Hundreds of Allied gliders arrived at dusk, bringing weaponry and reinforcements. They raised the spirits of exhausted soldiers on the ground. ‘One of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen,’ said one.
COLONEL LEOPOLD AUGUST Hermann von Oppeln-Bronikowski was having a bad day. His experiences as a panzer commander on the Eastern Front had taught him the value of speed. Strike hard and fast, that was how to fight with tanks. But speed was proving impossible right now, at the very time when it was most needed.
The colonel was one of the great panzer leaders of Nazi Germany, ‘an exuberant, dashing, gay individual’ with a noble Prussian pedigree that stretched back to the age of chivalry. War was in his blood: his dynasty had fought their way through central Europe for the better part of half a millennium and their coat of arms was bedecked with martial paraphernalia. At its centrepiece was a vicious-looking trapping hook that had been the family’s weapon of choice against the Saracens.
Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski was known by everyone for his ‘well-chiselled features, black hair, keen eyes and, frankly, enjoying the war for the thrills that he got’. He certainly looked the part, with impeccably oiled hair and an engaging smile. He also had ‘the amazing ability of always looking clean and well pressed, even in the midst of a battle’. He had represented the Fatherland at the infamous 1936 Olympic Games (he won a gold medal in equestrian dressage) and had subsequently proved a genius at tank warfare, personally destroying twenty-five Russian tanks on the Eastern Front. Now, his regiment’s precision guns had the ability to wreak carnage on the newly landed Allies.
But his morning offensive had been stalled by the OKW (Supreme Command) staff in Bavaria, much to his fury. He considered Hitler’s senior staff to be incompetent amateurs who ‘knew nothing of the problems of infantry or of panzers’. Nor, for that matter, did he ‘give a damn about Hitler’.1 Like so many noble-born Prussians in the military, he viewed the Führer as an ignorant upstart with little grasp of modern warfare. And now, when clear direction was most needed, the colonel found himself receiving wildly conflicting orders as to what to do with the 127 Mark IV tanks of his panzer division. First, he was told to throw them against the British airborne forces around Bénouville Bridge, an operation that took considerable time to put into effect. No sooner were they on the move than the order was countermanded. The situation on the coast was deteriorating so fast that he was told to wheel his tanks northwards, with the aim of driving a wedge between the British troops on Sword Beach and the Canadians on Juno.
His panzers were to receive no additional support for their counter-attack. The Panzer Lehr division, stationed seventy-five miles outside Paris, was not to receive its marching orders until later that day. The 12th SS Panzer Division was similarly paralysed. Major-General Fritz Witt and his officers had spent much of the day at Château de la Guillerie awaiting instructions from Bavaria.
It therefore fell to Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski to reverse the fast-growing catastrophe. The stakes could scarcely have been higher, as General Erich Marcks, commander of the 84th Corps, was quick to point out when he addressed the colonel that afternoon. ‘Oppeln,’ he said, ‘the future of Germany may very well rest on your shoulders. If you don’t push the British back into the sea, we’ve lost the war.’ Oppeln-Bronikowski snapped a crisp response. ‘General, I intend to attack immediately.’2
But attacking the beachhead was no easy matter. To do so, his tanks first had to cross the River Orne. This in itself presented a major logistical feat, for the nearest bridges had either been destroyed or were in the hands of the British. The colonel had no option but to lead his column of tanks towards Caen in the hope that one or more of its bridges was still intact. And this is where his difficulties began.
Among those riding alongside him was a nineteen-year-old corporal, Werner Kortenhaus. Hitherto, Kortenhaus’s attitude to the Allied landings had typified the headstrong arrogance of the panzer elite. There would be a sharp fight followed by a long bout of victorious celebration. ‘We were pretty convinced that by the evening we would be back in our quarters.’ But as his tank rumbled towards Caen, he got his first inkling that they were facing a formidable enemy. ‘When we finally reached the top of the rise, we saw huge black clouds in the distance, over the city.’ Caen was still aflame from the earlier bombing raid.
