Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (31 page)

The men who fought the battle for the Cotentin afterwards remembered chiefly the fear and exhaustion of groping their way through the Norman hedgerows with their infantry company or tank platoon – ‘tiptoeing in a tank’, one gunner called it – prickling with the sense of their own nakedness as they crossed each open space, cursing their inability to see the enemy mortaring or machine-gunningtheir advance, damning the air force, which was already revealing a disturbing inability to avoid strafing American positions. All wars become a matter of small private battles to those who are fighting them. But this was uniquely true of the struggle for Normandy, where it was seldom possible to see more than 100 or 200 yards in any direction, where forward infantry rarely glimpsed their own armour, artillery or higher commanders, where the appalling attrition rate among the rifle companies at the tip of each army’s spear rapidly became one of the dominant factors of the campaign.

In this first battle in north-west Europe, the American army was given cause to regret the poor priority that it had given to infantry recruitment since the great mobilization of American manpower began in 1940. All nations in the Second World War diverted some of their fittest and best-educated recruits to the air forces and technical branches. But no other nation allowed the rifle companies of its armies to become a wastebin for men considered unsuitable for any other occupation. The infantry suffered in the services’ attempts to allow men to follow specializations of their choice – of the 1942 volunteers, only 5 per cent chose infantry or armour. ‘By the end of 1943,’ confessed the official history of the training and procurement of US army ground forces, ‘the operations of this priority and a number of other factors had reduced to a dangerously low level the number of men allotted to the ground forces who seemed likely to perform effectively in combat.’
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It was discovered that infantrymen were an inch shorter than the army’s average height – a fair measure of general physique. Even more disturbing, statistics produced in March 1944 showed that while the infantry made up only 6 per cent of the army – an extraordinarily low proportion by any measure – they
had suffered 53 per cent of its total battle casualties. This proportion rose to far more alarming heights in Normandy.

Great efforts began to be made in the spring of 1944 to push men of higher quality into the infantry. In March, 30,000 dismayed aviation cadets found themselves transferred wholesale to the army, almost all to ground forces. Some specialists were hastily diverted to the infantry, and the first of many comb-outs of service units took place, in search of suitable officers and men for infantry duty. But none of this came in time to assist the army that was to fight the first battles for north-west Europe. In Normandy, only 37 per cent of the replacements arriving to make good casualties were rifle-trained. First Army was suffering a desperate shortage of competent officers and NCOs. Wholesale sackings proved necessary in some units. In a situation in which junior leadership was critical, where again and again men were called up to fight beyond the control and eyes of their battalion or even company commanders, such leadership was repeatedly found wanting. The American army had determinedly eschewed the German policy of building elite and low-grade divisions to meet different requirements, and had sought instead to create a force of uniform quality. But in Normandy and after, Bradley’s commanders found themselves principally dependent upon a handful of formations which proved exceptionally determined and competent – the 1st, 4th, 9th, 2nd Armored and the airborne divisions. Just as the first weeks of battle in Normandy caused the British to reach disturbing conclusions about their own tactics and about the determination of some of their principal formations, so the Americans found cause for serious concern in the performance of certain units. A First Army report on the tactical lessons of Normandy declared:

Like the British, the Americans had discovered that their tank–infantry co-operation was woefully inadequate. They lacked the means for rapid communication on the battlefield between the men on the ground and those in the Shermans, battened down inside their steel hulls. They had no telephones mounted on their armour, which later enabled an infantryman to contact a tank commander without clambering up and hammering on his hatch, often under heavy fire. Officers were surprised to discover after an action how few rounds their riflemen had expended. Despite all their training in the importance of ‘marching fire’ to suppress the defences, many infantrymen were instinctively reluctant to shoot when they could see no target, or were too concerned with hugging the earth for protection to reveal themselves and take an aim. Fieldcraft was likewise poor. A rifle company commander of the 9th Division reported: ‘The American soldier is too careless in unduly exposing himself when in view of the enemy. Individually he feels that some other “Joe” will get shot and not he.’
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A report from General Mark Clark in Italy at this time stated: ‘The infantryman in landing operations, as in other operations, carries the heavy load, suffers the losses, and must have the guts to go forward despite danger and heavy casualties. Without question our training has not yet produced disciplined officers and disciplined men. Leaders up to and including battalion have a tendency to allow their troops to get out of control.’
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There was interminable private debate in 1944, and there has been a great deal more in the years since, about the respective fighting power of the British and American soldier, and their shortcomings as revealed in Normandy. The truth seems self-evident – that the best British and American units were very good indeed, and perfectly comparable with each other. Each army was at times bemused by the different national approach to war of the other. Gavin wrote of the British: ‘In many ways they took the war far less seriously than we.’
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The British, in their turn, were sometimes scornful of the theatricality of the American style – of their generals’ invariable habit of wearing helmets and personal weapons when no British commander troubled with either, of their enthusiasm for histrionics on the battlefield while the British sought always to understate the moment. But a British officer who saw much of the Americans said later that ‘if they were sometimes boastful, they would also go to extraordinary lengths to try to make good their boasts’.
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Gavin added to his comment on the British above: ‘On the other hand, on matters of discipline and combat effectiveness they set very high standards.’
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It ill became either army in Normandy to seek to harp upon the shortcomings of the other – the British sluggishness in gaining Caen or the poor performance of some American divisions in the
bocage
. Despite the fine performance of Collins’s VII Corps in gaining Cherbourg, each army at large had found it difficult to work up the driving power, the killing force, necessary to break through well-positioned German forces on the battlefield. The most important recent American historian of the campaign has written of Normandy: ‘There the limitations of the American army in generating sustained combat power were further to cripple the drive into the unknown, on battlefields sorely lacking in appropriate ground to apply mobility.’
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Soldiers

