The Victors: Eisenhower and His Boys : The Men of World War II (29 page)

Thanks to American productivity and ingenuity, there were many more Shermans in action than Panthers or Tigers (in fact, about half the Wehrmacht’s tanks in Normandy were Mark IVs, twenty-six tons). Besides numbers, the Shermans had other advantages. They used less than half the gasoline of the larger tanks.  They were faster and more maneuverable, with double and more the range. A Sherman’s tracks lasted for 2,500 miles; the Panther’s and Tiger’s more like 500. The Sherman’s turret turned much faster than that of the Panther or Tiger.  In addition, the narrower track of the Sherman made it a much superior road vehicle. But the wider track of the Panther and Tiger made them more suited to soft terrain.

And so it went. For every advantage of the German heavy tanks, there was a disadvantage, as for the American medium tanks. The trouble in Normandy was that the German tanks were better designed for hedgerow fighting. If and when the battle ever became a mobile one, the situation would reverse. Then the much-despised Sherman could show its stuff.

American transport and utility vehicles were far superior to the German counterpart. For example, the jeep and the deuce-and-a-half (two-and-a-half-ton) truck had four-wheel-drive capability, and they were more reliable than the German vehicles. But again like the Sherman, their advantages did not show in the hedgerows, where squad-size actions predominated and the mass movement of large numbers of troops over long distances was irrelevant.  With any weapon, design differences lead to losses as well as gains. The German potato masher, for example, could be thrown farther in part because it was lighter. It had less than half the explosive power of the American grenade. The GIs said it made more noise than damage.

One other point about weapons. Over four decades of interviewing former GIs, I’ve been struck by how often they tell stories about duds, generally about shells falling near their foxholes and failing to explode. Lt. George Wilson of the 4th Division said that after one shelling near St.-Lô, “I counted eight duds sticking in the ground within thrity yards of my foxhole.” There are no statistics available on this phenomenon, nor is there any evidence on why, but I’ve never heard a German talk about American duds. The shells fired by the GIs were made by free American labor; the shells fired by the Wehrmacht were made by slave labor from Poland, France, and throughout the German empire. And at least some of the slaves must have mastered the art of turning out shells that passed examination but were nevertheless sabotaged effectively.  (In 1998, I received a letter from a man who identified himself as a Jewish slave laborer in a German factory making panzerfaust shells. He said he and his fellow slaves had discovered that if they mixed sand in with the sulfur they could render the explosive inoperable, and that they could do it when the German inspectors’ heads were turned. He said only German soldiers put on the final touch, the trigger mechanism. But those German soldiers liked to take breaks.  When they did, the slaves speeded up their output but in the process screwed up the mechanism. The German soldiers were glad to have a higher output and never inspected the shells that had been produced while they were on break. That, he said proudly, was his contribution, and he was glad to see from the story about German duds inCitizen Soldiers that the GIs had noticed and lives had been saved.)

A major shortcoming of the Sherman for hedgerow fighting was its unarmored underbelly, which made it particularly vulnerable to the panzerfaust when it tried to climb a hedgerow. British tanks without infantry support had been unable to make significant progress at Caen; American infantry without tank support were unable to take St.-Lô, the key crossroads city in lower Normandy.  Lt. Col. Fritz Ziegelmann of the 352nd Division attributed the German success in holding St.-Lô to “the surprising lack of tanks. Had tanks supported the American infantry on June 16, St. Lo would not have been in German hands any longer that evening.”

Another reason St.-Lô wasn’t in American hands: Normandy had its wettest July in forty years. One Marauder unit, the 323rd Group, had seventeen straight missions scrubbed during the first two and a half weeks of July. Others fared little better. Perhaps more than any other single factor, this bad weather explains the relative German success in Normandy in the early summer of 1944. Rain and fog made it possible for them to move reinforcements and supplies to the front.  There was nothing the Americans could do about the weather, but they could go after their problems in getting tanks into the hedgerow fighting. In so doing, they showed their mechanical ability and talents, and their ingenuity and resourcefulness. Rommel was impressed by the effort and results, saying that he thought the Americans “showed themselves to be very advanced in the tactical handling of their forces” and that they “profited much more than the British from their experiences.”

