During 12 August Abteilung 102 continued to support the 271st Infantry Division and the I and II Kompanies attempted to trap the advancing British armour. The latter broke through east of Barberie and II Kompanie moved to secure the roads to Espins and Fresnay. Six tanks also occupied the height on the northern edge of Zingal, catching seven enemy tanks. The British then brought down a massive barrage which stunned Ernst Streng, commander of II Kompanie:
The English shells hit the roofs, walls, windows, and streets like hailstones. The force and violence of the artillery fire, never experienced at such intensity before, raced through the town [Bois Halbout] like a hurricane. Wounded soldiers were trapped under the rubble of crumbling roofs and walls. Helpless injured over flowed the hallways and rooms of the main dressing station. Whoever was still breathing was buried under the falling walls.
Five Tigers at Tournebous had to make a fighting retreat to Bois Halbout or face being overwhelmed. The Tigers then withdrew southeast of Claire-Tizon to refuel and take on ammunition. Six tanks needed repairing and were handed over to the mechanics. The retreating Tigers were then caught at the junction of the western ring road just outside Falaise on 13 August by rocket-firing fighter-bombers. They sought sanctuary in a nearby wood without loss and were ordered to defend the Tournebous area. Soon the British were in amongst the three Tigers that formed the command post of II Kompanie and two were quickly knocked out.
The remaining panzers retreated and north of Soulangy, at Hill 184, they found German infantry fleeing twelve Sherman tanks. The Tigers knocked out three as the daylight began to fail and the infantry dug in. The following day, Will Fey and his crew, returning from the repair company, were ordered to hold the Caen-Falaise road between Soulangy and St Pierre. Although Soulangy had fallen, a few panzergrenadiers from the 12th SS screened Fey and his men.
At the approach of the Canadians, Fey drove forward to engage them but they disappeared in Soulangy. Moving to rescue some trapped panzergrenadiers, he spotted a line of ten Sherman tanks threatening the foxholes of the German infantry. At 400 metres the Tiger knocked out the first and last Sherman and then finished off the rest at leisure. Covering the retreat of about thirty men from 12th SS, the Tiger knocked out an approaching column of armoured personnel carriers. After all this success, Fey’s tank now refused to start and, in danger of being outflanked, had to be towed back to St Pierre.
Final days
The Tiger tanks withdrew to the Falaise road junction and on the night of the 15th the local Maquis were foolish enough to tangle with the abteilung’s sentries. By the morning the Tigers were at Versainville, just north of Falaise, and they moved forward to engage the Canadians just as the village was flattened. Their machineguns mowed down the numerous exposed advancing Canadian infantry; as long as no one surrendered they kept firing and it was soon the turn of the supporting Shermans.
When the Tigers fell back, the Canadian infantry bravely but vainly tried to deal with them. After abandoning Versainville, the Canadians continued to press them closely as they retreated to Eraines. The end was now in sight as Will Fey stoically noted:
On the horizon, we saw columns of tanks and vehicles rolling east in the evening sun, tank after tank, with no break. This meant that the encirclement, which had been obvious around Falaise for days, was to be completed. But it was not the first encirclement we had to break out of!
It was only a matter of time before the last of the lumbering Tiger tanks had to be abandoned.
Chapter 8
Operation Lüttich – 2nd Panzer Division
While the 21st and 12th SS Panzer Divisions fought almost immediately to contain the Allied bridgehead, it was a week before they received any other armoured reinforcements. Panzergrenadiers of the 2nd Panzer Division first went into action on 13 June, but its tanks did not join the fighting until 27 June. The 2nd Panzer Division was a well-equipped and powerful formation by the time of D-Day. It was involved in the desperate attempts to contain the American breakout before being caught in the chaos of the Falaise salient.
Combat experience
As its designation implies, 2nd Panzer was one of Hitler’s very first armoured divisions. Raised in October 1935 at Wurzburg, it was deployed to Vienna three years later following the Anschluss with Austria, where it remained until the invasion of Poland. After its role in the Polish campaign under General Rudolf Veiel, 2nd Panzer was sent to the Eifel area in readiness for the attack on France. It also supplied Panzer Regiment 4 to help form 13th Panzer Division on 28 September 1940 and was once again sent to Poland, this time for occupation duty.
