since the morning of June 6 was heavily overcast, and Allied fighter-bombers could not fly. But while Army Group B had control of the 21st Division, Hitler controlled the other two. Jodl refused to wake the Fuehrer, and questioned whether the Normandy landings were the main effort. It was 4 P.M. before the divisions were at last released.
The 21st Panzer had 150 tanks, 60 assault guns, and 300 armored troop carriers. Its commander, Edgar Feuchtinger, formed up part of his division to attack the British paratroops east of the Orne River in the morning, but got countermanding orders from 7th Army to attack west of the river. This caused delay and only a single battle group of fifty tanks and a battalion of panzergrenadiers launched the strike toward Sword beach about midday.
Around 9:30 A.M. the 1st Battalion of the British South Lancashires reached a point almost within sight of Caen when they encountered three antitank guns emplaced on a ridge. The South Lancs dug in and waited for the 65 tanks of the 185th Brigade, which were supposed to lead the midmorning attack toward Caen. For three hours the South Lancs sat there, while the tanks waited for the traffic jam on the Sword beach to clear.
Around 2 P.M. twenty Sherman tanks finally attacked the three AT guns, which withdrew, and the tanks’ accompanying force, the Shropshire Light Infantry, pressed on toward Caen. Just short of the town it ran into dug- in infantry, and withdrew to Bieville, four miles north. This was the closest the Allies got to Caen for a month.
Meanwhile the 21st Panzer battle group skirted around west of the Shropshires and drove northward with the intention of splitting Juno from Sword, and destroying each beachhead in turn. The Germans reached the unguarded coast between the two beaches at 8 P.M.
Feuchtinger was sending another fifty tanks to reinforce this advance when overhead the panzers saw the largest glider-borne force in the war, 250 transports, coming to reinforce the 6th Airborne a few miles east. Feuchtinger assumed wrongly that the gliders were landing in his rear with the intention of cutting off the division, and he recalled all his tanks. This fortuitous appearance of the gliders ended the last chance the Germans had to smash the beachheads.
The Germans made another fundamental error: they sent the two closest panzer divisions in daylight toward the Normandy beaches. Rommel and Guderian had preached against this, saying that troops had to move at night. But OKW ordered 12th SS Panzer Hitler Jugend Division, west of Paris, to advance on Caen on the late afternoon of June 6. It did not complete its 75-mile journey until 9:30 A.M., June 7. Friedrich Dollmann, 7th Army commander, ordered Panzer Lehr Division, near Chartres, 110 miles from the front, to drive in daylight on June 7 toward Villers-Bocage, fifteen miles southwest of Caen, to block British movement in that direction. Fritz Bayerlein, Panzer Lehr commander, protested in vain.
Both divisions suffered heavy damage from Allied air attacks. Panzer Lehr, the only division in Normandy at full strength, lost 5 tanks, 84 self-propelled guns and half-tracks, and 130 trucks and fuel tankers. Because of the air attacks Panzer Lehr’s tracked vehicles got separated from the wheeled units, and the division was unable to deliver an attack when it arrived, while SS Hitler Jugend had neither the time nor space to launch a coordinated assault by all its formations.
Nevertheless, the arrival of both panzer divisions stopped the rapid advance of the Allies out of Normandy. But these and other divisions were eaten up as they were committed piecemeal, and the moment passed when the German army could have thrown the Allies into the sea. Meanwhile Hitler held some of his strongest divisions at the Pas de Calais, still believing the Normandy invasion was a feint. From sites around the Pas, he also launched attacks on London, beginning June 12–13, with the V-1 jet-propelled cruise missile, and, in September, fired the first V-2 rocket-propelled ballistic missiles.
On June 10, Rommel proposed to Hitler that all armored forces in the line be replaced with infantry formations, and that armor be shifted westward to cut off and destroy the Americans in the lower Cotentin peninsula (7th Corps that had landed at Utah and the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions). But Hitler vetoed the plan, and the Germans were forced into a wholly defensive operation.
