23
Counter-Attack

IT WAS A little after 2.30 p.m. when the German intelligence officer Friedrich Hayn set off from his staff headquarters in Saint-Lô. He wanted to see for himself the extent of the Allied invasion. The timing of his trip had been chosen by his staff driver, who noticed that the airborne raids seemed to slacken each day at around 3 p.m., which was 4 p.m. across the Channel. ‘They are now having their tea in England,’ he said to Hayn, displaying a useful knowledge of British customs.

As his staff car sped across the Normandy countryside, Hayn was stunned by the scale of the devastation. ‘Every moment of our way we came across a charred, battered and bent skeleton of some vehicle. Most of them were lying on their rear axle, looking like some large squatting animal.’ Field guns, armoured vehicles and tanks had all been targeted and the roads were strewn with detritus. ‘A smouldering panzer with the paint boiling on hot steel, or a crackling, hissing and puffing ammunition car.’ In among the metal debris were mangled corpses in uniform and the half-shredded carcasses of cows, stiff and bloated with their legs sticking rigidly skywards.

Hayn couldn’t believe that the mighty German army had taken such a battering. The Allies were taking full advantage of their air supremacy to smash the Wehrmacht before it even reached the beaches.

His staff driver would live to regret his comment about English tea breaks, for the sky was soon filled with fighter-bombers, ‘swarming about in the sky like hornets’. Hayn was terrified by ‘the gargling sound of rocket projectiles’ and even more alarmed by the ‘bursts of fire’ that swept along every road. He soon had a first-hand encounter with a pilot from the same school of daring as James Kyle, who now performed his aerial gymnastics right over Hayn’s head. ‘One moment the plane seemed to drop out of the sun, the next it soared up into the sky like a rocket.’ There seemed to be no escape from this infernal fighter. ‘The pilot always kept his finger on the button of his 2cm gun, ready to fire at anything moving.’ Hayn managed to survive unscathed, aware that he’d had a lucky escape. Yet the attack left him despairing. ‘Where, now, was our Luftwaffe?’ The question kept repeating itself in his head. ‘Could there ever have been a better chance to strike at the massed enemy forces with paralyzing effect?’ But there was not a German plane to be seen.

As he drove eastwards from Saint-Lô, he was witness to the mass exodus of civilians who had realized, far too late, that fleeing their homes was their best hope of saving their lives. Thousands were on the move, carrying their families and goods on two-wheeled carts covered with white sheets. ‘Men who kept a gloomy eye on the sky were sitting on them, together with sobbing women and frightened children.’¹

D-Day had now been under way for the better part of fourteen hours and a vast military machine was thrusting inland – tanks, jeeps and armoured bulldozers, as well as hundreds of mechanized ‘funnies’ belching thick diesel from their thunderous engines. Their like had never before been seen on the country lanes of Normandy: Crab tanks with flailing chains were thrashing their way through minefields while ditch-filling Fascine tanks were tossing giant logs into the enemy’s defensive trenches. Armoured bulldozers were shunting aside concrete obstacles while Crocodile flame-throwers squelched jets of petrol-fuelled fire into bunkers that continued to resist.

But mostly it was tanks: a vast army of Shermans, Centaurs and Churchills that was ploughing through metalled roads and churning the Normandy mud, shredding a passage through thickets and spinneys. By early afternoon the Allied advance was no mere pinprick: the landing forces were pushing forward along a front that stretched more than fifty miles. The stench of diesel hung thickly on the air from Ouistreham in the east to Sainte-Mère-Église in the west. Above and beyond the immediate battlefield, a pall of smoke was staining the sky above Caen. The five beachheads had not yet linked up, but if and when they did, the Allies would control a formidable slice of territory.

The situation on the ground was indeed more optimistic than some of the Overlord planners had originally predicted. On the eastern flank, Lord Lovat’s commandos had successfully linked up with John Howard’s paratroopers and secured the bridges over the River Orne and the Caen Canal. On neighbouring Juno, the Canadians were moving swiftly inland having knocked out the German strongpoint at Saint-Aubin-sur-Mer. They had also captured the resort of Bernières-sur-Mer, leaving only the coastal fortress at Langrune still in enemy hands.

