Von Rosen saluted and hurried back to his company. Their Tigers had already been run up and were ready and waiting. His instructions were swiftly passed on: they were to mount up, get to battle-readiness, then pull out. Thirty minutes after the alarm, the company rolled at top speed and within fifteen minutes they had reached Giberville, a mile east of the Orne and south-east of Colombelles. There they were held up when the immense vibrations of the passing Tigers caused a damaged house to collapse on top of one of them. ‘Nobody was hurt but it had to be dug out first because the company could not pass, the road being too narrow for more than one panzer at that point,’ noted von Rosen.2 ‘It always happens when one is in a rush!’ Leutnant von Rosen, meanwhile, clambered down from his own Tiger and hurried forward on a motorbike; he found the artillery OP of the StuG Battalion 200 in a room above a bakery. Peering through binoculars, he soon spotted a number of British Shermans below in the battle-scarred village of Sainte-Honorine. These were clearly their targets.
Hastening back, he was relieved to see his Tigers were now clear and they moved off again, although as they reached the northern end of the village they came under fire. Von Rosen now ordered two platoons to fan out, with a third in reserve, while he took up position in his tank in the centre. Immediately, they began receiving hits, although the shells mostly bounced off harmlessly, but once they were all in position von Rosen gave the order for them to advance at full speed. Much to his annoyance, there was no reaction at all from his men, so he repeated it, this time in a sharper tone of voice. Again, nothing happened. His Tigers continued to fire from where they were, although already they were hitting their marks as Shermans started to brew up, thick black smoke rising from the burning wrecks.
‘If you don’t attack at once,’ von Rosen now yelled into his microphone, ‘I shall turn my turret to six o’clock and fire behind me!’ But there was still no reaction.3 Enemy shells were hitting his Tiger, clanging and pinging off the armour or hurtling just past. Only then did he realize his radio aerial had been shot away – that was why no one had responded to his orders! For a moment he wondered what to do, but swiftly decided there was nothing else for it but to attack alone.
Off his Tiger went, speeding forward for several hundred yards. Much to his relief, the others had clearly realized what was happening and were now following, his men trusting to their good training rather than depending on verbal orders. The technique was like an infantry advance: one platoon advancing while the other gave covering fire. For a while the enemy tanks disappeared behind the smoke, but soon it cleared. ‘Every round we fired hit a Sherman,’ he wrote, ‘which then burst into flames.’4 The British tanks began falling back. Von Rosen’s Tigers were now in open country with little cover, and a spotter plane soon began circling overhead. Moments later, enemy shells were screaming in, the ground shaking and convulsing as if in the middle of an earthquake. Dust, grit and smoke swirled around them, blinding and choking them; von Rosen had never experienced anything like it, not at any point on the Eastern Front. Quickly signalling them to pull back 500 yards, he thought they were safe – only for them to come under attack again. His Tiger received a direct hit, the sound deafening and reverberating, stunning them all. The lights went out inside, but much to their surprise they were all alive and uninjured apart from the ringing in their ears.
For eight hours they were pounded. Von Rosen was shocked by the level of accuracy achieved by the Allied naval gunners and, despite repeatedly changing their position, with every move another salvo would straddle them. None the less, although there were a number of hits and welded seams were ripped and torn apart, the Tigers were still functioning and his crews in one piece. Finally, once the spotter plane disappeared, some semblance of peace returned and von Rosen took the opportunity to jump out and walk forward to have a look at the wreckage. In all, he counted eleven enemy tanks, including a couple of Fireflies, plus five anti-tank guns. He also discovered two abandoned Shermans, which had collided and obviously become stuck; in the heat of battle, the crews had scarpered. These he managed to get towed back in triumph.
