The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (27 page)

Flying from Stanmore to Bradley’s headquarters at Vouilly, Leigh-Mallory arrived on Monday at 11:20
A.M.
to find clouds still smothering Normandy, bombers already on the wing, and no way to contact the pilots except by a frantic cancellation order radioed to England. Too late. Although many pilots chose to abort their drops because of poor visibility and explicit orders “not to bomb short as the penetration route is directly over friendly troops,” some bombed by mistake—one startled bombardier accidentally tripped the toggle switch when a chaff bundle smacked the nose of his plane—and others took a chance on dropping through the thinning overcast. Of 350 heavies disgorging nearly a thousand tons, only 15 percent hit the target; several medium bombers also missed by as much as seven miles, and P-47s attacked misidentified targets four miles short of the bomb line. Twenty-five GIs were killed and 131 wounded, nearly all in the 30th Infantry Division, whose assistant commander told First Army, “As a fiasco this operation was a brilliant achievement.”

Bradley’s fury knew no bounds: Leigh-Mallory flew back to England with accusations of duplicity and bad faith ringing in his ears. At 10:30
P.M.
he phoned Bradley to confirm that the attackers had flown perpendicular to the target box rather than parallel, and that many bombs heavier than 100-pounders had been dropped. Bradley had evidently misconstrued what had been agreed to at the Stanmore conference on July 19, and Leigh-Mallory had left that meeting early for another appointment before all details of the mission were clarified. A full
COBRA
bombardment could be launched again on Tuesday morning, Leigh-Mallory now added, but only by flying the same perpendicular route from the north. With more marginal weather predicted, Bradley agreed, grumbling bitterly, and Collins worked all night to get his bewildered corps repositioned to try again.

From his farmyard redoubt, Pyle watched for half an hour as fighter-bombers dipped and darted. The black blossoms of German antiaircraft shells spattered the sky. Then a new noise intruded, “a sound deep and all-encompassing with no notes in it—just a gigantic faraway surge of doomlike sound.” From the north the B-17s and B-24s drew near, roofing the heavens with a stately procession of tiny silver cruciforms three miles up, “plowing their way forward as if there was no turmoil in the world.” Gawking soldiers leaned back until their helmets fell off.

The first detonations to the south reminded Pyle of “the crackle of popcorn.” Smoke and dust rolled back through the orchards, and “the bright day grew slowly dark.” Then, inexplicably, the bomb loads drew ever closer, with a terrifying rattle of wind over tail fins, and the ponderous footfall of explosions stomped through the trees. Pyle dove beneath a heavy wagon behind the stone house, “waiting for darkness” as concussion waves hammered his chest and eyes in what he would describe as “the most sustained horrible thing I’ve ever gone through.” At length the howling passed and a colonel staggered through the swirling dust, snapping his fingers and muttering “Goddammit, goddammit, goddammit.”

For others it was worse. The star-crossed 30th Division took more casualties from the Army Air Forces (AAF) on this Tuesday forenoon than from the enemy on any day in the war. “Then came that awful rush of wind,” a regimental history recorded, “that awful sound like the rattling of seeds in a dry gourd.” Bombs entombed men in their trenches or split them open like deer carcasses. Bombs obliterated command posts, tossed cows into trees, and raised the dead from local cemeteries. The concussion “felt as if someone was beating you with a club,” one officer reported, while another was whacked in the buttocks by what proved to be a body part. Men screamed for medics and raged against the “American Luftwaffe.”

Just over fifteen hundred heavies dropped two thousand tons of high explosives and an even larger payload of fragmentation bombs; of those aircraft, three dozen bombed American troops, joined in the fratricide by forty-two medium bombers. High clouds had forced some planes to descend several thousand feet, loosening the formations and requiring crews to hurriedly recalculate data for their bombsights. Red marking smoke was easily confused with artillery muzzle flashes, and the St.-Lô–Périers road was soon hidden by dense bomb smoke carried on a five-knot southerly breeze. Two percent of all bombs had fallen short by a mile or more, killing 111 soldiers and wounding 490, this in addition to the casualties from the previous day. Among the dead was Lieutenant General Lesley J. McNair, the commander of Army Ground Forces, who was visiting from Washington and had rashly inserted himself into an assault battalion of the 30th Division; a search detail with picks and shovels combed the crater where he was last seen without finding a trace. Eventually his corpse was spotted sixty-five feet away, beyond recognition but for his dog tags, shoulder flash, and rank insignia. “I warned him time and again about unnecessary risk,” Eisenhower cabled Marshall. A manifest listed all the personal effects left for his widow: “6 Lt. Gen. stars, tarnished, and clasp missing from 2 stars.”

