This is possibly a little harsh, however. Not only was there some precedent for reaching such a goal, but quite a careful plan had been made for the capture of Caen. The infantry of 8th Brigade, who had landed first, were to take the long, low ridge about a mile inland, then two battalions of 185th Brigade, with the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry, would pass through them. The planners believed, correctly, that once WNs 16 and 17 were captured, the path to Caen would be fairly straightforward. In this presumption they were quite correct, especially since the tanks of 21. Panzer had decided to skirt around the south of the city before turning north towards the coast. In Sicily the previous July, most of the troops had reached Syracuse on foot, but not all were expected to be so on D-Day. Ideally, the infantry would have been in half-tracks and trucks, of which the British Army had plentiful supplies. However, there had not been enough shipping for those, plus tanks, plus AVREs, so 8th Brigade were to advance to the ridge on foot, while one battalion of the infantry following behind would mount themselves on the tanks with mounted engineers and artillery in support. This would, in effect, be an armoured battle group.
So, there was a plan for taking Caen, and a not unreasonable one in the circumstances. The problem was the execution, because the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry took longer to get off the beach than had been anticipated. This was largely because of a much higher tide than usual, which had not been expected. It meant there was only a narrow sliver of beach on which the tanks could manoeuvre and not enough paths cleared quickly enough through the minefields. Congestion and a slower than expected exit off the beach were the result, which meant that while the infantry was ready by 11 a.m., the accompanying armour was not.
The second problem was Oberst Ludwig Krug’s defensive network at WNs 16 and 17, code-named Morris and Hillman by the British, who had accurately appraised these defences and bombed and shelled them heavily. Morris, at the foot of the slope, held four 105mm guns and was, on paper, a potentially tough nut to crack. In fact, the enemy troops there, mostly Osttruppen, had been more interested in brewing their own hooch than manning the guns and quickly surrendered. Morris was a walkover. Hillman, on the ridge behind, was a totally different kettle of fish. Here, Krug himself was still in command; he had trained his men well, and had also created a well-organized and coordinated defensive position; he had absolutely no intention of rolling over without a fight. It was not the fault of Montgomery or Dempsey, though, that Hillman hadn’t been more effectively pummelled beforehand. No one could have predicted that, of all the strongpoints along the Normandy coastline, this was the best organized, best defended and best led. In fact, some 150 men were defending it – nearly five times as many as at WN62 at Omaha.
Covering an area of 600 yards by 400, it lay directly in the path of the British advance on Caen. It was also surrounded by dense and effectively laid minefields in plain view of nasty numbers of machine guns, mortars and Tobruks, each with effective interlocking fire. The Suffolks from 8th Brigade were given the job of taking Hillman, among them Arthur Blizzard and the Pioneer Platoon. He was only too happy to get rid of the Bangalore torpedo he had been carrying around since landing. At around 1 p.m., together with sappers from the Royal Engineers, they began clearing gaps in the wire. Blizzard managed to blow a good gap, but came under heavy fire as he did so. ‘I nearly got kaput over it,’ he said, ‘but I got away with it.’18 Others were not so lucky. Casualties quickly mounted, including a number of officers and NCOs; Captain Geoff Ryley, A Company commander leading the assault, was one of the first.
The Suffolks were forced to pull back and wait for support, which came from the Staffordshire Yeomanry and 13th/18th Hussars, although they were supposed to be part of the armoured group pressing on towards Caen with the infantry of 185th Brigade. Meanwhile, the Norfolks tried to bypass the position well to the left, but were raked by machine-gun and mortar fire and in no time had 150 casualties. Oberst Krug’s strongpoint, heroically and determinedly defended by men who, on paper, looked likely to throw in the towel quite early, were badly holding up the British advance on Caen because it took time to organize a more coordinated attack with tanks and artillery. Arthur Blizzard was eventually able to use his ‘beehive’, but although it blew a big hole in the concrete of one particular emplacement, it wasn’t enough to get through the superior engineering work of Krug’s strongpoint. ‘What we really wanted was another one,’ said Blizzard.19 ‘We tried to get a tank up to put his gun through there but when there’s action you can’t get things done as you want.’
