Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (47 page)

The American Secretary for War, Henry Stimson, visited Bradley’s headquarters on 17 July, and recorded in his notes: ‘Plan Cobra – attack by 2 infantry divisions (30th and 9th) followed by 1st Infantry and 2nd Armored to the left. Break through and turn to right, enveloping 5 or 6 divisions. If successful would have easy going to the SW end of the
bocage
.’
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In the event, between Stimson’s visit and the COBRA jump-off, the thrust of VII Corps south-westwards from the St Lô–Périers road towards Coutances was strengthened by the addition of the 4th Division in the centre. In contrast to the usual American preference for broad front assaults, this was to be a narrow, concentrated attack on a 7,000-yard front, immediately preceded by a massive air bombardment. The fighter-bombers would concentrate on hitting forward German defences in a 250-yard belt immediately south of the road. Spaatz’s ‘heavies’ would bomb to a depth of 2,500 yards behind the German front, accompanied by the artillery fire of 1,000 guns.

The Americans’ principal secret weapon for COBRA was the ‘Rhino’ – a set of steel tusks welded onto the front of many of the Shermans, which so equipped had been found capable of battering a path through the Norman hedgerows in heartening fashion. Within weeks, the name of Sergeant Curtis G. Culin, of 2nd Armored’s 102nd Cavalry Reconnaissance, echoed across America as the imaginative young American who had devised the battle-winner. The reality, as usual in these matters, was touchingly a little different. Every American armoured unit had been puzzling over the hedgerow problem, and one day Captain Jimmy de Pew of the 102nd summoned a ‘bull session’ of his men to chew it over. A Tennessee hillbilly named Roberts asked slowly: ‘Why don’t we get some saw teeth and put them on the front of the tank and cut through these hedges?’ The crowd of men roared with laughter. But Sergeant Culin, a notably shrewd soldier known in the unit both as a chess player and a man impatient of army routines, said: ‘Hang on a minute, he’s got an idea there.’ Culin it was who put Roberts’s ill-articulated notion into effect, and directed the first demonstration: the tankers – and shortly afterwards General
Bradley – watched in awe as a hedgerow exploded before their eyes to make way for the Sherman bursting through. In great secrecy, steel lengths stockpiled from the German beach obstacles were salvaged and used to modify hundreds of First Army’s tanks. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the ‘Rhinos’, as they were called, for they restored battlefield manoeuvrability to Bradley’s armour. Henceforth, while the German tanks remained restricted to the roads, the Shermans possessed the power to outflank them across country. Culin was later summoned to appear before a press conference in Paris. An honest man, he tried hard to give some credit to Roberts. But the weight of the great propaganda and publicity machine was too much for him. He became a very American kind of national hero.
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Another kind of hero was lost to First Army on the very eve of COBRA – 54-year-old Colonel Paddy Flint, the hoary old commander of the 39th Infantry who had made himself legendary for the reckless courage which now killed him. Irritated by the slow progress of his 2nd Battalion approaching the COBRA start-line, he strode impatiently forward under heavy mortaring to galvanize them into life. He sent a message to his executive officer from the battalion CP: ‘Strangely quiet here. Could take nap. Have spotted pillbox. Will start them cooking.’ He reached the front line with his headquarters group to be greeted by a German with a machine pistol whose fire ripped Flint’s trousers. Flint ordered a tank to move forward, and when its commander told him that he could not do so as he had turret trouble, Flint exploded: ‘It isn’t often you’ll have a colonel for a bodyguard!’ The reluctant tank and a cluster of infantry advanced up the road with their colonel. At one point, when he was standing on the Sherman’s hull directing the driver, German fire began to ricochet off the steel, and Flint was induced to step down into cover. The ‘bodyguard colonel’ now advanced with his little group towards the Germans, disdaining their hand grenades: ‘I don’t mind that – they can’t hit me anyway.’ His driver was wounded, but while he was being taken to the rear Flint kept up heavy fire with the two carbines and M1 rifle with
which he was now armed, and of which his unhappy staff officer sought to relieve him. The colonel was standing in a doorway lecturing a sergeant on infantry tactics when there was a single shot, and he pitched forward, hit in the head. The sergeant spotted the German sniper and worked forward until he shot him out of a tree. Flint was given morphia and a cigarette, and murmured as he lay: ‘You can’t kill an Irishman, you only make him mad.’ He died in the field hospital. In one sense, Flint’s performance was suicidal and wildly unsuited to the role of regimental commander. But in another, given the chronic difficulty of inducing the infantry to employ ‘Indian fighting’, to get to close quarters with the enemy, it was a magnificent example. George Patton acted as one of Flint’s pallbearers, and said with uncommon accuracy that he was sure that this was how his old friend would like to have gone. Flint was one of the great characters of First Army, cast in a mould of leadership that filled his men with immense pride.
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The launching of COBRA was delayed for some days by the same torrential rain and low cloud that sealed the fate of GOODWOOD. On 24 July, the order was given and 1,600 aircraft had already taken off for the preliminary air bombardment when the weather closed in again. Some were successfully recalled, or declined to risk bombing through the overcast atmosphere. But others again poured down explosives destined for the path of the American attack. The results were disastrously erratic. 25 Americans were killed and 131 wounded in the 30th Division, and the Germans were provided with final confirmation of the American intention to move on the St Lô–Périers front. Some enraged American units, such as the 2nd/120th Infantry, opened fire on their own aircraft, a not uncommon practice among all the armies in Normandy when suffering at the hands of their own pilots.