Von Rosen’s Tigers had halted British plans to clear the south-eastern outskirts of Caen in preparation for Second Army’s next big offensive, Operation GOODWOOD. Infantry from the 51st Highland Division and armour from 148th Royal Armoured Corps had swiftly laid down a smokescreen and pulled back into Sainte-Honorine. ‘Our first engagement in Normandy was successful,’ commented von Rosen, ‘but was only of local significance and could not influence the overall situation.’5
He was quite right, but once again this small firefight had illustrated the difficulty of making ground in this unhelpful terrain. Before the invasion, Montgomery had recognized that the countryside around Caen did not favour sweeping armoured exploitation, but he had also presumed Rommel would not choose to fight so close to the coast. He had expected him to pull back to a series of flexible defence lines from where the German mobile divisions could better manoeuvre for a counter-attack far out of range of Allied naval guns. And that was exactly what Rommel would have done had he been unable to push them back into the sea immediately; it was what he had suggested to Hitler at Margival on 17 June. Now, though, the bridgehead was becoming immensely crowded; almost every field was covered in airfields, rear military area camps, depots and field hospitals. Southern England of May 1944 had been transported to Normandy and packed into an even smaller area. What options there were for bursting through the mass of divisions arrayed around Second Army were limited by the sprawl of Caen, now mostly lying in ruins, and large numbers of rivers that all worked against the Allied axis of advance. Ideally, they might mount one massive, broad-front attack either side of Caen, but there was not the space or even quite enough artillery or ammunition to pull off such a massive assault. It is hard to overstate the difficulties confronting the Allies. Montgomery now faced four enemy corps, including seven panzer divisions and six of infantry. It was true that all those panzer divisions had, by now, become badly mauled – 12. SS especially so – but a few fresh units, such as Schwere Panzerabteilung 503, were still arriving and a handful of Tigers could play merry hell with an attacking force, as von Rosen’s company had shown. There was simply no avoiding pushing infantry and armour forward into the open, but then the casualties began to mount – and to what was fast becoming an unacceptable level. It was a conundrum, but one that was being further exacerbated by political considerations.
During his time as Eighth Army commander, Montgomery had been largely protected from the kind of political and high command issues that plagued his superiors. He had been far away in North Africa when his immediate CO, General Sir Harold Alexander, a supreme diplomat and man-manager as well as a fine battlefield commander, had expertly shielded him from Churchill’s impatience for swift action. Eisenhower and Alexander had then together taken on this mantle of buffer between the front line and London and Washington, first in Tunisia, then in Sicily and finally in southern Italy. Now, though, Montgomery was operating far closer to home, Alexander was commanding Allied forces in Italy, Freddie de Guingand, Monty’s chief of staff, was still holding the fort in Portsmouth, and Eisenhower’s and just about everybody else’s patience with him was beginning to wear a little thin. In part, this was because of the evolving situation and in part it was because of Monty himself, who was becoming increasingly insufferable the more the pressure for swift and decisive action mounted.
Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery had all been seeing a lot of each other recently as they tried to rethink their plans to break out of the current impasse and as Ike sought to help his beleaguered battlefield commanders. On Friday, 30 June, for example, Bradley visited Monty’s Tac HQ, newly moved to a hillside near the village of Blay, a few miles west of Bayeux and closer to First Army. They found him in a particularly spikey mood.
‘I say,’ he said to Bradley, looking at Chet Hansen, who had been recently promoted, ‘now do you have a major for an ADC? Simply a dog’s body, you know, a whippin
g boy.6 I would not have an ADC who is more than a captain.’
What on earth compelled him to say such a thing? It was insulting to Bradley, insulting to Hansen, whom Monty had seen so many times before, and just so spectacularly rude, offensive and unnecessary. Bradley, not rising to the bait, patiently explained that he promoted his aides to the rank he believed they were capable of attaining elsewhere were they not working for him.
‘Messenger boys, simply messenger boys,’ muttered Montgomery, determined to have the last word. He then launched into an insulting critique of the superbly designed American M1 steel helmet. It is hard not to cringe recounting this conversation. Montgomery and Bradley needed to work side by side, hand in hand, with unity of purpose and with mutual respect and fellowship. How much harder it was when a small Englishman in corduroys and a sweater was sitting there being so appallingly discourteous, provocative and rude. It is hard to fathom why he behaved so.
