Chapter 7:
The fight to hold the Odon line and Hill 112.
Four weeks into the Normandy campaign, Rommel now recommended a tactical withdrawal to a line south of Caen, to pull the hard-pressed troops back out of range of the massive Allied battleship broadsides. Almost 100,000 German soldiers had been killed, injured or captured. Units such as Meyer’s Hitlerjugend were being bled to death. It alone had lost more than 20 percent of its frontline fighting strength. Only by fighting a mobile battle could the Allies be held in Normandy, or so said the “Desert Fox”.
When Rommel’s superior, Rundstedt, forwarded his suggestions to Hitler’s headquarters, no one was prepared to put the suggestion to the Führer, who was, as usual, demanding that not a metre of land be surrendered to the enemy. When a sheepish Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel asked for alternative suggestions that could be put to the Führer, Rundstedt made his famous reply: “Make peace, you fools”. Within hours, the veteran field marshal was replaced by Hans von Kluge. Born on 30 October 1882, in Posen, Prussia, he was one of Adolf Hitler’s ablest commanders on the Eastern Front during World War II.
Of an old aristocratic family, Kluge served in World War I and remained in the army after the war. During World War II he successfully led an army in the Polish, French and early Russian campaigns. As International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg of authorizing the shooting of hostages and other acts, and was executed. He was generally regarded as a weak officer who had little tactical military experience and who served chiefly as Hitler’s lackey.
Other officers Hitler considered lacking in “fighting spirit” were also purged from the Normandy Front. Rommel was looking increasingly isolated. He started to canvas senior commanders in France about disobeying the Führer’s orders and making a strategic withdrawal. Even hardened Waffen-SS commanders could see the futility of the current strategy. Dietrich was won over and declared to Rommel: “You’re the boss, Herr Feldmarschall, I obey only you – whatever it is you are planning.”
Suggestions have been made that Rommel was trying to enlist his subordinates in the famous 20 July Bomb Plot to kill Hitler. No firm evidence of this has emerged. Whatever he was planning came to nothing, because on 17 July an RAF Typhoon shot up Rommel’s staff car during one of his daily visits to the front. Badly wounded, Rommel was evacuated to Germany and would play no more part in the battle for Normandy or the plot to kill Hitler. Three months later, in the witch-hunt after the bomb plot, Rommel was offered the choice of standing trial or taking his own life. He opted for the poison.
In front of Caen, Montgomery had not given up his ambitions to destroy the Waffen-SS panzer divisions and seize the Norman city. The Hitlerjugend Division was still the rock of the German defence, positioned in a semi-circle in its western suburbs. The arrival of II SS Panzer Corps had released Meyer’s division from the responsibility of holding the western edge of the Scottish Corridor, and allowed him to concentrate it for the defence of Caen. The 25th Panzergrenadier Regiment was holding the villages to the northwest of the city, and Wilhelm Mohnke’s regiment was holding to the west of the city, centred on Carpiquet airfield. Meyer still had a Kampfgruppe from the Leibstandarte under his command, and he posted it to the south of the airfield. Max Wünsche’s panzers were holding the eastern edges of the Hill 112 feature. It would be mid-July before the Hitlerjugend’s sister division would be in Normandy in strength.
The Frundsberg Division was firmly entrenched on the summit of Hill 112 and the nearby Hill 113. It was now reinforced by the Tigers of the 102nd SS Heavy Panzer Battalion. Willi Bittrich’s other division, the Hohenstaufen, was on the north bank of the Odon, linking his corps to the army panzer units to the west.
Dietrich and Bittrich could muster a combined total of 94 Panzer IVs, 45 Panthers, 48 StuG IIIs and just over 30 Tiger Is ready for battle.
Deploying the divisions
Meyer’s tried and battered division based its defences on a series of village strongpoints held by panzergrenadiers, while 88mm Flak guns were deployed covering open ground between the villages, and panzers held back in reserve for counterattacks. Bittrich’s stronger divisions were deployed more aggressively, with his Panthers, Tigers and 88mm guns positioned on high ground in order to be able to sweep the approaches to both Hill 112 and Hill 113.
