Woollcombe watched the minute hand on his wrist watch reach 7.30. Right on cue, all 700 guns opened fire along with the naval guns off shore. They were guns of differing calibres, some concealed in fields just behind them, and the noise was immense, indescribable. The ground shook, as though shivering from the weight of the onslaught. ‘Little rashes of goose flesh ran over the skin,’ noted Woollcombe.5 ‘One was hot and cold, and very moved. All this “stuff” in support of us! Every single gun at maximum effort to kill; to help us.’ Everyone was smoking; it was steadying. Woollcombe wondered whether he ought to be giving his men some heroically inspirational pep-talk but realized words were totally superfluous.
Soon they were off, moving up behind the 8th Royal Scots and heading down a rough road as though on exercise. No counter-battery fire whistled over, but then their own guns stopped and Woollcombe felt a cold sensation in the pit of his stomach. Up ahead were the 12. SS. Just the name ‘SS’ was enough to inspire fear. The Canadians had already told them the SS men took no prisoners. It was as though they were going into battle against an entirely different breed of man, and a terrifying breed at that.
They now reached the shattered remains of Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse, crossed the main Caen–Bayeux road and headed on towards Norrey-en-Bessin, past charred Shermans and blown-up Carriers and into a field that was to be their forming-up place. From behind, the guns thundered again and shells whistled over then exploded somewhere up ahead in a part of Normandy now riven by the chaos of war. Mist still shrouded the landscape. Not a single aircraft flew above them. Suddenly, swirling black puffs of smoke dotted the sky, followed by the rippling cracks of explosions as the sound caught up. German air-bursts – shells that exploded above the ground, showering jagged shrapnel. Major Gilbertson, the company commander, ordered them to lie down and then, when the shelling stopped, they moved on once more just as a bedraggled group of SS prisoners was marched past – helmetless, bewildered and sullen-looking youths in grimy camouflage smocks.
A couple of miles to the west, XXX Corps’ MARTLET attack continued in a confusion of mist, rain and smoke. That same morning, A Squadron of the Sherwood Rangers moved through the shattered remnants of Fontenay. Leading them through the southern end was their new commander, Major John Semken, who turned a corner only to come face to face with one of the few Tigers now in Normandy. Fortunately, he had an armour-piercing round already in place and his gunner hit it at 30 yards, then followed up with six more in quick succession. All of them bounced off, but one hit the turret ring, disabling it in the process; quick firing and a gyro gun stabilizer were two great advantages of the Sherman’s 75mm gun, even if it did lack the velocity of the best German tanks. At any rate, the Tiger crew quickly bailed out. ‘I happened to be following,’ noted Christopherson, ‘talking to Brigade Headquarter on the wireless – in fact, John had just passed me, which was indeed most fortunate, otherwise the Tiger and I would have met and the result might have been very different.’6 The Sherwood Rangers pushed on, Sergeant Dring, their ace, knocking out four further tanks as they pressed on towards Rauray, 1½ miles from Fontenay.
Standartenführer Meyer, who had been planning a major counter-attack, was now facing the second thrust of EPSOM. Hastily issuing new orders, he cancelled this operation and told Obersturmbannführer Max Wünsche, the commander of SS-Panzergrenadier-Regiment 26, to hold Rauray, to which the Sherwood Rangers and infantry were advancing, at all costs. At his CP at Verson, he could hear his own artillery firing furiously. The situation was desperate. By field telephone one of Meyer’s commanders was saying his anti-tank guns had been destroyed and that his men were being overrun by tanks and infantry at Cheux, when the line went dead as the wire was cut. His chief of staff pleaded with I. SS-Panzerkorps for help. The positions must be defended to the last round, came the reply; they were to fight for time, but II. SS-Panzerkorps was on its way and would be arriving soon. ‘As so often in the past,’ noted Meyer bitterly, ‘command and control was being exercised from a tactical perspective and not strategic considerations.’7
Meanwhile, the 6th KOSB were now advancing across fields towards Saint-Manvieu, C Company on the left, B behind a little on the right and A Company in the middle. Lieutenant Robert Woollcombe’s 7 Platoon was in the lead and he was with the leading section, his runner beside him, on the right of the company, as they waded through high, thick corn. Sergeant Duke’s section was about 100 yards to the left, with Corporal Macbeth’s behind them and, behind them, Corporal Tam McEwan’s section and the rest of Platoon Headquarters. A few hundred yards further back was Major Gilbertson with the company radio set and signallers and 9 Platoon. Nice and well spread out. The guns had briefly stopped firing and occasional stabs and burps of small arms could be heard somewhere up ahead. 8 Platoon overcame an isolated position of SS men, who, still stunned from the barrage, surrendered. Reaching a hedge, 7 Platoon stopped. In the field beyond were a number of pale objects – human faces? Germans? They fired a few bursts on the Bren then realized they were some of their own dead. Woollcombe felt sick. They advanced again and reached their first objective, the dried-up river bed of the Mue. Ahead, the Royal Scots were pushing into the hamlet of La Gaule with Churchill tanks, while the Royal Scots Fusiliers away to their left had reached the edge of Saint-Manvieu. In the next field, Woollcombe’s men found a number of dead Germans, whom they all paused to look at with a mixture of curiosity and horror. One of them was blond and good-looking. Woollcombe had never seen a dead body up close before.
