D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [128]
A far greater concern now for the Wehrmacht high command was coping with the Red Army’s offensive in Belorussia and the pressure in Normandy. ‘The effect of the major conflicts in the west and the east was reciprocal,’ stated Jodl, when he was interrogated with Keitel at the end of the war. ‘Each of the fronts felt itself neglected compared to the other.’ The concentration of SS panzer divisions in Normandy, especially the transfer of the II SS Panzer Corps back from the eastern front, had highlighted their inability to respond effectively to Operation Bagration. ‘The two-front war came into sight in all its rigour,’ Jodl observed.
A liaison officer from the Red Army, Colonel Vassilievsky, was brought on a visit to the headquarters of 7th Armoured Division. With true Soviet diplomacy, he expressed the view that the British advance was very slow. Apparently a British officer asked him to show on a map of the eastern front where his own division was fighting. It transpired that there were nine German divisions on that sector, which was over 600 miles long. The British pointed out that they were facing ten divisions, including six panzer divisions, along a front of only sixty-two miles.
Claims by Soviet propagandists that Germany’s best troops ‘are still on the Soviet-German front’ were simply untrue, as the presence of six SS armoured divisions, as well as the Panzer Lehr Division and the 2nd Panzer Division proved. ‘We know where young and strong Germans are now,’ wrote Ilya Ehrenburg in Pravda, decrying the quality of German formations in Normandy. ‘We have accommodated them in the earth, in sand, in clay - in the Kalmuk steppe, on the banks of the Volga, in the swamps near Volkhov, in the Ukrainian steppe, in the woods of the Crimea, in Moldavia, in Rzhev, in Veliki-Luki. Our allies are now seeing the Germans whom we have nicknamed “Totalnik” [total mobilization], a prefabricated product that is destined for annihilation. ’ But even Ehrenburg was prepared to admit that ‘the French frying pan is starting to resemble the Russian fire’.
16
The Battle of the Bocage
After the fall of Cherbourg at the end of June, Bradley’s First US Army prepared to push south. In the west at the base of the peninsula, the 79th Infantry Division, the 82nd Airborne and the unhappy 90th Division stretched across marshland. They faced most of Choltitz’s LXXXIV Corps, by now well entrenched on the wooded hills to their south. The 4th and 83rd Infantry Divisions south of Carentan were also in low-lying marshland. There they faced the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division Götz von Berlichingen and the 353rd Infanterie-Division.
To the east on the Saint-Lô front were the 30th, the 35th and the 29th Infantry Divisions already in bocage country. So were the 2nd and 1st Infantry Divisions around Caumont, running up to the British sector. They faced Meindl’s II Paratroop Corps. Although Geyr and Guderian objected bitterly to the splitting of divisions, the Germans operated very effectively in defence, with their Kampfgruppen, or battlegroups of infantry, assault guns and engineers.
The American campaign began on 3 July, when VIII Corps, commanded by Major General Middleton, attacked on the west flank. In that unusually wet summer, they set off under a heavy downpour. American soldiers, sick of the chill and damp of British weather during their months of training, had expected the French climate to be more benign. Low cloud ruled out air support and the rain was too thick to allow accurate observation for the artillery. The 82nd Airborne seized its objective, Hill 131, north of La Haye-du-Puits, by early in the afternoon, but the rest of the offensive became bogged down. The 82nd waited with impatience for the other two divisions to come level. The Germans had different problems. A battalion of Volga Tartars ‘immediately deserted to the enemy’. Another