Citizen Soldiers_ The U.S. Army from the - Stephen E. Ambrose [10]
In Normandy in June 1944 German soldiers became experts in camouflage to make themselves invisible from the sky, while the GIs laid out coloured panels and did all they could to make themselves plainly visible from the sky. They wanted any aeroplane up there to know that they were Americans, because they knew without having to look that the plane they heard was American.
German general Fritz Bayerlein of the 12th SS Panzer Division gave an account of how the Jabos worked over his division on June 7: "It was terrible. By the end of the day I had lost forty tank trucks carrying fuel, and ninety other vehicles. Five of my tanks were knocked out, and eighty-four half-tracks, prime movers and self-propelled guns." Those were heavy losses, especially for a panzer division that had so far not fired a shot.
The Jabos had a decisive effect on the Battle of Normandy. Without them the Germans would have been able to move reinforcements into Normandy at a better rate than they actually achieved. But air power alone could not be decisive. The Germans in Normandy were dug in well enough to survive strafing, rocket, and bombing attacks. They could move enough men, vehicles, and materiel at night to keep on fighting along the leaf-covered sunken lanes. The frequently foul weather gave them further respite. Low clouds, drizzle, fog-for the Germans, ideal weather to reposition units, and there were more of those days than there were clear ones.
OVER THE first ten days of the battle the Germans fought so well that the Allies measured their gains in metres. By June 16 the euphoria produced by the D-Day success was giving way to fears that the Germans were imposing a stalemate in Normandy. These fears led to blame-assignment and recriminations among the Allies.
The difficulty centred around the taking of Caen. Field Marshal Montgomery had said he would take the city on D-Day, but he had not, nor did he do so in the following ten days. Nor was he attacking. The British Second Army had drawn the bulk of the panzers in Normandy to its front. It was at Caen that the Germans were most vulnerable, because a breakthrough there would put British tanks on a straight road, through rolling terrain with open fields, headed directly for Paris. Therefore the fighting north of Caen was fierce and costly, but there was no all-out British attack.
The Americans, frustrated by their glacial progress in the hedgerows, were increasingly critical of Montgomery. Monty sent it right back. He blamed General Omar Bradley, commanding US First Army, for Allied problems, saying that the Americans should have attacked both north towards Cherbourg and south towards Coutances, "but Bradley didn't want to take the risk."
At the top, through June, the Allied high command squabbled. At the front the soldiers fought through to Cherbourg on the twentieth. It took a week of hard fighting to force a surrender on the 27th, and even then the Germans left the port facilities so badly damaged that it took the engineers six weeks to get them functioning. Meanwhile, supplies continued to come in via LSTs.
With Cherbourg captured, Bradley was able to turn US First Army in a continuous line facing south. St. Lo and Coutances were the objectives of this second phase of the Battle of Normandy. To get them, the GIs had a lot of hedgerows to cross.
THE US First Army was growing to its full potential in Normandy. By June 30 the Americans had eleven divisions in the battle, plus the 82nd and 101st Airborne, which were to have been withdrawn to England but which were retained on the Continent through June. The British Second Army also had thirteen divisions ashore.
The Americans had evacuated 27,000 casualties. About 11,000 GIs had been killed in action or died of their wounds, 1,000 were missing in action, and 3,400 wounded had been returned to duty. The active-duty strength of First Army was 413,000. German strength on the