serious mistake. Erskine, who had wanted to attack twenty-four hours earlier, was impatient. He had good reason to be as things turned out. The delay was mainly the fault of his superior, Lieutenant General Gerard Bucknall, the commander of XXX Corps.
Although he had impressed Montgomery in Sicily and Italy, Bucknall had little experience of armour. He had certainly not impressed Field Marshal Brooke, who two months before the invasion wrote in his diary, ‘Bucknall was very weak, and I am certain quite unfit to command a corps.’ His reputation had been boosted by the capture of Bayeux, but he was not highly rated by those who knew him. Dempsey also had his doubts, but did nothing. As the American airborne commander General Maxwell D. Taylor put it, British senior commanders never had the tradition of really pressing subordinates. American generals thought that their British counterparts were far too polite.
Erskine’s failure to provide an armoured reconnaissance screen in front, rather than as a flank guard, led to one of the most devastating ambushes in British military history. The 22nd Armoured Brigade, led by its brave but eccentric commander, Brigadier ‘Loony’ Hinde, charged forward through the identified gap. By that evening his leading regiment, the 4th County of London Yeomanry (The Sharpshooters), had reached the Caumont road, just five miles short of Villers-Bocage. They leaguered for the night in all-round defence with their attached company of the 1st Battalion the Rifle Brigade.
At dawn, the Sharpshooters and their infantry trundled down the road to their objective. They entered Villers-Bocage at 08.00 hours on 13 June to an ecstatic reception from the local population. Gendarmes in their best uniforms held back the crowds, who threw flowers on to the Cromwell tanks and offered presents of cider and butter. In the exhilaration of the moment, the capture of this strategic town seemed too easy. Villers-Bocage, above the Seulles valley and just a mile from the River Odon, was a key position. Less than a dozen miles to the south stood Mont Pincon, the dominating feature of the whole region, while Caen lay eight miles to the east.
The only enemy presence sighted had been a German eight-wheeled armoured car just before they entered the town, but it disappeared before the nearest Cromwell could traverse its turret. Brigadier Hinde, who accompanied them in a scout car, knew that to hold the town securely, they must occupy the feature on the north- east side known as Hill 213. The commanding officer of the Sharpshooters, Lieutenant Colonel the Viscount Cranley, wanted to carry out a thorough reconnaissance of the area, since more German armoured cars had been sighted, but ‘Loony’ Hinde would accept no delay. The reconnaissance troop of light Stuart tanks was not used. Cranley simply sent forward A Squadron and, leaving the rest of his tanks in the town, set off in a scout car to have a look himself at Hill 213.
In a small wood close to the road up which the Cromwells advanced, five Tiger tanks from the 101st SS Heavy Panzer Battalion lay hidden. They had just reached the front after a long and complicated journey from near Beauvais, north of Paris. Their commander was Obersturmfuhrer Michael Wittmann, who was already famous as a ‘panzer ace’. Credited with 137 tank ‘kills’ on the eastern front, he had received the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves. Wittmann, enraged by the Allied bombing of German cities, had told his men, ‘We have only one watchword and that is “revenge”!’
Wittmann’s Tigers were the first reinforcements sent forward to fill the gap in the German line. Leading elements of the 2nd Panzer Division would also arrive in the area that day. In fact the 11th Hussars covering 22nd Armoured Brigade’s flank identified their arrival from their first captive. A sergeant and trooper from the 11th had been stalking a sniper when they suddenly found themselves surrounded by a company of panzergrenadiers in half- tracks. They were marched off under guard towards the rear, but once out of sight, they jumped their escort, grabbed his rifle and brought him back as their prisoner instead. His paybook revealed that he was from the 304th Panzergrenadier-Regiment. Although Ultra had warned of the 2nd Panzer-Division’s approach, this proof of its appearance on the southern flank seems to have come as a nasty shock for General Erskine.
Wittmann, seeing the squadron of Cromwells halt on this high-banked stretch of road, immediately recognized the opportunity. Some of the Sharpshooter crews had unwisely dismounted. This apparently prompted Wittmann’s gunner to remark as he peered through his sight that they were behaving as if they had already won the war. Without waiting for his other Tigers to catch up, Wittmann emerged from the wood, swung parallel to the road and opened fire. The Tiger’s 88 mm gun destroyed one Cromwell after another. The Cromwells, badly designed, under-armoured and under-gunned, did not stand a chance. They even found it hard to back out of danger, since their reverse speed was little more than two miles per hour.
