D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [86]
The battlefield myth of female snipers spread with astonishing rapidity through ‘latrine rumours’, as they were known. But stories of young Frenchwomen staying with their German boyfriends were almost certainly true. Just inland from Omaha beach, a sergeant in the 6th Engineer Special Brigade recounted, ‘we saw in the ditches French girls lying alongside their German soldiers. These girls had gone along with the [German] army as they retreated and they were killed by our planes and they were found lying side by side.’
On both sides, mercifully, there were also cases of unexpected humanity. On the northern flank near Sainte-Mère-Eglise, Sergeant Prybowski, a medical non-com, was searching hedgerows for wounded when he came across two injured paratroopers. As he sat there applying bandages to their wounds, one of them whispered to him, ‘You’d better get down. There’s an 88 back of you.’ The sergeant laughingly turned round, only to stare down the barrel of a field gun. In the hedgerow a group of German artillerymen were watching them. But they allowed Prybowski to finish bandaging the two men and take them away.
To the west, at Chef du Pont and La Fière along the River Merderet, the 82nd Airborne could do little more than hang on to its positions until reinforced and resupplied with ammunition. To the west of the river, a force under Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Shanley was surrounded on a small feature known as Hill 30. With great courage and endurance, Shanley and his men held out for four days with no food apart from their original emergency rations. Many were wounded and had to be carried to the shelter of ditches and hedgerows, but the paratroopers were so weak from hunger and fatigue that four of them found it hard to carry one casualty. ‘There were so many wounded along the ditches, they had them head to toe,’ one soldier recounted. Shanley sent messengers to the main force east of the Merderet, begging for plasma. A small group of paratroopers tried to slip through with a supply, but they were all wounded.
Surrounded by part of the 1057th Grenadier-Regiment, Shanley’s reduced force was heavily outnumbered. Then they found that the Germans were bringing up artillery. This development was spotted from across the river. A naval gunfire controller radioed back to the bombardment force offshore. Allied warships, at a range of more than twelve miles, proceeded to knock out the German artillery without inflicting serious casualties on the beleaguered paratroopers.
Many of Shanley’s men kept going only with the help of Benzedrine. Lacking radio communications, they had no idea whether the invasion had succeeded or failed. But their prolonged resistance on Hill 30 greatly helped the establishment of a bridgehead over the Merderet by the time they were finally relieved. The newly landed 90th Infantry Division now had the task of increasing that bridgehead, prior to cutting off the peninsula for a general advance on Cherbourg. But due to a lack of leadership and discipline at many levels, the 90th started disastrously. Before the division reached the front, its point unit, on sighting a column of German prisoners being escorted back towards Utah, opened fire with every weapon available. Fighting the 91st Luftlande-Division among the hedgerows proved traumatic for these untested troops. Their performance was so lamentable that the divisional commander and two of his regimental commanders were sacked.
American generals were ruthless with subordinate commanders who ‘could not get their troops to perform the task which a division or corps said had to be done’. Even that fire-eater General Patton felt the US Army resorted to sacking commanders before they had been given a proper chance. The combat historian Forrest Pogue talked with a colonel who had just been relieved of his command. ‘He was sitting out a long the road with his belongings beside him, waiting for a jeep to take