Armour and infantry from Utah Beach had hooked up with men from the 101st Airborne, and at Brécourt Manor the German defenders, who had fallen back around the manor house after Dick Winters’s assault on the gun battery, had been cleared. Carl Rambo and his crew, however, remained stuck; having got through the minefields, his Sherman DD had ground to a halt and they had been unable to get it going again. It was in the way, so a bulldozer had pushed it clear and it had sunk down into the flooded area. They went back to the beach to try to get a replacement, but none was yet available, so the rest of the 70th Tank Battalion pressed on inland without them.
On the far side of the flooded area around the village of Chef-du-Pont and the hamlet of La Fière, Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Alexander was now temporarily commanding the 1st Battalion of the 505th PIR after what had been an eventful day. Soon after landing he had met up with Major Fred Kellam, commander of the 1st Battalion, and along with forty or so men they had begun heading south-west in the direction of the 505th’s DZ. As they were crossing the main road linking Sainte-Mère-Église to Cherbourg, they heard a small convoy approaching from the north heading towards the town. Quickly preparing an ambush, the paratroopers opened fire, killing more than twenty Germans and capturing a lot of communications equipment.
They had then continued on their way and Alexander successfully reached the 505th’s command post, where the operations officer and a small staff had already set up a tent and were in radio contact with other units. Troops in Sainte-Mère-Église had seen off a German counter-attack, while Kellam and his men, their number increasing as the day progressed, were heading towards the Merderet, where heavy fighting was taking place.
Just before noon, word reached the command post that Kellam, along with the 1st Battalion’s operations officer and a company commander, had all been killed. Alexander’s job was to run the regiment from the CP, but leadership was needed urgently with so many already killed, so he headed to La Fière, hurrying there with his orderly, Corporal ‘Chick’ Eitelman. En route, they had a brief firefight with some Germans and Eitelman was hit in the leg. Despite Alexander’s urging, Eitelman insisted on remaining with him. They reached the railway crossing above La Fière around 1.30 p.m. From there, a bridge crossed the river and a causeway led over the flooded area to the village of Cauquigny, some three-quarters of a mile away. The Germans counter-attacked across the causeway using old 1940-era French tanks, but the paratroopers held them off. Despite this, plenty of artillery and mortar shells were still being fired into the paratroopers’ positions. Casualties were continuing to mount. And ammunition was getting low.
Later in the afternoon, Alexander took a medic and hurried from foxhole to foxhole in case there were wounded in need of attention. They found one man still alive but with a dollar-sized piece of his skull missing, exposing his brains. They picked him up and were about to take him to the aid station when the Germans sent over a concentrated barrage. ‘They really schlacked that area,’ said Alexander.20 ‘Dirt and rocks were blowing in on us.’ He and the medic sat in the foxhole trying to protect the wounded man, their ears ringing.
Meanwhile, not far away, at the La Fière railway crossing, the Dubosq family were continuing to give shelter and aid to the American paratroopers. Geneviève’s father had brought back a wounded American in his boat from the flooded area and she had helped bring him into the house. ‘I have never seen such a bad fracture,’ she wrote.21 ‘The bones have broken t
hrough the skin and the leather of the boot.’ The man desperately needed a doctor, but they were cut off. Even worse, they had neither disinfectant nor dressings in the house. His name, he told them, was Lieutenant George Wingate. ‘Mama uses boiled water and calva,’ wrote Geneviève.22 ‘We don’t know if we are doing the right thing.’ Monsieur Dubosq continued to take his boat out into the water to rescue more supplies, despite enemy fire from the far side, while his daughter kept watch on Lieutenant Wingate. For the Americans defending La Fière and for the Dubosq family suddenly and dramatically caught up in the middle of this battle, the situation was far from good.