This led to a murderous battle, but the outcome was never in doubt. Overwhelming Allied power was building day by day. Before long the Allies would burst out of Normandy and roll over the German army.
22 THE LIBERATION OF FRANCE
ALL THE DISASTERS PREDICTED BY ERWIN ROMMEL FOR FAILURE TO MOVE UP forces in advance now came to pass. Practically every unit ordered to the battlefront suffered heavy damage. Reinforcements had to be thrown in as soon as they arrived, and their strength eroded rapidly. Battle losses ran 2,500 to 3,000 a day. Tank losses were immense, replacements few.
Allied aircraft destroyed the railway system serving Normandy and smashed anything moving on the roads in daytime. The supply system was so damaged that only the barest essentials reached the front.
As Hitler repeated his familiar order to hold every square yard, Rundstedt and Rommel went to Berchtesgaden on June 29 to talk with the Fuehrer.
Hitler’s ideas for stopping the western Allies were utterly unrealistic. The navy was to attack the Allied battleships, but Admiral Donitz pointed out only a few small torpedo and other light boats were available, and they could accomplish little. A thousand of the new Me-262 twin-engine, jet-propelled fighters were to wrest control of the air over Normandy. However, Anglo-American air attacks in the winter and spring of 1944 had virtually wiped out the pool of skilled German pilots. The Luftwaffe could produce only 500 crews, most of them ill-trained. Consequently, very few Me-262s, with a speed (540 mph) and armament (four 30-millimeter cannons) exceeding any Allied fighter, ever flew against the Allies.
Rundstedt and Rommel told Hitler the situation was impossible. How, Rommel asked, did Hitler imagine the war could still be won? A chaotic argument followed, and Rundstedt and Rommel expected to be ousted from their jobs.
Back at Paris on July 1, Rundstedt got Hitler’s order that “present positions are to be held.” He called Hitler’s headquarters and told a staff officer he couldn’t fulfill this demand. What shall we do? the officer asked. Rundstedt replied: “Make peace, you fools.”
The next day an emissary from Hitler presented Rundstedt with an Oak Leaf to the Knight’s Cross and a handwritten note relieving him of his post because of “age and poor health.” Hitler replaced Rundstedt with Gunther von Kluge, who at first thought the situation was better than it was. He changed his mind the moment he visited the front.
Rommel, to his surprise, remained at his post. About this time Rommel and his chief of staff, Hans Speidel, concluded that the Germans should commence independent peace negotiations with the western Allies. Their idea was to open the west to an unopposed “march in” by the British and American armies, with the aim of keeping the Russians out of Germany. Everything had been prepared and Kluge and others won over, when fate intervened on July 17: Rommel was severely wounded by a low-flying Allied aircraft near Livarot.
Three days later, on July 20, 1944, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, a leader of the secret opposition to Hitler, placed a bomb under a table where Hitler was meeting in his headquarters at Rastenburg, East Prussia. The bomb exploded, but Hitler survived. Immediately afterward, he replaced the army chief of staff, Kurt Zeitzler, with Heinz Guderian, who reported to Hitler at noon on July 21.
“He seemed to be in rather poor shape,” Guderian wrote. “One ear was bleeding; his right arm, which had been badly bruised and was almost unusable, hung in a sling. But his manner was one of astonishing calm.”
Hitler quickly recovered from the physical effects of the bomb. An existing malady, which caused his left hand and left leg to tremble, had no connection with the explosion. The attempt on his life had a profound effect on his behavior, however. Guderian wrote that “the deep distrust he already felt for mankind in general … now became profound hatred…. What had been hardness became cruelty, while a tendency to bluff became plain dishonesty. He often lied without hesitation…. He believed no one any more. It had already been difficult enough dealing with him; it now became torture that grew steadily worse from month to month. He frequently lost all self-control and his language grew increasingly violent.”
Hitler commenced a wave of terror against anyone suspected of a role in the bombing plot. This led to numerous executions. On October 14, 1944, Rommel, recovering from his wounds at his home in Ulm, received
