D-Day: The Battle for Normandy

roads were so packed that the 30th Division convoys averaged little more than three miles an hour. Their first troops did not reach Mortain until mid-morning on 6 August. Officers of the 1st Division briefed them on the situation. The sector was quiet, apart from a few artillery shells and some patrol activity on the flank of the Montjoie ridge. They admitted their surprise, however, that the night before the Luftwaffe had attacked Mortain with bombs and incendiaries. It had not been very effective, so nobody considered it significant.

When Colonel Hammond D. Birks, the commanding officer of the 120th Infantry Regiment, reached Mortain, he found that shops were open and the hotels full. To some of his men ‘it seemed like an excellent place for a little rest and relaxation,’ he noted. But suddenly the mood changed. ‘As we arrived there,’ an aid man with the 120th Infantry Regiment wrote later, ‘the few French people left in the town suddenly started to vanish. The word was passed to us that the French had been warned that the Germans were about to attack and they were taking refuge in some caves near the town. This report seemed completely implausible and we continued to lie lazily on the grass.’

The 2nd Battalion of the 120th dismounted from their trucks in the main street of Mortain and trudged up the side of the rocky Montjoie ridge to take over the 1st Division’s positions around Hill 314. Their commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Hardaway, made the unfortunate decision to set up his command post in the Grand Hotel down in the town, rather than with his battalion up on Hill 314. Other companies manned roadblocks leading into the town from north and south. A battalion was also sent south-east to secure the small town of Barenton.

Most of the German divisions were already concealed in their assembly positions on the Sourdeval-Mortain sector. The Das Reich and the 116th Panzer-Division had withdrawn under cover of darkness on 3 August. The 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler also pulled out of the line south of Caen to join the attack, but it had far to go. The remnants of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier- Division Gotz von Berlichingen were sent to strengthen the Das Reich, whose task was to cover the southern flank of the offensive and attack Mortain. In the centre, the main force was to consist of the 2nd Panzer-Division, which was to head straight for Juvigny-le-Tertre, just another fifteen miles away. On the northern flank, the 116th Panzer-Division was to attack from near Mont Furgon, west of Sourdeval. The 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, once it arrived, would pass through the other divisions after they had broken the American line and race on to Avranches.

Jodl warned Kluge that Hitler wanted the attack to be made with the maximum force and told him that he should delay the offensive until 8 August. But Kluge, having just heard that the Americans were advancing from the River Mayenne towards Le Mans, felt he could not wait. Beyond Le Mans lay the Seventh Army’s supply base at Alencon.

Kluge, Hausser and his chief of staff, Gersdorff, discussed this threat. An American map had been captured showing a thrust from Le Mans on towards Paris, but not north to cut them off. This encouraged them to think that the Allies were not aiming for encirclement. The heavy British attacks ‘were the greatest obstacles in making the decision,’ Gersdorff noted. Hitler showed little concern about the advance of the Third Army. In his view, it simply meant that the counter-attack would cut off even more American troops.

Kluge saw the Avranches offensive as a means of wrong-footing the Allies before withdrawing to the Loire in the south and the Seine in the east. Hitler, on the other hand, with his manic optimism, saw it as the first step towards re-establishing the front held in Normandy at the beginning of July. OKW promised 1,000 fighters in support of the operation, but none of the senior commanders believed this. ‘They had been deceived so many times in the past and they felt that they would be deceived again,’ Warlimont acknowledged after the war. Yet he himself had been one of Hitler’s deceivers, convincing generals that the situation was better than it really was.

Operation Luttich was to be led by General der Panzertruppen Hans Freiherr von Funck, the thoroughly disliked commander of XLVII Panzer Corps. Generalleutnant Gerhard Graf von Schwerin, the intellectually arrogant commander of the 116th Panzer-Division, had already had a series of furious rows with Funck over his handling of the counter-attack west of the Vire on 28 July. Funck had accused the 116th Panzer-Division of ‘passive resistance, cowardice and incompetence’. Schwerin was now involved in another bitter argument with Funck over the fighting to maintain the start-line for Operation Luttich. The newly arrived 84th Infanterie-Division on his right, which was supposed to take over his sector, was buckling under renewed American attacks. Then Funck believed wrongly that Schwerin had failed to transfer a Panther battalion to the 2nd Panzer-Division as ordered. He demanded that Schwerin should be relieved of his command. Since the attack was just about to start, Oberstgruppenfuhrer Hausser refused. All the senior commanders were clearly in a very agitated state.

