THE FIGHTING GREW ever more intense in Normandy later that June as the summer heat settled over the dusty, shell-scarred pastures and began to bake the ruins of hundreds of villages. Eisenhower’s driver and confidante, Kay Summersby, recalled that her boss, ensconced in his spartan trailer on the grounds of Southwick House, near Portsmouth, was “very much depressed” by the news filtering back from the front: “Most of the time we simply sat in the trailer in the woods waiting. We stayed late every night waiting for just one more report to come through. I would call up the mess and have them send sandwiches over for supper, and I would boil water on the little spirit stove for Ike’s powdered coffee. He would sit there and smoke and worry. Every time the telephone would ring he would grab it.”1
One of Eisenhower’s men, Captain Frank Lillyman, wasn’t prepared to wait for good news on the wrong side of the English Channel. Already feted in the American press as officially the first American to land in France on D-Day, Lillyman went absent without leave from a hospital in England after just a few days of treatment for his wounds, determined to rejoin his men in Normandy. He wrangled his way onto a supply ship on June 14 and reported for duty back in France.
The 101st Airborne’s commanding general, Maxwell Taylor, having just encountered savage German resistance at Carentan, was far from pleased to see his wayward, now famous pathfinder, and according to one report he “waved the papers for a promotion under Lillyman’s nose and then ripped them up.”2 Press footage of the 101st Airborne in Normandy showed an ever cocky Lillyman, surrounded by his fellow Screaming Eagles, tommy gun in hand, nonchalantly answering questions. A few weeks later, Lillyman paid the price for going AWOL and was ordered to change units, moving to the 3rd Battalion of the 502nd Parachute Infantry Regiment. His days as a swashbuckling pathfinder were over.
Meanwhile, back in England, General Eisenhower grew increasingly frustrated with Montgomery’s lack of progress and his excuses for not seizing Caen, the key British and Canadian objective on D-Day. “Naturally I and all my senior commanders and staff,” recalled Eisenhower, “were greatly concerned about this static situation near Caen. Every possible means of breaking the deadlock was considered and I repeatedly urged Montgomery to speed up and intensify his efforts to the limit. He threw in attack after attack, gallantly conducted and heavily supported by artillery and air, but German resistance was not crushed.”3
The Germans who carried the greatest burden in maintaining the deadlock were the beleaguered panzer crews, living short and brutal lives that more resembled those of men aboard hunted U-boats. Trapped by day in their dug-in and heavily camouflaged Mark IVs and Tigers, low on fuel and ammunition, hidden in the lee of honeysuckle-draped walls and hedgerows, covered in clods of lush pasture and leaves, Rommel’s amphetamine-fueled youths watched and waited for their prey to stir. No longer crack offensive units, masters of blitzkrieg, the panzers were now used mostly as armored anti-tank artillery, islands of static defense. Turrets reeked of fuel and of feces filling empty shell casings and of anxious boys’ sweat. Gingerly, tankers climbed from their turrets only at night and filled their lungs with fresh air.
There were a million Allied soldiers in Normandy by late June, but still the front barely moved. British generals had long been haunted by the bloodletting and stalemate of the Great War in France, when mazes of trenches had swallowed the best of their generation. Now it seemed as if the ghosts of the Great War had been resurrected. There had clearly been a monumental oversight in planning—not one of the legions of intelligence officers who had pored over reconnaissance photos had spotted the high, ancient banks of hedgerows known as the bocage. It made swift movement impossible and provided the perfect defensive landscape for the Germans.4 An entire infantry company, filled with confused and untrained replacements, could be engaged all day to seize just one field, one small patch of the infernal tapestry stretching from Caen to Cherbourg, the port at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula whose liberation would cost the Americans 22,000 casualties after an agonizing slog.
The Allies had made another costly error in planning: They had vastly underestimated the will of the German soldier to fight so long and so hard in Normandy. Germany’s survival depended on the outcome of the battle. Even the foreign conscripts from Russia and Poland killed with determination, until the moment they decided it was safe to surrender and emerged from their bullet-scarred pillboxes. “Why did I fight for the Germans?” said one Polish prisoner of war, interviewed by journalist Alan Moorehead in a POW cage on the Cotentin Peninsula. “Like to see my back? It’s got scars across it from the neck down to the arse. They hit me there with a sword. Either you obeyed orders or you got no food. Certainly I went on firing. There was a German standing behind me with a revolver. It wasn’t enough just to shoot. You had to shoot straight. If you didn’t you got a bullet through your back. Don’t believe me? Ask the others. Like the Germans? I’d like to tear their guts out.”5
On June 27, as Americans entered the shattered outskirts of Cherbourg, Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis and the Green Howards were still fighting near Caen, almost three-quarters of which would become a blanket of rubble, burying some of the three thousand civilians killed in Allied bombings beneath a shroud of blasted masonry and creamy yellow limestone.6 That day, beside a flower-speckled field, where the bloated corpses of cattle rotted, their feet jutting skyward, Hollis’s battalion lost its irreplaceable leader: Colonel Robin Hastings, who had led the first wave ashore on D-Day, was badly wounded in the leg by mortar fire.7 Medics rushed to help Hastings, and his unflappable demeanor fell away. “Don’t hurt me,” cried Hastings as men carried him to a jeep. His nerve had finally gone.