It was now the turn of the Canadians to return to the fray, and they were given the objective of taking the northwestern corner of Caen in Operation Windsor. The attack opened on the evening of 3 July with a massive salvo from the British battleship Rodney’s 16in guns. Then some 500 Canadian and British guns opened fire. Shells rained down on Carpiquet airfield throughout the night. At dawn the 8th Canadian Brigade was launched against the airfield. A forward panzergrenadier company held the attack briefly, while panzer reserves were mobilized. As the 17 tanks came up, a Hitlerjugend 88mm Flak battery on high ground outside the airfield started to rip into the Canadian tanks. Throughout the day, the Canadians tried to push forward across the airfield’s runway, but were rebuffed with heavy losses. RAF Typhoons were called in to blast a route through the defences. No panzers were hit and they kept up a furious resistance, hitting more than a dozen tanks and inflicting almost 400 casualties. To relieve pressure on the troops defending the airfield, a Leibstandarte panzergrenadier battalion was moved to its northern edge to launch a night attack. The assault was halted after German artillery fire mistakenly hit the Waffen-SS troopers.
Bombs away
Rebuffed with heavy losses at Carpiquet, Montgomery now decided to call up RAF Bomber Command to blast the Hiterjugend out of Caen. During the evening of 7 July, some 467 Lancaster and Halifax heavy bombers dumped 2540 tonnes (2500 tons) of bombs on the city in a raid that turned much of it into rubble. To avoid any of his troops being accidentally hit, Montgomery held back the follow-up infantry assault until 08:00 hours on 8 July. Laudable though this was, it meant Meyer’s men had time to recover from the shock of the raid and dust off their weapons in time to meet the inevitable attack.
Operation Charnwood
First into the attack during Operation Charnwood was the British 176th Infantry Brigade, which was to seize the northern suburbs of Caen. Then the Canadian 9th Infantry Brigade would take the northwest corner of the city. The defenders were soon on the verge of being overwhelmed. Hand-to-hand fighting raged all day in the villages held by Meyer’s troops. Apart from a single company of Hitlerjugend Panthers, there were few reserves, and Meyer used them to rescue panzergrenadiers trapped by Canadian attacks. The 32-year-old divisional commander even joined the battle at one stage, stalking Canadian tanks with a Panzerfaust. Almost 500 Hitlerjugend men were killed or wounded during the fighting. Then the Canadians threw in a fresh brigade. Meyer asked Dietrich for permission to withdraw, which was initially refused because it conflicted with a Führer order “to hold to the last bullet”. By nightfall, Dietrich relented, and Meyer’s battered division was starting to pull back into Caen and across the Orne River to a form a new defensive line, alongside the advance elements of the Leibstandarte which was finally arriving in strength. This was just in time. The Hitlerjugend Division had lost some 3300 men, or 28 percent of its manpower strength, and half its tanks had been knocked out since it was committed to battle on 6 June. Apart from 17 replacement Panther tanks, it had received no men or materiel to fill the breaches in its ranks.
It was now the turn of the divisions of II SS Panzer Corps to feel Montgomery’s wrath. The 43rd Wessex Division was given the objective of driving the Germans from Hill 112 once and for all, opening the way for the 4th Armoured Brigade to surge forward and seize crossings over the River Orne. Standing in their way was the Frundsberg Division of SS-Brigadeführer Heinz Harmel, reinforced by the pitiful remains of Max Wünsche’s Hitlerjugend Panzer Regiment.
Operation Jupiter kicked off with the usual heavy artillery barrage, after which two infantry brigades, supported by heavy Churchill infantry tanks, began frontal attacks on Hill 112 and the village of Maltot on its northern slope. As a novelty, the British tried to cover their dawn attack with a huge smoke barrage, which only served to blind their own artillery observers at a key moment in the battle.
Operations ‘Jupiter’ and ‘Charnwood’: 4–9 July, 1944
Panzergrenadiers duelled with the waves of British infantry, while dug-in 88mm Flak guns picked off a whole regiment’s worth of Churchills. When it looked like 25 Churchills were going to take the summit of Hill 112, Frundsberg’s panzer battalion arrived from its reserve position and “brewed up” most of them. More Churchills were thrown in to support the 129th Infantry Brigade’s attack, which was now making ground on the northern slope of the hill. Bittrich then committed his Tigers and rapidly started to tear into the heavily armoured, but under-gunned, British tanks. The British, fortunately, had some of their 17-pounder antitank guns to hand, and they equalized the battle, knocking out several Tigers. In spite of this, the German defences on the hill were just too strong, and some 43 British tanks burned on its northern slope. The commander of the 43rd Division eventually rescinded orders to commit the 4th Armoured Brigade’s last tank regiment after its commander persuaded him they would suffer 75 percent losses.
