D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

onto the road. On his first attempt to fire the bazooka it did not go off. He found that the safety was stuck. While the tank continued to approach him, [Burik] released the safety and fired point-blank at the tank.’ The tank then fired directly at him, knocking him down and seriously injuring him. He arose, loaded the bazooka, took direct aim and fired again. The tank fired another round, knocking him down again. ‘Dragging himself up to a firing position, [Burik] loaded the bazooka a third time and from his shaky position fired at the tank. Jerry had had too much and withdrew up the hill. [Burik] with utter disregard for his own safety then tried to push another injured soldier into a foxhole.’ Burik turned and called for more bazooka ammunition, then fell unconscious along the side of the road. Later he died from his wounds.
    Another attempt to seize the road junction on Hill 278 was led by Lieutenant Colonel Samuel A. Hogan, with a battalion of the 119th Infantry riding on his tanks from the 3rd Armored Division. They took a circuitous route round to the west of Mortain and across the railway bridge near the Abbaye Blanche roadblock. Held up by the Der Führer Regiment of the Das Reich , they had to spend the night in all-round defence east of the road. Then, on 10 August, they were involved in furious fighting among high hedgerows which cost Hogan nine Shermans.
    There was a particular hedgerow which the Shermans had to break through to continue the advance. After a ‘rhino’ tank made an opening, Lieutenant Wray, who had acknowledged that it was a suicide mission, led the charge through the gap. As his Sherman broke out into a wheatfield, a concealed German Panther scored a direct hit. Several of the crew died instantly. Wray himself jumped from the blazing tank, his body badly burned. He fell to his hands and knees, while the supporting infantry platoon, commanded by Lieutenant Edward Arn, watched in horror. ‘Then he pulled himself to his feet,’ Arn recounted, ‘and started back towards the hedgerow he had just busted through. It seemed as if he remembered something because he went back to the tank. He helped get another man out and they both started to run, but the Jerries cut them down with a burst of machinegun fire.’
    Arn’s platoon had pulled back into the nearest hedgerow, but to their surprise they were able to exact a rapid revenge. A group of Germans walked up to inspect Wray’s burning tank. ‘They came out in a little bunch and stood around it,’ said Arn. ‘Curiosity, I guess.’ Arn and his men ‘mowed them down’.
    Hogan’s combat team was so short of men that Sergeant Kirkman went back to Le Neufbourg to fetch reinforcements. He returned with thirty-six inexperienced replacements through German artillery fire. Several were killed or wounded on the way. According to Kirkman, the man right next to him was hit with a splinter from a treeburst which entered the back of his head and came right out through his face. The new arrivals were severely shaken by the time they reached the combat team. Lieutenant Arn asked Kirkman where his replacements were.
    ‘There, under that tank,’ the sergeant replied.
    Most of these replacements, ‘suddenly placed under the heavy enemy artillery and machinegun fire, were frozen into immobility’. This, of course, made them doubly vulnerable. Arn recounted that he ‘had to actually boot some of them in the tail to get them to move for their own protection. One man crouched in a foxhole with his hands clasped over his head and got a direct hit from an 88 that took his head clean off.’ Out of the thirty-six new men, only four survived.
    Hogan’s reduced force, almost within striking distance of its objective, was attacked in the flank by a panzergrenadier battalion. The Americans fought them off, then as soon as the Germans had disappeared into their foxholes, they bombarded them with white phosphorus. The shower of burning particles forced them to jump out. The Americans then switched to high explosive to cut them down. Soon after night fell, German aircraft arrived to attack the American positions, ‘but instead they bombed their own troops who frantically shot off green flares to stop this unexpected blow’. Colonel Hogan commented that the sight was ‘very enjoyable’.
     
    Before dawn on 10 August, the SS Kampfgruppe besieging the ‘Lost Battalion’ began the first of a series of attacks. Lieutenant Weiss again called down fire