D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [119]
Engineers from the 101st Airborne, who had been brought up to help with the reduction of strongpoints, joined in the general merriment of victory as the town returned to a version of normal life. ‘That was quite an experience,’ one of them wrote, ‘because the houses of prostitution were open, the taverns were open, MPs were in there, military government, rangers, paratroopers, dog leg infantry, artillery officers, and we had our first experience of using sidewalk urinals.’ The combat historian Sergeant Forrest Pogue saw nearly 100 soldiers queuing outside a former Wehrmacht brothel. A Frenchman warned him that they should be careful: ‘The Germans have left much disease.’
Along with all American troops, they were amazed by the stores which the Germans had accumulated in their concrete bunkers. Bradley wrote of their defences as ‘a massive underground wine cellar’. He ordered that the booty should be divided up among the front-line divisions, rather than allow it all to fall into the hands of rear troops and those working on reconstruction.
Hitler, when he heard of General von Schlieben’s surrender, was furious. He had summoned all commanders of coastal ports to Berchtesgaden in April to look them over and assess their belief in victory. He had relieved several on the spot for lacking what he perceived as sufficient determination to fight to the last man, but not Schlieben. Afterwards, Hitler harped on about how pathetic Schlieben had been. He was almost as outraged as he had been over Paulus’s capitulation at Stalingrad.
Two days after the surrender, Generaloberst Dollmann was found dead in his bathroom at Seventh Army headquarters near Le Mans. An official announcement stated that he had died from a heart attack. Most senior officers, however, believed that he had committed suicide in shame at the fall of Cherbourg.
15
Operation Epsom
Shortly before the fall of Cherbourg, Hitler made his last visit to France. He was in an unforgiving mood. His orders to sweep the Allies back into the sea had not been carried out and he regarded his senior commanders in the west as defeatist. Hitler complained openly at OKW headquarters that ‘Field Marshal Rommel is a great and inspiring leader in victory, but as soon as there is the slightest difficulty, he becomes a complete pessimist.’
Rommel, on his side, did not conceal his dissatisfaction with the way Hitler interfered with his direction of the battle. Even senior officers at OKW were driven to distraction by Hitler’s obsession with detail. He insisted that every emplacement should be marked on 1:25,000 maps. One day, he noticed in a report that the number of anti-aircraft guns in the Channel Islands had apparently been reduced by two. He demanded that the officer responsible should be punished for reducing the defences, but in fact somebody had miscounted the first time round. Hitler, without ever having visited the area of Caen in his life, continually pestered the OKW staff about the positioning of two units of multi-barrelled mortars: the 7th and 8th Nebelwerfer Brigades. He insisted that they would decide the outcome in the British sector if they were placed at a specific spot east of the River Orne.
Despite their earlier disagreements on tactics, both Rommel and General Geyr von Schweppenburg wanted to withdraw behind the line of the Orne. Geyr recognized that to launch a major panzer counterattack within range of Allied naval guns was pointless. Instead, he wanted to adopt ‘Jungle Tiger Tactics’, with sudden armoured raids. This came just as the Hitler Jugend had started to have second thoughts after their battering at the hands of the Canadians. But Rommel’s demands for ‘flexibility of action’, which meant having the right to pull back without reference to Führer headquarters, and the proposal to withdraw behind