Normandy '44

by James Holland

  Stranded and alone, he tried to get back to base, but it was several miles away. He began running, but suddenly the road was under fire from American artillery, the shells screaming over. Every time he heard the tell-tale whistle, he dived into the hedgerow, tried to make himself as small as possible, then got up again and carried on running. At one point he found an old bicycle. One of the tyres was flat, but he wasn’t going to worry about that; anything to get him back. Eventually he saw a car coming towards him and, hailing it, was relieved to see it was their own adjutant. Brought back, he was once again sent off to fulfil the original recce mission with Lange and Speidel. It seemed crazy, but on the other hand the battalion had only just moved in, the ground was unfamiliar and, if the Americans really were breaking through, they obviously needed to know about it and to find out where exactly the penetration was taking place.

  They set off again, stopping only when they spotted a frightened and helmetless German, who told them the Americans were all around them. As if on cue, they heard the chatter of an American machine gun behind them. Müller and his mates decided they couldn’t possibly be taken prisoner; if it came to it, they would take their egg grenades and blow themselves up. ‘How did we come to such a terrible idea?’ wrote Müller.23 ‘In our subconscious, we knew it was unworthy for a Waffen SS soldier to be captured. Thank God it didn’t come to that!’ In fact, once darkness came the sound of battle stopped, so they began walking, eventually reaching the piquets, who were Fallschirmjäger. It was now past midnight and they didn’t know the password, but managed to convince the guards of who they were. Allowed to pass, they pressed on and soon found the remains of their two companies. Müller’s first day at the front had certainly been memorable: he had been repeatedly strafed from the air, shelled, had twice got lost, then found himself surrounded by the enemy and contemplating suicide. ‘Can a seventeen-year-old forget a day like that?’24 he wondered.

  On the other side of the hedgerow, William Biehler had reached the front and joined his rifle platoon in the 90th Division, now back in the line with something to prove. His 1st Platoon of Company K, 357th Infantry Regiment were in action on 6 July, part of VII Corps’ broad push southwards, and were attacking through the bocage along an old Roman axis road that ran from the village of Saint-Jores to Le Plessis-Lastelle. By the time Company K attacked, at around 3 p.m. that afternoon, they were approaching some high ground immediately to the south of the hamlet of Beau-Coudray.

  Here, the aces were all with the defenders. Just to the north of Beau-Coudray was a particularly dense network of fields, and that had been hard enough to capture. Just to the south, the ground was on a rise and laced with a series of parallel hedgerows that ran roughly west–east, so at 90 degrees to the axis of the American advance. It is hard to find a more dense patchwork of hedgerows anywhere in Normandy, with some of the fields only 20–30 yards wide. There were gaps in the corners of the field that Biehler and the 1st Platoon were attacking, so the first two men went through and were immediately blasted backwards by artillery fire.

  ‘Medic!’ someone shouted.25

  ‘I don’t think a medic’s going to help them,’ said Biehler as he looked down at their lifeless bodies, blood pouring from their mouths. But they had been taught never to pause and to always keep going, so Biehler and his new fellows in his squad ran past and into the field. ‘The machine guns were firing,’ he recalled, ‘and the first two were killed and there’s three left out there.26 All of a sudden I look around and there’s nobody else there but me. So I got up and ran back.’ They were up against the machine-gun rich Fallschirmjäger-Regiment 15, the latest German paratrooper unit to reach Normandy. Safely back behind the hedgerows, Biehler and his comrades radioed for artillery and air support. Soon American shells were screaming over, then P-47 Thunderbolts turned up and plastered the German positions. It didn’t stop them from getting bogged down at Beau-Coudray, however, and Biehler and his mates in the 3rd Battalion were dug into foxholes and had to see off some fourteen counter-attacks by the enemy between then and 11 July. During one attack, Biehler was astonished to see the Fallschirmjäger charge across the field, gleaming bayonets fixed to their rifles and martial music playing from their lines. ‘We just fired until we almost ran out of ammunition,’ he said.27 It was enough to stall the attack, however. Yet again, the same pattern was being replayed: attack with the infantry, take the hits, fall back, wait for the counter-attacks, hammer the enemy. It was slow, attritional and costly, but there was no real alternative.

  Second Lieutenant Richard Blackburn first went into action just a few miles to the west of the 90th Division, at the town of La Haye-du-Puits. Blackburn, who had turned twenty-five on 3 July, was from Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and, although he had been eligible for the draft from 1940, had not been called up until February 1942. As a college graduate, he had initially been singled out for staff work, but he had done well in his training, was physically strong and bright enough to apply for Officer Candidate School, even though that meant applying for the infantry, something he had vowed never to do. He had accepted, though, that he could do more to help win the war by carrying a rifle than by sitting behind a desk filling out endless forms. A devout Christian, he believed it was his moral duty. ‘After much thought and prayer,’ he wrote, ‘it just seemed the right way to go.’28

  On 4 July, he had reached Normandy as a replacement officer, one of the toughest cards to have been given, and was assigned to Company A, 121st Infantry Regiment in the 8th Infantry Division, joining the company on 13 July under Captain Arthur Kaiser, a kindly fellow, who immediately welcomed him in but warned him sombrely to remove his lieutenant’s tabs from his collar as the Germans would purposely target officers. Blackburn was shocked by the scene of death and destruction around him. Just a few feet away from where he and Kaiser were talking lay two dead Germans, their bodies bloated with gases, their skin distorted.

