Division to the north, were bound to try to escape past them.
Near Saint-Denis-le-Gast, a mile from Grimesnil, the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion set up a block covered by anti-tank guns and the 92nd Field Artillery Battalion. They saw a column of vehicles approaching led by a couple of American armoured cars, but these had been captured and were being used as a
Soon afterwards, the command post of the 2nd Armored’s reserve was nearly overrun in a surprise attack, but the defenders, mostly clerks and rear-echelon personnel, held their nerve. With the help of a bright moon and the light from burning vehicles, they picked their targets at short range as the German infantry charged. This was clearly demonstrated later that morning when officers went out to examine the corpses of the attackers. The Germans had been killed ‘by single rifle shots rather than machinegun bursts’.
Another report cited the bravery of Sergeant Bishop, whose body was found with seven dead Germans around him, and Staff Sergeant Barnes, who cut the throats of three German attackers with a trench knife. ‘Action during the fight was so mixed up that an aid man looked up to find a German aid man sharing his slit trench. For a few minutes both men frantically pointed at their Red Cross armbands, then frisked each other for possible weapons.’
The same night, a couple of miles to the south-east, two companies of armoured infantry in the process of setting up a roadblock were taken by surprise when the Germans rolled ‘their vehicles down the hill toward the Grimesnil road, with their engines off’. In the desperate fighting in the dark, the armoured infantry suffered heavy casualties not just from enemy fire, but also from their own artillery and tanks. When Lieutenant Colonel Crowley arrived at 07.00 hours on 30 July with the reserve company of his battalion, the battle was virtually over. The whole area was littered with burning vehicles. The roadblock itself had been overrun and Crowley could not contact one of the attacked companies by radio. But the Germans were exhausted and cowed by the artillery. His men picked up 300 prisoners in the area. The worst part of that morning was to be under consistent fire from the 4th Armored Division to their west: ‘Even the use of yellow smoke failed to stop them until Colonel Crowley established radio communication with them.’
There were two main German columns trying to escape that night, one of which contained ninety-six vehicles, including ‘tanks, 150 mm and 170 mm guns — towed and self-propelled — half-tracks, staff cars, motorcycles and trucks’. The troops came from three divisions, the 275th Infanterie-Division, the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division and the reconnaissance battalion of the 2nd SS Panzer-Division
A badly damaged M-10 tank destroyer had come to a halt by the side of the road from Saint-Denis to Lengronne. The crew inside played possum as the German column passed, then, as soon as the last half-track had gone by, they brought their three-inch gun to bear and began knocking them out, one by one, firing twenty-eight rounds altogether.
The main force at the crossroads had to pull back to higher ground, where infantry could protect the Shermans from German foot soldiers trying to stalk them with Panzerfaust launchers. The first vehicle in the German column, a Mark IV tank towing an 88 mm gun, advanced towards the defensive position and was destroyed by a tank shell. ‘Then the organized slaughter started,’ an officer reported. The mortar platoon began rapid fire down the line of the convoy, ‘a ratio of one white phosphorus to three high explosive’. The vehicles set ablaze by the white phosphorus lit up the scene, aiding the tank gunners and mortar crews, who dropped high-explosive rounds into the open backs of the German half-tracks. While their gunners continued to engage targets, tank commanders were having to fight off German infantry with the .50 machine gun mounted over their hatch.
One officer recorded that ‘as daylight broke, about 300 German infantrymen tried to advance through a swamp to the north of the Grimesnil road… the tanks went after them and killed nearly all. Close to 300 bodies were found in and around this swamp.’ Another 600 dead were found along the road which had been shelled — ‘a bloody mass of arms and legs and heads, [and] cremated corpses… at least three German women were found in various stages of decapitation’. One of them had been driving a major general’s staff car.‘The major general was identified by his uniform, but when battalion officers returned later they found that souvenir hunters had taken all his clothes.’[58]
The American graves registration service retrieved 1,150 German dead from the convoy of ninety-six vehicles. ‘The whole area was raw meat splattered on burned and ruined vehicles,’ observed one officer. Another report stated that ‘prisoners were coming in so fast that it became impossible to count them. Many stated that they had not eaten for two or three days.’ Meanwhile the 82nd Reconnaissance Battalion slipped south to seize bridges over the River Sienne.
Brigadier General Hickey’s combat command from the 3rd Armored Division, following the German retreat, found in Roncey that ‘German equipment, abandoned and broken, cluttered the road to such an extent that progress through the main street was impossible, and the task force had to go through the back streets to get out of the town’. A tank dozer had to be brought up to clear the main road. So many German soldiers were surrendering that they had to send them to the rear without a guard. When the 3rd Armored reached the area of Grimesnil and Saint-Denis-le-Gast, a medical officer noted in his diary ‘Carnage gruesome. Includes enemy dead smashed flat by our tanks.’
Generalmajor Rudolph-Christoff Freiherr von Gersdorff, the new chief of staff of the Seventh Army, who had reached their advanced command post three miles north-east of Avranches on the afternoon of 29 July, found a disastrous situation.[59] Nobody had issued orders to blow any of the bridges and no landline communications existed. As a result of the German retreat away from the coast, which had so infuriated Kluge, the American 6th and 4th Armored Divisions were now virtually unopposed.
In Granville, on the coast, the Germans began blowing up the port installations at 01.00 hours and it continued for five hours. The local
There was consternation at La Roche-Guyon and at the
The bulk of the German forces had withdrawn in the direction of Percy. An American reconnaissance troop, trying to find an undefended route to Percy, searched the side roads, but found they were all blocked. On one small country lane, the sergeant in the lead Jeep spotted some German soldiers creeping behind a hedgerow. ‘Pour it to them!’ he yelled to the soldier standing in the back, manning the .50 machine gun. The gunner swept the line, killing most of them with ‘incinerator’ (tracer) bullets. He joked afterwards that the bullets were humane, as they sterilized the wound going in and the one going out the other side. Many soldiers saw it as payback time after all the hard fighting in the
The Germans had virtually no forces left to defend the coast road. A field replacement battalion on the south side of the River Sienne had rounded up stragglers who had managed to slip through the American screen. The 6th and 4th Armored Divisions, already under Patton’s direction, were well on their way to Avranches. Patton did not accept any excuse for delay. ‘The thing to do is to rush them off their feet before they get set,’ he wrote in his diary on 29 July. He was in an exuberant mood. Breakthrough had been achieved. The breakout, which he felt belonged to him by divine right, was about to begin.
