D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

exasperation with the Luftwaffe. General Bülowius, the commander of II Air Corps, regarded this as very unfair. Allied air supremacy meant his aircraft were intercepted as soon as they took off, and bombers were forced to drop their loads long before they reached the target area. He suffered from the army’s ‘daily reports which even reached Führer headquarters that their own Luftwaffe and own aircraft were nowhere to be seen’. As a result he received ‘many unpleasant reproaches and accusations’ from the highest quarters.
    Luftwaffe aircrew in Normandy consisted of a surviving handful of aces, while the vast majority were cannon fodder straight out of flying school. Major Hans-Ekkehard Bob, a fighter group commander with fifty-nine victories, often found himself being pursued by eight or ten Mustangs. He survived only by using all his flying skills, twisting and turning almost at ground level round small woods and church towers. He claims he was helped greatly by the intense competition between American pilots, each desperate to shoot him down and thus getting in each other’s way.
    Since every known airfield was bombed and strafed by the Allied air forces on a regular basis, fighter squadrons deployed to woods close to a stretch of straight road, which they could use as a runway. They had to land and then turn off into the trees, where ground crews would be ready to cover the plane with camouflage nets. For this sort of work, the Focke-Wulf 190, with its wide undercarriage and robust construction, proved much more effective than the Messerschmitt 109.
    As Rommel and Kluge had warned, the German forces in Normandy were close to breaking point. They had received only a very small number of men to replace their losses. ‘Alarm units’ of clerks and others known disparagingly as ‘half-soldiers’ were brought forward to fill some of the gaps in the front-line divisions. They were not just losing men to enemy action. The reduced rations due to Allied air attacks prompted desertions, both of Poles, Osttruppen , 50 Alsatians and Volksdeutsche, but also of Germans born in the Reich. 51
    Some were soldiers who did not believe in the Nazi regime or who just hated the war. A British doctor was suspicious at the enthusiastic help of a young German soldier who had surrendered. Sensing this distrust, the boy pulled out a snapshot of his girlfriend and showed it to him. ‘No, no,’ he said. ‘I play no tricks. I want to live to see her !’
    Generalleutnant von Lüttwitz, the commander of the 2nd PanzerDivision , was shocked when three of his Austrians deserted to the enemy. He warned that the names of any deserters would be published in their home towns so that measures could be taken against their relatives. ‘If somebody betrays his own people,’ he announced, ‘then their family does not belong within the German national community.’ Lüttwitz may have supported the idea of resisting Hitler, but he was still prepared to adopt measures of a Nazi character.
    Treatment of SS soldiers was even harsher. According to a Führer decree, SS soldiers could be accused of high treason if they were taken prisoner by the enemy unwounded. They had been forcefully reminded of this just before the invasion. It was hardly surprising that the British and Canadians captured so few SS alive. 52 But perhaps the most horrific story of SS discipline came from an Alsatian drafted into the 1st SS Panzer-Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler . A fellow Alsatian in the 11th Company of the 1st SS Regiment of the Leibstandarte , who had also been forcibly recruited, deserted and tried to escape in a column of French refugees. He was spotted by members of their regiment and brought back. Their commander then ordered members of his own company to beat him to death. With every bone in his body broken, the corpse was thrown into a shell-hole. The captain declared that this was an example of ‘ Kameradenerziehung ’, an ‘education in comradeship’.

21
    Operation Cobra - Breakthrough
    On 21 July, the Germans intercepted a radio message summoning American commanders for an orders group. This confirmed their suspicions that the US First Army was preparing a large-scale offensive, but they still did not know where. After the heavy fighting for Saint-Lô, Oberstgruppenführer Hausser expected a thrust south-westwards down the Vire valley from Saint-Lô to Torigni. Generalfeldmarschall von Kluge, on the other hand, was convinced that the