  The following day, Friday, 14 July, the battalion attacked south towards the Ay River. The ground was a continuous stretch of swampland, ankle-deep to begin with but then knee-deep. They immediately came under small-arms, mortar and artillery fire. Bullets began to ping and hiss past Blackburn as they approached the jump-off point for the attack, and he could feel his heart pounding, although curiously he didn’t feel scared exactly. He thought about what might happen to him but was glad he could still think. Dead men lay in the swamp, on the roads and in the ditches. Collapsed buildings, once homes, were in ruins. Smashed vehicles were burning, their occupants with them.

  Now came the order to move forward into attack and Blackburn was moving forward, urging his men. There was nothing glorious about it, he realized. It was brutal, violent, and death hovered above each man. Somehow, though, he got through, the objective taken, and so began the process of digging in, his first experience of every infantryman’s task. Within a few days, his newcomer’s sheen had gone. Several days’ growth of beard covered his filthy face; he was dirty, smelly and living in a hole in the ground. ‘It was very difficult,’ he wrote, ‘getting accustomed to the fact that a German soldier was always in the next hedgerow, in a window in the next house, in the ditch just ahead, or behind the next tree, waiting to kill me.’29

  By mid-July there was still no sign of a decisive breakthrough for the Allies, but they were making ground, chipping away at the enemy, grinding them down and whittling away at their strength. They were learning too. The US 2nd ‘Warrior’ Division had been stuck below the ridge around Hill 192 since 11 June, but when they launched their third major attack on 12 July they did so with the support of one armoured field artillery regiment, two extra battalions of the neighbouring Big Red One, and an armoured regiment as well. What’s more, despite the enormous losses over the past month, replacements had arrived and ensured the assaulting battalions were doing so at pretty much full strength, which was more than could be said for the 3. Fallschirmjäger-Division defending the position. That day, the Americans finally took Hill 192, advancing 1,
500 yards and getting very close to the vital Bayeux–Saint-Lô highway.

  The following day, Thursday, 13 July, the New York Times reporter Hanson Baldwin arrived at Bradley’s headquarters and proceeded to lecture Chet Hansen and other staff, making little effort to conceal his contempt for the Allies’ limited progress inland. ‘Disregarding the bocage country we fight in,’ noted Hansen, ‘and the terrain which hinders our movements, the swamps which canalize our advance, the lack of space in which to maneuver and the necessity for build-up before we break out, he asks why we haven’t gone more quickly.’30 Hansen was quite right to feel indignant. Baldwin was doing what others back in England were doing: looking at a two-dimensional map and comparing the Normandy battle with that raging on the Eastern Front, where the rapid Soviet advances had already cost the Red Army hundreds of thousands of casualties – the kind of losses that could only be absorbed by a totalitarian regime like that of Stalin’s, where the lives of his men counted for nothing. The democratic Allies, with their conscript armies, were simply not going to squander the lives of their young boys so recklessly, and their commanders and war leaders were better people for taking this approach. Huge materiel support was the way to go, with ever-improving technology and tactics. For all Baldwin’s contemptible and arrogant lecturing, the Allied way was working. If Eisenhower, Montgomery, Bradley and others could have been flies on the walls within the HQs and command posts of their adversaries, they would have taken great heart. The dam had not broken yet, and there were still disappointments to come over the course of the next week, but they were close. The breakout for which they had been striving since D-Day was now within reach.

  A Canadian Sherman crew from the South Alberta Regiment rest to the south of Caen, 28 July 1944.

  CHAPTER 27

  A Brief Discourse on Weapons and the Operational Level of War

  There is a persistent myth that despite materiel wealth, the Allies were facing a German Army equipped with far better weaponry. It is a myth that needs to be knocked on the head. In terms of small arms – pistols, rifles, sub-machine guns and machine guns – there really wasn’t much of a difference.

  American troops tended to fetishize the German Luger, a pistol that was designed in 1898, although the wartime version dated to the P08 version first produced ten years later. It was a perfectly adequate semi-automatic pistol that fired a 9mm slug, although far more common was the Walther P38. A number of other pistols, such as smaller Sauers and other Walthers, were issued to Luftwaffe and tank crews. Pistols were used for very close-quarter combat and at ranges of up to 10–20 yards they were, frankly, much of a muchness. If a person found himself in a situation where he needed to use his pistol, the most important thing was to make sure he killed the person trying to kill him, so the bigger the bullet (calibre) and lower the velocity, the better. Smaller bullets from higher-velocity pistols might easily pass through a victim quite neatly, but a lower-velocity and bigger slug would hit its target and the kinetic energy spread out on impact, causing much greater damage. At close quarters, it was generally best to try to kill one’s enemy with a single shot.

