A violent storm in the English Channel that broke on 19 June came to the Germans’ aid. Lasting for three days, it greatly reduced supplies to the Allied armies. As a consequence, the pressure on the German front line briefly relaxed, allowing the young soldiers of the Hitlerjugend a temporary respite. It also gave time for the Germans to organize a large-scale counteroffensive, their last opportunity to defeat the Allies in Normandy.
Chapter 26
UNEQUAL STRUGGLE
A CENTRAL PART of the Allied strategy for the Normandy landings was to create an aerial interdiction zone around the still vulnerable beachhead. Although the Allies could not prevent the Germans from reaching the beachhead, such was their aerial supremacy that they could seriously slow the progress of German formations and harry them so comprehensively that when they at last arrived at the battle zone, they were in a poor condition to fight. The 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend had been the first to suffer at the hands of the Allied air forces, but it was, at least, close to the invasion site on 6 June. The other Waffen-SS divisions would have farther to travel and so endure the full fury of the Allied aerial attack.
The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division was stationed south of the River Loire in western France, and on 7 June it was instructed to advance northward to engage American forces pushing out of the Utah beachhead. A staff officer from the division recalled that “everyone was in a good and eager mood to see action again—happy that the pre-invasion spell of uncertainty and waiting was snapped at last.” The officer’s optimism was not to last, however, when the division came under attack from the air. The bombardment devastated the German columns: “The length of the road was strewn with splintered anti-tank guns (the pride of our division), flaming motors and charred implements of war. The march was called off and all the vehicles that were left were hidden in the dense bushes or in barns. No one dared show himself out in the open anymore. Now the men started looking at each other. This was different from what we thought it would be like. It had been our first experience with our new foe—the Americans.”1 From then on the SS troops were forced to advance during the hours of darkness only, remaining well hidden during the day. The division would soon find itself embroiled in the close fighting of the classic bocage country, a network of small fields enclosed by high hedges growing on thick, earthen banks that made offensive operations especially difficult.
The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division had been formed in central France during the fall of 1943, drawing its leadership cadre from replacement and reserve units, with the bulk of its manpower made up of Romanian Volksdeutsche conscripts with some French volunteers. The division was accorded the title of “Götz von Berlichingen,” after a redoubtable sixteenth-century German knight who replaced an arm lost in battle with a steel prosthetic gauntlet (which became the divisional emblem). The division’s commander, Brigadeführer Werner Ostendorff, was a former “Der Führer” officer and protégé of Paul Hausser. Ostendorff, a stern disciplinarian, had been chosen by Hausser to act as his senior staff officer in the Reich Division and then in the original SS Panzer Corps. During the early stages of Operation Barbarossa, Ostendorff had also proved a dynamic frontline soldier, in one instance personally leading a counterattack against superior Soviet forces during the Smolensk encirclement battles of September 1941.
The 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division did not benefit from the generous allotment of resources of the SS panzer divisions, lacking a tank battalion and being generally short of the vehicles usually assigned to a mechanized division. It was, however, equipped with a potent Panzerjäger (antitank) battalion, equipped with forty-two assault guns.
Advance elements of the division first encountered U.S. ground troops on 10 June, with the remaining units arriving on the battlefield over the next seven days. As in most encounter battles, there was confusion as the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division took up its position alongside army units and those from a Luftwaffe Parachute Division, now acting as ground troops.
An attempt by the Waffen-SS to recapture Carentan on 13 June ended in ignominious failure, the German attack repulsed with ease by U.S. armored units. Feeling let down by the troops on his flanks, an aggrieved Ostendorff turned on Lieutenant Colonel von der Heydte, the aristocratic commander of 6th Parachute Regiment, and in a furious row he threatened to have the Luftwaffe officer court-martialed for his earlier withdrawal from Carentan. Nothing came of the threats, however, as the whole German line fell back to better positions farther inland. On 16 June Ostendorff was seriously wounded during the retreat and did not return to the division until October, when the battle for Normandy had long been decided. In the interim, Ostendorff was replaced by Otto Baum, a tough, no-nonsense officer who had fought with distinction in the Totenkopf Division.
