Among those now dug in was Johannes Börner, still only eighteen years old and from Leipzig. Called up at seventeen in March the previous year, he had carried out his Arbeitsdienst – his labour service – then joined the Luftwaffe as ground crew before volunteering to join the Fallschirmjäger in January 1944. ‘They asked us whether we would rather go to Russia as ground crew on Messerschmitt 109s or join the paratroopers,’ said Börner, ‘so I volunteered to become a Fallschirmjäger.’16 Posted to parachute school near Berlin, he underwent three weeks’ intense training, which included the standard six practice jumps, and was then posted to Brittany to join the 15. Kompanie of the III. Bataillon, Regiment 5 of the 3. Fallschirmjäger-Division. ‘We were really elite troops,’ said Börner. Despite this claim, his paratrooper training had been a mere twenty-one days. In contrast, there was not an American paratrooper now in Normandy who had been training for less than two years.
At Finistère in Brittany, they carried out route marches, practised machine-gun and small-arms training, laid mines and prepared defences. They never once trained with tanks and only a limited amount with artillery. Then, early in the morning of 6 June, they began moving up towards Normandy. From Brest and the Finistère region to the front near Saint-Lô was more than 200 miles, and Börner and his comrades had to march the entire way, from dusk until dawn, reaching their new positions during Monday, 12 June. ‘It was very hard,’ admitted Börner.17 ‘We were really tired and had blisters on our feet.’ Despite this, they went into action immediately, because that same day the Americans tried to burst through.
Among those attacking was Sergeant Bob Slaughter in Company D of the 116th Infantry, who reached Couvains the same day. Digging in behind a hedgerow, he and his squadron had just finished camouflaging their position when Slaughter saw a new replacement officer wearing a fresh uniform move up and start scanning ahead with his binoculars. Moments later, a German high-velocity shell whooshed in, hitting the man squarely on the upper torso. ‘The 2nd Squad and I were splattered with gore,’ noted Slaughter, ‘as the spotter was blown backwards, minus his head.’18
On the afternoon of Thursday, 15 June, Montgomery visited Bradley. With V-1s now falling on Britain, the pressure to push the Germans harder and break out of Normandy was growing. All the senior commanders now in Normandy and those back in Britain had heard Monty’s briefings on 7 April and 15 May, when he had spoken so confidently and shown the projected phase lines to which Bradley had so objected. It wasn’t panning out quite as hoped, and those back in London and elsewhere looking at their maps had quickly forgotten just how well the Allies had done so far. Caen had been a D-Day objective, Cherbourg a priority. Both were still in enemy hands. So too was Saint-Lô, an objective that the Allies had hoped to capture in a matter of days.
At their meeting, Monty urged Bradley to take Saint-Lô swiftly, but Bradley told him the town was meaningless; what mattered was capturing the high ground on either side and that was what his forces would be assaulting the following day. They then set off by Jeep and car to see Major-General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins, the US VII Corps commander, to discuss his plan of attack for Cherbourg. They passed through Grandcamp, Isigny and Carentan. Each was wrecked. Roads were pitted and littered with destroyed vehicles and rubble. Work parties were already trying to clear up, but it was a massive job. ‘Carentan badly hit,’ noted Chet Hansen, ‘square was mass of rubble, still smell of burning wood.19 German barracks in center of town mass of discards as though they had picked up in a hurry and got out … churches were hit, demolished, windows broken. Shop fronts smashed, Civ. Affairs posters around warning of looting and pillage with death to offenders.’
They had their conference with Collins at his farmhouse CP near Sainte-Mère-Église. Collins, who had turned just forty-eight in May, had been the youngest divisional commander in the US Army when he was given the 25th Division back in 1942. He had led them during the final battles on Guadalcanal, which had so far proved the decisive campaign in the Pacific War against the Japanese. There, he had been faced by fanatical enemy troops and difficult terrain, yet had still earned the nickname ‘Lightning Joe’ for his speed of operations. Collins’s philosophy was simple: always take the high ground wherever possible and get artillery forward. It was Bradley who had lined him up to take charge of VII Corps. The two had served together at West Point and then later as instructors at the Army Infantry School, where they became friends. Collins had also known Eisenhower briefly in the Philippines in the 1930s. Having returned to the US just before Christmas 1943, he was both available and keen to test himself in the cauldron of the campaign in Europe.
