Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (21 page)

Your loving Mutti.

That’s going to be a tough order to follow. I mean the order to hold Cherbourg, not to make babies. Not even one day after it was issued, the enemy has broken through to the west coast of the Cotentin Peninsula which means that Cherbourg is now cut off. We ordered all available coastal gun batteries to turn inland and attack the advancing enemy soldiers and while the barrages stopped many of them, they didn’t stop enough.

General Rommel knew exactly what the enemy was doing. They were trying to cut all roads going into the Cotentin Peninsula so that we couldn’t bring our reinforcements to bear in defending Cherbourg. I say, “reinforcements” but even with the extra troops who have been ordered to Cherbourg, they’ll probably be used as replacements instead of reinforcements. We simply have too few available troops which pretty much makes reinforcement out of the question. That goes not only for Cherbourg, in my opinion, but for every battle site in France. (I can only hope it’s different in Russia). Here, ammunition is all but being rationed and we are critically low on fuel, so I’m not sure we could hold Cherbourg anyway. Nevertheless, we still fight to repulse the enemy’s attempts to seal off the peninsula. We could not take troops from Calais since der Führer was still holding them there waiting for an invasion that General Rommel and I no longer believe would occur. We were fighting the British at Caen and couldn’t allow that city to fall into enemy hands either. So General Rommel made do with the forces he had to stave off disaster both in the east and in the west of Northern France.

After fighting for more than a week with insufficient strength to protect the Cotentin peninsula, General Rommel was finally allowed to relinquish protection of the whole peninsula so he could concentrate on better defending the two most important sectors. On 17. June, General Rommel was finally given permission to move two infantry divisions in the peninsula directly to Cherbourg and to move the other two to defend the neck of the peninsula. Of course that left the rest of the peninsula undefended, but with what we had available to us, this plan made the most sense. As expected, once they saw what was happening, the enemy made a concentrated push towards the unprotected part of the Cotentin Peninsula. I wonder though, how they intuited so quickly that our troops had been re-positioned.

General von Schlieben is commandant of the Cherbourg troops and I know him to be brave and skilled enough to hold the Peninsula from the weak and unskilled Americans. As the battle for Cherbourg rages, General von Schlieben continues to defend the city but has repeatedly asked for permission from der Führer to regroup further back from the line he was originally ordered to defend. Since it was der Führer himself who put Herr General von Schlieben on this specified line, everyone could have told him Hitler would never permit a deviation for any reason. As expected, the general received orders commanding the remaining troops in Cherbourg to defend that port city to the last man. He was ordered to fight from his position and not to give a centimeter of ground. General von Schlieben reported to us that his losses were terrible. Without more troops and artillery to strengthen his defense, it is clear to us at least that he will not be able to hold out much longer. It is clear to der Führer, however, that he can hold out indefinitely.

I’m sorry to say that we were right. General Rommel received news the day of 25. June that our gallant soldiers could no longer hold the port city we all knew the enemy so desperately needed. With that report, we knew Cherbourg would soon fall into American hands. One consolation we can take however, was that it took the enemy almost two weeks to take this city when some of the defeatists around here thought it would be overrun in a matter of days given how few men we had left there.

In a classic display of military wisdom, General Rommel had previously planned for the demolition of the port and our men were ordered to blow it sky high before the unthinkable happened. German engineers and sappers were successful in detonating the charges before the enemy could stop them and it was reported that the port was indeed destroyed before Cherbourg fell. In fact, the port is so badly damaged that the enemy won’t even be able to clear it, let alone repair it, for weeks or months, if at all. The enemy’s victory has been a hollow one, essentially yielding them no militarily significant gain that I can see, except now their whole front line no longer has any gaps in it which we could penetrate and exploit. But we don’t have the resources to penetrate and exploit much of anything, though I hope the enemy generals don’t know that.

When General Dollman called our headquarters to report that Cherbourg had fallen to enemy forces, he sounded beside himself and I worried whether he would survive the shock. He had been ordered to hold Cherbourg until the last man only to find out that General von Schlieben surrendered. When der Führer was told of the surrender of Cherbourg by General Karl von Schlieben, it was reported that he was furious. “First, von Paulus in Stalingrad and now this! These fearful capitulations have to stop!” he said. He wanted only “valiant” commanders to lead our troops. He even went so far as to compare these surrendering German generals to the Italians!

I heard that Hitler called General Dollman to his Alpine headquarters to stand for an inquiry into the loss of Cherbourg. General Rommel as well as General von Rundstedt were also ordered to proceed to a meeting with der Führer in Berchtesgaden. They left by car on the next afternoon just as the British intensified their fight for Caen. As the two Field Marshals drove towards Germany, we learned that General Dollman had suffered and died of a heart attack.

General Rommel and old von Rundstedt went to see der Führer and were hoping to explain the situation in Normandy since Herr Hitler had never really inspected the places where the fights had occurred nor had he witnessed the might of the enemy aircraft or what the superior number of the enemy’s soldiers means. Once at Hitler’s headquarters, General Rommel later told me that they had been held waiting to talk with him for over six hours. While waiting, General Rommel and General von Rundstedt (and Goebbels and Himmler) talked amongst themselves and each agreed that the war should be ended. When they all went in to meet with der Führer, Hitler became incensed at what was being said which apparently caused everyone in the room to want to shrink into invisibility. It was only General Rommel who had the courage to stand up to him to try to make him understand how dire the situation really was. As usual, Hitler recognized that it was he alone who was the military genius and he therefore didn’t listen. He told General Rommel to limit his comments only to military matters and to cease talking about political issues. After he left, General Rommel told General Keitel, one of Hitler’s right hand men, that Germany was headed for total defeat and I was told that even this “Yes” man, as Herr Rommel referred to him, agreed.

