The Boy Who Went to War (16 page)

The following day's newspaper took purposeful misinformation one step further, reporting that the German army had pushed the British and Americans back into the sea. It conceded that a second wave of troops had managed to get ashore and were now clinging precariously to a small strip of coastline: ‘But not at all deep…and at the cost of shameful quantities of men and material.'

By day three, the regional Baden newspaper was gleefully reporting tens of thousands of Allied deaths. Like so many in Pforzheim, Marie Charlotte assumed that the British and American landings – the only real hope of a swift end to the war – had been a catastrophic failure.

 

As Wolfram and his fellow
funkers
neared the front, they came under increasingly heavy fire. They had spent many months training for just such an eventuality and had learned how to keep cool heads. However, now that they were on the field of battle, they discovered that real bullets were very different to simulated fire. They also realised that the enemy were going out of their way to destroy their radio machines. The
funkers
would find a safe place, install their antennae and dig themselves into a deep hole, but no sooner had they started transmitting and decoding signals than they came under sustained fire.

The Americans were indeed targeting battlefield communications in order to maximise the confusion for the German forces. It took them an average of two hours to locate the position of
funkers
like Wolfram. Once they had done so, they would begin shelling these positions with great intensity.

The scene at the battlefront was one of total chaos. No one had a clear idea how to halt the American advance and no one was even sure whether the Normandy landings were indeed the long-awaited invasion, or merely the first of several. Hitler had long predicted that the Allies would land in the area around the Pas de Calais. A week after the initial invasion, he was still expecting a second set of landings.

Much of the initial confusion among the German forces in Normandy had been caused by the American airdrops in the hours that preceded the landings. Soldiers from two airborne divisions, the 82nd and the 101st, had been landed in the countryside behind Utah Beach. The drops had not gone according to plan, for the troops had been widely scattered and found it difficult to reconnoitre in the little fields and hedgerows of the bocage.

And yet, ironically, in failure lay their greatest success. The airborne assault caused absolute confusion among the German defenders. Some officers thought that the Americans were deploying an entirely new military strategy, disrupting their defences by engaging in sporadic action behind enemy lines.

The German defence, if disorganised, was spirited and the Americans had to fight their way into every village. St Mère Eglise, the bridge at La Fière, Azeville and Crisbecq: one by one they fell into American hands and small numbers of Germans were killed or taken prisoner.

The Americans had originally intended to swing swiftly northwards from Utah Beach to capture the port of Cherbourg, but they now saw the advantage of pushing westwards across the peninsula, thereby cutting the Cotentin peninsula in two and trapping large numbers of German troops.

The drawback to this strategy was that there were many natural obstacles to overcome. The Meredet and Douve rivers, as well as strong German positions on the ridges of high ground, made the American advance a daunting one for the newly landed troops. Yet it was conducted with gritty determination on two flanks.

The front line kept moving with every hour that passed and Wolfram and his men were obliged to move with it. Even though they were the ones relaying all the battlefield signals, they could get no clear idea of what was happening.

As the Americans drove westwards, the plight of the German forces in the Cotentin grew desperate. The loss of Carentan, a strategically important town in the south of the Cotentin, came as a heavy blow. This was quickly followed by the American capture of the Quinville ridge in the north.

The Allied control of the skies was also presenting a growing threat. Not only were they continually strafing and killing troops on the ground, but they had also managed to cut all the supply routes into the Cotentin peninsula. The German army stationed in the Cotentin required 5,250 tons of food each week to keep its soldiers fed. By mid-June, it was receiving just 200 tons.

 

Ten days had now passed since the Allied landings and the German forces in the peninsula were facing disaster. It was at this moment of crisis that Hitler decided to take personal control of the situation. On 16 June he made a trip to Soissons, east of Paris, in order to discuss strategy with the senior commanders of Germany's western forces, including Rommel and Rundstedt.

‘He [Hitler] looked sick and tired out,' wrote Hans Speidel, Rommel's chief of staff. ‘Nervously he played with his spectacles and with coloured pencils which he held between his fingers.' Speidel thought he resembled a broken man. ‘His old personal magnetism seemed to have gone. After brief and cool greetings, Hitler, raising his voice, first expressed sharp dissatisfaction with the successful Allied landings, found fault with the local commanders and then ordered that Fortress Cherbourg be held at any cost.'

Rommel and Rundstedt begged Hitler to rethink this approach. It made no strategic sense to keep troops holed up in positions that were not under attack. What was needed was for troops to confront the American invasion head-on, hitting hard at every spearhead into new territory.

Rommel eventually decided, without Hitler's explicit approval, to use elements of Wolfram's 77th Infantry Division to construct a defensive wall on the western bank of the River Meredet. In that way, he hoped to forestall the American plan to cut the Cotentin peninsula in two.

Wolfram and his men began their deployment on 16 June, the same day as Hitler's visit to Soissons, by which time the American advance had proved so successful that the defensive wall had to be moved even further west, to La Haye-du-Puits, a little village just a few miles from the coast.

They were dug in along the road that linked Montebourg and Valognes. It was Sunday morning, 18 June, and there was a lot of gunfire, for the Americans had taken the land just to the south. Wolfram and the other men were told to pack up and get on the move as quickly as possible.
Schnell! Hurry! Hurry!
They were in great danger of being completely isolated by American troops.

The withdrawal took place amid scenes of absolute chaos. Wolfram's unit had no news of what was happening, nor did they have any maps. Even the road signs had been removed, so they had no idea where they were going. It was only by memorising the names of some of the villages that Wolfram was later able to work out where he had been.

The 77th Infantry Division took everything with them as they tried to escape the clutches of the Americans, including artillery, armoured vehicles and tanks. What they did not know was that their retreat southwards would lead them through territory that had already been captured by advance units of the American army.