‘Look,’ one of his men said, having rifled through the dead man’s possessions, ‘he’s only seventeen!’8
They paused again and Gilbertson ordered Woollcombe to take eight men and patrol forward looking for snipers. Setting off through the corn, well spaced out, they worked their way along a hedgerow until they were several hundred yards from the rest of the company. Suddenly Private Black fired a short burst from his Bren. Woollcombe froze as an SS man rose from the corn, charged at him, then fell at his feet. He had been hit in the shoulder, which was bleeding profusely.
‘Don’t shoot – don’t shoot!’9 he implored. ‘Have pity! Don’t shoot!’ They swiftly disarmed him. Woollcombe found it a very strange experience to stare down at this man clutching his legs and pleading for his life. ‘One did not blame him for his terror,’ he wrote. ‘Nevertheless … one felt no compassion.’ He looked dishevelled and unshaven, with his grubby fair hair and pale blue eyes. He was twenty years old.
‘Well done, my boy,’ said Gilbertson in an avuncular manner to Woollcombe when they returned with their wounded prize.10 ‘It was the acme of praise,’ noted Woollcombe. ‘The prisoner was taken away.’
Three new SS panzer divisions were now converging towards the Caen battle front: 2. SS, 9. SS and 1. SS, although General Geyr von Schweppenburg had planned to use them in the massed panzer counter-attack that was the only conceivable means of knocking back the Allies. This, however, could only happen if the panzer divisions already in the line and in action were relieved by the infantry and pulled back in order to reorganize themselves for a coordinated assault alongside the newcomers. The knowledge of these intentions was what made Montgomery press ahead with EPSOM despite the shortfall of men and materiel compared to his original plan. Ideally, he would have postponed EPSOM further, but there could be no more delaying.
In fact, on 26 June the planned relief of the Panzer-Lehr by the newly arrived 276. Infanterie-Division got under way. Hauptmann Helmut Ritgen’s panzer battalion, however, remained at the front for the time being, subordinated to an infantry regiment from the 276. Division that had no combat experience. Two of his companies were spread out across the entire divisional front in a largely static anti-tank role. Ritgen hated it as much as Kurt Meyer did; it went against all the principles of mobile panzer warfare that panzer men, especially, regarded as the way armour should be used. Yet such was Allied fire-power, responding to almost every single sound with an instant reply of screaming shells and mortar
s, there was little for it but to stay put, hardly daring to breathe, let alone fire up their engines. As Hans Siegel had discovered, sitting in the cramped and deeply uncomfortable belly of a tank for long hours was debilitating in the extreme. Now it was the turn of Ritgen and his men to suffer the same.
So far, the morning had gone reasonably well for the British, despite the lack of air support and the dismal weather. Inevitably, not all the advancing troops had managed to keep up with the rolling barrage and some of the supporting tanks had become caught up in the enemy minefields. There were also errors in map-reading and confusion caused by the smoke, rain and the enormously disconcerting effects of advancing into a wall of fire. Communications between infantry and tanks continued to cause problems too – it wasn’t only Stanley Christopherson who was finding this frustrating. Flame-throwing Crocodiles, those particularly brutal new weapons of war, were used very effectively in Saint-Manvieu. Not only did they cause huge damage, they also had a powerfully debilitating effect on the morale of the enemy – and no wonder. Being enveloped by flames of oil and rubber shooting out like a jet from a lumbering tank was not a good way to go.