Der Führer is now apparently very distressed about the situation in France. He sent word that after allowing the destruction of his Panzer Group West, General von Schweppenburg is to be replaced but that we are not to tell him of this since der Führer believes he will sabotage our efforts in protecting Caen if he were to find out. We learned that it’s General Karl Eberbach who has been ordered to replace the injured general. I don’t know much about him but I hope he is not another uninspired commander who doesn’t see possibilities because he’s so focused on obeying orders from afar. I think overzealous leaders tend to have little regard for what their bravado costs. But der Führer remains convinced that losses are directly related to the amount of steel in a commander’s backbone so I expect more and more replacements will be made. In fact, we heard Hitler indicated that General von Rundstedt’s health is not all it should be so we are expecting news of his replacement soon as well. With General Dollman’s death on top of these replacements, I’m getting the very clear picture that Hitler is fed up with generals who cannot deliver what der Führer orders.

The last days of June brought an even greater intensity to the fighting for Caen when we learned that the British have now called in bombardment not only from their aeroplanes, but from their naval ships as well. Panzer Meyer moved back three kilometers and the fighting continued. We expected that after that heavy bombardment, the British troops would come crashing through the holes in our defensive line but for some reason, they waited. General Rommel hurriedly patched together a semblance of a defensive line and yet the British still did not attack so he moved even more of the veterans from the Eastern Front who were arriving as reinforcements into the bombed out craters that used to be our defensive line. Not all the anticipated reinforcements (no one here is calling them replacements so I won’t either) made it to where they were ordered, though. We received reports, for example, that one general who had been ordered to Caen, General Hausser, found his convoy trapped. He reported he was bombed by air, by sea and by land forces before he could even arrive at his designated objective.

Since we were given the time to strengthen our defenses and we had all this extra armor with the arrival of the 9
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and 10
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SS Panzer Divisions, the enemy’s attempted breakthrough in late June was halted although eventually the British took the hill with an elevation of 112 meters that lies southwest of Caen, about 15 km away. General Rommel’s placement of all available units meant that the enemy took that hill but only with very heavy casualties. Unfortunately, the Allieds could afford them while we could not. We fought the British for this important hill for another two days and lost many irreplaceable soldiers and tanks in the quest. Reports of these gruesome battles came in to our headquarters from different commanders but ironically, several of them said the same thing: that the battle for Hill 112 was like the “No Man’s Land” of the last war. The space between the two fighting armies was filled with corpses from both sides. The number of corpses continued to increase until we were almost at the end of our strength. It was reported that each of the boys of the 12
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SS Panzer Division who were still left alive after the British began their late June offensive, became a sniper. We hoped the Tommies would think these few soldiers were a forward line in front of our main body of Armour because if they found out these few troops were all that remained of the Hitler Jugend, we’d be in even more trouble.

The ploy must have worked because on 30. June, just a day before our generals in the field said they would have no more resources left, the English General called for a withdrawal of his troops. No one here could believe it! It was clearly the will of God who sent in the rain, which gave us time to move our troops which gave us the strength and power to hold Caen which we sorely needed to keep. But we held it at a great price.

After Battle Casualty Reports showed that the 12
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SS Panzer Division had only 56 operational tanks left which was less than 25% of its strength three weeks earlier. Panzer Lehr also had approximately 243 tanks at the start of this action and afterwards, it had 53. Overall Casualty Reports for the momentous month of June showed that we lost over 47,000 men killed, wounded or captured. Even more shocking was that this figure included 826 officers and 6 generals! Nevertheless, with what’s left of our valiant Panzer and infantry divisions, we miraculously have proven once again that our strength and tenacity can hold our slow moving enemy back. I will give credit also to the fact that the weather was stormy which meant we could avoid some enemy air attacks. We kept the enemy in the hedgerows which meant their tanks were all but unmaneuverable as well. Even after all this fighting, the battle lines around Caen have moved but little. Our line was far from solid but it was not breached and Caen still remains in our hands.

The DDay objectives planned for and discussed at St. Paul’s School in London in April, 1944 were falling further and further behind schedule. While progress in Normandy was being made, it was far slower and exceedingly more difficult than anticipated. With the destruction of the Mulberries and the port in Cherbourg, the Allieds were facing supply problems. Some major advancements were going to have to be made and made quickly or the Allieds ran the risk of stalling in a trench warfare scenario reminiscent of World War I. The Americans needed to control the western part of Northern France so they could clear the way south and the British needed to control Caen and its airfield which would allow for a push through the open Falaise plain. Until the Allieds cleared out of the bocage, there was no room to bring over the troops still waiting in England and General Patton’s Third Army could not be unleashed in the final drive towards the borders of the Third Reich.

The Allieds made new plans, all with the goal of breaking out into open tank country and destroying the remaining Germans in France. Caen was still in German hands with the failure of General Montgomery’s plan to capture Caen by way of Villers-Bocage and the subsequent failure of Operation Epsom and the loss of Hill 112 in June. How to gain control of Caen was therefore the subject of two more major operations which were to take place in July. Montgomery’s third plan was named Operation Charnwood and finally contemplated a frontal attack instead of his prior attempts to capture the city by indirect attacks. Charnwood did not succeed so a fourth plan, Operation Goodwood, was devised. Whether a drive to the Falaise plain was to be the ultimate goal of Goodwood remains a dispute but at the end of two days not only was the way to the Falaise Plain not open, Caen still remained in German control. If and when Caen was taken, the route would be clear for a drive east but until then, the Germans controlled the open country. Caen was finally entered by the British on July 20
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but parts of it still remained under German control.