A notable absentee in these initial engagements was one of the premier formations in the German armed forces: the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich. After the grueling series of attritional battles fought on the Eastern Front during 1943, the battered division was withdrawn to southern France in early 1944, subsequently joined by the remnants of Das Reich Kampfgruppe in April. Stationed around Montauban, near Toulouse in southwest France, the division began a rebuilding program. This had been done many times in the past, not only to replace casualties but also to replace the many officers and units transferred from the division to provide building blocks for other formations. Leibstandarte had suffered a similar dilution of its prewar core, and by 1944 the strains on the system were finally beginning to tell in both divisions.
The commander of Das Reich, Brigadeführer Heinz Lammerding, had joined the SS as part of Theodor Eicke’s concentration-camp inspectorate. He had then risen up the ranks in the Totenkopf Division before transferring to act as chief of staff of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski’s antipartisan forces fighting on the Eastern Front. Lammerding was given command of Das Reich in January 1944, although as an outsider his appointment was not particularly welcomed by his fellow officers, who considered him too close to his mentor, Heinrich Himmler. One officer dismissed him accordingly: “As an engineer and smaller unit commander he was fully capable but was not skilled as a divisional leader.”2
Lammerding’s first task was to integrate the new recruits into the division and train them up to a battleworthy standard. Otto Weidinger, an officer in “Der Führer,” bemoaned the poor caliber of men arriving from the replacement depots, totaling fourteen different nationalities with a preponderance of Balkan Volksdeutsche and conscripts from the Alsace. “There could be no more talk of the cream of the crop,” Weidinger wrote. “The lowering of the quality of personnel replacements was also reflected in a rise in military and criminal offences, as a result of which the division court was forced to impose harsh sentences.”3 Desertion was a growing problem, especially among the French-speaking Alsatian recruits, many of whom were encouraged to flee their posts by members of the French Resistance.
Adding to the division’s problems was a shortage of weapons, vehicles, fuel, and ammunition, admittedly commonplace within all German units by 1944. During the spring of 1944, strenuous efforts were made to rectify these shortfalls, but when the order was given to advance to Normandy, some units were not yet operational and were left behind until deemed sufficiently well equipped. Despite these limitations, Das Reich remained a powerful fighting force, able to field just over 200 armored fighting vehicles and 15,000 men.
While the division was engaged in training its new recruits, the activities of the French Resistance increased in intensity, designed to stretch the German armed forces in France prior to the Allied invasion. The division then found itself engaged in antipartisan sweeps across the French countryside, where brutal reprisals for enemy action were the norm. When the invasion began on 6 June, the resistance raised the tempo of its operations still further, so much so that the division was initially ordered to come to the assistance of isolated army units under attack from the Resistance in the Limoges area to the north of Montauban.4
As the
long vehicle columns of the SS panzer division advanced northward, they too came under attack. When they reached Tulle they discovered that the German garrison there had been overwhelmed by Resistance fighters, who had shot nine members of the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the SS secret intelligence service. Waffen-SS reprisals were swift and deadly: in a roundup of the town’s civilian population, 117 people were killed on 9 June—99 of them hanged from the town’s lampposts—while a further 149 were deported to Dachau. On the same day, Sturmbannführer Helmut Kämpfe, commander of “Der Führer’s” III Battalion, was abducted by the Resistance (later killed). The fury of the SS soldiers at news of his capture culminated in the destruction of the village of Oradour-sur-Glane and the massacre of 642 civilians on 10 June.5
Even by the standards of the Waffen-SS, these atrocities were noteworthy, and as they occurred in Western Europe they received wider publicity and condemnation than would have been the case on the Eastern Front. But they were far from unusual in this period of heightened tension. As well as killing British and Canadian prisoners, the Hitlerjugend Division had shot eighty-six French civilians in the town of Ascq on 2 April 1944 as a reprisal measure for the derailment of a train carrying troops from Belgium into France. For its part, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division had gunned down wounded U.S. paratroopers and French civilians in revenge for the heavy casualties it suffered during the fight for Graignes between 10 and 13 June.6
Once the men of Das Reich had finished with their reprisals in the Limoges area, they continued their northward trek, well laden with loot plundered from the local population. They faced little activity from the Resistance, but progress remained slow, especially when the armored columns crossed the Loire and came within the Allied interdiction zone. The division arrived at the front in a piecemeal fashion to the west of St.-Lô from 17 June onward, with those units that had been left behind at Montauban not arriving until 7 July. The combined actions of the French Resistance and the Allied air forces had helped prevent Das Reich from playing a role on the battlefield when it was most needed.
