Meyer urged his troops forward at every opportunity, but the Canadians held firm. To his dismay, Meyer was informed that the commander of II Battalion, Sturmbannführer Scappini, had been killed, decapitated by a Canadian tank shell. Making matters worse was the failure of 21st Panzer Division to attack on the right, while the remainder of the Hitlerjugend Division had still not arrived to protect Meyer’s exposed left flank. With light fading, the attack was called off, Meyer reluctantly admitting that the enemy were by no means “little fish.”
This small opening action would set the pattern for the fighting throughout the Normandy campaign. The tactical advantage lay with the defense—whether German or Allied—and unless the attackers could mobilize a massive material advantage, offensive action would invariably falter in the face of well-organized resistance.
Despite his frustration in not being able to exploit his initial success, Meyer was profoundly relieved that his young panzergrenadiers had passed the test of battle. Apart from some wavering at one of the critical moments in the day’s fighting, the resilience of the Hitlerjugend infantry had exceeded expectations. Meyer went on to record, “I was struck dumb by the positive attitude and spirit of the soldiers. We, the old soldiers, had been deeply concerned by the events of the day. The artillery fire and the enemy air attacks had affected all of us. Not so the young soldiers. For them it was a baptism of fire they had expected. They knew that many hard days and weeks of hard fighting lay ahead of them. Their attitude deserved respect.”6
The Battle for Normandy, 1944
That first day of fighting on 7 June had certainly been fierce, sufficiently so for some Hitlerjugend soldiers to kill Canadian and British prisoners under their control. During this opening phase of the campaign, at least 156 Canadian captives were known to have been executed.7 All sides were guilty of killing surrendered opponents, for reasons that ranged from bloodlust and revenge to simple expediency, but the Hitlerjugend gained a special infamy during the Normandy battles. The former Leibstandarte officers and senior NCOs had encouraged their recruits to display the utmost ferocity in combat at all times, and many of their teenage soldiers—full of vengeful thoughts after Allied bombing raids on their homeland—lived up to the expectations of their veteran mentors.8
One Hitlerjugend panzergrenadier privately admitted to the killing of Allied prisoners of war (PW) to an army soldier, shortly after they both had become prisoners:
If people here know what we have done to their PWs we shouldn’t live much longer either. [The PW] was interrogated a bit. If he said anything that was all right; if he didn’t say anything, that was all right too. They would let him go, and then fire fifty rounds with the MG when he was ten paces away, and that would be the end of him. Our CO always used to say: “What am I to do with the swine? We haven’t got enough to eat for ourselves.”9
THE TACTICAL SKILLS of the Hitlerjugend in defense were of a high order. This was especially true of armor and infantry, where German superiority over the Allies was most marked. In terms of artillery, the Allies held the edge, any advantage conferred on the Germans by their massed Nebelwerfer batteries more than countered by superior command and control on the Anglo-Canadian side. And in this initial phase of the campaign, the Allies could rely upon the guns of warships stationed in the English Channel.
The most potent naval artillery support was provided by monitors and battleships, among them HMS Rodney, capable of firing a salvo of nine 16-inch shells—each containing nearly a ton of high explosive—to a distance of twenty miles. Meyer railed against the “damned naval gunfire,” with “the heavy shells roaring above our heads like express trains.”10 But even worse for the Germans was the Allies’ tactical trump card: aerial supremacy over the field of battle.