The action was by no means one-sided, however. Mortars, Nebelwerfers and artillery, together with well-concealed machine guns, continued to take their toll, although first Saint-Manvieu and then Cheux were cleared. However, the advance was not quick enough to keep to the planned schedule for getting on to the high ground south of the River Odon, and by mid-morning General Dick O’Connor was already wondering how to maintain momentum. Back in 1940, when he had commanded the Western Desert Force in Egypt, his small army of just 36,000 men had routed two Italian armies of 160,000 and he had done so by employing speed of manoeuvre and tactical flexibility and flair. O’Connor was not an unimaginative commander. Waiting in reserve was the 11th Armoured Division, who were designed, trained and ready for rapid breakout operations once the infantry and armour had smashed a hole in the German lines. However, O’Connor decided to throw them into the fray now – or one armoured battalion at any rate – to provide the impetus and drive to get EPSOM to its objective before the Germans could properly reorganize themselves.
Major-General ‘Pip’ Roberts, at thirty-seven the youngest general in the British Army and commander of 11th Armoured, was highly sceptical about this early use of his division; although the enemy had been driven out, Cheux had become a choke-point blocked with rubble and battle debris, while the roads leading down to the river were also narrow, winding and clogged with war wreckage. Moving rapidly with overwhelming force was going to be next to impossible. Still, O’Connor reckoned he needed more armour up front and so the 2nd Northamptonshire Yeomanry, 11th Armoured’s reconnaissance battalion, was sent forward, starting its advance at 12.50 p.m.
Corporal Reg Spittles had been rudely awakened that morning by the opening of the barrage, which was firing all around him; their tanks were right next to a battery of 25-pounders. Hurriedly, he and his crew clambered into their Cromwell and hastily shut down the hatches to drown out the noise. His regiment’s task that day was to hurry forward to the River Odon and occupy the three bridges, a troop on each, then report on the situation by radio. It all sounded so simple and was the kind of mission they had practised countless times. In England, though, villages and towns were always intact, but in Normandy they had already been reduced to rubble and passing through them, despite the enormous speed of the Cromwell, was no easy task. It took an hour and a half for them to get through Cheux and, while doing so, A Squadron’s second-in-command, Captain Wyvell Raynsford, was shot and killed by a sniper, as was the FOO – the artillery forward observation officer – attached to them. At one point, as they became stationary, German troops rushed the tanks, hurling grenades. From the turret, Spittles lobbed out phosphorus grenades, then, once they had exploded, used the smoke as cover to step out of the turret and spray the surrounding area with his Sten gun. ‘It was a case of survival,’ he noted.11 ‘I was too young to die just yet!’
They pushed through Cheux, then the hamlet of Le Bosq and, using the Cromwell’s speed, hurried on, spreading out in battle formation. No. 4 troop pressed ahead and reached the Odon, while 1 Troop was held up by a ditch. Spittles’ 2 Troop was in reserve, so held back while 3 Troop continued through a cornfield. One moment 3 Troop were speeding towards a ridge of trees and bushes, the next two of their tanks had stopped and were brewing up. Spittles was shocked; he had never seen a tank on fire before. ‘I just thought, “Bloody hell!”’12 he noted. But then Major Bobby Peel, the squadron commander, came over the radio and said, ‘You see what’s happened – get up there!’
‘Hello, Baker,’ the troop’s commander, Lieutenant Hobson, said to Spittles, ‘you heard that. Take the lead. Away you go.’
With no small amount of trepidation, they moved forward, Spittles using the smoke from the burning Cromwells as cover, then pushing on at Lieutenant Hobson’s urging up and over the ridge. Suddenly, there was the Odon Valley spread before him, with a number of Panzer IVs and even a couple of Panthers moving from one position to another. Reporting what he could see to Hobson, the message was relayed back to Major Peel, who promptly said, ‘Then shoot the bloody things!’
