Inferno - Max Hastings [340]
“The attack entailed crossing about one thousand yards of open cornfield which fell away from Cambes Wood,” wrote an officer of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers. “We had barely crossed the start-line when the enemy reacted fiercely, with well-sited machine-guns and intense mortar fire which enfiladed the companies as they moved forward. It was a situation almost reminiscent of some First World War battlefield … We could see the tracer bullets flicking off the corn.” Pvt. Robert Macduff of the Wiltshires said: “One of the scenes which will live forever in mind is the arms and legs on the roadside covered in maggots. The smell was vile. Someone had been killed, someone had gone forever … There but for the grace of God go I.” Brig. Frank Richardson, one of Montgomery’s ablest staff officers, wrote afterwards of the Germans, whom he admired boundlessly: “I have often wondered how we ever beat them.”
But the Wehrmacht was also capable of extraordinary blunders, and made many in Normandy, especially before its commanders grasped the significance of the Allies’ power to punish daylight movement. “Here we encountered one of the most terrible images of the war,” wrote a German NCO near Brouay on 8 June. “The enemy had virtually cut to pieces units of the Panzer Lehr Division with heavy weapons. [Half-tracks] and equipment had been ripped apart; next to them on the ground, and even hanging in the trees, were body parts of dead comrades. A terrible silence covered all.” On 9 June a dozen Panthers of the 12th SS Panzer Division launched a reckless headlong charge against Canadians emplaced at Bretteville. Sergeant Morawetz of the SS described what followed:
The whole company drove as a body, at high speed and without any stops, in a broad front … After a muffled bang and a swaying, as if a track had been ripped off, the vehicle came to a stop. When I looked to the left, I happened to see the turret being torn off the panzer driving on the left flank. At the same moment, after another minor explosion, my vehicle began to burn … Paul Veith, the gunner sitting in front of me, did not move. I jumped out, then I saw flames coming out of the open hatch as if from a blowtorch … To my left, other burning panzers … The crews burned without exception on their faces and hands … The whole area was under infantry fire.
Within minutes seven Panthers were destroyed by antitank guns; their commander returned from receiving treatment for wounds inflicted in an earlier action to find his regiment sorely depleted. He was exasperated by the attack’s futility: “I could have cried with rage and sorrow.”
The Americans fought a series of hard battles to secure the Cherbourg Peninsula, where the small fields, steep banks and dense hedges of the bocage country enabled the defenders to inflict heavy losses for every small gain. “We had to dig them out,” said a U.S. infantry officer. “It was a slow and cautious business, and there was nothing dashing about it. Our men didn’t go across the open fields in dramatic charges … They did at first, but they learned better. They went in tiny groups, a squad or less, moving yards apart and sticking close to the hedgerows on either end of the field. They crept a few yards, squatted, waited, then crept again.” Soldiers of the U.S. airborne divisions, who had expected to be withdrawn from combat after D-Day to prepare for another assault, instead fought on in Normandy for five weeks; they displayed an energy and commitment lacking in some infantry formations, and made a vital contribution. An operational report from the U.S. First Army highlighted “the urgent need for