The British troops on Gold Beach were also driving inland after overcoming stiff resistance. WN33 was cleared late morning, while the monstrous Le Hamel bunker was being targeted by two companies from the Hampshires. By early afternoon they were ready to launch a rearguard attack.

Even the defences of Omaha Beach were busted. Franz Gockel and Karl Wegner had not been alone in fleeing their strongholds. When the German radio operator Alfred Sturm attempted to call a beachside bunker from his position inland, he was met with a sorry tale of abandoned positions and unmanned guns. One particularly desperate message was to stick in his mind: it came from a young German defender whose bunker was under attack. ‘The artillery has entered our strongpoint. I’m on my own.’ There was a brief pause before the youth gave his valedictory farewell. ‘Live well, comrades!’²

Omaha had proved a costly victory for the Allies, but neighbouring Utah had been won with comparative ease. As wave after wave of men pounded ashore in the footsteps of Leonard Schroeder, fewer than 200 were gunned down by the German defenders. Every loss was a tragedy; every death a cause of grief. Yet it could have been far worse. In the live-ammunition rehearsal for the landing at Slapton Sands in Devon – Exercise Tiger – no fewer than 749 American servicemen had accidentally perished. It was a disaster of such magnitude that any survivor who revealed the truth was threatened with a court martial for years to come.

Now, on D-Day afternoon, there was a feeling of cautious optimism among senior officials at Supreme Headquarters in Southwick House, even though very few battle reports had been received. Admiral Bertram Ramsay, mastermind of the naval operation, was in particularly ebullient form. In a briefing with journalists, he (somewhat oddly) compared the attack on the Atlantic Wall to the cutting of a slice of pie. ‘The crust is broken,’ he said, ‘and now we must go through with it.’

Shortly after Ramsay’s briefing, General Montgomery chatted with journalists on the neatly clipped lawn in front of his lodgings, close to Southwick House. He was as chirpy and upbeat as usual. ‘Things are going nicely,’ he beamed, ‘otherwise I should not be enjoying my garden.’³

Alone among senior staff, Eisenhower remained cautious. True, he had dictated a short message to the Combined Chiefs of Staff in London, informing them that the invasion seemed to be going smoothly. Yet his famously broad grin masked a genuine anxiety. He was alarmed that so few reports had been received from the beachhead, especially given the vast numbers of wireless sets issued to the men. He had no idea that most of these sets were slopping around in the shallows of the English Channel, waterlogged and useless. Nor could he know that many of their operators had been gunned down on the beaches.

Something of his state of mind that D-Day afternoon can be gleaned from the tongue-lashing he was to give General Bradley on the following day. ‘Why the devil didn’t you let us know what was going on?’ he snapped. ‘Nothing came through until late afternoon – not a damned word. I didn’t know what had happened to you.’

‘We radioed you every scrap of information we had,’⁴ said Bradley weakly but honestly. Only later did it transpire that his hourly dispatches, sent from USS Augusta, lay piled up in Montgomery’s radio room, undeciphered and unread because of a lack of staff.

Eisenhower might have been better off tuning in to the BBC, which scored a coup of sorts that afternoon with a so-called ‘live report’ from the battlefront. It was not live, as such, for it was broadcast some hours after it was recorded. Yet the correspondent who made it, William Helmore, was a consummate performer who had cut his broadcasting teeth reporting on the Schneider Trophy, a hair-raising race between seaplanes and flying boats. Now, there was an even bigger trophy up for grabs – occupied Europe – and Helmore was to give the performance of his life.

‘I’m calling you from a Mitchell bomber,’ he told his listeners. ‘I’m speaking now at ten thousand feet.’ With the background roar of engines and the crackle of static, his report was a little masterpiece of ‘live’ reporting. ‘We’re going to have a look at the invasion … Now I’m looking down, down, through a thin patch of white cloud.’ The sky, he said, was ‘full of aircraft of all kinds, coming and going … the heavy bombers are out, fighters have been passing us … we’ve just had some whacking big bombers swarming by here.’

