D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [212]
Since his meeting with Jodl and Warlimont, Hitler’s mood had stiffened and he now rejected any idea of withdrawal. The gambler in him, combined with his taste for the dramatic, had inspired one of his map fantasies. He had been gazing at the divisional symbols on his map, while refusing to acknowledge that most were reduced to a fraction of their theoretical strength. For him, the idea of cutting off Patton’s Third Army proved irresistible. He also justified his idea of holding on in Normandy on the grounds that almost all the infantry divisions were without mechanized transport. Retreat would leave them at the mercy of the American armoured divisions and the Allied air forces. At the same time he refused to take Allied air power into consideration when planning Operation Lüttich. This was typical of his compulsion to see only what suited him.
Time was against them, as Kluge knew better than Hitler. On the evening of 4 August, Patton returned from Brittany and conferred with Haislip, the commander of XV Corps. Bradley had issued orders for the Third Army to strike east along the Germans’ open flank. Patton told Haislip to take Mayenne and Laval the following day. Less than two hours later, Haislip was briefing his divisional commanders for an attack the next morning. The 79th Infantry Division was to take Laval, while the 90th Infantry Division was to seize the town of Mayenne to the north.
Patton had been scathing about the 90th when he encountered them on the road east of Avranches just three days before. ‘The division is bad, the discipline poor, the men filthy and the officers apathetic, many of them removing their insignia and covering the markings on helmets. I saw one artillery lieutenant jump out of his Peep and hide in a ditch when one plane flew over at high altitude firing a little.’ But under its new commander, Major General Raymond McLain, the 90th rapidly showed how a formation with low morale could be turned round dramatically by good leadership and a change in circumstances. On 5 August, the 90th seized the town of Mayenne in just six hours. The main crossing over the river had been mined, but ‘a fifteen-year-old French boy went out onto the bridge, and cut the wires’. The 79th took Laval the next morning. The American attack into Brittany, even though it failed to seize a major port, had at any rate distracted the Germans from the real threat to their southern flank. They never expected the Third Army to advance east so rapidly.
Patton also remained privately scornful of Bradley’s concern that the Germans might launch a major counter-attack to his north around Mortain. ‘Personally I do not give much credence to this,’ he had written in his diary on 1 August, when Bradley broached the subject. He was then irritated the next day when Bradley ordered the corner of the front near Fougères to be strengthened. Patton felt that Bradley was being as cautious as the British. Yet Bradley’s instinct was right, though at this point he had no intelligence to back up his hunch.61
For Patton, the most pressing problem was logistical. His armoured divisions were running out of fuel and his supply dumps were still north of Avranches. The roads to the rear were jammed with supply trucks and troops. Military police were overwhelmed as they tried to control the traffic passing through the Avranches bottleneck twenty-four hours a day. Even divisional and corps commanders tried to sort out the chaos. ‘Approximately 13,000 trucks, tanks, jeeps, half-tracks and howitzers crossed over the Pontaubault bridge, averaging one vehicle every thirty seconds.’ The Luftwaffe, ordered to make any sacrifice to attack the Avranches route, launched raids by day as well as by night with bombers and fighter-bombers. But the Americans, having overestimated their needs for anti-aircraft artillery battalions in Normandy, were able to concentrate a formidable firepower around the key bridges south of Avranches.
While Patton’s Third Army began its advance east, Hodges’s First Army continued to push back the Germans south of Vire.