rearguard action in parts of the town.
Cota’s task force entered ‘a shell of a town’, smashed both by the original Allied bombing of 6 June and by artillery fire during the recent battle. Sky could be seen through the upper windows of the roofless buildings. The streets were blocked with wrecked vehicles and rubble, and this brought most traffic to a halt. Different groups were assigned to seize key points and fight house-to-house battles against the stay-behind groups from the 30th Mobile Brigade. By 19.00 hours, Gerhardt was able to claim that the place was secured. The engineers and dozer tanks got to work clearing streets to allow free movement, but the harassing fire did not stop. A forward controller of the divisional artillery was planning to use one of the twin spires of Saint-Lo’s small cathedral as an observation post, but before he and his men could get into position German artillery had brought down both towers. Brigadier General ‘Dutch’ Cota was wounded by shell fragments, having shown as much disregard for his personal safety as he had on Omaha beach. ‘Cota was hit by a shell fragment in his arm,’ wrote a lieutenant with the cavalry reconnaissance troop. ‘I can remember the blood running from his sleeve and dripping off his fingers. Not a bad wound but he just stood there talking. It didn’t bother him in the least.’
Saint-Lo’s capture provoked a measure of over-confidence. When the 25th Cavalry Squadron relieved the 29th’s reconnaissance troop the next day, they charged ahead, despite warnings of German anti-tank guns, and lost several Jeeps and armoured cars.
The general advance from 7 to 20 July had cost the Americans some 40,000 casualties. But in Bradley’s view, it had finally secured the left flank for Cobra and ground down the German forces to such a point that the breakthrough being planned stood a far greater chance of success. General Gerhardt wished to mark the 29th Division’s victory with a symbolic act. He ordered that the body of Major Howie, the battalion commander killed just before the final assault on the town, should be brought into the ruined city. The corpse, wrapped in an American flag, arrived on a Jeep. It was placed on a pile of rubble by the episcopal church of Notre Dame. Howie became known as the ‘Major of Saint-Lo’. His death came to represent the sacrifice of all those whom General Montgomery, in his tribute, called ‘the magnificent American troops who took Saint-Lo’. Yet German commanders, even after the war, still regarded the huge American effort to take the town as unnecessary. Saint-Lo would have been outflanked immediately once the great American attack, Operation Cobra, opened to the west just over a week later.
19. Operation Goodwood
After the costly battle for northern Caen, Montgomery was even more concerned about infantry shortages. British and Canadian losses had now risen to 37,563. The Adjutant-General, Sir Ronald Adam, had come over to Normandy to warn Montgomery and Dempsey that replacements would run out in the next few weeks.
Dempsey’s Second Army was not, however, short of tanks. He now had three armoured divisions, five independent armoured brigades and three tank brigades. While Montgomery remained wedded to his idea of holding down the German panzer formations on his front to allow the Americans to break out, Dempsey was determined to break the bloody stalemate. The bridgehead east of the Orne appeared to offer a good opportunity for a major armoured attack over open country south-east towards Falaise. Dempsey had been deeply impressed by the destructive power of the heavy bombers in their attack of 7 July. He seems, however, to have been strangely misguided about its lack of military effectiveness.
On 12 July, Dempsey persuaded Montgomery that he should mass the three armoured divisions into General Richard O’Connor’s VIII Corps. Montgomery was extremely reluctant. He did not like the idea of tank formations ‘swanning about’ as they had in the Western Desert, occasionally with disastrous consequences. But he felt he had no option in the circumstances. He did not want to risk another major infantry battle, yet he had to do something to head off the criticism building in London and at SHAEF headquarters. The attack on Caen had failed to gain the territory needed for airfields and to deploy the Canadian First Army.
Most important of all, in Montgomery’s thinking, this offensive represented a major blow on the Caen front just before the Americans launched Operation Cobra in the west. If nothing else, this would prevent the Germans from transferring panzer divisions to face Bradley’s First Army. Yet Montgomery’s true feelings are still not clear. Either he had suddenly convinced himself that the operation must achieve a major breakthrough, or else he felt compelled to mislead his superiors to be sure of obtaining the heavy bombers to smash open the German lines. Politically, this was a very unwise course of action.
