D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

with them feared the worst. They quickly realized that the safest place would be in among their enemy. They charged the British positions, rolling over trenches. With an ironic admiration, they saw British anti-tank crews trying to bring their ineffective guns to bear. ‘They’re brave, the Anglo-Saxons!’ one of them noted.
    The monster panzers suddenly emerged from the bank of mist. ‘We had a scene in front of us of which every Tiger dreams,’ a crew member wrote. Barely a hundred yards away was a forward replenishment point with ammunition trucks and other vehicles, including tanks. ‘Our commander called out: “Armour-piercing! Open fire!”.’ Two Churchill tanks in front of them were traversing their turrets towards them, but the Tigers blasted them at close range and they both exploded into flames.
    That day, General Eberbach told II SS Panzer Corps that Hill 112 must not be lost under any circumstances. It was a ‘ Schlüsselstellung ’ - a key position. Frantic telephone calls followed in an attempt to secure replacements of both men and materiel. The panzergrenadiers supported by the Tiger companies held the ridge all day.
    After dusk, D Company of the Somersets received orders to ‘infiltrate the enemy position’. ‘The despair I felt when this order reached me can be imagined,’ wrote Sergeant Partridge, who had taken over command of his platoon after the death of their lieutenant the day before. Weapons were cleaned and ammunition distributed. At 01.00 hours, they rose out of their slit trenches and advanced silently. But as soon as they reached the barbed wire on the summit which the SS panzergrenadiers had erected, a murderous fire opened. The platoons threw themselves flat. ‘The tracer bullets,’ wrote Sergeant Partridge, ‘were arcing their way almost lazily through the air, winging their way to pre-selected targets chosen during daylight, and now being fired on “fixed lines”.’
    Any attempt to breach the wire ended when a section commander attempted to scramble through. A German bullet hit a phosphorus grenade in his ammunition pouch. ‘Struggling in desperation,’ wrote a corporal watching, ‘he became entangled in the barbed wire and hung there, a living screaming human beacon.’ Sergeant Partridge heard the man’s ‘anguished cries of “Shoot me, shoot me!”’. ‘A single well-aimed bullet from a compassionate but no doubt appalled officer,’ the corporal continued, ‘put the lad out of his blazing hell. Even in death the horror continued as the phosphorus burned into the now mercifully lifeless body.’ Everyone who witnessed the scene was determined never again to carry a phosphorus grenade in their webbing pouches.
    An order was given to pull back, but that was not the end of the horror. Some men became lost in the dark on their way down the hill and were shot as they reached the positions of other companies who did not know who they were. The corporal noted that 18 Platoon of D Company had only nine men left out of thirty-six. One of the survivors then shot himself in the foot, because he could not take any more.
    The nightmare of Hill 112 continued. The British recaptured it the next day, then the SS seized it back in another counter-attack with Tigers. After the rains of the week before, the temperature had now risen to thirty degrees centigrade and every explosion created clouds of dust. The small wood of chestnut trees was shredded by the British artillery firing airbursts. These were intended to rain splinters down on the defenders. Very soon the wood was reduced to smashed stumps and broken branches, a ‘moon landscape’ as one of the SS put it. On 15 July, the artillery fire was so intense that the panzergrenadiers were forced to withdraw, leaving the Tigers there alone.
    All this time, the artillery of the II SS Panzer Corps resorted to the German tactic of sudden intense barrages on the British positions on the north slope of the ridge. The SS gunners, being much further back, did not suffer the same privations as the panzergrenadiers. One battery of the 9th SS Artillerie-Regiment with the Hohenstaufen Division appears to have been adopted by a young Frenchwoman, whom they knew as ‘Mademoiselle Jeanette’. Each day, she used to bring food to the soldiers in the gun line.
    Further to the east, German artillery now bombarded the liberated capital of Caen. On 14 July, the Lycée Malherbe and the quarter of Saint-Etienne were hit. People who had