Among the little market towns that Wolfram and his comrades passed through was Briquebec, which lay some eight miles from the coast. As they made their way down the main street in the early-morning sunshine, they were wholly unaware that the Americans had already dug in and were watching the German retreat from their foxholes.

The men passed through the town without seeing a single American soldier. There was no one around, not even civilians. The place was deathly silent and eerily deserted. The only sign of conflict was the dozens of abandoned parachutes that had blown into the trees and were billowing from the branches.

Wolfram and his comrades were by now in serious trouble. American forces had reached the western coast of the Cotentin peninsula and captured the resort of Barneville-sur-Mer. It was an extraordinary achievement. Twelve days after landing on Utah Beach, they had succeeded in entrapping tens of thousands of German soldiers stationed on the northern coastline.

The Americans had no intention of engaging the enemy as they moved south. Instead, they were planning to lure them towards the hamlet of Le Vretot, which was the perfect place for an ambush.

Wolfram was blissfully ignorant of the danger as he and the other men marched through the rich farmland. The country lane that led to Le Vretot seemed little different to the thousands of other byways that criss-crossed the peninsula: it lay below the level of the fields and was lined with flowering hedgerows. The foxgloves and cow-parsley proved a source of constant temptation for the horses, which kept trying to munch on these vergeside snacks. The men were thankful that the weather was crisp and bright, unaware that the clear sky was about to rain death upon them.

Panzers, artillery, horses and men – all were making their way along the road to Le Vretot. Their path was frequently blocked by crippled and burned-out vehicles, which halted their progress. Each one had to be dragged away before the men could continue. It was during one of these enforced halts that Wolfram happened to notice a subtle change in the landscape. The road no longer passed through the bocage. On one side there was a steep bank and on the other a sharp drop. They were suddenly very exposed.

Then, quite without warning, there was a screeching roar in the sky to the north. Scores of American fighter-bombers hurtled towards them at extremely low altitude.

Wolfram flung himself into a low ditch and buried his head. As he did so, all hell broke loose. Exploding shells, grenades and machine-gun fire rattled down on the men, cracking through the air with a hail of fire and shrapnel. The artillery column came to an abrupt standstill as soldiers leaped from their vehicles in blind panic and urgently sought cover. Only now did they realise why the Americans had chosen this spot to launch their attack. With its steep drop and sharp bank, it was a death trap, making it almost impossible to avoid the fragments of flying metal.

As Wolfram lay cowering in the ditch, tanks, guns and mortars exploded around him. At one point he raised his head slightly and saw that the little lane had been turned into a scene of bloody carnage. The horses were neighing and whinnying in terror and pain, desperately trying to escape their harnesses. Unable to break free, they were being ripped to pieces.

The attack was relentless. Wave after wave of fighter-bombers screamed overhead, peppering everyone on the ground with machine-gun fire. Survival depended on potluck. Some of the best-concealed men were killed instantly. Others, more exposed, managed to escape with their lives.

Wolfram lay in the ditch for what seemed like an eternity as the
jabos
– the dreaded fighter-bombers – strafed everyone. His Morse equipment lay scattered across the road, smashed into hundreds of pieces, and he had no idea whether his fellow
funkers
were dead or alive.

‘You lie there, helpless…' wrote one German soldier after surviving a similar attack just a few days earlier, ‘pressed into the ground, your face in the dirt – and there it comes towards you, roaring. There it is. Diving at you. Now you hear the whine of the bullets…Not till they think they've wiped out everything do they leave. Until then you are helpless. Like a man facing a firing squad.'

At one point there was a slight let-up in the shooting. During the raid, Wolfram had been lying next to another lad and exchanging a few words with him. When the bombing relented for a moment, he shouted to him: ‘Quick! Let's get out!' When there was no answer, he realised that the lad was dead.

Wolfram knew the planes would soon be back so he got up quickly, clambered out of the ditch and ran ahead to slip down a side road. As he crouched in a ditch that was deeper and less exposed, there was another roar of planes and the strafing started all over again. The soldier next to him had a piece of his earlobe neatly shot off. If he had been hit just a few millimetres to the left, he would have been killed instantly.

The fighter-bombers seemed determined to destory everything on the ground below. A sergeant who had previously fought on the Russian front lay next to Wolfram and told him that his experiences in Normandy were far worse that anything he had experienced in the East. In Russia, the shooting was slow and measured because of a need to conserve weaponry. Here, the Americans loosed off everything they had – a massive quantity all at the same time.

In less than one hour, the 77th Infantry Division was decimated. It suffered such heavy casualties, along with the loss of almost all its vehicles and artillery, that it was no longer a viable fighting force.

Only one group of men attempted to fight back, attacking the advancing American infantry in the fields around St Jacques-de-Néhou. They were firing at close range and, for a short time, caused severe damage. However, the Americans soon counter-attacked, pounding them with 81-millimetre mortars. Some 250 Germans were killed and a further sixty taken prisoner. Among the dead was the 77th Infantry Division's commander, General Rudolf Stegmann. He was driving along the road when a fighter-bomber swooped down from the sky and opened fire with such force that Stegmann's car was torn open like a tin can. The general was killed instantly – the fourth senior commander to lose his life since the landings of 6 June.

Then, after about two hours, the bombardment suddenly stopped. The planes retreated towards the horizon and silence returned to the countryside. The only sound came from the terrible moans of the wounded and dying.

The survivors were in a daze for there was a sense of unreality to what had just happened. One minute they had been walking along a country lane in the sparkling sunshine; the next, they were being torn apart by bullets and exploding shells. Stunned by the intensity of the battle, as well as completely lost, they were unsure where to go. All they knew was that they were trapped inside American-controlled territory and would have to fight their way out if they were to avoid death or capture.