“What’s going on down there?” he asked as he came up beside me.
“Damned if I know,” I replied.
“But I just saw you come up the hill a few minutes ago from the town.”
“I didn’t stay around long enough to find out what was happening.”
I explained that I had a bunch of spark plugs to deliver to our tanks on the other side of the town, where I’d be going as soon as the firing subsided. He asked if he could follow me. “Be my guest,” I replied.
Shortly thereafter, the firing seemed to subside considerably, and I figured it was time to go. Just then a 36th Armored Infantry half-track came down the road. We decided to follow it.
Suddenly, the reporter became apprehensive. After much cogitation, he turned to me. “Lieutenant, you go on down there and deliver those spark plugs. I think I’ll go back to battalion, look at the map, and get the ‘big picture’.” This was the first time I’d heard the expression “big picture.”
As we followed the half-track down the hill into Camprond, the firing continued to subside. We passed through the village and found the road to the right on the map and started back up the hill. About half a mile out of town, we came upon the tank column, which had just been engaged in a heavy fire-fight. There were German vehicles and litter on the road. The body of a young German soldier, stripped to his waist, lay on a stretcher beside the road where he had evidently been left by his own medics. Some soldiers in their final agony develop a wax-like hue, then later turn whitish gray, particularly if there had been a great loss of blood.
This man, with his blond hair and ivory skin, looked like a wax figure.
The 33d Maintenance people were glad to see me coming with their spark plugs, and they wasted no time in placing them in their engines. They gave me the old plugs so I could have them sandblasted, then the tank column continued to the high ground north of Coutances. From this position they could dominate the road net into the city in all directions while the infantry secured the city itself. This opened the road for Patton to move his divisions south toward Avranches and the Brest peninsula.
Lessons from Operation Cobra
The first phase of Operation Cobra ended with the complete destruction of the left flank of the German army.
This enabled the First Army to move south to widen the gap and outflank the Germans south of Saint-Lô.
The comparison between this operation and the operations in the bocage country, south of Airel, was astonishing. Previously, it had taken twelve days to penetrate eight miles. Including the operation around Villiers-Fossard, our total tank losses had been eighty-seven. In the first phase of Operation Cobra, from the morning of July 26 through July 28, the division moved forward seventeen miles to Coutances with a loss of only two tanks.
The lessons were straightforward. The hedge choppers, although we had fewer than half of those ordered, allowed the tanks to break through the hedgerows at a number of points simultaneously without forewarning the Germans. Next, we had the almost perfect classroom solution of air, armor, infantry, and artillery working in support of one another. The crushing firepower completely destroyed enemy troops in the area and neutralized their reserves. This kept the flanks open long enough for the armor to secure a complete breakthrough.
The armored division is in its ideal element once it is through the main line of resistance and has a more or less open field. Here it can move rapidly, bypass pockets of enemy resistance, and keep casualties at a minimum. Conversely, when it gets bogged down and moves slowly, casualties reach a maximum. Operation Cobra will be remembered as one of the best-planned and best-executed examples of combined-arms warfare in military history.
4 – The Falaise Pocket
Breakthrough Becomes Breakout
Operation Cobra now entered its second phase. On August 1, the 12th Army Group, with Gen. Omar Bradley in command, became operational. The army group consisted of the newly activated Third Army under Gen.
George Patton and the First Army under Gen. Courtney Hodges. General Montgomery retained command of the 21st Army Group, which consisted of the British Second Army and the Canadian First Army. With the British 21st Army Group maintaining terrific pressure on the Germans in the Bayeux-Caen area facing southward, the American 12th Army Group made the deep penetration through the Saint-Lô breakthrough and now began to swing around to envelop the entire left flank of the German 7th Army.
As the infantry moved into Coutances, CCB was ordered to leave the high ground and to double-back to Camprond. There they helped the 1st Infantry Division reduce a German strongpoint. They then headed south toward Cerisy la Salle. In the meantime, CCA came down on the left flank of CCB and bypassed the town of Montpinchon, a German strong-point. They put a roadblock north of Montpinchon, and elements of the 2d Armored Division swung to the left and south of CCA and blocked the road south of Roncey. This cut off the retreat of a large German column consisting of fifty tanks and self-propelled guns plus infantry, artillery, and a number of horse-drawn vehicles.
The American armored commanders called for an air strike. A drove of P47s came in, bombing and strafing the entire length of the column. When the Germans tried to abandon their vehicles and run into the fields, they came under the roaring fire of the strafing planes. This, plus the tank, artillery, and automatic weapons fire from both the armored divisions, produced a horrendous debacle for this German column.
Tanks, half-tracks, and self-propelled guns littered the highway. Many were burning; others had been abandoned by the troops in a mad dash to avoid the screaming P47s. The burned bodies of German tankers climbing out of their tanks looked like charcoal mannequins. Dead German soldiers were strewn along the highway and the fields on both sides. Many horses were killed because they could not escape the traces holding them to the burning caissons. Tank dozers had to clear the road in many areas to allow our columns through.
After the air strike, CCB headed south toward its next objective, the high ground just west of Villedieu-les-Poêles. The retreating German army was at a great disadvantage. The units that had survived outside of the initial bombardment area and then were overrun during the first phase of the breakthrough broke up into smaller columns and headed south and east as rapidly as possible to escape the oncoming Allied juggernaut.
With complete air superiority in daylight, the P47s ranged ahead of the columns and notified the ground troops of the Germans’ positions and movement. This enabled the armored columns, with infantry riding on the backs of the tanks, to intercept the retreating enemy columns. Nothing is more devastating to an infantry column than to be caught in the open by tanks. The tanks would fire rounds of high explosive (HE) aimed to hit the road in the middle of the column, then glance up about three feet before exploding. Where the two columns ran into each other, the armored column’s overwhelming firepower was immediately apparent. In many cases our armored columns would race ahead of the Germans, block the road in front of them, men call for an air strike. This ideal situation for an armored division demonstrated time and again the catastrophic results on the enemy of mobility, firepower, and shock action.
In addition to the 75mm and 76mm guns on the tanks, we had the awesome firepower of massed automatic weapons. Our .30-caliber machine guns, both air and water cooled, were of World War I vintage. The cyclic rate of fire, some six hundred rounds per minute, was much slower than that of the German counterpart, but they were reliable weapons and easy to maintain. Both the barrel and the bolt mechanism could be interchanged in a few minutes. The German standard .30 caliber was an MG42 of much more recent design and with a higher cyclic rate—twelve hundred rounds per minute. This was an excellent design, but the tolerances were so close that the barrel and the bolt were not interchangeable. For that reason, the German spare parts situation was much more critical than ours; in many cases it was easier for them to replace the entire gun if the barrel went bad. The Germans had no weapon comparable to our .50-caliber M1 machine gun. If this massive slug penetrated the torso, the hydraulic shock would generate a virtual explosion inside the body. If an arm or a leg was struck, the entire limb might be severed. The Germans were terrified of it.