D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [65]
The two leading battalions from the 4th Infantry Division began their advance inland as soon as the beach was secured. A Sherman from the 70th Tank Battalion fired at one strongpoint guarding the causeway and the Germans inside immediately came out to surrender. The company commander jumped down from his tank to approach them, but they began yelling at him. It took him a moment to work out that they were shouting, ‘Achtung! Minen!’ at him. He retreated to the safety of his vehicle and called up the engineers. But he was to have less luck later in the day. After his tank company advanced south-west to Pouppeville, their attention was attracted by some wounded paratroopers from the 101st calling for help. The commander climbed down, taking their first-aidkit, but on the way over to them he stepped on an anti-personnel mine. He shouted to his crew not to come anywhere near, but they threw him a rope and towed him out with the tank. The remains of his left foot were amputated later.
Inevitably, civilians and their property suffered during the advance inland. A company of the 20th Field Artillery with the 4th Division came under fire from some farm buildings. The widow who lived in the farm told the Americans that the ‘sniper’ was a very young soldier in her barn who was drunk. The artillerymen turned one of their guns on the barn. The first round set it on fire and the young German inside shot himself.
One soldier’s account was particularly revealing. ‘French people, of course, lived there,’ he recounted. ‘Us being there was as big a surprise as anything in the world to those people. They didn’t really know how to take us, I guess. One man started to run, and we hollered for him to halt. He didn’t halt, and one of our men shot him and left him there. I remember one house a couple of us went into and hollered, trying to tell them to come out. We didn’t know any French. Nobody came out. We took a rifle butt and knocked the door in. I threw a grenade in the door, stepped back and waited until it exploded. Then we went on in. There was a man, three or four women and two or three kids in that room. The only damage that was done was the old man had a cut on his cheek. It was just a piece of luck that they didn’t all get killed.’ He then went on to tell how they captured a small hill with the support of tank fire. ‘It was pretty rough. And those guys [the Germans] were baffled and they were crazy. There were quite a few of them still in their foxholes. Then I saw quite a few of them shot right in the foxholes. We didn’t take prisoners and there was nothing to do but kill them, and we did, and I had never shot one like that. Even our lieutenant did and some of the Non Coms.’
The French had to cope as best they could in the circumstances. A couple of American officers ‘came across a little French farm cottage where a good sized French woman was dragging a dead German soldier out of her house. With one heave, she flung him across the road up next to the hedgerow. She waved to us indicating that she was glad to see us, but she went back into the house, I suppose to clean up the mess that had been made.’ On the road to Sainte-Mère-Eglise another American saw ‘a German soldier lying dead, stripped to the waist and shaving cream on his face’. He had been in the middle of a shave when paratroopers stormed the building and was shot down as he ran out. At the back, there was a field kitchen, or Gulaschkanone as the Germans called them, with its draught horses dead still in their traces.
The most extraordinary encounter of the 4th Division’s advance to relieve the paratroopers was American infantry fighting a German cavalry unit made up of former Red Army prisoners. The horsemen had forced their mounts to the ground to take up firing positions behind them, a classic cavalry tactic. ‘We had to kill most of the horses,’ wrote a lieutenant unused to such warfare, ‘because the Germans were using them for shelter.