'The Germans in Normandy'
This week's excerpt covers the moment when the American breakout began, as seen from the German perspective
Richard Hargreaves’ The Germans in Normandy has received wide acclaim since it was first published in 2006. This is one of the best single-volume histories of the campaign in Normandy, even if the emphasis is on the German perspective.
Using a wide range of sources, many of them not published in English, he paints a picture of the gradual deterioration of the German military machine. Contemporary accounts, from Generals down to ordinary Landser, describe the growing desperation of an Army that is constantly exhorted to fight on in ever more impossible circumstances. They faced two Allied armies that grew in strength day by day whilst their own side was ground down by air atacks and recieved few replacements for their own losses.
The following excerpt covers the period when their complete collapse became inevitable:
Wednesday, 26 July, dawned brightly. It would be another hot, sunny day in Normandy. And it would be another day of stemming the American tide. It began on the German left flank, along the Atlantic coastline. The Americans threw another corps into the attack, two divisions, to batter the German line anchored on the Atlantic shore.
The ranks of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers bore the brunt of the onslaught near the town of Periers. For once, panic struck the usually reliable ranks of the Waffen SS. 'Battery crews came back from the front and reported: "There's nothing more at the front," ' gunner Hans Weidner of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers remembered. The men of Gotz von Berlichingen streamed to the rear in flight. Weidner continued:
A destroyed bridge over a river with swampy banks, which was the only link with the rear still open, forced a halt. After a short discussion and under the weight of the Jabos [Allied fighter bombers] still operating above us, the gun barrels were rendered useless; the breechblocks sank into the swamp.
Barely had the scattered battery assembled in the rear area than the order reached us that we were to be used as infantry. In platoon strength, under the command of Obersturmfilhrer Prinz we marched to the planned area of the front, which was not continuous. For us artilleryman, not trained as infantry, this was action which caused us extremely bloody losses. After a number of days, when we were almost half wiped out, we were pulled out and sent on our way far to the rear to re-form and re-arm.
To the east, somehow the Panzer Lehr held on. For three hours fighter bombers pounded the division's crumbling front, before the Americans jumped off, again supported by a rolling air assault. Weakened by two days of fighting and two days of bombing, the panzer grenadiers fell back. And all the time, the Jabos circled hoping to pick off the retreating Germans.
Major Helmut Ritgen waited for the American steamroller with his panzer regiment on the outskirts of the small town of St Gilles, a few miles west of St Lo, mostly turned to rubble by the air raids of the previous day. 'Every road to my panzers was monitored by the murderous circling Thunderbolts,' he wrote. 'One had to play Russian roulette by trying to outwit the pilots while they rose back into the air after descending to attack. It took an entirety to move along any road.'
The fighters-bombers ranged deep into the interior; far behind Panzer Lehr's lines. It was impossible to send reinforcements to the front. All roads leading to the line were blocked by air attacks. No vehicles could move. No men could move. The defenders were on their own. The Panzer Lehr's front buckled. By the day’s end, the enemy penetration was four miles deep.
Panzer Lehr still had a front. But for how much longer, Fritz Bayerlein asked himself. The forty-five year old general was becoming increasingÂly war weary, despondent, irascible. Bayerlein was a rarity in the Wehrmacht: an officer who had served in all theatres of war - Poland, North Africa, Russia, and twice in France. But after six weeks in Normandy, Panzer Lehr's operations officer Kurt Kauffmann was beginning to question his commander's leadership. 'He was a very good soldier, but he was worn out,' Kauffmann commented. 'In Normandy he showed himself nervous and weak.'
Gunther von Kluge was also beginning to have doubts about Bayerlein's state of mind. On 26 July, an emissary from the field marshal's staff arrived at Panzer Lehr's forward headquarters near the village of Dangy. The officer, an Oberstleutnant, brought personal orders from Kluge. 'You've got to hold out,' the officer told Bayerlein. 'Not a single man is to leave his position.' Bayerlein was enraged. 'Out in front everyone is holding out. Everyone,' he told the emissary. 'My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews - they're all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post. Not one. They're lying in their foxholes mute and silent, for they are dead. Dead. You may report to the field marshal that the Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated. Only the dead can now hold the line.' To reinforce his point, the Panzer Lehr commander sent a report to Kluge's headquarters which pulled no punches:
The forces are so weak, however, that we fear a breakthrough at any time. The division's losses in panzers, panzerjager,is and 5,000 men in forty-eight days of continuous heavy fighting are so great, and the poorly-trained replacements who lack battle experience so inadequate, that the division no longer has any substantial infantry or armoured forces.
In previous reports, I have already pointed out that we can calculate the precise moment when we will have no more panzer grenadiers or engineers left as a result of the unavoidable losses of a material battle waged with such unequal forces. That moment has now come, unless the division is provided with forces immediately.
The thin veneer of the German front along the Atlantic coast disintegrated the next day. The house of cards collapsed. American armour rolled all night, bypassing the German defenders. In the small hours of 27 July, the US 2nd Armored Division reached its first objective - a road junction far behind the Panzer Lehr's lines. The Americans were all but in open ground. For once, the Allied attack did not lose momentum. The American armour did not pause for the infantry. It kept on rolling. To the south, to the south-east, to the south-west. It kept on rolling. The Americans had learned the art of Blitzkrieg, Hans Stober of the 17th SS Panzer Grenadiers astutely observed. 'We could see that the Americans had learned how to break through, ignoring their flanks and pushing on. We lost vast quantities of materiel.'