The 2nd Panzer then saw action under Veiel’s leadership in the Balkans during the invasion of Greece and Yugoslavia. After a brief deployment to France the division was sent to the central sector of the Eastern Front, where it was involved in the fighting at Moscow, Smolensk, Orel and Kiev. It subsequently fought at Kursk and the Dneiper, suffering heavy losses, and was sent to France under General Franz Westhoven for much needed refitting in 1944.
The division made the most of its well-earned rest and by late May/early June 1944 Panzer Regiment 3 had ninety-eight Panzer IVs and seventy-nine Panthers, of which only eight tanks were in the workshop undergoing maintenance. Panzerjäger Abteilung 38 also had about twenty powerful Jagdpanzer IV tank destroyers. These had been designed as a replacement for the Sturmgeschütz III/IV assault gun and had only started being issued to the tank hunter detachments of the panzer divisions in March 1944. Although also issued to the Panzerjäger abteilung of the 9th, 12th SS, 116th and Panzer Lehr Panzer Divisions, it was quite a rare armoured fighting vehicle in Normandy, where only about sixty were deployed.
Panzer Schwere Infanteriegeschütz Abteilung 38 was equipped with the Grille 15cm self-propelled gun on a Czech tank chassis. In addition, 2nd Panzer’s Artillery Regiment 74 had six Hummel and twelve Wespe self-propelled guns, mounted on Panzer IV and II chassis respectively, and the panzergrenadiers had 476 armoured personnel carriers or armoured half-tracks. Manpower stood at 16,762, but this probably included 1,085 men belonging to the subordinated Panzer Abteilung 301 (Funklenk), although only the IV Kompanie of the latter unit accompanied 2nd Panzer to Normandy. On 5 June the battalion was sent back to Russia, leaving behind the IV Kompanie, which was supposed to form a cadre for the Panzer Abteilung 302 (Funklenk) that was just forming. The Kompanie consisted of two Panzer IIIs, six Sturmgeschütz and thirty-six Ladungsträger B IV remote-controlled demolition vehicles, totalling at the most 250 men. Panzer Abteilung 301 returned from the Eastern Front to be equipped with thirty Tigers, which were to be used as control vehicles for the Ladungsträgers.
Into action
On D-Day, the division, under General der Panzertruppen Heinrich Freiherr von Lüttwitz, who had reassumed command on 27 May, was deployed in the Amiens area. It was three crucial days before the division was instructed to move toward Normandy. Lütwittz received word in the early hours on the 9th, as he recalls:
Toward 0300 hours, 9 June, the division received orders to march through Paris, and on into the Argentan–Sees sector. It was ordered that the march movement was to become effective with darkness on 9 June, and it was to be carried out only under the protection of darkness. The reason for the movement route through Paris was because all other bridges between Paris and the river estuary had been bombed out. Besides in the heart of Paris were the only passages still intact.
By 1400 2nd Panzer was ready to move, two groups were to take to the road while nearly all the division’s tracked vehicles were to be transported by train to save on unnecessary wear and tear. On the road losses to enemy air attack were to be kept to a minimum by travelling in small groups or individually. The lead elements arrived in Paris after dusk and at first things went smoothly until midnight when an air raid caused chaos after the French traffic police led to the shelters.
Because the Allied air forces had destroyed all bridges over the Seine from Paris to the coast, 2nd Panzer was obliged to make a longer j
ourney when it moved from Amiens to Normandy. Instead of travelling via Rouen it had to take the detour via Paris, increasing the distance by more than 100 miles (150km). Moving mainly by road and by using the cover of darkness and periods of poor weather, the division managed to cover about 265 miles (400km) in two days, an impressive performance.
On the morning of the 10th von Lüttwitz arrived at the Panzer Corps HQ at Gallion. He was informed that it was intended that his division, along with Panzer Lehr Panzer Division, 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division and the 3rd Fallschfirmjäger Division were to recapture Bayeux. Three days later, at 1700, 2nd Panzer was ordered to move to the Aunay-sur-Odon area on the left wing of Panzergruppe West to co-ordinate its efforts with Panzer Lehr and the 3rd Fallschfirmjäger Division. For the attack on the 13th the division committed two kampfgruppen, one in the Jurques area and the other in the northern sector of the Bois de Homme. Some ground was taken but the lack of tanks greatly hampered operations.