Kortenhaus was unexpectedly shaken. ‘In that moment, I had the feeling that we were now actually in the war. It was then that I realized that there was no chance of being back in our quarters that night.’3 He also realized how naïve he had been. If the Allies were prepared to sacrifice a city as big as Caen, they clearly had no intention of being driven back into the sea.
As the gigantic armoured convoy snaked its way through the city’s outskirts, the scale of the destruction became all too evident. Entire buildings had been shattered by 1,000-pound bombs, blocking the streets with massive chunks of concrete. Crushed vehicles had been pitched into crazy angles and the ruins of shops were festooned with telephone wires. The dead lay mangled and exposed: many had yet to be taken away.
The convoy of tanks was soon joined by General Edgar Feuchtinger, commander of the 21st Panzer Division, who pitched up ‘in his special bulletproof glass-domed combat car’ equipped with machine guns and a radio. Feuchtinger had fought his way through the Great War and much of the current one and had participated in many highly destructive missions. Yet even he was taken aback by the scale of devastation in Caen. ‘The town was a sight of sheer hell,’ he said. ‘Dead were lying everywhere, German soldiers, French civilians, uniformed German women auxiliaries.’4 Oppeln-Bronikowski was no less shocked. As he surveyed the damage, he shook his head in despair. ‘A complete shambles.’5 They were the only words he could muster.
One of his junior staffers, Captain Herr, scouted ahead and discovered that a single bridge across the River Orne was still intact. But it was being ‘ceaselessly bombed by fighter bombers’ and anything that attempted to cross it risked being strafed from the air.
Captain Herr had two key qualities: cool-headedness and pragmatism. His first thought was to weigh up the odds of surviving the bridge crossing. ‘I got out my watch and timed the intervals at which the bombers flew over.’ His second was to study the flight pattern of each Allied plane. ‘Once each machine had dropped its bomb-load, it pulled up in order to allow the next to make a run.’ That gap between bomb-drops gave him the window of opportunity he needed. ‘As coldly as if I had been timing athletics, I sent my tanks over the bridge.’
Survival was a matter of timing. ‘On your marks! Ready! Go!’ His bellowed order was followed by a terrific roar as the engine of each tank clanked into gear. The vehicle would then lurch across the bridge in a choking swirl of dust and diesel fumes. All the while, Herr kept his eyes fixed on the falling bombs that followed each fly-pass. ‘Amazingly, the bombs fell right and left, into the river, but none hit the bridge.’6
While Captain Herr painstakingly manoeuvred his fleet of tanks across the river, Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski was brought news that a second bridge across the River Orne was still intact at the village of Colombelles. Impatient for action and increasingly concerned about the time it would take for the entire column to cross that one bridge in Caen, he led his vehicles around the outskirts of the city towards Colombelles. It was safer than Captain Herr’s approach, but no less time-consuming and it delayed the counter-attack yet further. The afternoon was well advanced by the time his armoured convoy regrouped, more or less unscathed, on the far side of Caen. Now, he had to thrust his mechanized army northwards, across the rolling farmland that lay between Caen and the coast.
The convoy had scarcely left the ruins of Caen when he was witness to a most unexpected sight. A Wehrmacht paymaster and two German soldiers were stumbling along the road, ‘drunk as pigs, their faces dirty and swaying from side to side’. As they lurched along, retreating from the coast, they didn’t even notice the approaching tanks. Oppeln-Bronikowski cut the engine of his vehicle for a moment and was astonished to hear that they were singing ‘Deutschland Über Alles’ ‘at the top of their voices’. He found the scene both pitiful and ‘tragically humorous’: he felt sure that half of his men would have happily joined these drunken clowns, since most felt ‘utter depression’7 at fighting a war that was clearly lost.
Scarcely five miles now lay between his armoured convoy and the sea, but those five miles held a unique geological feature. Between the villages of Périers and Biéville, the chalky bedrock thrust itself upwards into a smoothly contoured escarpment that afforded a fine panorama over the surrounding pastureland, orchards and coastline. Colonel Oppeln-Bronikowski was only too aware of the value of such high ground. It was every tank-man’s dream.
