross’ 53rd (Welsh) Division west of Falaise, before fleeing east. During August the division lost 3,000 men, giving a total loss of 8,000 for the entire campaign.
Chapter 4
Formidably Equipped – Panzer Lehr Panzer Division
Following the D-Day landings in the early hours of 6 June, it was not until 1400 that the German armoured reserve, Panzer Lehr and 12th SS Panzer Divisions, were released for combat operations. It would take up to three days to bring them into action. The Allied air forces did all they could to impede the panzers’ progress to the front and Panzer Lehr did not escape their unwanted attentions. Most of the Luftwaffe was tied up resisting the Allies’ strategic bombing campaign over Germany or on the Eastern Front.
Panzer Lehr’s commander, General Fritz Bayerlein, soon found that the constant air attacks and High Command’s insistence on radio silence created a state of chaos within his strung-out units. Panzer Lehr’s principal role would be desperately, but futilely, trying to fend off the American breakout, by which time it had suffered losses of 6,000 men. Almost swept away by the American offensive, Panzer Lehr remarkably avoided being trapped in the Falaise pocket.
Combat experience
Panzer Lehr had been formed at Potsdam in November 1943, from demonstration units of the various Panzer schools, and placed under the leadership of Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein. The division was then transferred to France in February1944 and on to Hungary in April of that year, where it absorbed Infanterie-Lehr-Regiment 901. It then returned to France for garrison duties.
Bayerlein was Bavarian, hailing from Würzburg, and like so many of his comrades he had served in the trenches during the First World War. During the invasions of Poland and France he had served as General Heinz Guderian’s First General Staff Officer. In North Africa he served under Erwin Rommel and that other leading panzer exponent, Wilhelm von Thoma. He was lucky to escape the German defeat in Tunisia, being sent back to Italy just before the Axis surrender on 12 May 1943. He then commanded the 3rd Panzer Division in Russia.
In Bayerlein’s capable hands, Panzer Lehr was one of the most formidably equipped panzer divisions in Normandy and was also one of the few divisions at almost full strength. By the beginning of June, Bayerlein’s command amounted to 14,699 Officers and men. Including those forces of the attached Panzer Kompanie 316 (Funklenk – radio controlled), Panzer Lehr amassed ninety-nine Panzer IVs, eighty-nine Panthers, thirty-one Jagdpanzer IVs, ten Sturmegschütz IIIs and eight Tigers (three Tiger Is and five Tiger IIs), giving an impressive total of 237 panzers and assault guns. Initially, Panzer Lehr was stationed in the Chartes–Le Mans–Orléans area.
Fate partly favoured the Allies when it was decided to ship the Panthers of the I Abteilung Panzer Regiment 6, which was on loan from the 3rd Panzer Division, to the Eastern Front. The day before D-Day, the first train bearing this unit reached Magdeburg in Germany, whilst the last was loitering in Paris. Once the Allied landings were under way the battalion was ordered to retrace its steps.
Again fortunately for the Allies, the half dozen Tiger IIs of Panzer Kompanie 316 (Funklenk) were defective prototypes that were due back in Germany. Because they could not be moved by rail they were left at Chateaudun and eventually blown up. Panzer Kompanie 316 (Funklenk) was attached to Panzer Lehr in Normandy for tactical purposes with about ten tanks, though by early July all but two were undergoing repair. It operated closely with the division’s Panzer Lehr Regiment, starting with an operational strength of nine StuG assault guns and three Tiger Is.
The divisional Panzer Artillery Regiment 130 also included Hummel and Wespe self-propelled guns, adding to its armoured fighting vehicle contingent. In addition, all the panzergrenadier units were equipped with armoured halftracks and an array of heavy sup
port weapons.
Bayerlein recalled the almost immediate aerial assault on his division:
We moved as ordered [at 1700], and immediately came under air attack. I lost twenty to thirty vehicles by night fall. It’s hard to remember exactly the figures for each day, but I do remember very well being strafed personally near Alençon.
We kept on during the night with but three hours’ delay for rest and refuelling. At daylight, General Dollmann [commander 7th Army] gave me a direct order to proceed and there was nothing else to do. The first air attack came about 0530 that morning, near Falaise. By noon it was terrible: my men were calling the main road from Vire to Beny-Bocage a fighter-bomber race-course – abo Rennstrecke.
I was driving in front of the middle column with two staff cars and two headquarters signal vans along the Alençon–Argentan–Falaise road. We had only got to Beaumont-sur-Sarthe when the first fighter-bomber attack forced us to take cover. For once we were lucky. But the columns were getting farther apart all the time. Since Army had ordered radio silence we had to maintain contact by dispatch riders. As if radio silence could have stopped the fighter-bombers and reconnaissance planes from spotting us! All it did was prevent the division staff from forming a picture of the state of the advance – if it was moving smoothly or whether there were hold ups and losses, and how far the spearheads had got. I was forever sending Officers or else seeking out my units myself.
We were moving along all five routes of advance. Naturally our move had been spotted by enemy reconnaissance. And before long the bombers were hovering above the roads, smashing cross-roads, villages and towns along our line of advance, and pouncing on the long columns of vehicles.
Falaise: The Flawed Victory Page 7