On 12 July, he sold Dempsey’s plan to Eisenhower on the basis that it offered the possibility of a decisive breakthrough. The supreme commander, who had despaired of Montgomery’s caution, replied exuberantly two days later, ‘I am viewing the prospects with the most tremendous optimism and enthusiasm. I would not be at all surprised to see you gaining a victory that will make some of the “old classics” look like a skirmish between patrols.’ Also on 14 July, Montgomery wrote to Field Marshal Brooke, saying that ‘the time has come to have a real “showdown” on the eastern flank’. Then, the very next day, Montgomery gave Dempsey and O’Connor a revised directive. This was more modest in its objectives. He wanted to advance only a third of the way to Falaise and then see how things stood. This may well have been a more realistic assessment of what was possible, yet Montgomery never told Eisenhower and he never even informed his own 21st Army Group headquarters. The consequences would be disastrous for Montgomery’s reputation and credibility.
The Guards Armoured Division, originally delayed by the great storm, was by now ready to take part. Its officers were urged to visit the different fronts in Jeeps to pick up what they could in battle knowledge. But the experience was not exactly encouraging. ‘I came upon a line of six or seven British Sherman tanks,’ wrote a member of the Irish Guards, ‘each of which had a neat hole in the side. Most had been burnt out. They had obviously been hit in quick succession, probably by the same gun.’ On their return, when briefed for Operation Goodwood, they were told that they were ‘going to break right through’. Goodwood, named like Epsom after a racecourse, prompted the joke that it would be a ‘day at the races’.
Montgomery, using his strategy of ‘alternate thrusts’ to throw the Germans off balance before the main offensive, persuaded Dempsey to begin with diversionary attacks further west. Shortly before midnight on 15 July, the British attacked near Esquay, Hill 112 and Maltot with flame-throwing Crocodile tanks. In the dark, they must have appeared like armoured dragons. Even further west, XXX Corps mounted a limited push. ‘There is a nice cool breeze now moving the ripening corn,’ wrote a captain near Fontenay-le-Pesnel. ‘Amongst the corn one can just see the tops of guns and tanks, the spurts of flame and clouds of dust as they fire… another gloriously hot day. Dusty, hazy, with gunfire smoke hanging low over the corn like a November fog.’
Once again, Hill 112, the ‘hill of Calvary’, saw the most bitter fighting. The commander of the 9th SS Panzer- Division
The German 277th Infanterie-Division had just reached the front near Evrecy from Beziers on the Mediterranean coast. A young gunner with the division, Eberhard Beck, travelled with his artillery regiment to the Loire by train, then marched from there by night. Even the draught horses pulling their 150 mm howitzers and limbers had been half asleep. When the column halted, which was often, the horses trudged on, and the soldiers dozing on the back of the gun carriage in front found a horse’s muzzle in their face. The only high point of their journey had been the successful looting of a wine cellar in a chateau. Beck and his fellow soldiers had no idea what to expect in Normandy.
Closer to the front, they were joined by infantry, carrying Panzerfaust anti-tank grenade launchers over their shoulders. They could see ahead the sickly light of magnesium flares and ‘the whole length of the front flashed and flickered like lightning’. Beck wanted to hide himself in the depths of a wood or forest. ‘An unbelievable nervousness came over both soldiers and horses.’ The sound of aircraft overhead became ‘an endless, relentless roar’.
Their battery commander, Oberleutnant Freiherr von Stenglin, directed them to their first fire position west of Evrecy. Almost immediately, shells began to explode. The head of a driver named Pommer was taken off by a piece of shrapnel. Horses reared in terror and a container of hot food brought up from the field kitchen went flying, spilling goulash on the ground. Beck had two preoccupations, one of which was to sleep after the exhaustion of the march.