Before pushing forward, he gathered his forces in a glade near the hamlet of Lébisey, some three miles to the north of Caen. Here, he discussed tactics with his captains. Here, too, he was joined by the stiff-jointed General Erich Marcks. Such was the gravity of the situation that Marcks wanted to be there in person, yet he was in a highly agitated state. ‘His normally composed features were twitching. He had only one thought in mind, to get into action, to attack.’8 At a little after 5 p.m., he gave the nod to Oppeln-Bronikowski: the great panzer counter-attack could at long last commence.
As the tanks fired their engines, the air was once again filled with the stench of diesel. One by one their low-slung silhouettes emerged from the wooded glade, knocking unripe apples from the branches and crushing them into the dirt. The thrust towards the coast was to be twin-pronged. Oppeln-Bronikowski himself was to take twenty-five tanks towards the heights of Biéville, some two miles from their current position, while his most trusted captain, Wilhelm von Gottberg, would lead a further thirty-five tanks towards the high ground at Périers. From these two commanding positions, they would be able to wreak havoc on the Allied forces below.
Gottberg was a wise choice to lead the advance: although only twenty-nine years of age, he (like Oppeln-Bronikowski) was the scion of a distinguished Prussian military dynasty and had considerable experience of tank warfare. Oppeln-Bronikowski valued him so highly that he had persuaded him to cancel his overdue furlough (he should have been visiting his mother in Berlin) and remain in Normandy. ‘Don’t go, Gottberg,’ he had said just a few days earlier. ‘I think our time will soon be up.’9
Advancing with Oppeln-Bronikowski’s battle group was Captain Herr, who had so carefully timed his tanks across the bridge at Caen. As they churned their way towards the high ground, they flattened the near-ripe corn and sent whirls of dust into the air, a telltale sign for Allied soldiers that something big was coming their way. It was not long before Captain Herr sighted a stationary column of Sherman tanks less than 600 metres away. He felt a sudden frisson of fear. ‘It was really spooky. They just stood there and nothing moved.’10 There was no one in sight. It was as if the entire position had been abandoned.
The truth was somewhat different. The soldiers of the Staffordshire Yeomanry were lying in wait and studying the advance of the panzers through their field glasses. So, too, were the troops manning the British anti-tank guns dug in between Périers and Biéville. The original goal of all these troops had been the city of Caen, but they had been delayed in getting off the beach and then halted altogether by the German counter-attack. Caen would have to wait for another day: checking the advance of the panzers was the most urgent priority.
Wilhelm von Gottberg was the first to move forward, thrusting his thirty-five tanks towards the ridge at Périers. He soon found his advance stalled. A thwacking explosion rocked his vehicles long before he got close to the high ground, triggering a series of powerful blasts. When it was safe to peer outside, he was aghast to see that ten of his tanks had been knocked out. He felt a deep sense of helplessness: there was nothing he could do other than ‘curse the shortsightedness’11 of his own command.
Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski was also grinding his way forward, aware that he and Captain Herr needed to get as close as possible to the Allied lines. Their Mark IV tanks were equipped with 75mm long-barrel guns that were deadly when fired at a nearby target. But their maximum range was no more than a mile and a half, rendering them quite useless against the British long-range anti-tank guns.
The colonel sent five of his tanks ahead: they were to scout up a small incline in order to check the lie of the land. It proved a fatal error, for they were silhouetted against the sky, presenting the perfect target. ‘The moment they reached the ridge, they were suddenly hit, one after the other, by British anti-tank fire.’ Oppeln-Bronikowski had a soldier’s respect for the enemy and would later admit that ‘the British gunners were better by more than six hundred yards at firing.’12
He continued his advance with greater caution, but soon found himself facing a bruising assault from the British anti-tank guns. The Staffordshire troops opened up with everything they had, shredding metal and gouging craters. One shell exploded right next to Captain Herr’s tank, ripping away the protective skirt that covered the tracks. ‘It just swirled up and literally flew through the air.’ Herr felt his second frisson of terror. ‘I personally had always been frightened of being burned to death in the cockpit of my tank, so I lengthened the lead of my microphone so that I could sit behind the turret.’ It was not a wise decision, but it was born of experience. ‘I’d had such appalling experiences earlier, when I had to extract the [shrunken] bodies of comrades from tanks that had been burned out and put them in coffins that were as little as three-quarters of a metre long.’