At 15.20 hours on 6 August, less than four hours before the offensive was due to begin, Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge received a signal which began in characteristic fashion: ‘The Fuhrer has ordered…’ Operation Luttich, it stated, was not to be led by General von Funck, but by General Eberbach. Hitler loathed Funck because he had been a personal staff officer of Generaloberst Werner Freiherr von Fritsch, whom Hitler had dismissed in 1938. In 1942, Funck had been destined to command the Afrika Korps, but Hitler appointed Rommel instead.

Kluge was appalled by this decision. He immediately rang the OKW in East Prussia to protest that a change of command a few hours before the attack was ‘virtually impossible’. When told that the operation should be delayed as the Fuhrer insisted, Kluge replied, ‘The attack must be carried out this evening. If we wait any longer, we would have to deal with a grave deterioration in our position. The postponement by a day creates the danger that the enemy air forces would strike our assembly areas.’

Kluge managed to persuade OKW to postpone the transfer of command to Eberbach, but he had other worries. The advance elements of the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler had only just reached Flers. Kluge rang Seventh Army headquarters to say that he was doubtful whether they would arrive in time. Although the Leibstandarte had started to pull out on the evening of 4 August, its move to the area of Mortain had been delayed by a sudden Canadian attack, then by traffic jams and the odd air strike.

In spite of Kluge’s fears of bombing raids on their assembly areas, the day saw ‘little air activity’. The 2nd SS Panzer-Division Das Reich lay well hidden under the beech and oak trees of the ancient Foret de Mortain, a long wooded ridge to the south-east of the town. On the right it had the Fuhrer Panzergrenadier-Regiment, in the middle the battlegroup of the 17th SS Panzergrenadier-Division Gotz von Berlichingen, and on the left was the Deutschland-Regiment, supported by the 2nd SS Panzer-Regiment, ready to swing past Mortain to the south-west.

The American 30th Infantry Division in and around Mortain still had little idea of what was afoot. The 4th Infantry Division, which was in reserve, noted in its daily operations log, ‘The war looks practically over.’ This optimism was stimulated by the news of Turkey breaking off relations with Germany, the attempts by Finland, Bulgaria ‘and possibly Hungary’ to get out of the war, the American advances to Brest and Mayenne, and the Red Army reaching the outskirts of Warsaw and the edge of East Prussia. On 6 August, the division’s 12th Infantry Regiment finally pulled back to rest in ‘a beautiful bivouac near the picturesque little town of Brecey. Arrangements for showers, shows, movies and Red Cross “doughnut” girls have hurriedly been made. For the first time since D- Day the hollow-eyed, gaunt-cheeked men of the 12th combat team could relax.’

That afternoon and evening, the code-breakers at Bletchley Park began to work on a flurry of intercepts. The Luftwaffe was asked to provide night-fighter protection for the 2nd SS Panzer-Division for an attack on and beyond Mortain. The 2nd and 116th Panzer-Divisions and the Leibstandarte were also identified for an attack whose start-line was between Mortain and Sourdeval. Bradley, although more sceptical of Ultra intelligence than most commanders, was left in no doubt about the seriousness of the attack. He made sure that every artillery battalion available was rushed forward to the threatened sector between the rivers See and Selune. A message was sent to the 30th Infantry Division to reinforce the battalion on Hill 314 above Mortain, but this does not appear to have been received in time. To the north-west, the mayor of Le Mesnil-Tove warned a company commander of the 117th Infantry of the 30th Division that German troops with tanks were concealed in woods near Bellefontaine, which was behind American lines. When the company commander reported this, he was told by divisional headquarters ‘to stop spreading rumours’.

The start of the attack, originally scheduled for 18.00 hours, was delayed several times due to the SS Leibstandarte’s late arrival. Changes were also made to the formations at the last