What made his report all the more compelling was the fact that he was participating in a live bombing mission. ‘We’re going across to bomb a target which is a railway bridge,’ he told his listeners, ‘which I hope we shall succeed in dropping four one-thousand-pound bombs on.’ And off they went, bombing their way on to the radio. Lest he sounded too confident, he ended on a note of caution. ‘I can see a very beautiful scene,’ he said, ‘but it is a rather nervous scene, though I feel it holds in it the seeds of history.’⁵

William Helmore was right to describe the scene on the ground as ‘nervous’. Many soldiers were concerned that they would not be able to hold on to their territorial gains. In the hinterland behind Utah Beach, the key objective that afternoon was to retain control of the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, wrested from the Germans some ten hours earlier. Without the use of the N13 that ran through the town, all German forces to the north were effectively cut off.

The stakes could scarcely have been higher for both sides, as the Germans were well aware. If they failed to recapture the town, it was hard to see how they could prevent a massive build-up of American supplies. But if they could retake it – and reopen the N13 – they could dramatically turn the tables. The thousands of American paratroopers who had landed in the fields to the west would be completely isolated.

The stage was set for an epic struggle whose intensity and violence would reflect the personalities of the men involved. In a scene reminiscent of Custer’s Last Stand, a small group of American paratroopers on the outskirts of town were to find themselves isolated, alone and massively outnumbered.

The northern defences of Sainte-Mère-Église had been entrusted to Benjamin Vandervoort, the brook-no-nonsense battalion commander who had broken his ankle on landing. Neither the fracture itself, nor the accompanying pain, had diminished his relish for the fight ahead. Like a true gambler, he seemed to enjoy the fact that the odds were stacked against him.

His views were shared by the men entrusted with holding that road to the north. They were led by Turner Turnbull, a hardened combat veteran whose half-Choctaw, half-Scottish ancestry had scored two key traits into his personality. One was stubbornness, inherited perhaps from his Scottish mother. The other was pride, a trait that must surely have come from his paternal forebears. His distinguished great-grandparents had been forced to walk the infamous Trail of Tears when evicted from their ancestral lands, while his father had been the youngest Choctaw chief ever to be elected by popular vote (so young, indeed, that federal law forbade him from serving). Not for nothing was young Turnbull known by everyone as Chief.

There was a third factor in Turnbull’s childhood that had left him with a fierce sense of independence. He had been orphaned at the age of fifteen, a blow that had required resilience and courage for him to survive the harsh world of adolescence. He grew into adulthood with a rod-like backbone, enabling him to fight with distinction in Sicily, where he was shot in the abdomen and hospitalized for four months. It could have been his ticket out of the army; instead, he volunteered for the D-Day invasion. And now he was being sent to its outer fringes, to the lonely hamlet of Neuville-au-Plain that lay one and a half miles to the north of Sainte-Mère-Église. His role, and that of the forty-three men with him, was to block any German advance.

This little outpost was frontier territory, wild, dangerous and unpredictable. Turnbull sniffed the lie of the land and prepared to use its natural features to his advantage. He concealed one squad of ten men in an orchard close to the roadside. The rest were dug in behind a hedgerow, along with a 2.36-inch bazooka. With luck, it could knock out a tank.

For some hours all was quiet. The skies had been brightening ever since midday and it had turned into one of those bucolic summer afternoons that made Normandy so picturesque. At around 1 p.m., Vandervoort had ventured out to Neuville-au-Plain in a jeep, passing en route a Frenchman clattering along on a bicycle. When he arrived at the outpost, Turnbull told him that the same cyclist had just given him some unexpected news. A large group of German prisoners was being marched towards Neuville, having been captured by American paratroopers.

Turnbull had scarcely finished speaking when the long column hove into view. There was more than a battalion of them, and they were accompanied by two tracked army vehicles. Both he and Vandervoort could clearly identify the field-grey colour of the German uniform, as well as a few soldiers in paratrooper uniform. The latter were cheerfully waving the orange recognition flag that had been issued before leaving England. Vandervoort smelled a rat. ‘It looked just too good to be true.’

His suspicions turned out to be correct. He told Turnbull to fire a warning burst from his machine gun, deliberately aiming to miss. The reaction was instant and revealed the Germans’ true intent: the prisoners were nothing of the sort. They now deployed themselves on either side of the road and began firing their self-propelled guns directly at Turnbull and Vandervoort. One shot knocked out the bazooka, another just missed the machine gun. Turnbull and his men were in deep trouble.

