Normandy '44

by James Holland

  ‘What’s the matter?’ came the reply. ‘Is the mud too deep up there?’

  ‘No,’ Rambo replied, ‘it will dry real quick, we have four tanks on fire and I’ve been hit.’

  They pulled back and later that afternoon dive-bombing P-47 Thunderbolts came over and plastered the enemy positions. Afterwards they discovered one of the newly arrived German Panthers had been dug in there. Four out of six American tanks had been knocked out in a matter of minutes. Fighting through the bocage was going to be tough. And slow.

  A few miles to the north-west were the 82nd Airborne, still in the line despite being shock troops designed for coup de main operations, despite having suffered over 50 per cent casualties since D-Day, and despite their sister divisions having already been sent back to England. General Matt Ridgway had complained to Bradley about this, but the First Army commander had insisted his men fight this one further battle; then they could pull out and head back to England.

  Lieutenant-Colonel Mark Alexander had been shifted across from the 505th PIR to the 508th, where he was once again performing the duties of XO. He wasn’t happy about either; as far as he was concerned, he was a 505th man. What’s more, he much preferred leading men from the front to playing an admin role, but his protestations fell on deaf ears. The decision to move him had been General Ridgway’s and was done because he had concerns over the 508th commanding officer, Colonel Roy Lindquist. Ridgway worried he wasn’t aggressive enough and more suited to a staff role. He wanted Alexander to come in and provide the aggression and front-line leadership while Lindquist managed the show. In effect, the roles of commander and XO were being reversed, albeit without the switch in status or rank.

  The 82nd were given the capture of La Haye-du-Puits as their objective, another small Normandy country town that had the misfortune to sit on a confluence of roads heading north, south and east. The 505th were to take a ridge called Hill 131 and then the 508th were to follow through them and take the next feature, Hill 95, before pushing on to La Haye-du-Puits. As planned, Hill 131 was captured on 3 July, but the 2nd Battalion commander of the 508th was wounded by a mine and so for the attack on Hill 95 Alexander took over temporary command just as he had at La Fière.

  His 2nd Battalion would lead the assault on Hill 95 at dawn the following morning, Tuesday, 4 July, so with half an hour of daylight left on the 3rd, Alexander crept forward to make his own reconnaissance. Crawling towards a wall, he managed to remove one of the stones and peer through with his field glasses. Directly ahead was a shallow valley of exposed open ground before the rise of the hill, but away to the left was a wood, which ran all the way up to the top of the hill. He also spotted two enemy guns on Hill 95 and was fairly certain one of them at least was an 88mm. Resolved to attack through the cover of the woods on the left-hand saddle of the hill, he returned to his battalion CP, phoned Colonel Lindquist and told him that to cross the open ground in a direct assault would be suicidal. ‘They’re shooting right down our throats from there,’ he told him.8

  He had no sooner rung off than the Germans began mortaring their positions. Alexander heard the first mortar round coming but too late and was hit in the back by a couple of fragments. All he could do was lie there on the ground, cursing. The medics were not long in coming and, after bandaging him up, they put him into the front seat of a Jeep and drove him to the nearest field hospital. He had been severely hit and the blood quickly started to seep through the bandages and into the seat. By the time he finally reached the hospital, he was slipping in and out of consciousness, but American medical services were second to none and, after emergency surgery, the worst had passed. He would be in a bad way for a while, but Alexander would pull through.

  This was a lot more than could be said for a number of his men. His own XO, Captain Chet Graham, took over command of the battalion and was ordered by Colonel Lindquist to attack directly, across the open land, rather than along the approach Alexander had suggested. As it was, there were only 225 men left in the battalion out of the 640 that had jumped on D-Day. Despite the odds, they crossed the open ground, stormed the hill and by around 4 a.m. on the 5th it was secured. But the cost had been horrific, with nearly 50 per cent casualties. It was, however, their last action for a while. Like the 101st Airborne, it was time for the ‘All Americans’ to be pulled out of the line and sent back to England.