On D-Day, the Allied air forces had flown more than 12,000 sorties, the Germans just 319. From then on, the Luftwaffe was effectively absent over the skies of Normandy, thereby allowing the Allies to land men and vehicles on the beaches and advance inland without hindrance from the air. The Germans, by contrast, could barely move in daylight without being attacked by U.S. and British fighter-bombers that included the rocket-firing Typhoons of the RAF, known as “meatflies,” or Jabos ( Jagdbombers). Vehicles were particularly vulnerable to aerial attack, with rocket warheads able to penetrate the deck armor of even the well-protected Tiger heavy tank. Untersturmführer Herbert Walther, a Hitlerjugend panzergrenadier officer with long experience on the Eastern Front, complained bitterly:
The Jabos were everywhere; you just couldn’t escape them. We had to camouflage our vehicles with tree branches and leaves, so we looked like a moving forest. And if we travelled by day we had to be carefully spaced out, with at least a 100 meters between the vehicles, and with a man in each truck or APC acting as an aircraft spotter. When one of the Jabos saw us and turned into an attack dive, we had to stop and throw ourselves into a ditch. When they had gone we would push the destroyed trucks off the road and then carry on. We all asked ourselves, “Where is the Luftwaffe?”—but they never came.11
The failure of the powerful mobile elements of the German Army to close swiftly with the Allies around the beachheads would prove decisive. But this was due not only to air supremacy but also to the second great advantage enjoyed by the Allies: superior strategic intelligence. The Allies had confused the Germans as to the site of the invasion, and even after the Normandy landings many in OKW believed this to be merely a feint attack prior to the main invasion farther east along the coast around the Pas-de-Calais. Accordingly, several panzer formations were initially held back from the fighting. They included the refitting Leibstandarte Division, ordered to remain in Belgium for ten vital days.
By the evening of 8 June the three panzer divisions of Dietrich’s corps were slowly and painfully moving into position to open their assault, but their preparations were disrupted by the Allies’ own advance. Whereas on the Eastern Front, German infantry would provide a screen for the panzer divisions to attack at a time and place of their choosing, in Normandy infantry reinforcements were still to arrive, forcing the panzers to act as both screen and reserve. As a result, the armored divisions were committed to the forward defense, launching local counterattacks to keep the Allies at bay, a process that deprived them of the tactical initiative and steadily drained their fighting strength.
Aggressive offensive action was the cornerstone of Waffen-SS military philosophy, but in this phase of the campaign it was overplayed by the Hitlerjugend commanders. Witt and Meyer—presumably worried at the wilting effects of a passive defense on their young troops—threw everything at the advancing Allies. Having secured the Caen and Carpiquet airfield, Meyer ordered repeated assaults against the enemy to the west of the city. The Canadian official history noted that the “attacks were pressed with courage and determination but with no particular tactical skill.”12 According to the Hitlerjugend’s chief operations officer, the launching of successive raids against the Red Army on the Eastern Front claimed ground and undermined enemy morale.13 This did not prove to be the case in Normandy.
A combined infantry-armor assault against Bretteville on 8 June promised much, but after a desperate house-to-house struggle the SS troops were ultimately repulsed. Of more concern, however, was the position taken by the Canadians in the village of Norrey, now a salient projecting two miles south of Bretteville. As a preliminary to the proposed general offensive to drive the Allies into the sea, Meyer ordered a night attack on 8–9 June to remove this obstacle.
During the opening stages of the battle, the Hitlerjugend Division had been forced to rely on the Panzer IVs from II Battalion, but the arrival of I Battalion’s more powerful Mark V Panthers was eagerly welcomed by Meyer. Max Wünsche led the panzers in the assault on Norrey, but the Canadians were well prepared, firing magnesium flares into the night sky to reveal the charging German vehicles to their antitank guns. The Germans broke into the village, but after a close-fought struggle they were beaten back by the Canadian Regina Rifles. W�
�nsche, hit in the head by a shell splinter, was driven back to Caen to have the wound dressed.
The determination to eliminate the Norrey salient led Meyer to order an unsupported tank assault on the afternoon of the ninth. Whether the presence of Wünsche would have been sufficient to deter Mayer’s rash action cannot be known, but during the afternoon twelve Panther tanks of 3rd Company were ordered to drive on Norrey at full speed. The open countryside immediately to the west of Caen was excellent tank country, but it also provided perfect fields of fire to the Allied antitank guns and dug-in tanks that now defended the village. As the Panthers tore across the fields, they came under intense fire.