It soon became clear that they were facing a ‘whole damned battalion of Krauts’⁶ – it was the 91st Luftlande Division – who had been ordered to force open the road to Sainte-Mère-Église. Against them, Turnbull had fewer than four dozen men. He was outnumbered by at least five to one.

Vandervoort had to make a snap decision: abandon Neuville or defend it at all costs. There was never much doubt as to which option he would choose. He ordered Turnbull to dig in and hang on while he made a spirited dash back to Sainte-Mère-Église in order to call up reinforcements. He jumped into his jeep and careered into town, screeching to a halt at his battlefield headquarters and ordering Captain Clyde Russell and his men of E Company to join Turnbull at his outpost. He warned them not to become embroiled in a head-to-head battle. Rather, they were to fight like guerrillas, picking off the Germans one by one.

Among these reinforcements was Otis Sampson, a tough-nut paratrooper in a band of hardened veterans. In later years he liked to recount the story of how one of his comrades had been stricken with malaria just days before D-Day. The sickly individual ‘insisted he would make the jump if he had to crawl out of the door on his hands and knees’. This, said Sampson, ‘was the kind of man that made up our unit’. He and his comrades had served in Sicily and Italy, where they terrified the enemy by shaving their heads ‘Iroquoi Indian style, with just a narrow strip of hair running from back to front’. Many had done the same for their Normandy adventure. Such a haircut must have bemused the Choctaw chief, Turner Turnbull.

As they swooped north towards Neuville, they spied German soldiers creeping forward and attempting to surround Turnbull’s outpost. Sampson and his men launched an immediate counter-attack. ‘We hit hard and fast.’ They pounded the German positions with everything they had and ‘moved the mortar continuously so as not to give Jerry a target’. It was guerrilla warfare at its most effective. The Germans began crossing the road as fast as possible, one by one. Sampson timed them. ‘I judged when another would cross and had another round put in the tube.’ Bang. He scored a bull’s-eye each time. ‘The timing was perfect.’⁷

Fighting alongside Sampson was John Fitzgerald, a paratrooper with the 101st Airborne Division who had got hopelessly separated from his comrades and now found himself serving with men he had never met. It did not take him long to see the danger posed by the advancing Germans. ‘They were quickly gaining command of the entire area and were shelling it with artillery and chemical mortars. The mortars would announce themselves with a spine-chilling scream. A few seconds later, they would land, spreading shovel-sized fragments of shrapnel.’ Travelling at high velocity, these could decapitate a man in an instant.

The Germans soon sighted the machine gun manned by Fitzgerald and his comrade-in-arms and began pouring in heavy concentrations of 88mm artillery fire. It was of an intensity he had never before experienced. ‘We could not raise our heads, much less return fire. Rounds were coming in, one after the other, most landed within feet of us.’ Fitzgerald was half terrified, half exhilarated. ‘The impact of the shells threw up mounds of dirt and mud. The ground trembled and my eardrums felt as if they would burst. Dirt was filling my shirt and it was beginning to get into my eyes and mouth.’ He had a deep respect for the accuracy and punch of the Germans’ 88mm gun, saying that ‘there were more soldiers converted to Christianity by this 88 than by Peter and Paul combined.’ He was only half joking. That big gun also taught him to fear the enemy. ‘I could not hold a razor steady enough to shave for the next few days.’⁸

Chief Turnbull’s situation was grave indeed. What had begun as a skirmish had developed into a fire-fight to the death. His own men were still dug into their positions in Neuville, while the men of E Company were battling their way towards them.

Colonel Vandervoort was so concerned not to lose control of the N13 that he ordered yet more reinforcements to the north side of town. Many of these men were to excel themselves under extreme pressure, even though they appeared at first glance to be ill-equipped for the fight. Waverly Wray was one such hero. A slow-spoken young gentleman ‘from the Old South’ (he was from Mississippi), Wray carried the Bible with him at all times ‘and read it in his fox-hole in the evening, when he had the chance’. Indeed, he had such a ‘devout religious faith in the goodness of God that [it] kept him from drinking, smoking or even using language stronger than “Dad-burn” or “Dad-brown” ‘. He could virtually recite the Old Testament by heart: its uncompromising God seemed to chime with his own concepts of vengeance. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth. ‘He was armed,’ said one, ‘with the conviction that he fought on the side of the Lord.’

