The Canadians also lacked the American half-track, but they had shown the right approach in their advance on Carpiquet by mounting infantry on tanks and rounding up every available Bren-gun carrier. But the British attempt to take Caen was bound to fail, even if there had not been delays at the start and congestion on the beaches when the second wave arrived. The advance of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry to Lebisey, less than a couple of miles from the centre of Caen, was a courageous achievement. Its battered remnants had to withdraw, lacking that vital armoured support.
On the other hand, their fate would have been far worse if the 21st Panzer-Division had received the decisive leadership which Feuchtinger so conspicuously failed to provide. By the time Oppeln-Bronikowski’s panzer regiment had circumnavigated its way through Caen and was ready to attack the gap between the 3rd Division and the Canadians late in the afternoon, the British were ready to receive them. Lieutenant Colonel Eadie, the commanding officer of the Staffordshire Yeomanry, had predicted their move. He had concentrated three troops of ‘Firefly’ Shermans armed with the seventeen-pounder gun, a main armament almost as effective as the Tiger’s 88 mm, just west of Hermanville.[17] With their greatly superior range, these tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry knocked out thirteen of Oppeln-Bronikowski’s Mark IV panzers in a matter of minutes. Only a small detachment of the 21st Panzer-Division slipped through to the coast, but they too withdrew rapidly.
By a happy coincidence for the British, the dramatic appearance at 20.30 hours of nearly 250 gliders bringing an air-landing brigade to reinforce the 6th Airborne Division, helped persuade Oppeln-Bronikowski to withdraw. The battlefield virtually froze as everyone stared in admiration at the sight. A subaltern in the 2nd Battalion Royal Ulster Rifles then overheard one of his soldiers comment on the arrival of their sister unit by air: ‘I suppose that’s what the 1st Battalion calls a fucking route march.’ Suddenly the flak detachments and machine guns of the 21st Panzer opened up, firing furiously. They brought down fewer than a dozen gliders, although they claimed twenty-six.
Hillman was finally subdued at 20.15 hours. The Suffolks began to dig in for the night and their supporting tank squadron pulled back to reammunition. All work stopped as they too watched the gliders arrive. ‘It equally impressed the German prisoners,’ their commanding officer noted, ‘but in a different way. They did not seem to think it was quite fair.’
A different sense of unreality still cocooned their supreme commander at the Berghof. Three hours before, General Günther Blumentritt, the chief of staff of OB West, had to tell Seventh Army headquarters that Hitler wanted ‘the enemy annihilated by the evening of 6 June since there exists a danger of additional sea and airborne landings. In accordance with an order from General Jodl, all units must be diverted to the point of penetration in Calvados. The beachhead there must be cleaned up by NOT later than tonight.’ The chief of staff Seventh Army replied that that would be impossible. Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, who was with him at the Berghof, saw that he had not yet accepted the true might of Allied air power: ‘He was still convinced that the ground forces could be thrown back.’
A striking example of Allied air supremacy took place that very evening. Together with the SS Hitler Jugend Division, Hitler was counting on another full-strength panzer division to drive the Allies back into the sea. Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein’s Panzer Lehr Division had been ordered to make all speed for the coast. But even before Panzer Lehr moved out during the afternoon of 6 June, its units were bombed in their assembly area. Bayerlein reported to Generaloberst Dollmann at his headquarters at Le Mans. He wanted to keep his tank troops under cover during the day to avoid the Allied fighter-bombers, but Dollmann ordered him to keep moving. Bayerlein, ‘a short, stocky, energetic man’, who had been Rommel’s chief of staff in North Africa, was almost speechless with rage at the long delay and then the stupid waste.
Rommel himself was not in a good mood when he returned to discover that the last remaining bridge over the lower Seine had been destroyed by Allied fighter-bombers. He went straight to the operations room in the Château de La Roche-Guyon and stared for a long time at the map. ‘What’s happened to our proud Luftwaffe?’ he asked cynically. The answer was predictable. ‘How goes the attack of the 21st Panzer-Division?’ No details had arrived. ‘Why were the Panzer Lehr Division and the 12th SS held up?’ In reply, Speidel explained the refusal of OKW to come to a decision. ‘Madness,’ said Rommel. ‘Of course, now they will arrive too late, but we must get them moving immediately.’