The next morning, the forecasters’ promise of brighter weather was fulfilled. At 7.00 a.m., 901st Panzergrenadiers telephoned divisional headquarters to report: ‘American infantry in front of our
trenches are abandoning their positions. They are withdrawing everywhere.’ As similar reports reached Bayerlein from all along the front, his operations officer, Kurt Kauffmann, said cheerfully: ‘Looks as if they’ve got cold feet. Perhaps Seventh Army is right after all.’ Hausser’s staff had confidently predicted, despite every indication from Panzer Lehr to the contrary, that the major Allied attack would come south of Caen. Then the field telephones in Bayerlein’s farmhouse at Canisy began to ring again, reporting: ‘Bombing attacks by endless waves of aircraft. Fighter-bomber attacks on bridges and artillery positions.’
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At 9.38 a.m., the fighter-bombers opened their first 20-minute assault on the German front line. Behind them, high above the dust and smoke, 1,800 heavy bombers of 8th Air Force droned slowly towards the target area, their glinting wings watched by thousands of expectant young Americans in their foxholes and tank turrets below, massed ready to move when the airmen had finished.

Bradley had asked that the bombers attack east–west, out of the sun and parallel to the front on the St Lô–Périers road, to reduce the risk of ‘short bombing’, or ‘creepback’, as the British called it. The airmen, for their own reasons, came in north–south. Despite desperate efforts by the ground troops to identify their positions with yellow panels and smoke markers, there was wild bombing by 8th Air Force, with appalling consequences for the men below.
‘The ground was shaken and rocked as if by a great earthquake,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel George Tuttle of the 30th Division. ‘The concussion, even underground, felt as if someone was beating you with a club.’
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Ernie Pyle wrote of ‘that awful rush of wind, like the rattling of seeds in a dry gourd’. Lieutenant Sidney Eichen of the 120th Infantry had stood with his men watching the bombers approach with comfortable satisfaction: ‘We thought – “How gorgeous.” Then it was – “Goddamit, they’re coming for us again!” My outfit was decimated, our anti-tank guns blown apart. I saw one of our truck drivers, Jesse Ivy, lying split down the middle. Captain Bell was buried in a crater with only his head visible. He suffocated before we could get him out.’
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111 Americans were killed, including Lieutenant-General Lesley McNair, who had come forward to watch the attack, and 490 wounded. The entire command group of the 9th Division’s 3rd/47th Infantry was wiped out. Maddened men were forcibly carried to the rear. Others merely ran blindly from the battlefield. Maimed men lay screaming for aid. Brigadier-General William Harrison of the 30th Division wrote savagely home that night: ‘When you read of all the great glamour of our flying friends, just remember that not all that glitters is gold!’
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Harrison won a Distinguished Service Cross that day for his part in dragging men from their shock and paralysis, pulling together shattered units, and driving them forward to press on with the attack. He told the commanding officer of the 120th Infantry: ‘Colonel, the attack goes ahead as scheduled. Even if you have only two or three men, the attack is to be made.’ Eichen saw his regimental commander running from company to company shouting: ‘You’ve gotta get going, get going!’ Eichen said: ‘Half-heartedly, we started to move.’