Two days later, they were back at Monty’s Tac HQ, this time with Eisenhower. Monty was still wearing the same corduroys and sweater; Hansen wondered when he ever washed them. His two puppies were there, Hitler and Rommel, a fox terrier and a spaniel; Hitler had been given to him by some BBC journalists.7 ‘Hitler and Rommel both get beaten when necessary,’ he told the journalist Phyllis Reynolds, ‘but both are coming to heel well.’ It was a shame his wit didn’t come to the fore more often. After conferring, they all went out to look at a Panther and at John Semken’s Tiger, which had been brought in; it was hard not to be impressed by their size, although they were aware of the mechanical limitations. ‘We’ll give him a battle when our stuff comes in,’ Montgomery told them and reported that some forty-two enemy tanks had been knocked out the day before.8
A week later, Caen had finally fallen, but there was still no breakthrough. Back in England, the V-1s continued to buzz over. The horizontal blast effect of each was enormous, shattering windows and causing casualties in a wider area than more conventional bombs; Londoners had once again gone back to sleeping in shelters and in Underground stations. Everyone was getting fed up, while on the map it looked as though the huge amount of fighting in Normandy was getting the Allies nowhere. In fact, on the map board, the Allies looked horribly penned in and even vulnerable.
On 10 July, Montgomery met again with Bradley and this time Dempsey. Montgomery’s chief planning officer, Brigadier Charles Richardson, had already told Monty and Dempsey that he was worried about the state of the infantry and urged them to make more liberal use of the plentiful amounts of armour now available. Bradley was also gearing up for a major offensive, but told Montgomery his forces needed more time to manoeuvre southwards before he launched his attack north-west of Saint-Lô. This operation had already been given the code name COBRA and Bradley, taking Eisenhower’s promise of air support at his word, intended to have heavy bombers drop some 4,000 tons on a tightly designated area. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this now since we landed,’ he told Chet Hansen two days later.9 ‘When we pull it, I want it to be the biggest thing in the world. We want to smash right on through.’ He imagined attacking with three divisions and a mass of armour, with tank destroyers in support, driving straight through this big gap created by the bombers. But he wasn’t ready yet. Montgomery was persuaded by this plan, but also accepted it was paramount to keep as many of the panzer divisions around Caen as possible so that First Army was mostly confronting the less-trained and -equipped German infantry. Already they had intelligence that the Panzer-Lehr had switched west; they did not want any more to do so.
On the other hand, mounting casualties was one of the prime political considerations troubling Montgomery and one that had been brought into sharper focus earlier that day when he met with General Ronald ‘Bill’ Adam, the adjutant-general. The British Army, Adam told him plainly, was suffering a manpower shortage that was about to become severe if they weren’t careful.
By the end of June, there were some ninety-five infantry battalions in England, which, on the face of it, seemed like quite a lot.10 Only five, however, were regular rifle battalions, while the remaining ninety were a mixture of territorial, reserve or holding battalions; of these, only twenty-six were up to strength, while the rest were far from being the full complement and were either unfit for operations on the Continent, still undergoing transiting, already earmarked elsewhere – such as Burma and Italy – or were ‘Lower Establishment’ and suitable only for home defence. So as far as deployment to Normandy was concerned, there wasn’t a lot in the pot. There were also some 172,815 men in Anti-Aircraft Command, and 50,000 had been earmarked to be transferred to 21st Army Group. The V-1 attacks had put a halt to this, however; British people needed their protection once more and, politically, withdrawing home-based anti-aircraft gunners and sending them to the front line in France was, for the time being at any rate, no longer on the cards.
Britain’s global reach was enormous, with its contributions to the Italian campaign, naval forces all around the world – the Pacific Fleet was due to be formed in August – the campaigns in Burma and Normandy, as well as its vast air force. Of course Britain did have more manpower, but it had sensibly continued to put a lot of it into factories. Germany, on the other hand, had pulled its industrial labour force out of the factories and given them rifles, replacing them with inefficient slave labour, and was now losing the war. Britain was not prepared to make the same mistake, but nearly five years at the heart of a global conflict was taking its toll; only Germany had been in it longer, and that by only two days.
