D-Day. The Battle for Normandy

he had just been awarded the Oak Leaves to the Knight’s Cross. Pemsel, the chief of staff of the Seventh Army, did not believe Heydte’s version of events, but General Meindl, the commander of II Paratroop Corps, ordered his release. In any case, German commanders had rather more serious matters to consider. The next day, American advances linked up the Utah and Omaha beachheads.

12
    Failure at Caen
    At midnight on 6 June, Generalmajor Pemsel, the chief of staff of the Seventh Army, rang the commanders of the 21st Panzer-Division and 716th Infanterie-Division. He passed on the order from the OKW that the counter-attack next day must reach the coast ‘without fail’ to relieve those defenders of strongpoints still holding out. General Richter of the 716th told him that ‘communications between division, regimental and battalion command posts no longer exist’, so he had no idea which positions still held out and which had been taken. In fact, the 716th Infanterie-Division had virtually ceased to exist, and its 200 survivors were withdrawn two days later.
    Although the British 3rd Division had captured most of the defensive positions which had held them up on D-Day, the most powerful of all still held out on their right flank. This was the Luftwaffe radar station near Douvres-la-Délivrande, which had been turned into a veritable underground fortress. It also possessed a buried landline back to Caen, so its defenders could act as artillery observers. The Canadians who tried to reduce it faced a hard fight. They also had to clear the woods near the heavily defended radar station, which were ‘honeycombed with trenches, shelters and tunnels’.
    The 21st Panzer-Division, following its unsuccessful attack on the late afternoon of D-Day, was put under the 1st SS Panzer Corps. Its commander was Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. Dietrich had been an apprentice butcher, then a front-line soldier in the First World War. In the chaos after the Armistice, when Germany was on the edge of civil war, Dietrich joined the Freikorps. An early member of the Nazi Party, he became commander of Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard in 1928. This later formed the basis for the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler , which fought under Dietrich in France, the Balkans and on the eastern front. Goebbels deliberately portrayed him as a hero for ordinary people to counterbalance the aristocracy in the regular army. Although more honest than most of his senior Waffen-SS comrades, Dietrich was a brutal and unintelligent field commander. According to General der Panzertruppen Heinz Eberbach, who replaced Geyr von Schweppenburg later, ‘under his command the Leibstandarte killed thousands of Jews’. 20
    Dietrich had been in Brussels with I SS Panzer Corps headquarters early on the morning of 6 June when news of the landings arrived. Rundstedt immediately summoned him to Paris. Dietrich was to take under his command the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend , the Panzer Lehr Division, the 21st Panzer-Division and the remains of the 716th Infanterie-Division. The corps was then to attack the British around Caen at dawn the next day and sweep them into the sea. But the effectiveness of Allied air attacks, together with the delayed start of both the Hitler Jugend and the Panzer Lehr Divisions, played havoc with the plan.
    Dietrich reached the headquarters of Feuchtinger’s 21st Panzer-Division at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives that night. Feuchtinger was away at the command post of the 716th Infanterie-Division in a tunnel on the edge of Caen. Dietrich exploded when he heard that Feuchtinger had forgotten to take a radio with him. In his place, the divisional chief of staff, Oberst Freiherr von Berlichingen, a descendant of the knight with the iron fist, ventured to suggest that two panzer divisions were not enough to throw the British and Canadians back. Surely they should wait for the Panzer Lehr Division to join them. Dietrich replied in no uncertain terms that only the two formations were available and he should liaise immediately with the Hitler Jugend Division to plan their attack.
    Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, the commander of the Hitler Jugend , sent Standartenführer Kurt Meyer to see Feuchtinger and Richter in the headquarters tunnel on the edge of Caen. Meyer, the commander of the 25th SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment, was an utterly devoted Nazi and a ruthless fighter. Tall, blue-eyed and good-looking, he was the beau ideal of a