Throughout the base of the Cotentin peninsula, isolated pockets of German troops - Fallschirmjager, infantry, panzer grenadiers, Waffen SS, regular Army - were left behind, encircled, cut off. Their comrades ran. 'Everything was chaos,' grenadier Walter Padberg recalled. 'Allied artillery and aeroplanes were everywhere. I did not know any of the people around me.' The temporary commander of 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, one Obersturmbannfuhrer Christian Tychsen, tried to rally his men. 'I am a veteran panzer commander,' he urged them on. 'If the enemy succeeds with this breakthrough, then the war in France for us is over.' Tyschen lasted two days in command of Das Reich; he died of wounds suffered in an air attack on 28 July. His rallying cry fell on deaf ears.
The German Army was breaking apart. It was a sight few, if any, Landsers had witnessed. 'I had seen the first retreat from Moscow which was terrible enough, but at least units were still intact,' Sturmmann Helmut Gunther of the 17th SS recalled. 'Here, we had become a cluster of individuals. We were not a battle-worthy company any longer. All that we had going for us was that we knew each other very well.'
Fritz Bayerlein could see the writing was on the wall. He had no front. He had no division. That evening, he reported bitterly: 'After forty-nine days of fierce combat, the Panzer Lehr Division is finally annihilated. The enemy is now rolling through all sectors. All calls for help have gone unanswered because no one believes how serious the situation is.'
The American advance was now rolling at fifty miles per hour, tearing south-westwards down the Norman lanes
At the day's end, the splintered groups of the Panzer Lehr just about linked up with grenadiers of the 17th SS in the west, but in the east there was a gaping hole, a six-mile gap in the front before there was any sign of men of the 352nd Infantry Division and II Fallschirmjager Corps. At his headquarters near the village of St Vigor des Monts, the corps' commander, the uncompromising Eugen Meindl, pondered over the task of sealing the gap.
Meindl was a battlefield general. He had little time for theory. The soldier, he said, learned his trade on the field of battle. 'Do not hesitate,' he told them. Defence was an anathema to him, the very opposite of what the paratrooper trained for. 'Our task must change rapidly from defence to attack.' Now Meindl himself hesitated. He had been ordered to throw two panzer divisions into the fray - the veteran 2nd, the untried 116th - and halt the breakthrough. But the paratroop general had seen for himself Allied air supremacy at work that very day; it had taken him four hours to drive nine miles. And now, the high command wanted to commit two armoured divisions under skies which the enemy ruled. Meindl would have none of it.
When Kluge's son, a staff officer at OB West, arrived at the paratroopers' headquarters to pass on his father's orders, Meindl was blunt. 'Tomorrow's attack is going to be a failure. Those tanks are destined to be smashed,' he told the young Kluge. 'The time has come when Normandy can no longer be held. It cannot be held because the troops are exhausted. All that's left for the grenadiers to do is to lie down and sacrifice their lives. It's heartbreaking to have to stand by and watch.'
The entire valley we are in seems to be on fire. Thick columns of smoke rise from the shot-up vehicles.
The American advance was now rolling at fifty miles per hour, tearing south-westwards down the Norman lanes. In doing so, they were shredding five German divisions, including two Waffen SS units. The scattered remnants of these divisions were either left where they stood and held out to the last, or fled southwards, disorganised. The German Army streamed back across the foot of the Cotentin peninsula. Time and again the German soldier found the 'Ami' had already beaten him to his objective. 'The roads were crowded with American vehicles, and all that we could do was to take to the fields on foot,' Helmut Gunther of the Gotz von Berlichingen recalled. 'We were losing stragglers all the time. We were not a battle-worthy company any longer.'
This was a new experience for the German soldier in Normandy: encirclement. Those who did not fall victim to the American armour, fell victim to the fighter bombers. 'Wild confusion in all units,' the operations officer of a flak unit in the 17th SS wrote in his diary. 'Roads clogged with vehicles. Heavy losses caused by Jabo attacks, since we have to move by daylight to escape encirclement.' He continued:
The entire valley we are in seems to be on fire. Thick columns of smoke rise from the shot-up vehicles. Amongst them ammunition shoots upwards. In the evening we are again attacked with bombs, and before it is pitch black, they also fire at us with artillery. It's barely dark when the streets are again clogged with vehicles. A blood-curdling picture. Everywhere there are blazing vehicles, exploding ammunition, burning fuel and supply trucks...Everyone streams to the rear. If the Americans used paratroops here now, the chaos would be complete - or it would be the end. We go past numerous blazing wrecks.
The retreat was desperate, one SS Untersturmfuhrer, recalled. The German Army had been driven back so far that maps, given to front-line commanders before the battle, ran out. The men followed their instincts and headed south. 'We were unable to tell whether the US army had stretched this far already with its feelers,' the officer wrote. 'There was no sound of battle, no German soldiers, but also no Americans in the land. Weary, hungry and at the end of our strength we marched south. My men could hardly stay on their feet. I too was tired, but the uncerÂtainty about how everything would progress did not allow me to sleep.'
The rout had begun. It would not end. Omar Bradley saw to that. The US First Army commander was determined to press home his advantage. 'We shall continue attacking, never give him a chance to rest, never give him a chance to give in. We shall never stop until the [German] Army is beaten and until the [German] Army knows it is beaten.' Late on 28 July, he wrote to Allied Supreme Commander Eisenhower. 'To say that we are riding high tonight is putting it mildly. Things on our front really look good.'
© Richard Hargreaves 2006, 2019, 'The Germans in Normandy'. Reproduced courtesy of Pen & Sword Publishers Ltd
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