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A panzer staff-sergeant, captured by the Americans, offered his interrogators a comparison between the Eastern and Western Fronts: ‘The Russian won’t let you forget for one moment … that you are fighting on his soil, that you represent something he loathes. He will endure the greatest hardships … True, the average soldier lacks the resourcefulness of the American, but he makes up for it with a steadfastness I have never seen matched. If nine men get killed in an attempt to cut through wire, the tenth will still try – and succeed. You Americans are masters of your equipment, and your equipment is very good. But you lack the Russians’ tenacity.’

Yet if both sides suffered terribly in Normandy, German losses were worse, and irreplaceable. As early as 16 June Kurt Meyer’s 12th SS Panzer Division was weakened by 1,149 casualties and its tank strength was halved; during a briefing at his command post, Meyer wrote: ‘I see worried faces … Without talking about it openly we know we are approaching a catastrophe … Faced with the enemy’s enormous naval and air superiority, we can predict the breakdown of the defensive front … We are already surviving on subsistence level. Up to now we have received neither a single replacement for comrades wounded or killed, nor one tank or gun.’

SS panzergrenadier Fritz Zimmer recorded in his diary at the end of June that his company was reduced to eighteen men; a week later, on 8 July, he fought the last action of his own war:

From 6.30 to 8 a.m. again heavy drum fire. After this Tommy attacks with great masses of infantry and many tanks. We fight as long as possible, but realise we are in a hopeless position. When the survivors try to pull back, we find ourselves already surrounded … I crawled back under continuing fire as fast as possible. Some comrades tried to do the same, unsuccessfully. I still cannot understand how nothing happened to me, with shells falling two or three metres in front, behind and beside me. Splinters whizzed about my ears. I worked my way to within about two hundred metres of our lines. It was hard work, always on my stomach, only occasionally on hands and knees, for three or four kilometres. Attacking Tommies passed me five or six paces away without noticing me in the high corn. I was nearly at the end of my tether, my feet and elbows incredibly painful and my throat parched with thirst, but I rolled on. Suddenly the vegetation thinned and I had to cross an open field. I was only ten metres from the next cornfield when three Tommies suddenly appeared and took me prisoner. I was immediately given a drink and a cigarette. At the collection point I met my Unterscharführer and other comrades from my company.

By 22 July Luftwaffe paratrooper Martin Poppel lay in hospital, recovering from wounds inflicted in Normandy and increasingly fearful for the future of his nation’s cause. ‘How did the poor buggers at the front and the exhausted civilian population at home deserve to be so badly led? We have many anxious questions about the future and our prospects in this long war. Even the most confident among us have doubts.’ Another soldier wrote to his wife on 12 August: ‘My darling Irmi, it doesn’t look too good – that would be saying too much – but you know the cheerfulness with which I go about life … Man is a creature of habit. The roar of gunfire and explosion of bombs, which at first are hard on the nerves, lose their terrors after two or three days … The last three days we have had the most wonderful summer weather – sun, warmth and blue skies – so utterly at odds with everything else we see around us. Oh well, it will turn out all right in the end. Just have as much faith in my luck as I do and everything will look brighter, a thousand kisses to you, my darling Irmi and the children, your Ferd.’

A comrade wrote likewise to his family on 10 August: ‘My darling wife and darling children … the rumble of gunfire comes ever closer. When I hear it my thoughts wander back to you, my dearest, and the question of whether I shall ever see you