Adolf Hitler had woken at around 10 a.m. on 6 June and had been told about the invasion, but then had prevaricated as he so often did. Neither he nor those at the OKW were sure that the Normandy assault was anything more than a diversion. Despite the Allies’ enormous material strength, it was not clear how they were supposed to launch a second invasion. Frankly, it beggared belief, although 617 Squadron, the Dam Busters, had performed a clever and brilliantly flown operation in a looping box across the Channel, which, on radar, simulated an invasion fleet crossing towards Calais.
Not until 2.32 p.m. was 12. SS-Panzer given permission to move, and not until 4 p.m. were the rest of the panzer reserves released. Also at 4 p.m., some sixteen hours after the first report of enemy troops had reached them, SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 25, part of 12. SS-Panzer-Division ‘Hitlerjugend’, was finally given its employment orders, which were to attack the area around Carpiquet airfield to the west of Caen. ‘The time had come!’23 wrote the regiment’s commander, Standartenführer Kurt Meyer. ‘The soldiers mounted their vehicles. Dispatch riders roared down the streets on their motorcycles; the combat vehicles’ engines were bellowing.’ Meyer was thirty-three and already a veteran of the Anschluss in Austria, the battles for Poland and France, and the Eastern Front. The son of a coalminer from Jerxheim, he was an early convert to Nazism, joining the Party at the age of nineteen and the SS in October 1931, when he was still only twenty. ‘I have breathed in National Socialism as a religion,’ he said at one point during the war, ‘as my life, no matter whether it is called National Socialism or has some other designation.24 I have realized that that is the only right life for our people, that otherwise our culture would go to the devil.’ Originally an SS policeman, Meyer was soon noticed and asked to join the Leibstandarte-SS ‘Adolf Hitler’, the Führer’s own personal bodyguard. Originally known as SS-Verfügungstruppen, these combat SS units later became part of the Waffen-SS, while SS police and intelligence services, which included prison guards, were part of the Allgemeine-SS, or General SS.
Meyer was tough, unquestionably courageous and a natural leader of men. Time and again he proved himself, always leading from the front, and he also had a sharp tactical brain. Remaining with the Leibstandarte-SS throughout the early years of the war, he certainly had blood on his hands: he had ordered the burning of a village and the execution of all its inhabitants during the Battle of Kharkov in early 1943. He was far from alone and not just within the Waffen-SS; plenty of Wehrmacht commanders had committed similar atrocities in a war with the Soviet Union that was fought with particularly brutal violence. Underpinning Meyer’s ideology was a rabid abhorrence of communism. His greatest fear in June 1944 remained the annihilation of the German people at the hands of communists.
He also suspected that one day, in the not too distant future, Germany would link arms with the western democracies against the threat of the Soviet Union. That, however, was for the future. For now, he faced the days and weeks to come with no small amount of anxiety. ‘We knew what was in front of us,’ he wrote.25 ‘In comparison, the magnificent young soldiers looked at us with laughter in their eyes. They had no fear.’ At least he knew he had trained his own regiment well. The division had been formed the previous summer and Meyer had ensured his fanatical young troops, nearly all of them teenagers, avoided drill and instead focused on physical toughening and the tactical and operational techniques outlined by General Geyr von Schweppenburg, commander of Panzergruppe West and responsible for the training of armoured troops. Meyer had also ensured his troops had extra rations to make them physically stronger after the stringent rationing back home. As they headed to battle, he was proud of them. ‘They were imbued with a belief in the rightness and justice of the German cause,’ he noted.26 ‘The young soldiers went to war superbly trained. There were few divisions which had been trained as well.’ That was perhaps overstating it, but both the 12. ‘Hitlerjugend’ and the Panzer-Lehr were fully motorized, fully trained and superbly well equipped. The men were motivated and highly disciplined. On the march, these troops looked impressive: fit, healthy, with the latest uniforms and riding an array of tanks, armoured cars, half-tracks and other vehicles. The contrast with the half-bitten, half-trained, half-equipped infantry divisions on the coast could not have been greater.