As he was being taken to an aid station, Hastings came across a senior officer whom he detested, the kind of “bloody old fool” who had sent so many men over the top and to their deaths in World War I and was now doing the same a generation later. “What are you doing back here?” the officer asked Hastings. “I think you’re perfectly fit.”8 A medic, perhaps taking umbrage at the insult, showed the officer a large pool of Hastings’s blood in the ambulance.
Hollis and his fellow Green Howards, most of them scared young replacements, fought on under new but less capable and loving leadership, in what the men trying to kill them now called a “schmutziger Buschkrieg”—“dirty bush war.”9 And it was foul indeed, forcing men on both sides to casually cross moral lines, to become glib and debased, to do what once had been unthinkable—especially if it meant staying alive. Hollis would later tell his daughter of an incident that would haunt his fitful sleep for decades. “He had to kill a young German soldier who was wounded,” she explained, “one of the Hitler Youth, not much older than his own son, Brian. The boy, in SS combat uniform and helmet and carrying an automatic weapon was aged about 14 or 15 when captured in the deadly Bocage. The Green Howards pulled this boy into their foxhole, fed him, gave him water, dressed his wounds and shared what little they had. They were looking after him because he was so young. When they thought [they were] safe from the fighting, they relaxed. But that was when the boy grabbed one of their guns and shot one of Stan’s men dead. In a flash, [Hollis] grabbed his gun and shot him and killed him and that was what his nightmares were about. They were awful and plagued him for years afterwards.”10
It was these most demented worshippers of Hitler, these “German problem children,” pallid and dusty-haired, who most disturbed their captors and journalists such as Alan Moorehead.11 The more he saw of them, the more he gave up hope for the German people. They embodied the utter nihilism and amorality of Nazism. They were the ones who had gotten drunk fastest and raped without conscience, who had most shamed the nation of Beethoven and Goethe, who had been in kindergarten when Hitler promised them a Jew-free thousand-year Reich.
CHERBOURG FELL ON JUNE 30, three weeks behind schedule. Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt was installed as the proud military governor of the port, which had been so badly destroyed by the Germans that it could not be used until the middle of August. On July 10, General Montgomery and General Bradley met to discuss plans to finally seize Caen and then to break out of Normandy. Operation Goodwood would commence on July 18 and become the largest tank battle ever waged by the British. Operation Cobra was scheduled to begin a week later, preceded by three thousand aircraft carpet-bombing a narrow section of the front, thereby punching a hole in the German lines.
The day after the Allies’ senior generals met, twenty-four-year-old Quentin Roosevelt II, who had landed with the Big Red One on Omaha Beach on D-Day, visited his father in Cherbourg. They sat together until 10 P.M., recalled Quentin, chatting about “home, the family, my plans, the war . . . having a swell time.” General Roosevelt confessed that he was “very tired” after two years of war. In fact, he had had several minor heart attacks. Quentin insisted his father take it easy, “stay low.” After he bade him good night, Quentin paid a visit to his father’s doctor, and then to the general’s aide, pressuring the man to promise to “hold” his father down if he got sick again. Just a couple of hours later, around 2 A.M. on July 12, Quentin arrived back to his unit and learned that his father had suffered yet another heart attack.
“The lion is dead,” Quentin wrote to his mother.12 D-Day’s oldest general, the eldest son of one of America’s greatest presidents, was buried on Bastille Day, July 14, 1944, in Sainte-Mère-Église. Among the honorary pallbearers at what Quentin described as a “warrior’s funeral” was General George Patton, who would write in his diary that Roosevelt was the bravest man he ever knew. The funeral was like “the magnificent climax of a great play,” Quentin wrote. After his body was moved, at the request of his widow, Theodore Roosevelt Jr. would be buried near Colleville-sur-Mer beside his brother, a pilot who was killed during World War I.13
Four days after Roosevelt was placed in the ground, Operation Goodwood began with an attack of three armored divisions. The British lost five hundred tanks, more than a third of their total in Normandy, but Goodwood managed to strain the Germans severely, drawing in vital reserves of men and matériel. Six hundred German tanks were engaged against the Canadians and British, four times the number deployed against the Americans farther west.