It was not long before this fate came close. A second shell burst on to his tank, flinging a deadly wave of shrapnel through the air. He felt a searing pain in his lower half. ‘I fell to the ground and had to feel around my knees with my hands to check that I still had my legs. Blood was pouring out of me.’ He would survive, but he was seriously injured.
Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski knew he was outnumbered and outgunned. He also knew there was no hope of recapturing the high ground that lay between him and the coast. Dismayed and dejected, he turned to the blood-soaked Captain Herr and asked for advice. Herr shrugged. ‘If you don’t know, then how on earth should I know?’
Herr was in the process of radioing one of his comrades, Lieutenant Lehman, when the line was rocked by a thunderous boom. A shell had scored a direct hit on the seven-centimetre-thick glass observation window in the turret of Lehman’s Mark IV tank. ‘The black forage cap that Lehman always wore was hurled out and landed on my tank in the shock waves of the explosion.’ Herr peered through the dense black smoke ‘and saw that the whole dome had been blown away – it was an appalling situation’.13 Of Lieutenant Lehman, there was no trace.
As the enemy fire increased in intensity, Oppeln-Bronikowski’s great panzer advance was stalled and then stopped. Only a tiny unit of grenadier-adventurers would fight their way through to the beach that afternoon. In their vanguard was Walter Hermes, a nineteen-year-old army messenger with the 192nd Regiment: small, dark-haired and wiry, he was equipped with a low-slung 350cc Terrot motorcycle and a snarling disdain for the enemy. ‘We’ll soon throw these British back into the sea,’14 he snapped to his comrades. After scouting the coastal dunes and dodging Allied soldiers, he stumbled across a few German defenders still hiding out in a bunker. They represented the last shattered remnants of the Atlantic Wall, a forlorn group of survivors who had yet to be spotted by the Allies. It was clear that further resistance was hopeless without the support of the panzers. It was also clear that the panzers would never come. Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski’s tank offensive had been permanently stalled by the brawn of the Staffordshire Yeomanry.
As the first shadows of evening tarnished the clear sky, the colonel began digging his tanks into the fields around Lébisey, leaving only their turrets poking above ground level. For him, on a personal level, digging those impromptu earthworks was the defining moment of the war – the moment at which his role changed from attack to defence.
An hour or so later, he witnessed German officers retreating from the front line with twenty or thirty men apiece. They were haggard and dejected and had defeat in their eyes. He was aghast at the spectacle of his fellow fighters throwing in the towel. He suddenly felt like a broken man.
‘I never thought I’d see the day this would happen,’ he later admitted. It was his D-Day epiphany. ‘I knew then that the war was really finished.’15
Colonel von Oppeln-Bronikowski was not alone in feeling a profound sense of gloom. Just over a mile from his newly dug tank positions, Hans Sauer was wondering if he would survive the rest of the day. He had spent the last five hours cowering in an underground bunker in fear of his life. Ever since lunchtime, WN17 – known to Allied forces as Strongpoint Hillman – had been under siege by the young men of the Suffolk Regiment.
Sauer was twenty years of age, a heavily jowled young cartographer from North Rhine-Westphalia with a badly injured knee (that saved him from serving on the Eastern Front). Until now, he had considered himself fortunate to have escaped being sent to Russia, but as shells and mortars began slamming into the concrete roof of his bunker, he grew increasingly anxious. It was not that he didn’t have confidence in the structure: he had worked for Krupps before the war and had first-hand experience of the skill of the company’s technicians. Rather, it was the fact that his job was to squat beneath the steel cupola and peer through the long-range periscope in order to observe what was taking place outside.