By the time the last medium bomber flew off at 12:23
P.M.
, nearly 2,500 planes had dropped five thousand tons of bombs plus heaps of white phosphorus and a new jellied-gasoline agent called napalm. In the pinched target box, where the Army’s armored breakout was to burst forth, each square mile absorbed more than eleven thousand bombs, among the greatest concentrations of killing power in the history of warfare. As for the dead and dying GIs on the wrong side of the line, Pyle wrote with the laconic fatalism that now bleached his bones, “Anybody makes mistakes.”

*   *   *

Eisenhower flew to see Bradley at Vouilly for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon, then returned to England, dejected and vowing never again to use heavy bombers in a tactical attack. “That’s a job for artillery,” he snapped. “I gave them a green light this time. But I promise you it’s the last.” Bradley continued to fume, at Leigh-Mallory and others, obfuscating his own role in putting troops danger close.

By early that afternoon the
COBRA
ground attack was well under way. Assault columns initially made meager progress: a 30th Division column butted into enemy resistance after only four hundred yards, including Panther tanks. “Good God,” a GI in a light tank cried over the radio, “I fired three rounds and they all bounced off.” Panzer return fire dismasted a platoon sergeant. “Just his legs and hips were there,” a comrade wrote. “One arm, with the wrist watch on it, lay near the house.” By nightfall, VII Corps had gained no more than a mile beyond the St.-Lô–Périers road and fewer than three hundred prisoners had been bagged. German shells rained down, leading an intelligence officer to conclude that “enemy artillery was not touched by our bombing.”

Africa veterans like Eisenhower and Bradley should have recalled two lines of Kipling popular in Tunisia:
“Man cannot tell, but Allah knows / How much the other side was hurt.”
In truth, German defenses had been blown to smithereens: the enemy was profoundly hurt, mortally hurt. The main opponent confronting VII Corps, the Panzer Lehr Division, had earlier been described as “worn out” by the German high command after six weeks of fighting; Tuesday’s “conveyor belt bombing” had devastated the weakened division, flipping tanks, smashing radios, and obliterating headquarters. The division commander, General Fritz Bayerlein, former chief of staff for Rommel’s Afrika Korps, described “half-crazed soldiers jumping out of the craters of a lunar landscape, running in circles.… Everything was burned and blasted.” He calculated that 70 percent of his men were dead, wounded, or inert with “a feeling of helplessness, weakness, and inferiority.” Orders could be transmitted only by motorcycle couriers nosing a path through drifted debris. When Field Marshal Kluge passed word that the St.-Lô–Périers corridor must hold, Bayerlein replied, “Tell the field marshal that the Panzer Lehr is destroyed. Only the dead can still hold.”

Unaware of the size of the American host and lulled into complacency by Monday’s aborted attack, German commanders had been caught out. As Montgomery intended, two-thirds or more of Seventh Army’s panzers still faced the British in the east, and reserves in the German Fifteenth Army remained pinned to the Pas de Calais, awaiting the thirty Allied divisions still believed to be assembling in England for a second invasion. Seventh Army failed to keep a sufficient armored reserve to plug any breach in the Cotentin, and battlefield leadership proved wanting. Kluge’s headquarters informed Berlin late Tuesday night: “The front has, so to speak, burst. There is a penetration of two to five kilometers deep on a front seven to eight kilometers wide. It has not yet been possible to seal this off.”

Nor would it be possible. Collins had massed 120,000 troops on a five-mile front along the St.-Lô–Périers road, plus fifteen thousand engineers to lift mines and bury dead livestock. His six hundred artillery tubes, with 140,000 rounds stockpiled, exceeded the firepower of the other three First Army corps combined. Most Sherman tanks were now fitted with hedge cutters for slashing through the bocage—rugged tusks designed by GIs and fabricated with angle-iron salvaged from German beach obstacles. Welders and virtually all of the oxygen acetylene cylinders in England had been flown to Normandy, where an assembly line in St.-Jean-de-Daye turned out three hundred cutters in two days, all kept secret before
COBRA.
No less innovative was a decision by Major General Elwood “Pete” Quesada, the tactical air commander, to position liaison officers with VHF radios in each tank column for direct communication with fighter-bombers overhead, a collaboration that proved priceless in what airmen called “hazing the Hun.”

