squad, became very hard. Their officers described it as ‘more like jungle fighting’. The advance progressed only because of the courage of a few individuals outflanking machine-gun positions. The high proportion of dead to wounded showed how most engagements were fought at close quarters. The experience proved a considerable strain for a division which had not yet found its feet. By the next day, one battalion in the 358th Infantry had lost so many men that three companies had to be merged into one. Fortunately, the 90th then found that the German paratroops had slipped away in the night.
German Seventh Army headquarters was already extremely concerned at the situation on that western sector, because General von Choltitz lacked any reserves and the Mahlmann defence line had now been outflanked. Oberstgruppenfuhrer Hausser had spoken to Rommel on the evening of 10 July, insisting that he must shorten that part of the front. Army Group B only gave its agreement late in the afternoon of 11 July. Choltitz ordered a general withdrawal back to the line of the River Ay and the town of Lessay.
‘The population has to evacuate now and it’s a complete mass migration,’ wrote the Obergefreiter in the 91st Luftlande-Division. ‘The fat nuns sweat profusely as they push their carts. It is hard to watch this and to go along with this accursed war. To continue to believe in victory is very hard since the USA is gaining more and more of a foothold.’
Allied fighter-bombers continued to attack not only front-line positions, but also any supply trucks coming up behind with food, ammunition and fuel. The almost total absence of the Luftwaffe to contest the enemy’s air supremacy continued to provoke anger among German troops, although they often resorted to black humour. ‘If you can see silver aircraft, they are American,’ went one joke. ‘If you can see khaki planes, they are British, and if you can’t see any planes, then they’re German.’ The other version of this went, ‘If British planes appear, we duck. If American planes come over, everyone ducks. And if the Luftwaffe appears, nobody ducks.’ American forces had a different problem. Their trigger-happy soldiers were always opening fire at aircraft despite orders not to because they were far more likely to be shooting at an Allied plane than an enemy one.
In the VII Corps sector, the 4th and 83rd Divisions pushed down either side of the Carentan-Periers road, but the 9th Division, severely disrupted by the Panzer Lehr attack, was unable to join in that day. One of their battalion command posts received a direct hit. Convinced that the only possible German observation post was in a church tower, their divisional artillery brought it down. Church towers and steeples were always suspect. A few days later, on the slow advance towards Periers, soldiers from the division claimed to have found a German artillery observation officer dressed as a priest in a church tower with a radio. He was shot. But even in the more experienced 9th Division, officers reported that unnecessary casualties were sustained because their soldiers failed to shoot when advancing. ‘The men said they held their fire because they could not see the enemy.’
General Meindl of II Paratroop Corps was rightly convinced that the Americans would use the Martinville ridge east of Saint-Lo for their assault on the town, but he did not have the strength to retake Hill 192.
With the 2nd Division firmly ensconced south of Hill 192, the main American effort was concentrated in the sector of the 29th Division towards the western part of the ridge. Another assault was launched that night, but it achieved little success in the face of German mortar and artillery fire, and was halted in the evening of 12 July. It was to take the 29th Division another five days at the cost of heavy casualties to clear the ridge and establish positions south of the Bayeux road. Thursday, 13 July, did not see much fighting and the medical staff finally had a rest. The surgeons of the 3rd Armored Division were able to enjoy ‘poker and mint juleps in the evening — until midnight’, as one of them noted in his diary. On 14 July, the weather was so bad that the American attack halted and for the first time the Germans found it ‘possible to relieve units during daylight’. But XIX Corps was planning an attack for the next day. General Corlett called it his ‘Sunday punch’.
Corlett’s XIX Corps headquarters was made more colourful by its British liaison officer, Viscount Weymouth (soon to become the 6th Marquess of Bath), ‘a tall Britisher who had gained a reputation for eccentricity because of some of his trips through the German lines and his habit of leading two ducks around on a leash’.
On 14 July, at nightfall, the funeral took place of Brigadier General Teddy Roosevelt, who sadly for him had died of a heart attack rather than in battle. Generals Bradley, Hodges, Collins, Patton, Barton and Huebner were the pall-bearers, an eloquent tribute in the middle of an offensive to Roosevelt’s extraordinary courage and popularity. Patton, who had a great taste for military ceremonial, was, however, rather disappointed by the occasion. The guard of honour was too far away and formed up in column, not in line. He was particularly irritated by ‘two preachers of uncertain denominations’, who ‘made orations which they concealed under the form of prayers’. In fact, the only fitting touch in his view came towards the end of the service, when ‘our antiaircraft guns opened on some German planes and gave an appropriate requiem to the funeral of a really gallant man’. Yet even such a solemn occasion could not rest untouched by military prima-donnaship. ‘Brad says he will put me in as soon as he can,’ Patton added in his diary. ‘He could do it now with much benefit to himself, if he had any backbone. Of course, Monty does not want me as he fears I will steal the show, which I will.’
In the far western sector, the German withdrawal carried out secretly by Choltitz had permitted VIII Corps to advance all the way to the River Ay. Next to it, VII Corps found that its artillery was now finally in range of Periers. The heavy mortars of the chemical battalions concentrated on firing white phosphorus, and more and more German dead were found with terrible burns.
Amid the high hedgerows of the
French families who refused to leave their farms remained at great risk during these battles. ‘I remember one poignant scene that hurt all of us there,’ recorded an officer with a chemical battalion. ‘A family came through our position carrying a door on which was the body of a young boy. We did not know how he was killed. The pain on the faces of the innocent family affected each of us and made us feel for the people of the area and what they must be suffering.’
Sometimes French farmers and their families, on finding a dead soldier, would lay the body by a roadside crucifix and place flowers on it, even though they were trapped in an increasingly pitiless battle. Near Periers, a small American patrol was captured. According to a battalion surgeon with the 4th Division, a German officer demanded to know the whereabouts of the nearest American signals unit. Receiving no answer, he shot one of the prisoners in the leg. ‘Then, he shot the commander of the patrol through the head when he refused to talk.’
Occasionally it seems that the Red Cross symbol offered no protection from reprisals. ‘I saw medical aid men and medical officers who had been killed outright by the Germans,’ reported a surgeon with the 2nd Armored Division. ‘One medical man was stripped and hung from rafters and bayoneted in the stomach.’ The Germans, on the other hand, complained that Allied fighters frequently attacked their ambulances despite the Red Cross markings.
In field hospitals well behind the lines, the chief danger was stress. Inevitably some surgeons broke down under the physical and psychological pressure. The screams, the stench of gangrene, the blood, the severed limbs, the terrible burns of armoured troops were bound to have a cumulative effect. What is astonishingly impressive is how the vast majority stayed the course. A captain in the 100th Evacuation Hospital calculated that in three and a half months he performed over 6,000 operations: ‘I got so I can tell from the type of wound whether our troops are advancing, falling back or stationary. I can also detect self-inflicted wounds.’ Green troops were more likely to suffer from booby-traps and mines. ‘Self-inflicted wounds generally roll in just as a battle starts. On the advance it’s mortar, machinegun and small arms. After breakthrough or capture of a position we get mine and booby trap cases. When stationary, all claim it’s an 88 that hit them.’ Yet the chief of the X-Ray department of the 2nd Evacuation Hospital expressed amazement at how uncomplaining the wounded usually were: ‘It’s such a paradox, this war,’ he wrote, ‘which produces the worst in man, and also raises him to the summits of self-sacrifice, self-denial and altruism.’
Psychological injury still constituted a large minority of their case-load. US Army medical services had to deal