Collins had come ashore on Utah Beach on 7 June and hurried as many troops as the unloading would allow into the peninsula, ensuring the northern flank was secure and then pressing his forces to sever the Cotentin and trap the Germans to the north still defending Cherbourg. With 4th Division pressing northwards, he quickly brought in the 90th Division as well. The latter was new to combat in this war, but Collins hoped this would not hinder them. Their orders were to pass through the 82nd Airborne and push on towards Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, a significant town and confluence of roads and railways heading north and likely to be stiffly defended. It was, however, held by the German 265. Division, newly arrived from Brittany and a low-grade unit with fragments of other units attached.
After two days of fighting through the hedgerows, the 90th had made little progress, however, so on 13 June Collins headed to the front to see them for himself. After calling in at the divisional CP, he and his party drove on, but could find neither any regimental or battalion headquarters nor any fighting. Eventually, he came upon a group of 90th men in a ditch alongside a road. Stopping, he asked the sergeant what they were doing and received an evasive reply. ‘It was obvious,’ wrote Collins, ‘they were malingering.’20 Appealing to their sense of pride, he talked about the division’s great record in France in 1918 and of the incredible fighting carried out by the 82nd, whom they had passed through on their way to the front, but the men were unmoved. Collins ordered them to get going and later reported his findings to their commander, Major-General Jay MacKelvie. ‘He made no excuses,’ commented Collins, ‘but seemed at a loss as to what to do about the lack of fight in his division.’21
Collins, however, knew exactly where the problem lay. Divisions were only ever as good as their commander. MacKelvie had had the division only a short while and Collins felt the lion’s share of the blame lay with MacKelvie’s predecessor, who clearly hadn’t trained or toughened them up enough. On the other hand, MacKelvie wasn’t the right man to shake them up either. This was war – men’s lives were at stake, and there was simply no time to give commanders like MacKelvie the benefit of the doubt. Collins recommended to Bradley that MacKelvie be swiftly replaced by Major-General Eugene Landrum, another Pacific War veteran, and suggested bringing in the 9th Division, now landed, to drive west across the peninsula alongside the 82nd. Bradley accepted all Collins’s recommendations. ‘Still a good artillery man,’ Chet Hansen noted of MacKelvie, ‘everyone agrees on that.22 Probably not enough of a driver to be a good div commdr especially under hot mustard like Collins who demands ready action quickly.’ Within 24 hours, this had all been put into action. Collins wasn’t called ‘Lightning Joe’ for nothing.
It did mean, however, keeping the 82nd at the front longer than their fellows in the 101st, who had been withdrawn after Carentan and were due to ship back to England to rest and refit. The 82nd jumped off with their latest attack on 15 June, with Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Alexander’s 505th PIR and the 325th Glider Infantry Regiment leading the charge to the upper River Douve and the town of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, which the 90th Division had so woefully failed to capture. To help him, Alexander had been given just two tanks, but they quickly proved their worth, as together with his men they took out one strongpoint after another. He found himself constantly in motion, flitting between company forward positions, his own battalion and regimental CPs.
By evening on the 16th, they had pushed the enemy back 15 miles and reached the eastern side of the River Douve, proving both the ineffectiveness of the German opposition and that Collins had been right to act swiftly over the 90th Division. He had also now brought the 9th Infantry Division into the line on the 82nd’s right. Even so, how to get across was the next headache, because an opposed river crossing was not easy, even against third-rate opposition. Alexander now went ahead with his radio operator and orderly to survey the task, only to discover Bradley, Collins, General Matt Ridgway and Colonel Bill Ekman, the CO of the 505th PIR, already there. The Germans had failed to blow the bridge, so the plan was to hit hard and fast and get straight across, albeit behind a massive artillery barrage. ‘Before you cross a river,’ commented Alexander, ‘you better know that you’re going to have support, or they’ll chew you up if you get out there by yourself.23 We were sticking our neck out, but the General sure provided an opening barrage.’