As the battle for Neuville raged all around, Wray set off on a desperate lone-wolf mission, just as Stanley Hollis had done at Gold Beach. He disappeared for hours. When Vandervoort next saw him, he looked like he had stepped out of hell, ‘with his cartridge belt half-torn from his middle and with two large nicks in his right ear’. He had clearly been involved in quite a scrap. ‘Dry blood was caked on his neck, shoulder and right breast on his jump jacket.’ Vandervoort gave him a cheery greeting. ‘They have been getting kind of close to you, haven’t they, Waverly.’ Wray gave a wide grin. ‘Not as close as I’ve been getting to them.’⁹

Chief Turnbull’s little band held out for another three hours, until about 5 p.m. It was a superb act of defiance that effectively stopped the Germans at the gates of Sainte-Mère-Église. He had started his defence with one officer and forty-three men; by the time he got back to the town, there was only himself and fourteen men left alive. As they beat their tactical retreat, Otis Sampson could hear the Germans taunting them. ‘It reminded me of an unfinished ball game, and they were yelling for us to come back and finish it.’ But Sampson knew there was no need. ‘Our mission,’ he said, ‘had been accomplished.’¹⁰

By the time they had retreated, the defences of Sainte-Mère-Église had been massively strengthened. ‘We still held the town,’ said Fitzgerald, ‘and there was talk of tanks coming up from the beaches to help us.’¹¹

Turnbull’s defence was magnificent, but it came at a cost. One of the defenders, Charles Sammon, helped a few of the walking wounded into a makeshift farmhouse-hospital. He was greeted by a sight he would never forget: ‘a couple of German doctors working alongside a couple of American airborne doctors on what had once been a dining room table. They were sawing off arms, legs, etcetera, and throwing the discarded limbs into a pile.’¹²

Such was the reality of war. Yet Vandervoort knew it was worth it. He described Chief Turnbull’s stand as truly heroic, ‘a small unit performance that has seldom been equaled’.¹³ Turnbull himself would pay the ultimate price for his up-front leadership. He would be killed by a round of artillery on the very next day.

The Allies were not alone in fielding soldiers who were prepared to put their lives on the line. The Germans, too, had countless troops willing to fight to the death. Many of those stationed close to the Cotentin peninsula spent that afternoon battling their way towards Sainte-Mère-Église in a desperate attempt to throw the Americans back into the sea. They knew that if they could not do this by nightfall, they would probably be unable to do it at all.

Among those spoiling for a fight was a hard-drinking young corporal named Anton Wuensch, a stocky twenty-three-year-old from Silesia with a barbed wit and instantly recognizable features. This was due, in part, to his bulbous nose and deep-set eyes. But it was also because of an ugly scar ‘running through his left eyebrow and down onto his left eyelid’. He was popular with his men – a seven-strong mortar unit – on account of having a seemingly inexhaustible supply of the local digestif. Each evening, they would gather at his foxhole and drink until late into the night.

Wuensch’s unit was stationed at the Vire estuary, just seven miles from Sainte-Mère-Église. They had been on high alert ever since being woken by the pre-dawn bombardment. ‘We must really throw them back into the sea,’ said Wuensch to his men as they prepared to advance towards the landing zone. ‘There are no reserves behind us.’

As they moved northwards towards the town, they found their progress hampered by Allied fighter planes that seemed to jump out of the sky from nowhere. They also encountered other unexpected surprises. ‘Look!’ whispered one of Wuensch’s comrades as he pointed towards a tree. ‘There’s an American sniper.’ Wuensch observed the man intently before crouching down with his rifle and preparing to have a crack.

‘All right, my boy,’ he muttered under his breath. ‘Now I’m going to get you.’

He raised his rifle, took aim and squeezed the trigger – once, twice and then a third time. It was the final shot that hit its mark. He ‘saw the sniper throw up his arms and fall backwards out of the tree’. They all cheered and then ran across to inspect their victim. He was dark-haired, handsome and very young. ‘His eyes were open and blood was trickling down from his mouth.’ When they looked more clearly, they noticed that the bullet had passed ‘through the back and out through the left breast’.