Having caused havoc with A Squadron on the hill, Wittmann’s Tiger lumbered down into the town of Villers- Bocage. It rammed aside a Bren-gun carrier of the Rifle Brigade and began to descend the main street. He dealt first with the tanks of the Sharpshooters’ regimental headquarters, then attacked B Squadron. Many crews were dismounted and incapable of replying. But even those who managed to score direct hits on the Tiger found that their low-velocity 75 mm gun had little effect. Wittmann then returned to Hill 213 to finish the battle with A Squadron and the Rifle Brigade detachment.
That afternoon, Wittmann returned to Villers-Bocage with leading elements of the 2nd Panzer-Division. This time the Sharpshooters and the anti-tank guns of the Rifle Brigade were ready, and the attack was repulsed. But General Erskine, having failed to send forward sufficient support, was now worried that the 2nd Panzer-Division threatened his extended southern flank. He decided to withdraw the 22nd Armoured Brigade from its precarious position, rather than reinforce it. As they pulled out of the town that afternoon, British artillery fired a heavy barrage to cover the retreat. But many of the crews from knocked-out tanks had to escape on foot across country back to British lines.
Hinde withdrew the 22nd Armoured Brigade to a defensive position on Hill 174, between Tracy-Bocage and Amaye-sur-Seulles. Bucknall, the corps commander, agreed with the decision, but did little to help except order the 50th Division to continue their attacks on the Panzer Lehr Division. He failed to send infantry reinforcements to help the 22nd Armoured Brigade, isolated as it was between the Panzer Lehr and the 2nd Panzer.
On the afternoon of 14 June, Erskine felt compelled to withdraw his troops all the way back to the Caumont salient. Panzergrenadiers of the 2nd Panzer-Division attacked wherever they could. One British artillery regiment, finding itself in the front line, just managed to fight off an assault by firing airbursts with their twenty-five-pounders. The retreat of the 7th Armoured Division was greatly assisted by a devastating barrage from American artillery supporting their 1st Infantry Division. RAF bombers literally flattened Villers-Bocage that night. The townspeople who had welcomed the Sharpshooters so joyfully were now killed, injured or homeless. Most of the survivors sought shelter in the cellars of the nearby chateau, which belonged to local mayor, the Vicomte de Rugy.
Aunay-sur-Odon, an important crossroads four miles to the south, had also been smashed in a series of RAF bombing attacks. The first had taken place during Mass. The priest, the Abbe Andre Paul, recounted how the sound of aero engines overhead, rapidly followed by explosions which made the church shake, threw his congregation into panic. Many tried to crawl under an upturned prie-dieu for protection. As soon as it was over, the Abbe told them to leave quickly in small groups. As they emerged from the church, they were greeted by a vision of the Last Judgement. The bombs had disinterred many of the skeletons in the churchyard. Repeated raids killed 161 villagers and crushed the whole village to rubble. British troops were shocked by the scene when they finally reached the village just before the end of the battle for Normandy. The small town of Tilly-sur-Seulles had suffered almost as much. A local doctor tending the civilians said that even at Verdun he had not seen such terrible wounds.
On 15 June, the day after the British withdrawal, an Unteroffizier with the 2nd Panzer-Division found time to write home. ‘The fighting in the west has now begun. You can imagine how much we are needed and that little time is left for writing. It is all or nothing now, it is about the existence or the end of our beloved Fatherland. How each of us soldiers will come through this is pretty irrelevant — the main thing is and remains that we will achieve a just and lasting peace… we have learnt to do without everything regarding ourselves or the future and have often come to terms with our mortality. Yet repeatedly one catches oneself still having yearnings and they uphold our faith and our perseverance — but with the explosion of the next shell one’s entire life could be extinguished in an eternal void. We have stepped up to the highest battle.’
The British attempt to break the deadlock in Normandy had failed humiliatingly. One can indulge in many fruitless arguments on the Villers-Bocage fiasco. Would everything have been different if, without the initial delay, the Sharpshooters had been established on Hill 213 before Wittmann arrived? Why did Bucknall not send reinforcements? And why was there no reconnaissance screen in front? The important point is that the operation was not just a major tactical setback. It was a devastating blow to the morale of the 7th Armoured Division and the rest of the British armoured regiments. An intelligence officer with 7th Armoured wrote in his diary a few days later