Although elements of 2nd Panzer had been blooded, it was another six days before all of the division arrived in-theatre. Frustratingly, the Panther abteilung with fifty-two operational tanks did not arrive until the 19th; twenty were damaged in transit. Similarly the Panzer IV abteilung arrived with 75 per cent of its tanks operational and only two thirds of the Hummels and Wespes were combat ready.
The left battle group of 2nd Panzer advanced on Caumont and by nightfall on the 13th they had driven the British off Hill 174, near Cahagnes, and almost cut the road between Caumont and Amaye-sur-Orne.
Oberfeldwebel Hans Erich Braun, a senior NCO with Panzerjäger Abteilung 38, was with III Kompanie, equipped with nine 7.5cm anti-tank guns pulled by half-tracks. In total the division had twenty-five Pak 40 7.5cm towed antitank guns, while Abteilung 38’s I and II Kompanies were equipped with the Jagdpanzer IVs. Braun was involved in the fighting southeast of Caumont and on 14 June noted that the British artillery ceased firing at around 0530. He was also grateful that it was too early for the enemy fighter-bombers, but an enemy artillery spotter plane was already up and about. He felt that the division was horribly exposed and recalled:
From Caumont, especially from one of the town’s highest towers, the enemy could see everything, and fired at the slightest movement in the forward area, usually with several batteries combined. However, the three 7.5cm anti-tank guns of my troop were so well dug in and camouflaged, in the orchards and by the field paths which ran to the north, that it was impossible for anyone who did not actually know that they were there to spot them from a distance of twenty paces.
Braun and his men were hardened Eastern Front veterans and emplacing and hiding their guns was second nature. They had a steady nerve and allowed enemy patrols, tanks or armoured cars to get so close that their surprise fire was inevitably overwhelming and devastating. They were not afraid of hand-to-hand fighting either, but found their British counterparts were shy of such close-quarter combat. Braun adds:
Often, we were accused of fighting fanatically, but we had long since learned the lesson, that one thing alone counts in war: to fire first, by a fraction of a second, and kill; or otherwise, be killed oneself.
At 0603 the British shelling resumed for fifteen minutes and Braun was stunned by the weight of the bombardment:
A hurricane of fire raged through the countryside, wrapping everything in grey smoke and dirt; only once before, in the great battle near Orel [in Russia], had we ever experienced anything like this. Then, suddenly it stopped.
Then came the British Typhoons, followed by more artillery fire. Despite this deluge, the right-hand battle group of 2nd Panzer attacked on 15 June and, although suffering heavy losses, took Launay and St Germain d’Ectot. Two days later the left battle group reached le Quesnay.
Erich Braun was with the left-hand kampfgruppe that attacked under a covering barrage from its Hummel and Wespe self-propelled artillery:
In spite of the enemy’s strength in artillery and in the air, our left Battle Group assembled on the morning of 17 June for yet another attack towards the north. In our kompanie we had five operational anti-tank guns left; their task was to follow close behind the attacking grenadiers, down roads or paths, or across the patch-work of fields. At the start, I was with two remaining guns of my troop, in support of Panzergrenadier Regiment 304. Overhead, as we assembled, shrilled and whispered the protective barrage from Artillery Regiment 74. Our grenadiers rose up from their trenches and went forward, firing their machine-pistols and machineguns from the hip as they advanced.
In this way, and with some close combat, they got into the outskirts of le Quesnay. We pushed our guns forward, muzzle first, straining and heaving, to keep up with them.
Braun and his guns, taking up position behind a stone wall, were soon engaging advancing British tanks:
I gave the command: ‘Fire!’ Simultaneously, some of the grenadiers let fly with their panzerfausts (which only tore holes in the ground short of the tank), and my gunner pulled the trigger.