Unterscharführer Alois Morawetz, a commander in the platoon’s far-right Panther, described his part in the action:
After a muffled bang and a swaying as if the track had been ripped off, the vehicle came to a stop. It was quiet inside the vehicle. I thought we had driven over a mine. When I looked to the left to check the situation, I happened to see the turret being torn off the panzer driving on the left flank. At the same moment, after another minor explosion, my vehicle began to burn. The machine-gun ammunition caught on fire and there was a crackling noise like dry wood burning.14
Following a frenzied struggle with a jammed hatch, a badly burned Morawetz managed to bail out of the tank, where he joined other dazed and wounded survivors struggling back to German lines while under enemy mortar and small-arms fire. Seven Panthers had been knocked out, the remaining five in full retreat. Wünsche, on his return from the dressing station, saw the burning tanks. He later wrote, “I could have cried for rage and sorrow.”15
The German fixation with Norrey continued. In the early hours of 10 June an assault was made by the Hitlerjugend’s pioneer battalion, the only remaining reserve unit in the division. Preliminary German radio transmissions had alerted the Canadians to the attack. As soon as the pioneers began to advance, they were hit by heavy and accurate artillery and mortar fire. The attack failed, forcing the pioneers to go to ground as dawn broke.
The battalion’s medical officer, Dr. Friedrich Zistler, personally carried wounded men away to safety in full view of the Canadians, who chivalrously refrained from firing on him. Zistler remembered coming across the body of his best friend, Oberleutnant Otto Toll, the 1st Company commander: “I can still see Otto lying before me. He had tried to make a tourniquet using the ribbon of his Knight’s Cross and a flashlight to stop the bleeding from an artery.”16
The fighting lessened on the tenth, representing the end of what the Germans called the First Battle of Caen. But the pause was short-lived: on 11 June the British launched Operation Perch—the Second Battle of Caen—that would comprise a two-pronged assault on both sides of the city.
The British offensive to the east of Caen—spearheaded by the 51st Highland Division—was contained with little difficulty. Of greater danger was the major British attack to the west of Caen, against the Hitlerjugend and Panzer Lehr Divisions. The hardest fighting was centered around Tilly-sur-Seulles, defended by Panzer Lehr; despite the Anglo-Canadians’ best efforts, their advance was held.
The Allied attacks did, however, lock Panzer Lehr in place, preventing close liaison with the adjoining 376th Infantry Division, which faced the U.S. 1st Division. As the Americans advanced, the German infantry division fell back, distancing itself from Panzer Lehr. The British spotted the emerging gap, and General Dempsey, commander of the British Second Army, ordered his 7th Armoured Division to seize the opportunity and advance on the village of Villers-Bocage and the nearby Hill 213 that dominated the area. If the British could gain Hill 213, then the whole German position around Caen would be outflanked.
The British 22nd Armoured Brigade led the advance on 12 June, meeting virtually no opposition. The following morning, the brigade continued in a leisurely manner to Villers-Bocage itself, where it halted for a tea break. For whatever reason, the brigade’s commander had not covered his advance with a reconnaissance screen and had no knowledge of the presence or otherwise of the enemy.
The only German forces in the area on the morning of 13 June were two companies of the 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion, part of I SS Panzer Corps. The battalion’s Panzer VI Tiger tanks had experienced a wretched march to the battlefield. The destruction of much of the railway system in northern France had forced them to detrain too early, with the resulting road march causing repeated breakdowns. Near-constant air attacks had also slowed progress, with each tank forced to travel several hundred yards apart. The Tiger companies had hoped to rest and refit on the thirteenth but would be flung straight into battle.
The five Tiger tanks of Obersturmführer Michael Wittmann’s 2nd Company were closest to Villers-Bocage. Wittmann—who had already destroyed 117 Soviet armored vehicles on the Eastern Front—was unaware of the British advance and was surprised to see a long column of enemy armored vehicles parked on the road outside Villers-Bocage. Despite the odds stacked against him, he immediately saw this as an opportunity for swift, direct action. Climbing into the nearest serviceable Tiger, Wittmann roared toward the stationary British force, which comprised a mix of Cromwell and Sherman tanks with Bren Carriers.
