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D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

Titel: D-Day. The Battle for Normandy Kostenlos Bücher Online Lesen
Autoren: Antony Beevor
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soldiers were to be seen scattered everywhere, and their number increased from hour to hour.’ Gunner Eberhard Beck of the 277th Infantry Division saw a soldier sitting motionless on a rock. He pulled him by the shoulder to get him out of danger, but the man rolled over. He was dead already.
    On 18 August alone, the US Ninth Air Force estimated its tally at 400 vehicles, while the RAF claimed 1,159 vehicles destroyed and 1,700 damaged, as well as 124 tanks destroyed and 100 damaged. But these figures were preposterously high. Once again Air Marshal Coningham was furious when he received the Operational Research report later. Their teams had found only thirty-three armoured vehicles which had been destroyed by air attack. The report concluded that the random nature of the Allied air attacks had failed to achieve a decisive degree of destruction. 71 On the other hand, the Allied air attacks had once again panicked German crews into abandoning their vehicles, and their destruction of fuel supplies had certainly contributed to the very high number of armoured vehicles which were left behind.
    With so many RAF and American squadrons attacking targets at will on the ground, there were countless cases of ‘friendly fire’. The ironic cry, ‘Take cover, boys, they may be ours!’ took on a new urgency. Bradley’s 12th Army Group headquarters acknowledged that ‘some British armored vehicles had been attacked inadvertently’, but pointed out that British tank crews carried so much kit on the outside that their identifying white stars were often ‘covered with paraphernalia’.
     
    Because of the random air attacks, the Canadian 4th Armoured Division held back from occupying Trun until the afternoon of 18 August. The division was also hampered by the lethargy and incompetence of its commander, Major General George Kitching, and by Simonds’s plan that its armoured brigade was about to break off to lead the advance to the Seine. On the evening of 18 August, a detachment from the division reached Saint-Lambert-sur-Dives, halfway between Trun and Chambois, but was too weak to take the village until reinforced.
    The Polish battlegroup heading for Chambois made a serious mistake in map-reading and ended up six miles to the north. It was also short on ammunition and running out of fuel. The 10th Mounted Rifles reconnaissance regiment had reached the edge of Chambois, but did not have the strength to take it. Meanwhile, from the south, the American 90th Division, supported by part of Leclerc’s 2ème DB, advanced to within a mile of Chambois. Both Montgomery and the American commanders seemed to think that the battle could be won with air power and artillery. Yet the screen of Canadian, Polish and American troops was far too thin both to hold back the waves of German forces fighting to escape the pocket, and to face the threat of a counter-attack from behind by remnants of the SS panzer formations.
    On 19 August, the Polish 10th Dragoons reinforced their reconnaissance regiment outside Trun and met up with the American 90th Division. Americans and Poles shook hands. ‘They were excellent fighters and very cold-blooded,’ an American lieutenant reported later. Chambois, soon known as ‘Shambles’, was in flames from the bombardment and filled with dead Germans and burnt-out vehicles. Reports of the scale of destruction certainly seem to have increased the sense of complacency among Allied commanders. Even the energetic Simonds, commanding the II Canadian Corps, spent the following morning ‘tidying up official correspondence’ instead of forcing forward his divisions.
     
    Conditions within the pocket were, according to German sources, impossible to imagine if you had not seen it. ‘The roads were blocked by two or three shot-up and burned-out vehicles standing side by side,’ an officer with the 21st Panzer Division wrote. ‘Ambulances packed with wounded were carbonized. Ammunition exploded, panzers blazed and horses lay on their backs kicking their legs in their death throes. The same chaos extended in the fields far and wide. Artillery and armour-piercing rounds came from either side into the milling crowd.’
    Gunner Beck with the 277th Infanterie-Division saw teenage infantrymen stumble past: ‘In their faces one could read the utter tragedy of this appalling experience, which they could not cope with.’ Many men went to pieces after days without sleep. Some began to hide in the woods, preferring to be

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