Bright-red flame: a terrific detonation: a violent blast of air. The shell screeched away towards the Cromwell, hitting the sloping top of the turret, and shooting straight up into the smoke-obscured sky, hissing and spitting. Unfortunate. The British gun began to wing in our direction, as the turret revolved. My crew re-loaded with solid shot, and fired again before the enemy gun could bear. The shell went straight through the turret and thinking that the enemy gunner was probably out of action, my crew recommenced firing with the appropriate ammunition, this time into the lightly-armoured side. Immediately a deep blue flame, surrounded by a bright lash, leapt up from the tank; there was a terrific explosion; and the Cromwell literally burst apart.
To Braun’s left the panzergrenadiers claimed another Cromwell using panzer-fausts. Reaching le Quesnay it took them an hour, fighting house-to-house and cellar-by-cellar, to drive the British out, though they clung on in the northern part of the town and in the neighbouring orchards. Braun’s guns were used to fire explosives at point-blank range to crumble the buildings.
Following an artillery bombardment of southern le Quesnay, 2nd Panzer was counterattacked by British tanks and infantry. For a moment disaster loomed, but as Braun recalls quick thinking and discipline saved the day:
Then the first waves of retiring grenadiers began to pass us, and we could hear the roar of the enemy tanks above their artillery and mortar fire. The British had forced their way back into le Quesnay, and cut the line of retreat for the German half-tracks and lorries. It could have been a catastrophe, but energetic Officers and NCOs stopped the panic and the British attack halted. At the end of the day, we were back precisely where we had started from.
Driven back, Lüttwitz’s 2nd Panzer attacked again the following day, seizing le Quesnay once more and pushing through to Briquessard at considerable cost. However, all the abandoned tanks and weapons which they had lost on the 17th were recaptured and found to be in good order; ultimately, though, what had 2nd Panzer gained? – a little ground for irreplaceable manpower. It was a war of attrition the division could ill-afford.
On 14 June in the Villers-Bocage area, an American artillery ‘serenade’ broke up an attack by 2nd Panzer, knocking out eleven panzers, though the tanks of the British 7th Armoured Division were still in serious danger of being cut off. The 2nd Panzer’s divisional reconnaissance group, on entering Villers-Bocage, found an almost intact Sherman, its turret was removed and the vehicle pressed into service as a much-needed recovery vehicle.
For the rest of June the division fought in the Caumont area, although the Panthers were despatched to resist the British Epsom offensive. When the British broke through east of Tilly-sur-Seulles on the front held by Panzer Lehr on 25 and 26 June, the 12th SS, supported by the I Abteilung Panzer Regiment 3, counterattacked on the right. On the 28th the Panthers destroyed fifty-three British tanks and fifteen anti-tank guns. By 1 July they had claimed eighty-nine enemy tanks, thirteen Bren carriers and nineteen anti-tank guns for the loss of twenty panzers.<
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The division, like many other German units in Normandy, did not escape the attention of the Allied air forces, especially the bombers. Air Marshal Arthur Harris, in charge of RAF Bomber Command, wrote:
On June 30th it was learned that the 2nd and 9th Panzers division were moving up through Villers-Bocage to make an attack that night; there was a network of roads here which it would be almost impossible for the enemy to by-pass and it was therefore the obvious place in which to bomb the Panzer Divisions and their equipment – the enemy had also established a supply point there. This time Bomber Command attacked in daylight and dropped 1,100 tons of bombs; the Panzer Divisions had to call off the planned attack.
Cobra strikes
By early July the division still had eighty-five Panzer IVs in the field with another eleven in the shop, and twenty-one operational Panthers and thirty-eight undergoing maintenance. In addition it still had its twenty Jagdpanzer IVs. On the 2nd, IV Kompanie Panzer Abteilung 301 (Funklenk) was given sanction to remain with 2nd Panzer and Panzer Kompanie 316 (Funklenk) was earmarked for Panzer Abteilung 302 (Funklenk). The latter, stationed near Vouziers, was not destined to see action in Normandy and instead was sent to Warsaw in mid-August.
On 15 July the British launched Operation Greenline, a subsidiary of Goodwood, tying down the 2nd, 9th SS and 10th SS Panzer Divisions west of Caen, along the Epsom Salient, and forcing the 1st SS to hold the Orne. Goodwood was launched east of Caen three days later.
Falaise: The Flawed Victory Page 14