Experiments involved welding pipes or steel teeth onto the front of the Sherman tank. Lt. Charles Green, a tanker in the 29th Division, devised a bumper that was made from salvaged railroad tracks that Rommel had used as beach obstacles.  It was incredibly strong and permitted the Shermans to bull their way through the thickest hedgerows. In the 2nd Armored Division, Sgt. Curtis Culin designed and supervised the construction of a hedgerow-cutting device made from scrap iron pulled from a German roadblock. The blades gave the tank a resemblance to a rhinoceros, so Shermans equipped with Culin’s invention were known as rhino tanks.

Another big improvement was in communications. After a series of experiments with telephones placed on the back of the tank, the solution that worked best was to have an interphone box on the tank, into which the infantryman could plug a radio handset. The handset’s long cord permitted the GI to lie down behind or underneath the tank while talking to the tank crew, which, when buttoned down, was all but blind. Many, perhaps a majority, of the tank commanders killed in action had been standing in the open turret, so as to see. Now, at least in some situations, the tank could stay buttoned up while the GI on the phone acted as a forward artillery observer.

These improvements, and others, have prompted Michael Doubler to write in his prize-winningClosing with the Enemy: How GIs Fought the War in Europe, “In its search for solutions to the difficulties of hedgerow combat, the American army encouraged the free flow of ideas and the entrepreneurial spirit. Coming from a wide variety of sources, ideas generally flowed upward from the men actually engaged in battle.”

They were learning by doing.

12 -    Breakout and Pursuit

FROM THE HIGH COMMAND down to the lowliest private, the Americans in Normandy applied everything they had learned to the mounting of Operation Cobra, including a massive air bombardment, forward observers in small planes and at the front lines calling in artillery fire, tanks slicing through hedgerows with their rhinos, and infantry moving forward before the smoke cleared, not pausing to help a wounded buddy or ducking behind a bit of shelter and letting the others go ahead. The shock of the bombardment and the elan of the infantry were sufficient to drive the Germans from their positions.  The breakthrough was a great feat of arms. First Army had accomplished something that had been nearly impossible in 1914-1918, and not achieved by the British in front of Caen in June-July 1944. First Army had accomplished something that it had not been trained or equipped to do, in the process developing an air-ground team unmatched in the world. Now, along with Third Army, it was finally going to get into a campaign for which it had been trained and equipped.  The dean of American military historians, Russell Weigley, referring to the flow of GIs that poured around the German open flank, writes in his classic study Eisenhower’s Lieutenants, “This virtual road march was war such as the American army was designed for, especially the American armored divisions.  Appealing also to the passion for moving on that is so much a part of the American character and heritage, it brought out the best in the troops, their energy and mechanical resourcefulness. . . .

“Now that Cobra had achieved the breakout, the most mobile army in the world for the first time since D-Day could capitalize on its mobility.” Weigley further notes that with the hard-won mobility, “the issues confronting the army became for the first time in Europe strategic rather than tactical. The soldiers’ battle of Normandy was about to become the generals’ battle of France.” With the German left flank in the air, and the Allies facing an open road to Paris, Patton was activated and all his pent-up energy turned loose. He had come over in time for Cobra, to familiarize himself with the situation and to set up Third Army headquarters. He took command of one of the corps already in Normandy and had other divisions coming in from England.* By August 1, he had divisions attacking in four directions. Meanwhile First Army pressed forward to the south as German resistance collapsed.

When Third Army was activated, Gen. Courtney Hodges succeeded Bradley as First Army commander while Bradley moved up to command Twelfth Army Group (First and Third Armies).

As the general German retreat began, the American air-ground team pounded the enemy. The Wehrmacht was out of the hedgerows, out in the open, trying desperately to move by day to get away. Patton’s tanks mauled them, the Jabos (the German term for the Allied fighter-bombers) terrorized them.  “I had seen the first retreat from Moscow,” Sgt. Helmut Gunther of the 17th Panzer Grenadiers recalled, “which was terrible enough, but at least units were still intact. Here, we had become a cluster of individuals. We were not a battleworthy company any longer. All that we had going for us was that we knew each other very well.”