For every soldier of imagination in the German army, the battle for Normandy was the last struggle of the war which offered a frail chance of final victory. From all over Europe through the month of June, hundreds of thousands of men, thousands of tanks and vehicles, crawled painfully by the devastated rail network, and finally along roads lined with slit trenches to provide ready refuges from the inevitable fighter-bomber attacks, to bolster the precarious German line in Normandy. A 21st Army Group intelligence report of 22 June, based upon captured correspondence, found in Rommel’s soldiers:

Corporal Wilhelm Schickner of the reconnaissance battalion of 2nd Panzer Division was a 25-year-old stonemason’s son who had been an apprentice printer in Stuttgart when he was conscripted in March 1939 first for work service and then, a year later, for the infantry. Plunged immediately into the battle for France, like so
many others he spent the next four years marching the length of Europe – with the German spearhead into Athens, to the gates of Moscow, where he was wounded in September 1942, back to Russia, to be wounded again in July 1943, and at last to join 2nd Panzer at Cambrai when he was once more fit for duty that December. On the night of 5 June, they were alerted in their positions around Amiens, and then stood down, only to be alerted again on 6 June. They moved at last on the afternoon of the 9th, reached Paris at nightfall, and drove through the empty and darkened streets to cross the Seine. Thereafter, they leaguered all day in woodlands by the line of march, and drove only in darkness to reach Caumont around noon on 12 June. The reconnaissance battalion was immediately deployed to relieve the thin screen of defending troops covering the town. Schickner himself was ordered to take two machine-guns and one section to take over a position commanding the road 200 yards northwards. When his little party reached the spot, they found two men with a weary NCO, who said: ‘Thank God you’re here – we’re getting the hell out of it.’ There was no other German position to their right for some 600 yards, and little enough on their left. For half an hour, they lay patiently in the mist and waited. Then a jeep appeared in front of them, full of Americans. It stopped hesitantly, and retired abruptly when a 2nd Panzer gun crew behind them fired a 37 mm
Pak
round in its direction. Shermans appeared in the distance – Schickner counted 18 of them, and sent a runner back to report. The American tanks stopped, and began to fire HE towards the Germans. A lone GI rounded the corner of the road, helmet tilted back on his head. Behind him, Schickner could see long files of other enemy infantrymen. He sent his runner back again, and told Briese, the machine-gunner beside him, to link his belts for longer continuous fire. Then Jupp, the other gunner, called: ‘They’re coming now,’ and the Americans moved confidently up the road towards them.

Schickner marvelled, because if the enemy had advanced through the fields on their flanks rather than along the road, ‘they
could have walked into Caumont’. Instead, ‘it was as if they were out for a Sunday stroll’. Jupp asked: ‘Do I start now?’ and settled over the butt of his MG 42. The hail of German fire scythed through the files of approaching men. It stopped, quite simply, when the two guns had fired all their available ammunition, and Schickner himself had emptied five magazines from his Schmeisser. In the silence that followed, the defenders could hear wounded Americans screaming for help from the roadside and the ditches. One of their own men, Gross, had been hit in the stomach. He could still walk, and they gave him cover while he stumbled back towards the houses. A young lieutenant appeared, who inspected the situation and declared: ‘You must launch a counter-attack.’ ‘What, with six men?’ demanded Schickner. ‘Then what do you suggest?’ asked the officer less confidently. ‘Stay put here,’ said the corporal. The officer disappeared, and for half an hour there was silence. The Germans lay on their weapons and smoked.

Darkness fell, and they could see the flash of firing all around them, but there was no movement on their own front. At last they received the order to pull back into the town, where they found the rest of the battalion, along with 75 mm guns of the
Panzerjäger
battalion, locked in a house-to-house struggle against American attacks already well inside Caumont. Their own company commander, Captain Schultz, ran from position to position telling his men, ‘We’ve got to hold the town – it’s a Führer-order.’ After a huge effort, supported by the 50 mm guns of their big Puma halftracks, they captured some of the lost ground in a counter-attack in the early hours of the morning. But a few hours later, American armour began pressing them relentlessly. The Germans pulled back down the hill south of the town, having suffered appalling casualties. Schickner said: ‘We were never told to push forward again.’
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The American official history recorded: ‘The 26th Infantry at the same time got one battalion to the edge of Caumont but there ran into determined resistance from an estimated two companies of Germans, giving the Americans the impression at some points that counter-attacks were in progress. Actions, however,
though sometimes sharp were all local and involved few troops. The town was not cleared until the following morning.’
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