D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [251]
After a circuitous route, Meindl found the commander-in-chief of the Seventh Army sheltering in a bomb crater with men of the SS Der Führer Regiment. They collected other groups of infantry and two Panther tanks which appeared. Meindl, obsessively proud of his paratroops, was scathing about some of the army personnel who had joined them. Many had abandoned their weapons. He saw ‘fear in their eyes and cowardice in their hearts’ in the desperation to break out of the encirclement, rather than join in the battle to open the breach. ‘Here one saw the communication zone troops from France, who had not known what war was for the past three years. It was a pitiful sight. Dissolution and panic. And in between them my paratroops, with contempt in their eyes, fulfilling their duty in an exemplary way.’ His men, together with a handful from the SS and infantry, were prepared to make the sacrifice for the rest, while the ‘toe-rags’, as he called them, displayed nothing but ‘crass egoism and cowardliness’. ‘For the first time I now understood how war was the worst possible way of breeding the best type of human being . . . how the best blood was lost and the poorest retained.’
The improvised attack went forward, and, ‘as if by a miracle’, they seized the heights of Coudehard at 16.30 hours when the Waffen-SS panzers attacked from the other direction, thus breaking the encirclement and creating a gap nearly two miles wide. The few prisoners they took confirmed that they had been up against the 1st Polish Armoured Division.
In the meantime General Hausser, who had been badly wounded, was evacuated on the back of one of the very few tanks left. Meindl’s main concern that afternoon was to send through the rest of the wounded in a column of clearly marked ambulances. ‘Not a shot was fired at them,’ wrote Meindl, ‘and I recognised, with thankfulness in my heart, the chivalrous attitude of the enemy.’ He waited a full half-hour after the column had disappeared before sending through any fighting troops, ‘so that there should not be the slightest suspicion in the mind of the enemy that we had taken any unfair advantage’.
News had spread behind them that a gap had been opened at Coudehard and that night a mass of stragglers hurried forward to take advantage of the opportunity. Meindl, however, was disgusted to hear from a senior officer who joined him that many more, including officers, had considered escape a hopeless project. As it grew light on 21 August, Meindl decided that they would not be able to hold open the gap for another day. He went round waking his men. It was not an easy task. Having organized a force to cover there treat, he set off on foot eastwards towards the Seine. It began to rain steadily. That at least would help conceal the route of the long snaking column of exhausted men.
Although part of the 3rd Canadian Infantry Division finally arrived to strengthen the cordon between Trun and Saint-Lambert, small groups of Germans had continued to slip through all day. Some of them joined the SS combat teams fighting to keep open the gap, but a US spotter plane circling above them continued to direct artillery fire on the retreating troops. On the southern shoulder of the gap, a combat team from Leclerc’s 2ème DB had taken up position on a hill, where they found themselves almost next to the main Polish force. And further round to the south-west, the Langlade battlegroup with the American 90th Division fought ‘German attempts, more or less disorganized, to break through between