  The bocage was every bit as dense and difficult away to the north-east of Saint-Lô, where the Germans were now dug in along the low ridge that dominated the 15 miles or so of land to the coast. From the base of the Cotentin all the way to Caumont and beyond into the British and Canadian sector was a mass of small villages and hamlets, linked by narrow, winding roads and lanes, none of which was asphalted, but rather just grit and compacted earth. Every road, every sunken lane and every field was lined with those hedgerows on earthen mounds. Most fields were only a few acres in size. Colonel Tick Bonesteel, of the US 21st Army Group planning team, had warned the First Army planners about the potential dangers of this terrain and had even briefed the US 1st Division – the Big Red One – in some detail. Despite this, and despite much of First Army training in south-west England where, as in Normandy, the fields are small and the hedgerows every bit as high, the focus for training had been on fitness, on weapons, on beach assaults and on attacking fixed positions, but very little thought – if any – had been given to how they might attack an enemy dug in along hedgerows. ‘So here was what I would call at least an imperfect terrain appreciation,’ commented Bonesteel.9 ‘We had not trained in the special fighting techniques needed to work our way through the bocage.’

  The challenge was how to get through one hedgerow and across the field to the next without being cut to ribbons. The German defenders could position machine guns at each far corner behind the mound of a hedge. Riflemen would be dug in between the two corners. Further back, behind the next field or two, there would be mortar teams. No matter how the Americans tried to break through the hedge, they would be exposed and mowed down by twin machine guns that had every part of the field covered. In many ways, the hedgerows offered the Germans a far better defence than concrete bunkers. Concrete was fixed and rooted to the spot, whereas hedgerows offered much more flexible defence because troops could move about behind them and could also always pull back to the next field. The problem for the Germans, as their extensive training instruction pamphlets were quick to point out, was that in hedgerow country the forward view was often not particularly good. Certainly during the first fighting inland after the invasion they had been trying to second guess where the enemy might attack and in what strength because they had no aerial reconnaissance to act as their eyes on the ground.

  From the ridge around Saint-Lô, however, the Germans were, for the most part, able to look down on the Americans from what they called the Hauptkampflinie – HKL – the main line of defence, which had been earmarked by the 352. Division before the invasion and prepared with a web of foxholes and firing positions. Key roads and crossroads, meanwhile, were zeroed with well-placed anti-tank guns, such as the much-feared 88mm and the Pak 40 75mm, which was a similarly high-velocity and lethal weapon. To defend the ridge effectively they didn’t need a huge number of troops. Some well-placed artillery, as many mortars as possible, a decent number of machine guns and trained snipers could hold up the advance of a much bigger attacking force very effectively. The Germans were materially poor, but they had enough of those weapons to stop the Americans in their tracks.

  An important and particularly troublesome feature for the Americans was Hill 192, near the village of Saint-Georges-d’Elle, which had commanding views all the way back to the coast and which was covered by a patchwork of dense hedgerows, sunken lanes and copses. The 2nd ‘Warrior’ Division, on the right flank of the Big Red One, had been given the job of clearing this feature. They had first attacked on 11 June, but had made no headway at all, then launched a second assault on the 16th. Although they had managed to reach the summit, they had been
pushed off again and four days later had to pull back; there had not been enough artillery support or nighttime patrol work to pin down enemy positions, but the real problem was how to penetrate the hedgerows without the infantry getting massacred. Although air power and artillery could unquestionably help, what was really needed were Shermans working alongside the infantry. Ideally, a Sherman would burst through the middle of the hedge, fire its 75mm at each corner and knock out machine-gun nests, then spray the entire hedgerow with MG fire while the infantry fanned out from behind. The trouble was, the mound underneath the hedge, and then the hedge itself, were too much for the tank, which merely rose up and was unable to push through. Dozer tanks could work, as they had for the 70th Tank Battalion, but generally only those units that had landed on D-Day had them. This inability to get through the hedgerows was making the tanks almost redundant; ‘Kraut Corner’ and ‘Purple Heart Draw’ had become death zones for the 2nd Division boys the moment they got up from their foxholes as the machine-gun heavy 3. Fallschirmjäger-Division defending the ridge exacted a terrible toll.