Simultaneously, as the attack on Hill 112 was going in, the British 130th Brigade was assaulting Maltot. Three regiments of infantry backed by more Churchills had to attack across open ground to seize their objectives on the northern bank of the Orne River. After making good progress, the brigade was soon being raked by fire from three sides. Tigers of the 102nd SS Battalion on Hill 112 were firing into the British left flank, Hitlerjugend Panthers and Panzers IVs were to the attacker’s front, and elements of the Leibstandarte Kampfgruppe were on the right. The British were caught in a classic killing zone, which knocked out most of the attacking squadron of tanks. Determined infantrymen from the Hampshire and Dorset Regiments made it into Maltot. Harmel rushed to the scene in his armoured command halftrack with the Frundsberg’s reconnaissance battalion to evict the British infantry. With close support from the Tigers, all the Dorset Regiment’s antitank guns were knocked out and the British soldiers were soon streaming back to their start-line.
Back on Hill 112, the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry were launched forward into the attack as dusk was falling, and took the summit at last. A counterattack led by a handful of Tigers failed to dislodge the British from their newly won prize.
With the key to the German position in central Normandy about to fall, Dietrich and Bittrich re-shuffled their forces to strike back. SS-Standartenführer Sylvester Stadler’s Hohenstaufen Division was released from west of the Odon to counterattack and retake Hill 112. During the night, the division was moved into position on the western slope of the hill ready to attack as soon as its artillery was in position to give supporting fire. Congested roads meant the attack was delayed for several hours and when the panzergrenadiers at last started to move forward, they ran into withering artillery barrages. Even the presence of Tigers in the assault wave had failed to make any impression on the British defences by dawn on 11 July. The arrival of daylight gave the German tanks an edge at last and they drove off the British armoured regiment that had moved up to the crest of Hill 112, leaving infantry and 17-pounders to hold it. By the middle of the afternoon the British infantry regiment was being ripped to pieces by machine-gun, tank, artillery, mortar and rocket fire. Hohenstaufen’s assault gun battalion led yet one more attack forward, and it swept away the Duke of Cornwall’s, leaving 250 dead or wounded behind, including their commanding officer, on the summit of the hill. The Germans had regained control of Hill 112 and stayed on its summit for the rest of July.
II SS Panzer Corps remained the anchor of the German defence on the Odon line for the remainder of July. On 15 July Montgomery launched Operation Greenline to expand the British front down the Odon valley. Its aim was to keep II SS Panzer Corps occupied while the British massed their armour for a major attack to the east of Caen. In this aim it succeeded. A breakthrough around Noyers forced Bittrich to move the Hohenstaufen to close the breach on 16 July. Only some 20 panzers could be mustered to form the assault Kampfgruppe as it attacked from Hill 113 towards the Odon. The panzers ran into a British tank brigade and chased it off, knocking out 48 Shermans and capturing a dozen for the loss of five German tanks. The division was soon sucked into a meat-grinder battle. A day later its two panzergrenadier regiments had to be combined into a single Kampfgruppe, while its panzer regiment could only muster 25 Panthers, 13 Panzer IVs and 15 StuG IIIs.
Holding the British at bay
The Frundsberg Division remained on Hill 112, fighting off a sustained series of attacks. Almost every day British infantry and tanks tried their luck against the Waffen-SS lines. In just over two weeks of fighting it had lost more than 2200 men. Its panzer regiment was reduced to 12 operational Panzer IVs and 6 StuG IIIs. Only with help from the 102nd SS Battalion’s Tigers was the division able to hold the British at bay.
The bitter fighting to the west of Caen had bled II SS Panzer Corps dry, reducing Rommel’s last panzer reserve to a shadow of its former self. The last hope for the Germans was the arrival at last of the Leibstandarte Division to the south of Caen. Rommel’s brush with death robbed the German Army in Normandy of its commander at a crucial point. The new commander in France, Kluge, had little idea of what was going on at the front, preferring to stay in his chateau near Paris, preoccupying himself with his plot to overthrow Hitler. He would take his own life in August 1944, after Hitler began to suspect he was attempting to negotiate with the Allies.
The Normandy Front was now being largely run by Waffen-SS generals. Hausser commanded the Seventh Army, leading the battle against the Americans, while Bittrich and Dietrich were commanders of the bulk of the German armour fighting Montgomery’s armies. In the coming weeks, they would shoulder the responsibility for holding the beleaguered front together.