D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

compromised themselves the most during the German occupation were the first to approach the victors, ‘smiles on their lips and their arms full of flowers’. She also observed that when Allied troops threw chocolate and cigarettes to young women as they drove by, they waited until the truck had disappeared, then knelt down a little shamefacedly to pick them up.
    Many Normans were cynical about members of the Resistance. ‘The explosive growth of the FFI is incredible,’ observed a local lawyer. ‘All the village boys who chased girls and danced on Saturday nights appear with a brassard and a submachinegun.’ Yet Allied troops greatly appreciated the help of the true Resistance fighters. ‘The Maquis are doing an excellent job, we see more and more of them,’ a Canadian major wrote home. And Myles Hildyard at 7th Armoured Division noted in his diary that, during the advance to the Seine, ‘every 11th Hussar [armoured] car has a Maquis on it and they have been invaluable’.
    Also near Livarot, a troop of the Inniskilling Dragoon Guards joined a company of the 1st/5th Queens soon after dawn. The company commander waved them to a halt. The troop leader, Lieutenant Woods, jumped down. ‘Would you like a Panzer Mark IV for breakfast?’ the infantry officer asked. He led him down a track to an orchard. ‘Moving hesitantly in open ground on the next ridge about 800 yards away was the quarry, which had clearly no idea that he was observed.’ Woods brought his tank through the apple orchard thick with foliage and fruit. They spent a seemingly endless time manoeuvring so that both the commander and the gunner could see the target, which drove Trooper Rose, the driver, to distraction as the tension mounted: ‘The minutes ticked by; the dialogue in the turret verged on the acrimonious.’ Finally, they had a clear shot. The first armour-piercing round hit the suspension towards the rear. The panzer’s turret began to traverse round towards them. The second round also struck, but the gun continued to turn towards them. Only after the third strike did it stop. At first there was just a wisp of smoke, then flames appeared and the crew baled out frantically.
     
    The Americans, having returned to the plan of a long envelopment of the Germans retreating to the Seine, sent first the 5th Armored Division and then Corlett’s XIX Corps to swing left up the west bank of the river. But they too found it hard going and had a tough fight at Elbeuf, where Generalfeldmarschall Model had ordered his fragmented divisions to hold them off to protect the crossing places further downstream.
    This manoeuvre also led to another row between the Americans and the British. Bradley, at his meeting with Montgomery and Dempsey on 19 August, had offered the British enough trucks to move two divisions to make this right-flanking move themselves. Dempsey declined on the grounds that he could not extricate them quickly enough.
    ‘If you can’t do it, Bimbo,’ Bradley replied, ‘have you any objection to our giving it a try? It’ll mean cutting across your front.’
    ‘Why no, not at all,’ Dempsey said. ‘We’d be delighted to have you do it.’
    But when Dempsey was later questioned by British newspaper correspondents about the advance to the Seine, he replied that it would have been faster if they had not been held up by US Army traffic across their front. Monty apologized to Bradley afterwards, saying that Dempsey must have been misquoted, but Bradley was unconvinced. He never forgave Dempsey for that remark. Some years later, he described it as ‘one of the greatest injustices ever done to the American army’.
    On 21 August, the Canadian and British armies had reached a line running from Deauville on the coast to Lisieux and then Orbec. The Canadians were reinforced with the 1st Belgian Infantry Brigade, which took Deauville the next day, and the Royal Netherlands Brigade (Princess Irene’s), which advanced towards Honfleur on the Seine estuary. A Czech armoured brigade also arrived right at the end of the battle. The roads leading to the Seine crossings were frequently blocked by German vehicles, some abandoned because of lack of fuel, others burned out from fighter-bomber attacks.
    Once again Typhoon pilots made wildly excessive claims. They estimated that they had destroyed 222 armoured vehicles, but out of 150 abandoned by the Germans, only thirteen were found to have been destroyed by air attack. But there can be no doubt