  This was why the American Colt .45 semi-automatic, first in service in 1911, was the one to have if there was a choice in the matter. It was solid as a rock, packed a punch and did what it promised on the packaging. The British and Canadians had a lot of these – they were issued to airborne forces, Commandos and tank crew, as well as to some infantry officers. The British also had revolvers, which were powerful, but it was not ideal to have to fiddle around reloading individual bullets with shaking fingers in the heat of battle. American Lieutenant Orion Shockley experienced this difference in calibres first-hand in Cherbourg. On the outskirts, he was on the right flank of a platoon as they approached a barracks-style building. As he started around one corner of the building, he heard a noise and, pulling out his British Webley .38-calibre pistol, saw a lone German emerge. ‘Achtung!’ Shockley yelled at him, but the soldier swung his MP40 at him. Shockley fired, hitting his adversary in the shoulder, but, rather than being knocked down, the man just staggered and tried to fire his sub-machine gun again. Shockley fired a second time and on this occasion hit him in the head and killed him. ‘Examining his wounds, we learned a lesson,’ he noted.1 ‘A .38 calibre gun did not carry the shocking or knockdown power of a .45 calibre bullet.’

  In terms of rifles, the German Mauser-breech K.98 was the least effective. It could take only five bullets at a time and the bolt came back so far that anyone aiming it had to move their face away and re-aim each time he fired. The British Short Magazine Lee–Enfield Mk IV had a shorter bolt and a magazine that could take ten rounds and could be topped up at any point, and because the short bolt didn’t require any movement of aim, its user could fire double the rounds per minute of his German adversary. The Americans had bolt-action Springfields and, more commonly, the M1 Garand, which was the first semi-automatic rifle to enter service and therefore had no bolt. It held eight rounds, but could not be replenished until all eight had been fired. All were well built and reliable, and a good marksman could fell a man at 400 yards using any one of these weapons.

  Sub-machine guns were also close-quarters weapons, ideal for laying down considerable numbers of bullets in quite a wide area. These would be best used to clear buildings and trenches, and in close hedgerow fighting. The Americans had the Thompson, which was heavy at 10 lb, but which also fired the bigger, more lethal .45-calibre slug and which in the US, British and Canadian armies generally had a 30-round stick magazine. The Americans also had the M3 ‘grease gun’, which was only 8 lb and smaller, but which also fired a 30-round magazine of .45-calibre bullets. It was cheap, simple, but a little unreliable and generally not popular. Its unreliability issues would be ironed out, but they hadn’t been by the summer of 1944.

  Another sub-machine gun with a mixed reputation was the British Sten gun, which was of even simpler construction, could easily be reduced into different parts so packed down very well, was light and was incredibly cheap to make. It was known to fire a bit too easily and the magazine, which fed two bullets alternately into a single chamber, could jam, but its early shortcomings had been largely resolved by D-Day. Because it was so simple, there was less to go wrong and it was pretty indestructible. It fired a 9mm bullet, so could use captured German ammunition should the opportunity arise, and it also had a magazine that extended sideways from the left, so could be fired lying down, something no other sub-machine gun could do unless angled sideways.

  The Germans had MP38s and more commonly MP40s, essentially the same weapon, and known to Allied troops as Schmeissers. These were fine bits of kit, beautifully made and balanced. Over ranges of 75 yards, the Thompson and MP40 were fractionally more accurate, but weapons such as these were generally used at ranges of 30 yards or less, in which case there was nothing to choose between them. The MP40 was incredibly expensive and over-engineered – especially so at this stage of the war, when the Germans were short of just about everything.

  The same could be said for their light machine guns. The very expensive MG34 had been largely replaced by the MG42, but this still took 75 man-hours to make compared with 45–50 man-hours for British and American machine guns. It had a rapid rate of fire of some 1,400 rounds per minute, which was incredibly useful in an ambush or when initially attacking men landing on a beach, but there was a pay-off: it was something of a scatter gun, so not very accurate, and because of the very rapid rate of fire, with some fifteen bullets each detonating a small charge in the breech every second, quickly overheated. Very strict firing discipline was needed, as well as multiple barrel changes, which meant German squads – or Gruppen – had to carry at least six spares, all of which had multiple inspection stamps on them. Such attention to detail was partly because of excellent engineering standards that the Germans were simply unable to get out of their system, and partly because they used so much slave labour and were understandably concerned about sabotage. It still added time and money,
however. Every MG42 cost some 250 Reichsmarks, around $10,500 in today’s money.

  The Americans had the Browning Automatic Rifle, or BAR, which was a halfway house between rifle and light machine gun, and fired a 20-round magazine. It cost half the price of an MG42 to produce. The BAR was good as far as it went, while the Americans also used the heavier, belt-fed .30-calibre Browning M1919, which was superb: solid, reliable, and fired at a sensible and effective rate with unerring accuracy. The British had the Bren, which was also very reliable and extremely accurate, hardly ever needed a barrel change – each was engineered to fire at least 250,000 rounds – and had a helpful wooden grip on the barrel, which made it easier to carry and also to change its barrel when this finally needed to be done. It was magazine- rather than belt-fed.