D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

Gavray towards Avranches on 31 July, faced much more resistance, encountering roadblocks covered by tanks and anti-tank guns. But they also caught a German column in the open trying to escape across their route. They inflicted heavy damage on reconnaissance vehicles and half-tracks. General Doyle O. Hickey, in a command half-track near the front of the task force, saw one of his self-propelled 105 mm guns blast one of the half-tracks to pieces at a range of less than fifty yards.
    When another column of the 3rd Armored Division also reached Avranches, Ernest Hemingway was just behind the spearhead. His accompanying officer, Lieutenant Stevenson, remarked that staying close to Hemingway was ‘more dangerous than being [Brigadier General] Roosevelt’s aide’. Hemingway, who had attached himself to General Barton’s 4th Infantry Division, persuaded Stevenson to accompany him on risky trips in either a Mercedes convertible or a motorcycle with sidecar, both abandoned in the German retreat. He wrote to his next-in-line wife, Mary Welsh, describing ‘a very jolly and gay life full of deads, German loot, much shooting, much fighting, hedges, small hills, dusty roads, green country, wheatfields, dead cows, dead horses, tanks, 88s, Kraftwagens, dead US guys’. He was soon joined by Robert Capa and nearly got him killed as well when they lost their way and ran into a German anti-tank gun. Hemingway, who had to shelter in a ditch under fire, afterwards accused Capa of failing to help in a crisis so that he could ‘take the first picture of the famous writer’s dead body’.
     
    Behind the ill-defined lines of the front, the American breakthrough caused chaos of a different sort. In Granville, locals had begun to pillage the houses abandoned by the Germans. Even the most respectable of citizens were making off with furniture, from dining chairs to a cradle. A lynch mob of 300 to 400 people wanted to string up a collaborator. The police had a difficult time persuading them to calm down and hand over their prisoner for a proper trial. During the next few days, they also had to round up German stragglers attempting to hide, often dressed in civilian clothes which they had stolen. One woman on the Villedieu road had taken pity on a German soldier and hidden him herself. She was arrested and held at the local fire station, while her young children were handed over for safekeeping to Madame Roy, the keeper of the public gardens.
    An elderly German Unteroffizier was captured in civilian clothes, hiding in a farm near Avranches. ‘ Ah, Monsieur ,’ he said to the farmer who had called an American patrol to take him away, ‘it’s a great sadness for me. I am here and my son is a soldier in the American Army.’ The farmer, who had heard that many young German emigrants were serving in the US forces, was inclined to believe him.
     
    The 6th Armored Division was also pushing on ahead through the Avranches gap. In their first actions, the tank crews had been trigger-happy on spotting any group of Germans, however small. But when thirty Germans popped up from behind a hedge with their hands up, they had to take them with them, as they could not spare any men. They made them sit on the hoods of half-tracks and Jeeps. ‘Our boys got their souvenirs that day,’ an officer remarked. Their advance guard consisted of a company of tanks, a company of infantry in half-tracks, a battery of field artillery, a company of tank destroyers, a section of engineers in half-tracks ready to deal with mines, and a reconnaissance section. They moved at a steady fifteen mph and at times they would overtake ‘unsuspecting Jerries bicycling or walking’. The Sherman crews loaded everything that was not essential on the outside of the tank so that they could stow ‘150 rounds of 75s and 12,000 rounds of .30 calibre’, twice the normal load of ammunition.
    To compound their problems, the Germans were suffering from increasingly audacious attacks by the Resistance further south. A train with sixty-nine wagons bringing urgently needed artillery ammunition had just been blown up in the Landes, while an armoured train was derailed in a tunnel north of Souillac. The British intercepted a signal calling for a construction train ‘under strong military escort’.
     
    On the evening of 31 July, Patton drove to the VIII Corps command post to see Middleton. Middleton’s 4th Armored Division had secured the line of the River Sélune south of Avranches,