  The men of the US 29th Division weren’t making much headway either and by 1 July were spending their days crouching in ever more sophisticated foxholes as both sides snipered, mortared and shelled one another. That day, Sergeant Bob Slaughter was making further improvements to his foxhole when the chaplain arrived with news from home. His father had died in May from an aneurism, aged only forty-nine; he could barely take in the news. ‘There was,’ he wrote, ‘no time to grieve.’10 In any case, he was daily staring death in the face himself, particularly since they were dug in on a forward slope with the enemy just beyond on the other side of a shallow ravine. One platoon was particularly in the firing line and when the section commander, Staff Sergeant Mackay, was killed by a sniper, Slaughter was ordered to go and take over.

  He hurried along a sunken lane, crouching as he made his way towards his new platoon’s positions. All the men were taking refuge in their foxholes and it bothered Slaughter that no one seemed to be keeping a watch out. Realizing he needed to show some leadership, he slowly raised his head over the hedgerow, looking out either side of him. A matter of seconds later, his helmet flew off and he fell forward on his hands and knees, blood gushing down his face. For a moment, he felt sure he would die, but he had been lucky; a sniper’s bullet had hit the small peak of his helmet and exited through the liner, grazing his head as it went. It was no wonder, though, that the Americans could barely move.

  Snipers, however, could not work very well at night and this enabled the Americans to carry out extensive patrols to capture enemy troops and pinpoint positions which could then be relayed back to the mortar teams and artillery. Karl Wegner, now dug in on the ridge opposite Bob Slaughter and the rest of the 29th Infantry Division, hated the nights. ‘The hedgerows were our allies during the day,’ he said, ‘but at night they were no one’s friends.’11 It was during a night patrol, for example, that Kraut Corner – which overlooked any advance along the road up the ridge towards Point 192 – was finally subdued. On the night of 6 July, Lieutenant Ralph Winstead of the 38th Infantry, 2nd Infantry Division, led a small patrol and inched forward across the field, under cover of both darkness and pre-arranged mortar and artillery fire, until they were mere yards from the German machine-gun position on the other side of the hedgerow in the corner of the neighbouring field. Gently extending a Bangalore torpedo, they fired the charge then stood up and charged the position, shooting eleven men, capturing key documents and returning safely to their own lines.

  Meanwhile, around Caen, the fighting continued. The Canadians of 8th Brigade were given the task of capturing Carpiquet airfield before the main attack on Caen was launched. For much of the past three weeks, the Queen’s Own Rifles had been dug in between Bretteville-l’Orgueilleuse and Le Mesnil-Patry; it was through these lines that British VIII Corps had moved up for the EPSOM battle. On 3 July, they had reached the village of Marcelet, barely a mile west of Carpiquet airfield, which was still in the hands of Kurt Meyer’s 12. SS ‘Hitlerjugend’. German signal intelligence had picked up on increased Canadian radio traffic and correctly guessed an attack was imminent, so were ready, although Meyer felt certain the attack would signal his division’s entry into Valhalla.

  His 12. SS had long since reached a point where it could no longer properly function. His Panzergrenadier-Regiment 26 had been reduced to the strength of a weak single battalion; it had arrived in Normandy with three full-strength battalions. His panzer strength had been reduced by around three-quarters. His reconnaissance battalion had just one mixed company left – perhaps a hundred men – while his combat engineer battalion had been effectively annihilated. One entire battalion of artillery had also been obliterated. Ammunition was low and his entire division had been reduced to that of a Kampfgruppe; only Panzergrenadier-Regiment 25, still defending the western half of Caen, remained in reasonable order. Despite this, Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich, his superior at I. SS-Panzerkorps, continued to give 12. SS the lion’s share of defending Caen; on their right was a weak Luftwaffe field division, while 21. Panzer remained to the east of the River Orne. Dietrich was a good Nazi and brave soldier, but not the sharpest tool in the shed. Like many senior Waffen-SS officers, his origins were as a street fighter; he had had little education, no military staff training and had most definitely been promoted above his capabilities, but increasingly men like Dietrich were given the task of keeping the German effort going. What they lacked in training and military sense, they made up for in loyalty. Dietrich was nothing if not loyal to the Führer.