What was equally obvious, however, was the growing military strength of the United States and the USSR. Very soon there would be more American troops and materiel in France than British. Patton’s Third Army was already being shipped over to Normandy and was preparing to be activated and thrown into the battle in a matter of weeks, while on 14 July the decision was finally made to go ahead with Operation ANVIL, the US-led invasion of southern France. Britain’s war leaders were now looking ahead to the peace that would follow, whether that came before the year’s end or into 1945. The Americans would eventually go home, but the Soviet Union threatened to bring communism to Europe, something Britain feared almost as much as National Socialism. Britain was a part of Europe and a neighbour – and had already made a huge contribution to liberating it from the Nazi yoke; it was vital it continued to do so. From Churchill downwards to Montgomery, it was understood that Britain needed to be sitting at the table with the USA and Soviet Union when the war was won. It was no wonder Montgomery was concerned about casualties.
More than that, however, Britain’s and America’s entire war strategy had been built around keeping those at the coal-face to a bare minimum, and they should be applauded for that rather than castigated in any way. For both personal and humane reasons, Montgomery, no matter his shortcomings of character, was never reckless with the lives of his largely conscript army; nor was Bradley. They wanted to win as quickly as possible, but with as few lives lost as possible. It was a very difficult and narrow line to tread, but it was also why they were so ready to use air power and fire-power to help them. Within British Second Army, for example, a mere 7 per cent of manpower was in tanks; 16 per cent only were infantry, 17 per cent artillery, 13 per cent engineers, 5 per cent signals and a whopping 42 per cent service corps. First Army was much the same. It was brilliant that the Allies could fight – and win, as they were doing – with so few men in the immediate firing line. This really was a far, far more efficient way of fighting than the path taken by Germany or Japan or the USSR, but it did mean there would be times when progress seemed slow and the map was hardly shifting. Montgomery could have ruthlessly burst through the German lines now, and had he been a Soviet leader – or a German commander – he would have done so. The cost, however, would have been heavy, too heavy, and it was not one he was prepared to bear. Nor were any of the other British and American war leaders, for that matter. What they couldn’t understand, however, was why, with the Allies’ overwhelming f
ire-power, they couldn’t break through without losing vast numbers of casualties. It was Montgomery’s singular inability to convey why this was the case that was at the root of the rising tension now. He was not a bad general; he was a very good one. So too was Bradley. But while Bradley had the innate personal skills to reach out to the lowliest GI as well as to generals and politicians, Montgomery’s insufferable arrogance and gaucheness drove people against him. It has unquestionably tarnished his reputation ever since.
That same day, Monday, 10 July, following his meetings with Bradley and Dempsey, Montgomery issued a new directive in which he made it clear he intended to expand the bridgehead across the Orne, south-east of Caen, but not push much further. He wanted to use the British and Canadians to anchor the Germans in their sector and not much more; even this was to be undertaken only if it could be done without too much cost. ‘I am not prepared to have heavy casualties to obtain this bridgehead over the Orne,’ he announced in his directive that day, ‘as we shall have plenty elsewhere.’11 On seeing this, Tedder in particular felt Monty was being far too cautious, despite the concerns over the approaching manpower shortage, and he said as much to Eisenhower.
In the days that followed, however, the next planned British assault began to take shape, although the idea for GOODWOOD was not really Monty’s but rather that of the Second Army commander and was rather more ambitious than Montgomery had originally intended. Miles ‘Bimbo’ Dempsey has been rather overshadowed by the dominating personality of Montgomery, yet he was no shrinking violet and a far more forceful commander than has often been supposed. Intelligent, incisive and a clear thinker, he was good at listening but was also willing to impose himself. With Bradley needing more time, Dempsey saw an opportunity to help keep the bulk of the panzer divisions in the British and Canadian sector while at the same time further chewing up their strength and possibly even breaking through at last. Such a breakthrough, he reckoned, might well be possible; he knew all too well that Coningham and Tedder were itching to get to the high ground beyond the Bourguébus Ridge, while a drive to Falaise, some 20 miles south-east of Caen, would not only tie up the German forces still facing Second Army but might well draw those from further west too; it would be impossible for the Germans not to respond, which would clearly help Bradley and COBRA.
Normandy '44 Page 55