General Courtney Hodges, commander-designate of First Army, visited 30th Division’s command post to meet its enraged commander, Hobbs, who, ‘was naturally terribly upset by the air show . . . “We’re good soldiers, Courtney, I know, but there’s absolutely no excuse, no excuse at all. I wish I could show some of those air
boys, decorated with everything a man can be decorated with, some of our casualty clearing stations.” ’
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Amid the shambles created by the bombing of their own forward areas, VII Corps’ attack began hesitantly on the 25th, men moving slowly forward to discover, to their dismay, that the Panzer Lehr division before them was battered but still unbroken. Some German troops had even moved rapidly forward to occupy ground evacuated by the Americans to provide an air safety zone – a technique they had also adopted on the 24th. Collins’s troops were even more disheartened to meet fierce artillery fire, which they had confidently expected to find suppressed by the bombing. ‘It was hard to believe that any living thing could be left alive in front of our positions,’ said Colonel Turtle. ‘However on moving to enemy-held territory, our men ran into some determined resistance.’
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Units found themselves entangled in protracted firefights against strongpoints and networks of foxholes held by the customary German mix of a handful of tanks, supporting infantry, and the inevitable 88 mm guns.

Bayerlein had personally ridden forward by motor-cycle to the 901st Regiment, whose commander, Colonel von Hausser, was sitting in a cellar beneath an old stone tower. Von Hausser declared gloomily that his entire front line had been devastated. Yet the survivors resisted with all their usual stubbornness. Colonel Hammonds Birks of 120th Infantry radioed to 30th Division that ‘the going was very slow . . . the boche had tanks dug in, hull down, and were shooting perhaps more artillery than they had ever previously used along any American sector.’ First Army’s diary recorded bleakly: ‘This day, a day to remember for more than one reason, did not bring the breakthrough for which we had all hoped . . . There was no question but that the postponement of the attack from Monday to Tuesday, plus two successive days of bombing of our own troops, took the ginger out of several of the front-line elements.’

Yet even in these first encounters, General Collins found cause
for encouragement. While the German positions were resisting fiercely, they did not appear to form a continuous belt of defences. They could be outflanked, bypassed. In contrast to the meticulously prepared succession of defensive positions in depth with which the Germans on the Bourguébus Ridge met GOODWOOD, below the St Lô–Périers road on 25 July, they retained only a crust. This, despite all the warning they had received of an impending American thrust. It was a tribute to the efforts of the British and Canadians that von Kluge’s fears, as well as his principal forces, were still decisively fixed upon the eastern flank. That day, the 25th, the 2nd Canadian Corps launched a new attack towards Bourguébus which quickly broke down and was counter-attacked by 9th SS Panzer. But, faced with two heavy assaults, it was to the east that von Kluge chose to go himself that day, to inspect the front. Against the 14 British and Canadian divisions, the Germans still deployed 14 of their own, including six panzer. The Americans faced only 11 seriously weakened enemy divisions, two of them armoured. The old Panzer Lehr began the COBRA battle with a strength of just 2,200 men and 45 operational armoured vehicles in the front line. Against this weary gathering of German battle-groups and depleted infantry formations, the full weight of 15 American divisions would shortly be committed. Bayerlein was enraged to receive a visit from a staff officer of von Kluge, conveying the Field-Marshal’s order that the St Lô–Périers line must be held: not a single man must leave his position. A battalion of SS Panthers was on its way to provide support. Bayerlein said flatly: ‘Out in front every one is holding out. Every one. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews – they’re all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post. They are lying silent in their foxholes, for they are dead. You may report to the Field-Marshal that the Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated.’
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In keeping with the occasion, at that moment a vast ammunition dump exploded nearby, hit by fighter-bombers. Bayerlein’s remarks were only slightly exaggerated.