  Meyer was resigned. He knew the Führer’s order to fight to the last round meant the end of the division. ‘We wanted to fight,’ he wrote.12 ‘We were prepared to give our lives, but the fighting had to have a purpose. I bristled at the thought of allowing my young soldiers to bleed to death in the city’s rubble. The division had to be preserved for a more flexible form of combat.’ He was quite right; German successes in the first years of the war had been based around flexibility, rapid manoeuvre and the ability of the commanders in the firing line to use their training, experience and judgement to make tactical decisions. That flexibility had gone the moment Hitler himself had taken over as C-in-C of the army back in December 1941 following the failure to capture Moscow.

  At Carpiquet village and the airfield Meyer had only around 200 men, although he also had several tanks hidden among the wrecked hangars in an anti-tank role, as well as a battery of 88s and some Nebelwerfers, all of which were zeroed in on key roads and positions. Weakened they might be, but in defence these men still posed a considerable threat, as the Canadian 8th Brigade discovered when they attacked on 4 July, with the usual immense artillery and naval barrage marking the start of their assault. Meyer was up with his panzer-grenadiers in the hangars on the southern side of the airfield when the barrage began, watching from the entrance to a bunker as the village on the far side disappeared in smoke and dust, while hangars and airfield buildings were obliterated. Above, Typhoons swirled, among them Ken Adam and the men of 609 Squadron. As the Canadian infantry and armour emerged from the smoke, however, Meyer’s defenders came out from their dugouts and foxholes and opened fire. The Winnipeg Rifles were particularly hard hit, cut to pieces by the German 88s and machine guns.

  Sergeant Charlie Martin’s A Company were on the right of the Winnipeg Rifles and were ordered to take ground and some of the buildings and shattered hangars on the north-eastern edge of the airfield. Despite heavy artillery support, it was a challenge, because here the ground was flat and open, and once again there was nothing for it but to keep going and hope that smoke and the fog of war would give them enough cover. A Company moved onwards, platoons spaced apart and with one ten-man section leading while the other two gave covering fire then leap-frogged forward. Having taken over several buildings, the Queen’s Own Rifles were told to dig in and hold. ‘It was terrible,’ noted Martin.13 ‘We had to dig in along the runway and in part of the old
hangar building. The enemy were watching every move.’

  Although the defenders tenaciously held on to the southern side of the airfield, Meyer’s men were unable to hold Carpiquet. Bad as it had been for the attackers, it had once again been worse for the SS men, whose inevitable counter-attack equally inevitably failed. Of the panzer-grenadiers defending the village, not one officer or NCO had survived. Meyer pleaded with Dietrich to be allowed to withdraw, but once again his request fell on deaf ears. The Führer’s order stood.

  By 7 July the 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry had moved eastwards a little way to the village of Fontaine-Henry and strung out along a hedge on a rising slope. Ahead lay Lébisey Wood and, beyond that, the medieval city of Caen. Lance Corporal Ken Tout had yet to go into action, although he had already seen more than enough of death to take the edge off his earlier excitement at the adventure of it all. First, there had been the burned-out German tank near Creully. Curiosity got the better of them, so he and his new crew mates clambered on to it and made the terrible mistake of taking a peek inside, where the blackened, wizened crew still sat. ‘The roasting of human flesh and the combustion of ammunition and the defecation of a million voracious flies,’ wrote Tout, ‘created an aura of such sense-assaulting horror that we recoiled.’14 Then there had been the growing stench of a dead German not far away, so they had been ordered to bury him. Digging the grave, the soil still soft from the rain, had been no great hardship and they had made sure it was nice and deep in the hope that it would eradicate the terrible, pervasive, sickly sweet smell. Once dug, they hurriedly picked him up to swing him into the hole, but the arm Tout held disintegrated. After vomiting, they shovelled the decomposing remains into the pit and hurriedly piled on the earth. It had not been a dignified burial ceremony for the poor fellow.