This was where fighting close to the sea played into the hands of the Allies. Naval warships as well as bombers and artillery flattened Saint-Sauveur in a brief but devastating barrage; as the Italians had discovered, when it came to saving towns and villages or the lives of Allied troops, it was the troops who always took priority. ‘My 1st Battalion crossed the bridge immediately behind the 2nd Battalion without too much fighting,’ recalled Alexander.24 ‘The bombardment had pulverized St. Sauveur-le-Vicomte.’
Further to the south, meanwhile, on 16 June the Americans attacked the high ground to the north and east of Saint-Lô, again behind a heavy artillery barrage. Shells screamed in and exploded, smashing trees, buildings and churning up the ground. Karl Wegner had welcomed the pause of the past few days, but as the shelling began he hurriedly put on his helmet and crouched at the bottom of his foxhole. When eventually the barrage stopped, the Americans pressed forward with infantry and tanks. Still in his foxhole, Wegner could not see much, but not long after Obergefreiter Kalb yelled for them all to get up and pull back. ‘One could feel the panic in the air,’ said Wegner.25 ‘I must admit that even I felt the Amis were right upon our heels.’ Hordes of men were hurrying towards the last bridge across the River Vire, a mile or so to their west; the road became clogged with troops and vehicles in full retreat, desperate to cross the bridge before it was blown by the engineers. Miraculously, they were not spotted by the Jabos and most managed to pull back safely. In fact, Wegner and his comrades in Grenadier-Regiment 914 were then ordered to halt and dig in around the village of La Meauffe, which was actually just before the bridge across the Vire. By dusk, the panic had subsided.
Their attackers had been 2nd Battalion of the 116th, with the 1st Battalion and Company D on their left, pushing through Couvains. Moving up along high hedgerows, Bob Slaughter and his men crossed hurriedly abandoned German trenches until up ahead they saw the steeple of Couvains’ church. Suddenly, artillery shells and mortar fire started falling around them. Slaughter dived into a ditch for cover and when the shelling stopped he dusted himself down only to see a German arm, still in its sleeve, lying beside him. Trying not to think too hard about it, he got his men moving again and was approaching a gap in the hedgerow when he heard someone moaning. Stepping forward he came face to face with a German paratrooper – one of Johannes Börner’s comrades from 3. Fallschirmjäger; Couvains was on the boundary between them and the 352. Division. The man had been badly hit by shrapnel in the upper thigh and, assuming he was staring down at a fanatical Nazi paratrooper, Slaughter’s first thought was to end it there and then.
‘Kamerad, bitte,’ mumbled the man, who, Slaughter realized, was probably as young as he. Back on Omaha, Slaughter had told himself not to take any prisoners, but the wounded man looked filthy and desperate. ‘That was then, this is now,’ thought Slaughter.26 ‘I couldn’t just shoot a wounded human being at point-blank range.’ Crouching down, he tied a tourniquet around the German’s thigh, applied sulfa powder, gave him a drink of water and lit a Lucky Strike for him.
‘Danke,’ said the man, smiling weakly. ‘God bless. Guten luck.’
They left him and pressed on through the village. The platoon sergeant was badly wounded, while Sergeant Romeo Bily had been killed instantly when a sniper’s bullet hit him between the eyes. Shelling continued with unerring accuracy, which meant a spotter was watching their every move. Obviously, the man was up in the church steeple and only once the spire was destroyed were they able to clear the village and push on south.
Despite this, by dusk on the 18th the Americans had made only limited gains. They had successfully crossed the River Elle, but the high ground eluded them and, with heavy casualties, there was nothing for it but to pause, dig in and bring up reinforcements for another push.
While fighting raged near Saint-Lô and on the Cotentin, King George VI had been the next VIP to visit Normandy, reaching the beaches on Friday, 16 June. It was another disruption for Montgomery, but certainly a more welcome guest than de Gaulle had been and unquestionably a morale-booster for the British and Canadian troops. While the British monarch was touring the Normandy invasion front and being entertained by Montgomery at Château de Creullet, Feldmarschall Rommel was once again speeding from one headquarters to another, and in between desperately trying to secure more supplies and replacements.