On July 25, all of Caen was finally liberated, although not much of it was left standing.14 “Where three and four story houses had been, there were now merely craters in the ground,” recalled one journalist. “New hills and valleys wherever you looked. The very earth was reduced to its original dust.” Bulldozers were needed to open routes through rubble piled twenty feet deep. “It was like an archeological excavation into a lost world.”15
As the traumatized citizens of Caen searched for loved ones in the ruins, in some cases turning their backs angrily on their British liberators, the Americans launched Operation Cobra. The aim was to finally escape the infernal hedgerow country that had stalled the American advance with its dense barriers, up to fifteen feet high, of blackthorn, hazel, and brambles. Near Saint-Lô, which, like Caen, was a critical crossroads, six hundred bombers pulverized a three-hundred-yard-wide strip of ground, punching a hole in the German line, held by the once elite Panzer Lehr Division.
The gap was expanded by a further eighteen hundred Eighth Air Force bombers, some of whom tragically dropped their loads on their own forces, wounding almost five hundred Americans and killing 111, including General Lesley McNair, the highest-ranking US officer to lose his life in Europe in World War II. “A bomb landed squarely on McNair in a slit trench,” recalled General Omar Bradley, “and threw his body sixty feet and mangled it beyond recognition except for the three stars on his collar.”16 The fratricide “cast a gloom” over Eisenhower, as he remembered, and indeed over Bradley, but Cobra proved a stunning success, allowing the Americans to finally push into open country and regain mobility.17
On August 1, General George Patton’s Third Army was activated and would sweep through Normandy into Brittany, exploiting open ground, and then threaten to envelop German forces west of the Seine.18 In response to the looming threat of defeat in France, Hitler ordered a massive counterattack, the Mortain offensive, to “annihilate” the Americans in the US VII Corps in the area of Mortain.19 On the night of August 6, just hours before the main German offensive began, SS troops struck hard at the Big Red One, in particular at Lieutenant John Spalding’s 16th Infantry Regiment. His and other platoons appeared to be surrounded. The SS attacked several times throughout the night, but the men who had fought their way off Bloody Omaha yet again refused to buckle.
It had now been exactly two months since Spalding first heard the zip-zip of bullets over his head on D-Day, and the haunting wail of Nebelwerfer rockets, which sounded like the “high-pitched scream of despairing women” and, remembered one officer, made it “difficult to retain any self-control under their horrible and obscene noise.”20 During the subsequent slog through the hellish bocage, he had “figured that if [the Germans] didn’t get him then they wouldn’t get him at all.” He was blessed, surely immortal. A later medical report noted that he had “developed a feeling of personal invulnerability which was reinforced as he saw so many of the others become casualties. Frequently he felt that if he weren’t an officer he would stay put and not move forward, but he pushed himself on because of his responsibility to his men and declared that if they were going to get him they would regardless of where he was.”21
The following morning, August 7, patrols detected in a nearby village a large and well-armed German force, part of the 9th SS Panzer Division, which appeared to be preparing for a knockout blow on the 16th Infantry Regiment.22 Spalding braced himself for the onslaught. There had indeed been an angel on each of his shoulders, as he put it, on D-Day. He had survived the odds on Omaha, but now, in the mined mud of hedgerow country, the waiting for the young fanatics of the SS to die for their Führer finally pushed him to the breaking point. He was, after all, merely human, and his nerves felt ever more raw and jagged. Near the village of Mayenne, with his regiment widely dispersed, he heard that SS paratroopers had been seen nearby. He would later tell a doctor that the tension of waiting for them to attack had become unbearable. “Patient started to worry,” a subsequent medical report noted, “apprehensive that he would make poor decisions which would be costly to his men.”23
As it turned out, the purported SS avengers never turned up. The Mortain offensive had been supported by just three hundred tanks, and by noon on August 7, as the morning mist burnt off, they became fatally exposed to Allied aircraft. Before long, Hitler’s supermen were retreating, anxiously scanning the skies for “Jabos,” RAF Typhoons that swooped low and massacred every living thing in their gunsights, including countless horses, their large eyes bulging in death with such pain that one pilot felt as if his “heart would burst.”24 On August 8, realizing that the German lines throughout Normandy were about to collapse, Bradley declared, “This is an opportunity that comes to a commander not more than once in a century. We’re about to destroy an entire hostile army and go all the way from here to the German border.”25 Spalding and his regiment played their part, capturing and destroying elements of the 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions as Hitler’s generals desperately tried to pull troops from what became known as the Falaise pocket.26 Just 460 men from the 9th SS Panzer would escape.27 A typical SS armored division at full strength had twenty thousand men.