Collins had not planned to launch his exploitation force—the 1st Infantry Division and two armored divisions, the 2nd and 3rd—until a clear hole had been drilled through enemy defenses by shock battalions from the 4th, 9th, and 30th Infantry Divisions. But the absence of the usual German counterattack on Tuesday afternoon suggested disarray and debility in the opposing ranks, even if the lead U.S. echelons had yet to break into the enemy’s rear. At 5:45
P.M.
on Tuesday, Collins ordered the follow-on forces to attack the next morning, July 26. Riflemen crept forward through the night, feeling for booby traps, removing mines, and listening for the growl of panzer engines.

With the new day, the American onslaught built momentum, as if both opposing armies had begun to slide across a landscape tilting south. GIs rode into battle “Russian style” on tank hulls, leaping off to spray every swale and thicket with blistering fire. On average, 1st Division troops required under three minutes to clear each hedgerow, a task that had taken hours just a few weeks earlier. On the eastern lip of the breach, forcing a narrow sunken road to St.-Gilles cost seven hundred 30th Division casualties, but by midafternoon tanks were churning through the village against little opposition. Marigny fell to the 1st Division, the 9th Division lunged nearly three miles beyond the Périers road, and at four
P.M.
the German Seventh Army reported Americans leaking through seven punctures in the narrow front. Enemy efforts to fling two divisions west across the Vire River to cork the bottle came to naught after the U.S. XIX Corps blocked the move. Fuel shortages forced abandonment of two Panther companies from the 2nd SS Panzer Division and an American patrol killed the Das Reich commander, a small but satisfying measure of vengeance for the massacres at Tulle and Oradour. Kluge told subordinates to expect no further reinforcements for at least a week.

By nightfall on Thursday, 100,000 Americans were pouring through the five-mile breach, armored columns had closed on Coutances, and Bradley’s map board showed ever more enemy positions with unit icons marked “Rem”—remnants. “This thing has busted wide open,” the 30th Division commander told Collins.

French farmers flitted across the battlefield, stripping shoes and tunics from German corpses. GIs found white tablecloths and wilting flowers on a mess table in a captured bivouac, along with well-thumbed pornography, copies of
Life
magazine, and checkers on a board abandoned in mid-game. A tank lieutenant saw a German drop his rifle and scamper away. “Then I caught sight of holes in his head, and he crashed full tilt into an apple tree,” he wrote. “He was running dead, like a chicken.”

On Friday enemy forces scuffed to the rear across a twenty-mile front, pressed by both Collins’s VII Corps and Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, clattering down a corridor along the Cotentin coast. German ambuscades, local counterattacks, and confusion permitted substantial enemy forces to escape entrapment in the Cotentin. Even so, sheets of marching fire took a heavy toll. Pilots over Roncey reported a “fighter-bomber’s paradise,” with German traffic triple-banked and crawling bumper to bumper. For six hours Allied planes lashed the column, eventually joined by artillery, tanks, and tank destroyers until more than 100 panzers and 250 other vehicles stood wrecked if not burning; survivors pelted away on foot, silhouetted against the flames. The Hun had been hazed.

Coutances fell on Saturday morning, July 29. German naval crews at Granville spiked their shore guns before fleeing. “Things on our front really look good,” an elated Bradley wrote Eisenhower. Ahead lay Avranches, among the oldest towns in Normandy, where the English monarch Henry II had arrived, barefoot and hatless, to make public penance on his knees for the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Built on a high bluff overlooking holy Mont-St.-Michel, eight miles to the west, Avranches gave onto Brittany and the Breton ports coveted by Allied logisticians. On Sunday evening, a spearhead from the 4th Armored Division lunged into the town only to find it undefended. Jubilant Frenchmen greeted them with waving tricolors.

Belatedly alive to their peril, German troops hurried toward Avranches in trucks and horse-drawn wagons. Counterattacking at dawn, they were thrown back with white phosphorus, strafing P-47s, and gouts of Sherman fire. American tankers and riflemen soon seized the vital bridge over the Sélune River at Pontaubault, four miles south of town and unaccountably still intact. Within hours, three more crossing sites over the Sélune had been secured. Here the roads radiated to all points of the compass, including the Brittany ports. Seven thousand German prisoners shambled into VIII Corps cages on July 31 alone; many had been simply disarmed and waved to the rear unescorted. “We face a defeated enemy,” General Barton told subordinates in the 4th Infantry Division, “an enemy terribly low in morale, terribly confused.”