The division was initially deployed on the far left of the German line around La Haye–du-Puits, where it fought alongside the army’s 353rd Division, beating back repeated American assaults. Growing American pressure forced Das Reich to fall back to Périers on 10 July. There it managed to stabilize the line, operating beside the 17th SS Panzergrenadier Division and a mix of army and paratroop units until the decisive U.S. Army offensive of Operation Cobra on 25 July. A Das Reich Kampfgruppe—based around “Der Führer” and its new commander, Sturmbannführer Otto Weidinger—had already been dispatched eastward on 26 June to help repel a renewed British offensive around Caen.
THE OTHER LEADING Waffen-SS division—Leibstandarte SS “Adolf Hitler”—had also been delayed in its move to Normandy. In part this was a consequence of OKW’s fear that the main Allied offensive might be launched in the Pas-de-Calais area and because the division was still completing its refitting process. On 13 June Hitler gave instructions for Leibstandarte to be released from its holding position in Belgium, although the transfer to the battle zone was painfully slow. By 20–21 June the division entrained in and around Ghent for the transit to Paris, where elements remained for several days, sufficient for some sightseeing, as Hans Quassowski recalled: “We moved into parkland by Versailles and took the opportunity to inspect the chateau. The Hall of Mirrors and especially Congress Hall impressed us greatly.”7
In response to Dietrich’s repeated calls for reinforcement, a Kampfgruppe based around two battalions of Obersturmbannführer Albert Frey’s 1st Panzergrenadier Regiment was sent on ahead, reaching the front alongside the Hitlerjugend on the night of 27–28 June. The remainder of Leibstandarte reached its assembly area in the Forest of Cinglais between 2 and 6 July, where it acted as a strategic reserve in readiness to take over from Hitlerjugend on 12 July. Whatever the problems caused by Allied bombing of the rail network and the fighter-bomber attacks nearer the combat zone, the tardy progress of Leibstandarte must also be seen as a symptom of the malaise running throughout the German command system in the West.
Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps—9th SS Panzer Division Hohenstaufen and 10th SS Panzer Division Frundsberg—was forced to detrain in eastern France, its armored units facing a long haul to Normandy, with the inevitable catalog of mechanical breakdowns attendant on long cross-country drives. By 23 June the two divisions were in place at their assembly area close to Falaise, to be joined by the recently formed 102nd Heavy Tank Battalion, with a strength of forty-five Tiger tanks. The II SS Panzer Corps was to be used as a powerful, highly mobile strike force that instead of merely buttressing the German front line would smash through the Allied defenses and drive toward Bayeux and the coast, thereby splitting the Allied beachhead in two.
While the SS and army reinforcements were moving to the front line, the Hitlerjugend Division was continuing its defense around Caen. On 25 June the British struck against Mohnke’s 26th Panzergrenadier Regiment, III Battalion fighting a desperate battle to hold on to Fontenay-le-Pesnel. But this was only a prelude to the main British offensive—Operation Epsom—launched on the twenty-sixth (the German Third Battle of Caen). This was the biggest British assault so far in the Normandy campaign and was intended to drive a wedge into the German lines to the west of Caen, sufficiently deep that the whole German position would be outflanked.
Standartenführer Kurt Meyer, the Hitlerjugend commander, was told to hang on as best he could against what were clearly superior forces and await the arrival of reinforcements. Throughout 26 June Meyer raced along the front, encouraging his young panzergrenadiers, who were taking on the enemy armor at close range with Panzerfausts and hand-applied shaped charges. The Germans were encouraged by the bad weather—rain and low cloud cover—which grounded the dreaded fighter-bombers, but they were shocked at the intensity of the Allied artillery barrage, which old veterans compared to the heaviest Trommelfeuer (drumfire) bombardments of World War I.