What he saw that afternoon made for a terrifying sight. Enemy soldiers could be seen advancing on every side, crawling on their bellies through the churned mud.
Among those soldiers was twenty-eight-year-old George Rayson, a baker by profession who, four and a half years earlier, had listened with excitement to Neville Chamberlain’s declaration of war against Germany. It was, he thought, ‘the best thing we could do’.16 Now, he wasn’t so sure. He had been through a lifetime of unwelcome adventures since wading ashore, the worst of which was getting trapped underneath his landing craft when he jumped off the ramp. His lungs were half filled with seawater by the time he choked his way ashore. When he eventually emerged from the shallows, his nose was broken and he was drenched in blood. Even now, hours later, he was caked in dried blood.
Yet his adventures were by no means over. He was one of a band of young men charged with capturing Hillman, the most formidable of the inland strongpoints on this stretch of coast. It was more heavily fortified than Morris, which had capitulated at 1 p.m., and Daimler, which had also been seized. There was good reason for the extra fortifications. WN17 was the headquarters of the 736th Infantry Regiment, under the command of Colonel Ludwig Krug. The colonel had placed his trust in the stronghold’s formidable network of tunnels and redoubts. He had no intention of surrendering his headquarters to the enemy.
‘The size of a bloody football pitch.’ That was Rayson’s first thought as he peered through his field glasses at the mass of trenches and machine-gun nests. ‘It looked as though they’d piled up dirt and then built this place in the middle.’ As he sized it up, he grew increasingly alarmed about the fight ahead. ‘There were about twenty gun emplacements on the top, machine guns, and round it triple Dannert wire [reinforced barbed wire] and a thirty-foot minefield.’17 Worse still, although as yet unknown to Rayson, its concrete walls were nine feet thick and it was defended by 300 highly motivated fighters.
Rayson’s teenage comrade-in-arms, Leslie Perry, was more concerned by the lack of craters, which his troop had been intending to use for cover as they advanced. Perry had been assured that the American air force and the Royal Navy would have pummelled the ground with heavy mortars. But the Americans had bombed little more than the surrounding fields, while the Royal Navy signaller had been killed on landing and was thus unable to direct the naval gunfire. There was to be no further bombardment: Perry was told that Hillman ‘was to be taken using just infantry and sappers’,18 the latter having been trained to breach exactly such fortifications.
The men had practised long and hard for this moment and now prepared for the well-planned attack. Three engineers crept forward and cleared a six-foot path through the minefield while two more used a Bangalore torpedo to blow a hole in the perimeter wire. One of the Suffolk lads, Jim Hunter, more than lived up to his surname by launching a pre-emptive one-man assault on his German quarry. ‘I’ve bloody well had enough of this,’ he yelled. ‘I’m going to have a go.’ His words were still hanging in the air when he grabbed his Bren gun and advanced into a hail of bullets. ‘There was bullets spattering all around me but I was so annoyed I just didn’t care.’19 As he leaped into a zigzag-shaped trench to avoid flying shrapnel, he ran headlong into a German soldier. They both fired simultaneously, a deadly duel in a deadly trench. The German bullet plunged clean through Hunter’s helmet, creasing the top of his head but leaving him unharmed. His own bullet was more fatal. He hit the German squarely in the chest.
‘Come on, Rayson!’
It was the company commander bawling at him. The main assault was under way. Time to move forward. Rayson leaped into action, only to find himself running headlong into machine-gun fire. ‘The first two blokes got killed – a corporal and a private soldier.’ Rayson flung himself into a deep trench, landing right behind a corporal who had just been shot through the face. It was not a pleasant sight. ‘Cor, his head. Just a mass of blood, brains and bone.’ Rayson tried to peek over the top of the trench but it was too deep. Aware that his mates were somewhere up front, he zigzagged forward until he caught up with them.