The Allies, although they had failed to secure key objectives, were at least ashore. Hitler’s beloved panzer divisions were incapable of dislodging them now. But the fighting ahead would make the Allied casualties suffered on D-Day appear light in comparison. Those British formations which felt that they had ‘done it all before’ in North Africa were about to receive a nasty shock when they came up against the Waffen-SS. Allied air power could do comparatively little to help them when it came to fighting skilled and determined defenders, village by village in the cornfields round Caen and field by field in the Normandy bocage.[18]
11. Securing the Beachheads
On the night following D-Day, few in the Omaha beachhead managed to sleep. In a quarry beside the Vierville draw, 29th Division staff officers bedded down on discarded lifebelts at their headquarters. Up on the bluffs and in apple orchards inland, farmhands and Pennsylvania coal miners from their division dug their foxholes with professional speed. They were to need them as protection from the indiscriminate firing that night. Nervous and exhausted men shot at any movement or silhouette, imagining it to be a German sniper. One young soldier shot a calf with his Thompson sub-machine gun.
Others tried to create an instant trench by exploding a charge of TNT in the ground, with the warning cry of ‘Fire in the hole!’ This only heightened the impression of fighting in all directions. Luftwaffe bombers arrived after nightfall to attack the ships at anchor, and the barrage of anti-aircraft tracer fire prompted many to compare it to a Fourth of July firework party. But the German air raid was too little and too late to help the defenders.
On 7 June, Oberstleutnant Ziegelmann of the 352nd Infanterie-Division looked out from the cliffs near Pointe et Raz de la Percée. He was less than 2,000 yards to the west of General Gerow’s command post on Omaha beach. ‘The sea was like the picture of “Kiel review of the fleet”,’ he noted angrily. ‘Ships of all sorts were close together on the beach and in the water broadly echeloned in depth. And the entire agglomeration remained there intact without any real interference from the German side. I clearly understood the mood of the German soldier abandoned by the Luftwaffe.’ The embittered cry of ‘Wo ist die Luftwaffe? ’ became a constant refrain of the German army’s experience in Normandy.
Fragments of German battalions still held on in the sector, especially on the cliffs round the Pointe du Hoc, where they had counter-attacked Colonel Rudder’sRangers. The Americans had finally cleared Colleville-sur-Mer and Saint-Laurent-sur-Mer that morning. One soldier advancing through the village had turned to find a military policeman just a few yards behind him putting up ‘out of bounds’ signs. On the beach, the detritus of war defied description, with burnt-out vehicles, smashed landing craft, abandoned gas masks, Bangalore torpedoes and weapons. The scene did not stop that stickler for discipline General Gerhardt from yelling at a soldier for dropping orange peel on the ground.
17
Most British armoured regiments spread their precious Firefly tanks around, usually allocating one to each troop.
18
21st Army Group headquarters had predicted 9,250 casualties out of the 70,000 soldiers landing on the first day. Some 3,000 of these — sailors, paratroopers landing in flooded areas and crews of DD tanks — were expected to suffer death by drowning. In the event, casualty figures are very hard to define for D-Day itself, since most formations’ figures accounted for a longer period, never less than 6 to 10 June. In the confusion of the time, the high figure of missing had to be constantly recalculated, with some proved killed, some to have joined up with other units, some unaccounted wounded taken back to England, and others later found to have been taken prisoner. In very rough terms, British and Canadian casualties for D-Day itself were around 3,000 killed, missing and wounded. American losses were much higher because of Omaha and the two Airborne Divisions. General Bradley gave a figure of 4,649 US seaborne casualties, but this appears on the high side when compared with divisional returns. The only accurate figures one can give are those from 6 to 20 June inclusive. American First Army losses came to 24,162 (of whom 3,082 were killed, 13,121 wounded and 7,959 missing). British casualties over the same period totalled 13,572 (of whom 1,842 were killed, 8,599 wounded and 3,131 missing). Canadian casualties for the same period amounted to 2,815 (of whom 363 were killed, 1,359 wounded and 1,093 missing).