The P-47s responded to calls from the tankers and infantry over the radio, descended on their targets, and hit them with napalm, 500-pound bombs, rockets, and .50-caliber machine-gun fire. Destroyed German tanks, trucks, scout cars, wagons, and artillery pieces, along with dead and wounded horses and men, covered the landscape.

Capt. Belton Cooper described the Allied teamwork. When two Panther tanks threatened his maintenance company from across a hedgerow, the liaison officer in a Sherman got on its radio to give the coordinates to any Jabos in the area.  “Within less than 45 seconds, two P-47’s appeared right over the tree tops traveling like hell at 300 feet.” They let go their bombs a thousand feet short of Cooper’s location: “It seemed like the bombs were going to land square in the middle of our area.” He and his men dove into their foxholes.  The bombs went screaming over. The P-47s came screaming in right behind them, firing their eight .50-caliber machine guns. The bombs hit a German ammunition dump. “The blast was awesome; flames and debris shot some 500 ft. into the air.  There were bogie wheels, tank tracks, helmets, backpacks and rifles flying in all directions. The hedgerow between us and the German tanks protected us from the major direct effects of the blast, however, the tops of trees were sheared off and a tremendous amount of debris came down on us.” “I have been to two church socials and a county fair,” said one P-47 pilot, “but I never saw anything like this before!”

The Jabos were merciless. The constant attacks inevitably broke up German units, which had a terrible effect on morale. A theme that always comes up when interviewing German veterans is comradeship. So, too, with American veterans, of course, but there is an intensity about the Germans on the subject that is unique. One reason is that generally German squads were made up of men from the same town or region, so the men had known each other as children. Another is the experience of being caught in a debacle-Jabos overhead, artillery raining down, tanks firing from the rear.

Corp. Friedrich Bertenrath of the 2nd Panzer Division spoke to the point: “The worst thing that could happen to a soldier was to be thrown into some group in which he knew no one. In our unit, we would never abandon each other. We had fought in Russia together. We were comrades, and always came to the rescue. We protected our comrades so they could go home to their wives, children, and parents. That was our motivation. The idea that we would conquer the world had fallen long ago.”

Lt. Walter Padberg of Grenadier Regiment 959 was appalled: “Everything was chaos. Allied artillery and airplanes were everywhere.” Then, the worst possible happened: “I did not know any of the people around me.” Padberg continued fleeing, essentially on his own even though in the midst of others. The retreat was turning into a rout.

A historic opportunity presented itself. As the British and Canadians picked up the attack on their front, Patton had open roads ahead of him, inviting his fast-moving armored columns to cut across the rear of the Germans-whose horse-drawn artillery and transport precluded rapid movement-encircle them and destroy the German army in France, then end the war with a triumphal unopposed march across the Rhine and on to Berlin.

Patton lusted to seize that opportunity. He had trained and equipped Third Army for just this moment. Straight east to Paris, then northwest along the Seine to seize the crossings, and the Allies would complete an encirclement that would lead to a bag of prisoners bigger than North Africa or Stalingrad. More important, it would leave the Germans defenseless in the west because Patton could cut off the German divisions in northern France, Belgium, and Holland as he drove for the Rhine.

That was the big solution. Obviously risky, if successful it promised the kind of big encirclements the Wehrmacht had achieved in 1940 in France and 1941 in the Soviet Union. But neither Eisenhower nor Bradley was bold enough to take it.  They worried about Patton’s flanks-he insisted that the Jabos could protect them. They worried about Patton’s fuel and other supply-he insisted that in an emergency they could be airlifted to him.

Arguing over the merits of different generals is a favorite pastime of many military history buffs. It is harmless and often instructive. And we all have the right to pass judgment; that right comes from the act of participation. The American people had provided Generals Eisenhower and Bradley with a fabulous amount of weaponry and equipment, and some two million of their young men. There has to be an accounting of how well they used these assets to bring about the common goal. And how well means, Did they achieve the victory at the lowest cost in the shortest time? Were they prudent where prudence was appropriate? More important, given their superiority over the enemy, did they take appropriate risks that utilized the greatest assets their country had given them, air power and mobility?