‘What you all stopped for?’
One of them pointed tellingly to the end of the trench.
‘Round the corner, Captain Ryley, Lieutenant Tooley, Corporal Stares, they’re all dead.’ The three of them had over-hastily swung around the corner and been hit by a burst of machine-gun fire.
As Rayson and the others crouched there wondering what to do next, a handful of stick bombs exploded into the dirt. Rayson lobbed some explosives back, unsure how they were meant to press home the attack.
‘You’ve got to get out as fast as you can!’20
There was sudden panic. A runner was yelling at them, telling them to call off the attack. The frontal assault was being postponed until the arrival of heavy armour.
Among the first of the German defenders to see the Allied tanks was Hans Sauer, who spied them through his long-range periscope. ‘They were advancing very slowly, very cautiously.’ It was happening before his very eyes, a most disconcerting experience. ‘One advances, stops, waits. Another advances. They seemed extremely cautious, looking everywhere before moving forwards as much as a metre.’21 He released his eye from the periscope and rushed down the narrow metal staircase in order to report what he’d seen. As he did so, there was an explosion of such force that it seemed to wrench at his brain. A shell had crashed through the Krupps steel cupola, shattering its dome. Sauer was fortunate not to have been killed.
Allied trooper John Barnes was advancing in one of those tanks and wrestling with the gun controls as he tried to crank his biggest gun into an angle low enough to fire into the slit trenches. But it proved impossible and he eventually abandoned his efforts, leaving the crew to deal with the problem in more homespun fashion. They lobbed grenades into the trenches in the hope that the German defenders would be ripped to shreds.
Barnes couldn’t help reflecting on how brutal war had become. ‘It wasn’t like it was before: “Play up and play the game.” You didn’t care who was in there – they got it this time.’22 Although the infantry and artillery fought with great tenacity, it was to require hours of brutal combat in the trenches and underground corridors before Hillman’s main bunkers could finally be entered.
As the attackers penetrated the interior of the stronghold at around 8.15 p.m., its commandant, Colonel Ludwig Krug, telephoned his commander, General Wilhelm Richter. ‘Herr General,’ he said, ‘the enemy are on top of my bunker. They are demanding my surrender. I have no means of resisting and no contact with my own men. What am I to do?’
There was a long pause down the line. General Richter had received nothing but bad news all day. ‘Herr Oberst,’ he replied, ‘I can no longer give you any orders. You must act on your own judgment. Auf Wiedersehen.’23 Richter’s valedictory words to Colonel Krug would be oft-quoted in the years to come. They seemed to encapsulate the fate of the entire German army.
Krug managed to hold out for the rest of the night and it was not until the following morning that he finally threw in the towel, along with Hans Sauer and the others.
One of George Rayson’s comrades, Arthur Blizzard, led the troops into the heart of the stronghold. ‘I saw a big metal cupboard in the corner and opened the door and it was crammed with bottles from the top to the bottom. And when I picked one up, it was five-star brandy.’ He was amazed. ‘I said, “Look at this, Alec.” He said, “Is it all right?” ’
Blizzard put the bottle to his lips and tasted it. It was more than all right. ‘After me and him had drunk the first bottle, I said, “We feel better now, don’t we?” And he said, “Yeah.” ’
Grinning widely and with their heads swimming with brandy fumes, Blizzard suddenly noticed a door in the corner of the room. ‘And I pulled the iron bolt back and opened the door and there they all stood. Sixty-odd Germans, I counted.’24
He had to pinch himself to check it wasn’t the alcohol. But no, it was for real. Part of the garrison had remained hidden away in the pitch darkness of this subterranean hell. Arthur Blizzard felt obliged to take them all prisoner, although he would have been happier leaving them in their underground dungeon. It seemed like a fitting place for them to end their occupation of Normandy.
Hundreds of Allied gliders arrived at dusk, bringing weaponry and reinforcements. They raised the spirits of exhausted soldiers on the ground. ‘One of the most thrilling sights I have ever seen,’ said one.