The fighting surged around the villages of Rauray and Cheux, vital strongpoints in the German defenses, with Hitlerjugend tank units also thrown into the fray. By the late afternoon it seemed that the line would rupture. Hitlerjugend’s divisional headquarters at Verson came under threat, forcing staff officer Obersturmführer Bernhard Meitzel to organize a scratch force to repel the attackers. In a brisk engagement, Meitzel’s cooks and bottle washers knocked out two British tanks within 225 yards of the headquarters.
In his diary Meitzel recorded how he had accompanied Meyer to one of the more intense firefights. There the reconnaissance troops of Meyer’s old 25th Panzergrenadier Regiment “were squashed by British tanks and the accompanying infantry. We could not even help with artillery fire since we were out of ammunition. The divisional commander knew every one of these 17- to 18-year-old soldiers who were fighting their last battle in front of us now. When I looked at the Standartenführer, I saw tears in his eyes.”8
The arrival of a few Tiger tanks stopped any further British advance in this sector. The British had made a dent in the German line, but the Hitlerjugend—at a cost of 730 casualties—had prevented any breakthrough. Chester Wilmot, doyen of Normandy-campaign historians, paid tribute to the youthful defenders: “The troops of the 12th SS fought with a tenacity and ferocity seldom equaled and never excelled during the whole campaign.”9
Initially, the Germans believed they had halted the British offensive, and on the twenty-seventh Dietrich launched an armored counterattack to recapture Cheux, while Hausser’s II SS Panzer Corps moved up to its assembly area for the drive on Bayeux. This optimism proved misplaced, with the German tank assault ripped apart by heavy and accurate artillery fire, followed by the resumption of the British offensive. On the morning of the twenty-eighth, the British crossed the Odon River and advanced on Hill 112, the summit of a ridge that dominated both the Odon and the Orne River valleys and overlooked Caen. The steady British progress caused consternation within the German command. Mey
er pleaded with Dietrich for reinforcement, who in turn demanded help from Rommel to stem the enemy advance.
The arrival of Frey’s Leibstandarte Kampfgruppe was welcomed by Meyer but was far too small to affect the overall outcome. A more fundamental move was required, which came early on 28 June with the postponement of Hausser’s offensive toward Bayeux, to be replaced by a local counterattack against the western half of the bulge created by the British advance. It was hoped this would be just a temporary measure, but the redeployment of Hausser’s panzer corps to frontline tactical action represented the end of any meaningful strategic initiative on the German side.
Hausser, seemingly unaware of the desperate predicament of the defending troops, protested that he had insufficient time to prepare for the attack: “I wanted to wait another two days, but Hitler insisted that it be launched on the 29th.”10 Fritz Kraemer, the hard-pressed chief of staff of Dietrich’s I SS Panzer Corps, unsurprisingly took the opposite view, arguing that the attack was made far too late and should have gone in on the twenty-seventh.11
Compounding German difficulties were a series of forced command changes, initiated by the death of the Seventh Army commander General Dollman on 28 June. As Rundstedt and Rommel were fruitlessly trying to persuade Hitler to sanction a strategic withdrawal east of the Seine, an overwhelmed Dollman, fearing court-martial for the loss of Cherbourg to the Americans, shot himself. Hausser was subsequently given command of Seventh Army—the first Waffen-SS officer to lead an army—while Wilhelm Bittrich, from the Hohenstaufen Division, took over the II SS Panzer Corps. Hausser briefly remained with his old corps to help supervise the coming counteroffensive.
A day prior to the opening of the main German attack, Kampfgruppe Weidinger had launched an assault on the western side of the bulge, but its two panzergrenadier battalions and support troops soon found themselves in close combat with advancing British troops and unable to make any progress. The makeshift nature of the Waffen-SS counterattacks was noted in a British intelligence report: “This seems to indicate that the enemy is not acting in accordance with a prepared plan, but is sending parts of the units into action when they arrive, ‘a little bit here, a little bit there.’ This does not show the vigor we had expected from these troops.”12
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