Wuensch ‘felt nothing’ at first, as befitted his cocksure veneer. He watched in silence as his men went through the young soldier’s pockets. The ever hungry Fritz Wendt filched his K-rations while others flicked through the pictures of the man’s wife. As they did so, Wuensch felt a sense of revulsion. The gruesomeness of the scene was compounded by the blood still welling from the man’s mouth. He would later confess to feeling as if ‘he was looking down at a dog that had been run over’.

As they approached the village of Saint-Côme-du-Mont, less than five miles from Sainte-Mère-Église, they ran into serious trouble. A group of American paratroopers had occupied a ridge above the village, blocking the way forward. Wuensch and company needed to eliminate them if they were to push northwards into town. They were in the process of preparing their mortar when one of Wuensch’s gunners suddenly crashed to the ground. He had been shot through the head. Seconds later, a second gunner was also shot dead. When a third member of the team tried to take his revenge, he, too, was hit. He ‘threw up his arms and with a frightful scream fell back dead’.

Wuensch was shocked by the deaths, yet he refused to retreat. ‘Let’s keep busy,’ he yelled. But just a few seconds later another of his men was shot, causing a sudden loss of nerve. ‘Leo – Franz – what’s happening to us? What’s happening?’ He was worried that he would be next. ‘Let’s knock off,’ he said.

It was his first confession of doubt. For years, he had thought of himself as invincible and had assumed that he and his men would sweep the Allies briskly back into the sea. Now, he was not so sure.

‘Let’s move back again and surround them,’ whispered one of his sergeants. If they could attack from the rear, they still had a chance to break the American line.

They crept towards the ridge from a different angle, manoeuvring their mortar as quickly as they could. Others had crept forward to join them, so that Wuensch now had almost two dozen men at his disposal, as well as a second mortar. He was in the process of leading them towards the N13 when the ground in front of him was kicked skywards in an explosion of dirt. He was smacked by a full burst of machine-gun fire and felt as if he had been hit ‘by a red hot iron’. The bullets passed clean through the thighs of both legs, shredding the flesh and shattering the bone. He fell flat on his face and lay on the road, screaming in pain. His feet were bloodless and numb.

Fritz Wendt went to his aid. ‘What’s happened?’ he said. ‘What’s this?’

‘Legs, legs!’

Wuensch was howling in agony.

Wendt drew his knife and cut away the trousers. More bullets started hitting the road, so he dragged Wuensch over to a tree, trailing his useless legs behind him in a welter of blood. Wuensch was wide-eyed with panic as he stared at the blood gurgling out of him. He felt as if he was ‘burning up from his own blood, as though it was lava’. In a daze of pain, he saw that both his feet were back to front. His legs had been skewed through 180 degrees.

One of his men, Lance Corporal Richter, tried to perform first aid.

‘Am I going to die?’

‘You? Die?’ Richter tried to make light of the wounds, but he was all too aware of their seriousness. Wuensch’s legs had been almost severed from his body.

It was several hours before the stretcher-bearers arrived and lugged him across the fields to a Volkswagen ambulance.

‘So they got you too, did they?’ He was half aware of a voice coming from a misty figure leaning over him. The next thing he knew, a doctor was removing the bandages from his legs and giving him a shot of morphine.

‘Am I going to die?’ asked Wuensch again.

‘Nothing much wrong with you,’ said the doctor as he slapped him hard across the face to see if the morphine was working. He then turned to a German soldier standing nearby and said, ‘Hold him.’ The soldier did as ordered, pinning Wuensch’s shoulders in a vice-like grip.

‘This is going to hurt a bit,’ said the doctor as he grabbed one of Wuensch’s shattered legs. He then wrenched it back through 180 degrees.

Wuensch screamed. He howled in agony. He heard the crunching of the bones as they twisted inside his leg. And then the doctor did the same to the second leg, twisting the shattered bones into their correct position.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ he said when finished. ‘It can’t hurt that much.’

Wuensch’s last memory of D-Day was slugging a large shot of Calvados. He was only half conscious. He had a blurred vision of the fire-fight, of the American paratroopers, of the road leading north to Sainte-Mère-Église. ‘We’ve certainly missed it this time,’¹⁴ he shouted out to no one in particular. And then he passed out.

German snipers hide out in a concealed foxhole. Often positioned at crossroads, they hindered the American advance inland from Omaha.