His number-one concern that Friday, however, was the fate of the Cotentin Peninsula, which he accepted would now inevitably fall. On one level, it was possible to look at a map, as Hitler was doing back in Berchtesgaden, and think the situation did not seem too bad: after all, some seven divisions were arrayed against just four American. However, those German units were in a pitiful shape, with mounting losses and no replacements coming through. Facing the American drive north were the remnants of three divisions, with the 77. Infanterie furthest to the west and so, of the three, the only one that might reasonably be able to escape back to the south before the Americans cut the peninsula. Rommel now issued orders for 77. Division to fight and hold out as long as possible, but then to make sure they withdrew south to safety.
No sooner had Rommel made this decision than an order arrived from Hitler himself insisting the 77. Division must not retreat under any circumstances but must keep fighting for Cherbourg instead. Later, a further Führerbefehl – order from the Führer – reached Heeresgruppe B: the line to the south of Cherbourg was to be defended at all costs. No retreat to the fortress of Cherbourg was to be allowed.27
On every level this was a ridiculous order. Hitler had always placed enormous faith in the concept of ‘will’. Willpower alone, he believed, could achieve anything. All the German troops now defending the Cotentin needed to succeed was self-belief. It was, of course, fantastical nonsense; this was the same day the Americans broke through at the key town of Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, two-thirds of the way across the peninsula. It was now only a matter of time before the northern half was cut off entirely. That was clear as day.
Rommel finally arrived back at La Roche-Guyon at 3 a.m., utterly exhausted and desperate for sleep, only to learn from Speidel that the Führer had decided to fly west to meet with him and von Rundstedt in person. Both commanders were to be at Wolfsschlucht II at Margival near Soissons at 9 a.m. This was 150 miles away, giving Rommel just six hours to get there. When he had asked for some of the OKW’s senior staff to visit the front and see the situation for themselves, never had he thought Hitler himself would come. In the early hours of 17 June, his initial astonishment was swiftly replaced by irritation and anger; but there was nothing to be done except get moving. The Führer demanded his presence and the Führer had to be obeyed. Grabbing the latest intelligence reports, Rommel and Speidel were on their way by 3.30 a.m., speeding through the night. At least there were no Jabos to worry them.
Hitler’s decision had been made on a whim the previous afternoon. Frantic arrangements had been made by his staff and by late afternoon he was on his way to Salzburg and then on a flight in his especially adapted Focke-Wulf 200 Condo
r, his staff following in three further FW-200s. They landed at Metz just after midnight and around 8 a.m. arrived at Wolfsschlucht II, a command post first built in 1940 and then lavishly expanded two years later. This, however, was the first time it had ever been used by the Führer.
Rommel and von Rundstedt met en route and so arrived together and, miraculously, on time. They were immediately ushered into the conference room by SS guards. Although a bomb-proof concrete bunker, it was well furnished with wooden furniture, carpets, empty bookshelves and even a fireplace, above which was a bas-relief of Napoleon on a horse. Hitler was waiting for them, sitting on a simple wooden stool. He looked tired and wan, and received the field marshals and their chiefs of staff coldly, then berated them for failing to stop the invasion and the poor conduct of the battle so far. ‘The fortress of Cherbourg,’ he added, ‘will be held at all costs.’ Von Rundstedt answered that it was impossible to counter the enormous Allied air and naval superiority, then turned to Rommel, whose temper, exacerbated by lack of sleep, was rising. Clearing his throat, Rommel gave a brief report on the latest situation before launching into a fuller assessment. He told Hitler he had warned about the Allied Materielschlacht and pointed out that the German situation was worsening because they could not match the Allies’ ability to replenish supplies of men and materiel. Supply lines were being constantly hammered by Allied air power, while enemy fighter-bombers also swarmed over the front lines ready to pounce and Allied naval guns were powerful enough to turn back even a concentrated counter-attack. Montgomery, he told the Führer, was following the same tactics he had in North Africa: slowly, methodically grinding down German forces. The British would pound their lines with bombers, then would come immense artillery and naval barrages followed by a strong, well-supplied advance of infantry with special new weapons.
Hitler said nothing, so Rommel continued. Front-line troops were becoming bomb-happy and demoralized in the face of this enormous Allied fire-power and materiel strength. Sooner or later, the front would inevitably collapse due to the wastage of men and weapons. Fixed positions were no longer enough.
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