Spittles did as he was ordered, directing fire towards the enemy, and was soon after joined by the rest of the troop, while 4 Troop attacked several gun and mortar positions down by the river. Spittles reported destroying a Mk IV and a half-track, machine-gunning the occupants in the process, then the enemy appeared to withdraw. At around 5 p.m. they were ordered to pull back to their start position, so turned and rumbled off down the ridge, their turret traversed backwards, and picking up several wounded crew from the burning tanks on the way. Rain was now sheeting down. ‘The absence of rocket-firing Typhoons,’ noted the battalion diarist, ‘and the lack of artillery support, due to the death of one FOO and poor wireless comms between the other FOO and the Arty Regts had an adverse effect on the whole op.’13 That was as may be, but as Spittles had discovered, there was a very great difference between exercises and real combat. It was inevitable that things would go wrong, that people would be killed or wounded. Front-line combat was brutal, disorientating and difficult.
Although the Cromwells had reached the Odon, the British advance as a whole was by this time, late on 26 June, 2 miles short of the river. The 6th KOSB moved up into the shattered wreck of Saint-Manvieu, where they found twenty-eight men from the Scots Fusiliers, all that remained from the company that had crossed the start line earlier that morning; casualties included the company commander, who had been killed. Rumours abounded of enemy resistance stiffening and of an enemy counter-attack. C Company hastily moved into the centre of the village, while A Company were pulled back into a copse to the west. Soon after, they moved again, this time to a farm near the corner of the churchyard at Saint-Manvieu. Both church and farm had been badly smashed. ‘The yard was a slough of refuse and decay,’ wrote Woollcombe, ‘and by the gate was a large iron cage.14 Inside, two huge black hounds were spread-eagled in death, their mouths crawling with flies and maggots; the wretched beasts, locked in and forsaken, the once savage guardians of their world. They capped the desolation, invoking mingled revulsion and pity.’
They remained at stand-to, waiting nervously for an attack. Shells still hurtled overhead in both directions, then the enemy began stonking the road junction about 100 yards ahead. Woollcombe’s 7 Platoon HQ was now on the northern side of the church wall, where once again they furiously dug slit-trenches. Woollcombe had absolutely no idea of what was going on. Rain continued to fall. A little distance away, three dead Fusiliers sat leaned up against the wall, their deathly skin pale in the dusk. Their presence, the thought of the sprawled, maggot-chewed dogs, the continual crash of shells and the rain all helped to cast a leaden pall of depression upon him the like of which he had never experienced before. ‘It seemed there was no hope or sanity left, but only this appalling unknown and unseen,’ he wrote, ‘in which life was so precious where al
l rotted, and where all was loneliness and rain.15 This was the war. It was bloody.’ To make matters worse, Lieutenant Seyton of C Company was killed soon after, shot through the brain by a sniper while on his rounds.
The promised counter-attack finally happened a little later, mostly against C Company. Meanwhile, A Company sat tight as British artillery responded furiously. Eventually, the fighting died away and the SS men pulled back. Around midnight, men of the 43rd Wessex Division, including the 4th Dorsets, arrived to relieve them. The 6th KOSB pulled back, marching through the rain to the comparative safety of a couple of miles back. Sergeant Walter Caines of the Dorsets had spent much of the afternoon getting ready to move into the line. ‘Transport had to be marshalled,’ he wrote, ‘wireless gear had to be checked, batteries issued, and numerous arrangements had to be made as no-one knew quite what to expect.’16 And all this done while the rain continued to pour down.
It had also been a sobering day for Obersturmführer Hans Siegel and his 8. Panzerkompanie, who had been supporting the panzer-grenadiers in the battle raging around Fontenay and Rauray; he had lost several of his tanks in the process. Early that evening, Siegel was hastily refuelling and re-arming four Panzer IVs at a dump just to the north-east of Rauray when he was met by Obersturmbannführer Max Wünsche, the regimental commander, who told him to clear up a very recent breakthrough south-east of Cheux at Le Bosq. The 12. SS were straddling both MARTLET and EPSOM operations in a juggling act that saw their mobile forces speeding from one part of the battlefield to another, desperately trying to firefight and plug rapidly emerging gaps in the line. Siegel had only these four Panzer IVs available; they would have to do. A quick briefing of the crews followed, then it was back into their tanks, engines growling and hatches pulled down, Wünsche’s good wishes swallowed up by the clanking and squeaking of the panzers as they got moving. They had all been in action virtually every day since 7 June and continually for over twenty-four hours. They were absolutely exhausted.
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