The bulk of Major Hans von Luck’s II. Bataillon had finally got moving later in the afternoon. Their goal was to push north, clear the British Red Devils and Commandos from around Ranville and retake the two bridges. With the support of a panzer company, his reconnaissance battalion of half-tracks and armoured cars went straight into the attack and reached the village of Escoville, to the south of Ranville. ‘Then all hell broke loose,’ wrote von Luck.27 ‘The heaviest naval guns, up to 38cm in calibre, artillery, and fighter-bombers plastered us without pause.’
The attack was stopped dead in its tracks as radio contact was lost, men desperately tried to take cover and the wounded streamed back. Hurriedly, von Luck managed to reach his forward commanders to tell them to break off the attack and start digging in. His were not the only ones in 21. Panzer to be stopped in their tracks, however. So too had been Oberst Oppeln-Bronikowski’s panzers. After laboriously inching his way around the southern edge of Caen, he pushed north, in between the British and Canadians at Sword and Juno. Unfortunately for the panzers, the Staffordshire Yeomanry saw them coming and moved their Sherman Fireflies into an ambush position. These were equipped with a 17-pounder anti-tank gun, a weapon that could fire a shell at over 3,000 feet per second and at a velocity superior to that of the German 88mm. These Fireflies made short work of Oppeln-Bronikowski’s panzers, knocking out thirteen in fewer minutes. Several panzers pressed on and reached the coast, but they achieved little and soon they were all pulling back. The intended massed counter-attack had had neither enough weight nor proper coordination and it had failed. With every passing hour, the Allies’ foothold became stronger.
German troops were falling back from Omaha too. Franz Gockel, like Karl Wegner, had run out of ammunition, and American troops were all around them. Abandoning their bunker, crouching, Gockel and his surviving comrades hurried up the communication trench to try to make good their escape. Unfortunately for them, the trench zig-zagged up the hill in plain sight and one of the men was shot in the head and killed, while another was wounded. Then Gockel was hit in the hand. A comrade quickly bandaged it as best he could and they continued, crawling then running, inching their way along hedgerows and across fields in the direction of Colleville. Eventually, they reached a company command post on the edge of the village, only to learn that the Americans now held the village itself. Saint-Laurent, the next village to the east, was apparently also in American hands. The company commander had been killed. ‘For us wounded there was no protection here,’ wrote Gockel.28 ‘Enemy planes flew over and attacked anything that looked like it was carrying troops.’
Gockel and other wounded men were bundled into a truck and taken towards their hospital in Bayeux at breakneck speed, away from the violence and terror of the day’s fighting on the coast. From the lorry, he saw the invasion fleet out at sea, huge and menacing, barrage balloons floating above. In the fields lay dead cows, and rubble on the road, while a little further on a burial party was interring a number of the dead. Eventually, the truck could go no further and so the walking wounded were told to try to reach Bayeux by fo
ot. As they trudged along the road, some farmers offered them a lift in their carts. ‘Even in these,’ added Gockel, ‘we were not safe from the Jabos.’29
Karl Wegner and his two comrades, meanwhile, had made it to the road into Vierville and, with a careful watch on the sky, headed in the direction of the village, only to come across a number of dead sprawled across the road. ‘It looked as though a Jabo caught them in the open,’ he said.30 Overcoming their queasiness, they rifled through the bodies for ammunition. Soon they met a number of other soldiers. A Feldwebel told them to fall in and they headed back away from the village soon after learning from another straggler that Vierville was in American hands. On they trudged, westwards, until they came across some other troops, including several officers, sheltering under a tree from the Jabos. One of the officers asked them what they were doing and where they had come from, but none of them answered in case they said the wrong thing and were shot for desertion. Instead, Wegner and his two friends were posted as replacements to 4. Kompanie of Grenadier-Regiment 914 and told to head towards Pointe du Hoc, where American troops were holding the battery. Their task was to wrest it back. Wegner was given some rounds of wooden bullets. These were normally training rounds only, but were good for keeping the heads of the enemy down – or so he was told.
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