The numbers were numbing. At least eighty thousand German troops were caught in the Allied encirclement at Falaise, of whom more than ten thousand were mercilessly annihilated. A favorite tactic of the Typhoon pilots, remembered one RAF wing commander proudly, “was to seal off the front and rear of a column by accurately dropping a few bombs. This imprisoned the desperate enemy on a narrow stretch of dusty lane, and since the transports were sometimes jammed together four abreast, it made the subsequent rocket and cannon attack a comparatively easy business against the stationary targets.”28
It was jolly good sport, although a tad too easy, like shooting fish, packed together like squirming sardines, in a barrel. Back and forth the vengeful RAF pilots flew, strafing, bombing, slaughtering the swarms of ragged men until their twelve Browning machine guns were smoking hot and their ammunition spent and it was time to gun the Rolls-Royce engine and soar away to get yet more rockets.29 “After each run,” remembered one pilot, “which resulted in a large vacant path of chopped up soldiers, the space would almost immediately be filled with other escapees.”30 Ambulances carrying grievously wounded men were turned to pitiful pieces of carbon. Another pilot recalled seeing pieces of uniform “plastered to shattered tanks and trunks . . . human remains hung in grotesque shapes on the blackened hedgerows.”31
AMONG THE ALLIED units mopping up final German resistance were Sergeant Major Stanley Hollis and his fellow Green Howards, embittered foes of Hitler’s finest killers since 1940. Toward the end of the battle of the Falaise pocket, as Hollis waited with other men at his company’s command post, he heard the familiar whine of an incoming mortar. It exploded and a man on a radio was “killed stone dead where he sat,” recalled Hollis, who was seated less than a yard away. Hollis himself was gravely wounded by dozens of mortar fragments. As one account had it: “His temple had been hit and his skull fractured, and his nose and the front of his face were badly damaged. He was also deaf in his left ear from the blast and his leg was wounded. His comrades were amazed and relieved to find him alive after what had been virtually a direct hit. This incident only served to add to Stan’s already considerable legend among the troops. If the Germans couldn’t kill him now, then surely nothing would.”
Doctors attached a silver plate over Hollis’s skull fracture and sent him back to England to recover. After five serious wounds and four years of combat, his time in the front lines was finally over. His tally of dead Germans stood at 102. Hollis would still be recuperating in a hospital in Leeds, in his native Yorkshire, several months later when he was told that he would receive the Victoria Cross. No Yorkshireman ever deserved it more. According to Lieutenant Colonel Robin Hastings, the commanding officer of the 6th Green Howards on D-Day, Hollis “was absolutely personally dedicated to winning the war—one of the few men I ever met who felt like that.”32
In the Falaise pocket, two panzer divisions and eight infantry divisions were captured “almost in their entirety,” recalled Eisenhower, who visited the battlefield two days after the pocket was sealed on August 21 and was met by “scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.”33 Only with the first frost would the dark clouds of flies covering the area begin to lift. The stench of death, which aircrews could smell far above, took just as long to dissipate.
There remained one final, glorious chapter in the Battle of Normandy, which had seen the defeat of one of the greatest armies in the history of war.34 On August 25, Paris was finally set free after more than fifteen hundred days and nights of increasing terror and starvation under the Nazi jackboot. The marvelously warm and sunny weather made “the day the war should have ended,” in the words of American writer Irwin Shaw, all the more memorable.35 Elements of the 4th “Ivy” Division, which had landed with Captain Leonard Schroeder on Utah Beach, fought to the very heart of the delirious city, seeing action just yards from Notre Dame cathedral. To many jaded reporters, who had recorded the Allies’ agonies for several years, the sight of GIs embracing genuinely ecstatic Frenchwomen was never to be forgotten, the most joyous memory of the entire war. “Any GI who doesn’t get laid tonight is a sissy,” quipped Ernie Pyle.36
Five days later, Hitler’s last troops retreated across the Seine, trudging east to defend their homeland. Since D-Day, as many as half a million of their compatriots had been killed, wounded, or captured or were missing.37 So many others had also made the ultimate sacrifice during the Battle of Normandy, since the Allied first wave hit the beaches in the early hours of June 6. More than 15,000 French men, women, and children had been killed, mostly by Allied bombing. The Allies had suffered more than 200,000 casualties on the ground, with almost 40,000 dead and 20,000 missing.38 Of 20,000 American fatalities, 9,385 would eventually lie in just one graveyard, near the village of Colleville-sur-Mer, overlooking Omaha Beach.39 In a chapel at the center of the cemetery, the following words would be inscribed: “Think not only upon their passing. Remember the glory of their spirit.”