The Tiger’s first shot from its 8.8cm gun knocked out the lead Cromwell. Firing on the move and at close range, Wittmann then drove parallel to the British line, destroying the enemy vehicles one by one. The British were stunned, and the few shells fired in return that managed to hit the Tiger merely bounced off its heavy armor. One British officer recalled seeing Wittmann’s tank drive past him: “Its commander waved his cap and laughed.”17 With the British column reduced to chaos, Wittmann drove into the village, where he destroyed several more British vehicles, but in the process his tank was brought to a halt by an antitank round that smashed one of its drive sprockets.
Having accounted for an extraordinary figure of twenty-five destroyed enemy vehicles, Wittmann and his crew promptly bailed out of their Tiger and made their way cross-country to the nearby headquarters of the Panzer Lehr Division. From there, a tank column was dispatched to support the two SS Tiger companies now heavily engaged in the fighting around Villers-Bocage.
The British had recovered from the shock of Wittmann’s initial assault and managed to hold the German attacks. Lacking necessary infantry support, the German tanks were unable to capture the village. The British, for their part, had failed to send reinforcements to Villers-Bocage and tamely withdrew their forces on the fourteenth. It was a humiliating defeat that severely damaged the morale of 7th Armoured Division. By contrast, Wittmann’s audacious solo effort represented the best in the buccaneering spirit of the Waffen-SS.
While the 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion was fighting for Villers-Bocage, the Hitlerjugend, now firmly on the defensive, repulsed a series of Anglo-Canadian attacks along its front, with Mohnke’s 26th Panzergrenadier Regiment bearing the brunt of the assaults. Mohnke lacked the charismatic touch so evident in the leadership of Witt, Meyer, and Wünsche. Never invited into the golden inner circle of old Leibstandarte officers, he was at least accepted as a conscientious soldier, capable of withstanding the hammer blows raining down on his panzergrenadiers defending Caen.
The Allies’ chronic failure to integrate armor with infantry in offensive operations was cleverly exploited by Mohnke’s soldiers. Typically, the Anglo-Canadian tanks would advance at speed, leaving their infantry well behind. The frontline panzergrenadiers of the Hitlerjugend—maintaining strict fire discipline—would let the enemy tanks roll past them, and then, from their camouflaged positions, deliver a devastating surprise barrage against the advancing Allied infantry, who now lacked armored support. Meanwhile, the Allied tanks were ambushed in the German second line by antitank guns and infantry liberally supplied with Panzerfaust antitank launchers.
Such tactics called for coolness and courage. Herbert Walther described how his young soldiers “were now veterans after just a few days fighting. They had a bright look in their eyes, eager to fight. They had been forged
in battle and were determined to defend the Fatherland.”18
Despite the heavy casualties inflicted on the Allies, the strain on the German front line was relentless. On 13 June Witt asked I SS Panzer Corps headquarters for permission to withdraw to less exposed positions. Permission was denied, Dietrich and Kraemer fearful that in these conditions, any retreat might occasion a rout.
On the following day, a salvo of shells from HMS Rodney crashed around the headquarters of the Hitlerjugend Division, a shell splinter fatally wounding Witt in the head as he shepherded his staff to safety. Fritz Witt had been one of the originals in the prewar Leibstandarte, and his loss was keenly felt. On hearing the news, Dietrich muttered, “That’s one of the best gone. He was far too good a soldier to stay alive long.”19 Witt’s achievement lay in fashioning the teenage boys of the Hitlerjugend into a first-rate fighting force. His chief of staff wrote, “He was a rock in the sea, admired by his young soldiers and trusted by all.”20
As the senior ranking officer, Kurt Meyer was given command of the Hitlerjugend and at thirty-three years and six months became the youngest divisional general in both the Wehrmacht and the Waffen-SS. Having assessed the situation, he requested the withdrawal first proposed by Witt, which this time was accepted.
Over the next few days the division held position in readiness for the arrival of reinforcements. On 17 June the bulk of Leibstandarte had been loaded onto trains in Belgium for the journey to Normandy. Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps (9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions) had been dispatched from the Eastern Front, due to arrive on 25 June. The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division was already locked in battle with the U.S. First Army, while units of Das Reich were expected to reach the front from the middle of June onward.
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