D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [76]
In any case, to reach Caen in a single day, the 3rd Infantry Division would have needed to send forward at least two battlegroups, each with an armoured regiment and an infantry battalion. The infantry should ideally have been mounted in armoured personnel carriers, vehicles which the British Army took another twenty years to acquire. With only a few honourable exceptions, the British Army was woefully unprepared for infantry-tank operations. Much of the problem stemmed from the regimental system and thus a reluctance to imitate the German panzergrenadier system, with closely knit armoured infantry and tank forces working together on a permanent basis.
The plan was for the 8th Infantry Brigade to seize the Périers ridge. Then the 185th Brigade, with three infantry battalions and only one armoured regiment, would pass through them and on to Caen. The 2nd Battalion of the King’s Shropshire Light Infantry had been supposed to mount the tanks of the Staffordshire Yeomanry in the assembly area near Hermanville, then lead the advance south to Caen. They were to be supported by the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwickshire Regiment on the right and the 1st Battalion of the Royal Norfolk Regiment on the left.
The three infantry battalions were ready at Hermanville by 11.00 hours, but there was no sign of the Staffordshire Yeomanry. An unusually high tide had reduced the depth of the beach to little more than ten yards, leaving no space for tanks to manoeuvre. And as German artillery was still shelling the routes south, traffic jams tailed back all the way to the beaches when vehicles were set ablaze. Minefields prevented the tanks from going a cross country. The brigade commander agonized over whether to launch the attack on foot and without tank support. After waiting an hour, he ordered the infantry to set off.
Meanwhile the 8th Brigade found the attack on the Périers ridge greatly hampered by two strongpoints codenamed ‘Hillman’ and ‘Morris’.Morris, which had four 105 mm guns, was taken quite quickly, its dispirited defenders surrendering after an hour, but Hillman proved a far more formidable complex. Spread out over 400 yards by 600 yards, it had ‘deep concrete pillboxes and steel cupolas with a complete system of connecting trenches’. Lacking the planned naval gunfire support, because the forward observation officer had been killed, the 1st Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment faced a terrible task crossing minefields and barbed wire covered by artillery and machine guns.
The Suffolks asked for tank support and a squadron of the badly needed Staffordshire Yeomanry was diverted to help them, reducing even more the weak armoured force assigned to the advance on Caen. With its wide fields of fire, the Hillman strongpoint made it hard for part of the 185th Brigade to bypass it on its advance, and the Norfolks lost 150 men. The Hillman strongpoint was also the headquarters of the 736th Grenadier Regiment. Its commander made sure that his men ‘fought with determination to the bitter end’. In certain cases, the defenders had to be ‘blown out of their emplacements by heavy explosive charges laid by the battalion pioneers’. The 3rd Infantry Division, although well aware of Hillman’s existence - it was accurately marked on all their maps - had gravely underestimated its strength.
Although the British were suffering many casualties around Hillman, the 60,000 citizens of Caen endured far worse. The heavy bombers of the RAF, as part of the strategy to slow German reinforcements, had begun to bomb the city systematically at 13.45 hours. The leaflets dropped that morning with the ‘Message Urgent du Commandement Suprême des Forces Expéditionnaires Alliées’ warning them to disperse immediately into the countryside had little effect. Only a few hundred citizens left before the bombers arrived.
André