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0:09
In 1944, World War 2 was reaching its dramatic climax rocket ships firing, Aircraft flying over head as the allies wage total war, to liberate occupied Europe this was a war in which all sides were learning as they went from the beaches of Normandy the water was full of blood the water was bright red to the forests of Germany i can still see all the dead lying there Both sides deployed weapons of ever greater power and sophistication And this tank suddenly gives the American a real big advantage
0:50
Its a very effective beast This is the story of the western allies final campaign told by the men on both sides, who were there you did what you did, you fire and you maneuver
1:05
he was my brother
1:16
On 6 June 1944 Allied sea, ground and air forces came together to launch the largest amphibious assault in military history codenamed Operation Neptune.
1:31
It took eighteen months of massive planning efforts But what’s known as the Longest Day came at a cost with thousands of casualties on both sides This is the story of D-Day the beginning of the end of the war in Europe.
1:54
By 1944, Nazi Germany had dominated most of Europe for over 4 years. But now, World War Two was starting to swing in the Allies favour In the Mediterranean, German forces had been chased out of North Africa and were dug in across Italy And on the Eastern Front, in Russia, they had suffered disastrous defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk and now struggled to hold back Stalin's Red Army While the defeat of Germany’s feared U-boats allowed US troops and supplies to pour into Britain
2:30
ahead of a much-anticipated Allied invasion of Europe The question now was how to win the war Stalin had argued very strongly for opening a second front Since 1941 and the invasion of German Forces into the Soviet Union the Soviets had actually taken the brunt of the fighting About 80% of the German Army were fighting in the East and this is why Stalin urged the Western Allies to open a second front to basically relieve some pressure off the Eastern Front
3:05
and give the Soviets some breathing space so to speak Churchill and Roosevelt agreed that the Second Front would be launched in summer 1944
3:16
And the person they wanted in charge to co-ordinate the Allied nations was American General Dwight D. Eisenhower
3:27
General Eisenhower was appointed Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe He had never seen front-line combat but Eisenhower was an exceptional military planner with an instinctive grasp of modern warfare Eisenhower’s abilities would be tested to the full as he took on responsibility for the single most important Allied operation of the war
3:54
The first dilemma - where to land The obvious choice was Pas de Calais just 20 miles from England and the most direct route to Germany Which was why the Germans had concentrated their beach defences and troops here So they turned instead to Normandy If the Allies could establish a foothold in Normandy they could then build up their forces, and launch a breakout operation liberating Paris, and beginning the advance on Germany itself
4:30
The invasion would hinge on the success of the first 24 hours, known as D-Day
4:39
Ground troops would be drawn from 21st Army Group, commanded by British general Bernard Montgomery Seven British, US and Canadian infantry divisions three armoured brigades and three airborne divisions were earmarked to spearhead the operation
4:59
The divisions with which the Allies were to fight the battle of Normandy and the rest of the 1944-45 campaign were a mixture of veteran formations which had fought in some cases from Egypt and North Africa and then through Italy and with them there were divisions going into action for the first time 18 year old Frank Rosier was a private serving with 2nd Battalion, The Gloucestershire Regiment A London boy that had survived the blitz, he lost his eye after 3 months in battle
5:32
This was my first time in action And there is a period of, we’re not playing cowboys and Indians in the woods, this is the real thing Wally Harris was a craftsman and one of the founding members of the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers We felt privileged to think well, we’ve been chosen to lead the assault. And everybody was chuffed While Edward Shames had just been promoted to Staff sergeant of the 101st Airborne ahead of the landings if you weren't scared you were crazy
6:02
Course there were a lot of crazy guys including me but we were still frightened I’m sure By 1944, the Allies had won the battle for air and naval supremacy Now US 8th and 9th Air Forces and Britain’s Second Tactical Air Force stood by to support the landings: nearly 6,000 aircraft in total
6:27
From the sea 5 battleships, 23 cruisers and 105 destroyers would bombard German defences before the assault craft landed By spring 1944 there were 3 million Allied troops in Britain preparing for the invasion Each division was given a designated staging area in southern England as vehicles, weapons and supplies poured in Units earmarked for the invasion trained relentlessly but details about the landings codenamed Operation Neptune, remained top secret
7:08
We never had any information at all where we were going we didn’t have any pictures of an area where we were going to land or anything at all No information at all All right, they must have, might have given it to the officers but we other ranks, we never knew a damn thing
7:32
While their own soldiers were kept in the dark the Allies launched what's been called the 'greatest deception plan in history' to fool the Germans about the landing sites
7:44
To deceive the Germans the allies set up Operation Fortitude They created an entire fake army in England aimed at the French Port of Calais Calais was the closest deep water port in France to England and it was a natural spot to invade The Germans thought that the allies were coming to Calais and Operation Fortitude convinced them of it Ken Sturdy, a veteran of Dunkirk found himself at the heart of the ruse to deceive the Germans when we arrived there, there were dummy tanks made of rubber
8:18
There were dummy landing craft made of canvas and wood All along the seafront at Dover were tents with big red cross painted on them to look like hospital tents there were army signallers, were RAF signallers We deliberately aimed our antennae across the Channel to, to Calais and all the traffic, and it went on for two weeks or so was we knew was phoney but it gave the impression there was very large contingent gathering ready for the invasion
8:55
Eisenhower knew the Allied deception plan was crucial because if the Germans were ready and waiting D-Day could turn into a costly disaster, with tragic consequences for millions
9:12
On the evening of 5th June, 1944 hundreds of Allied aircraft took off bound for the Normandy coast
9:21
Operation Neptune - the Western Allies’ invasion of Europe was underway
9:31
In the first phase, 24,000 men, arriving by parachute and glider would be dropped on both flanks of the invasion zone The US 82nd and 101st and British 6th Airborne Divisions were to seize key bridges, road junctions, and hold off German counterattacks While shortly after dawn US, British and Canadian infantry divisions would land at five beaches along 50 miles of coast codenamed Utah, Omaha, Gold, Juno and Sword When the beaches were secure, tanks and infantry would push inland
10:13
relieve the airborne troops, and prepare to resist the expected German counterattack
10:22
What paratroopers hadn’t been told was that their units were expected to take 50% casualties On the way in they’d be highly vulnerable to German anti-aircraft fire
10:36
Carl Beck had lied about his age to join the army at 17 A year on, he was about to go into action for the first time We picked up 20mm fire as we came over the coast You’re at 800 feet above ground line and that 20mm fire is vicious If you’re ever in a airplane that gets hit and I hope you never are it sounds like your heads in a bucket and somebody’s pounding on the bucket As they neared their drop zones, heavily-laden US paratroopers waited for the signal to jump
11:17
We were ready for the green light and we were getting ready to shuffle out and they had to shuffle because these guys they could hardly walk getting outta that door because of the weight that they were carrying The airborne forces were to be dropped behind enemy lines where they would be cut off from support, sometimes for several days This meant they had to take everything with them Of course the gear weighed about 150 pounds that I put on to get on that plane with the parachute
11:52
Everything we could possibly have Grenades, weapons, maps, the whole works And some guys had mortars 81mm mortar plates that they jumped with. Machine guns. Everything. Taff Gillingham is an expert in the equipment of the ordinary soldier This is the uniform and equipment worn by the American airborne forces that jumped in Normandy in 1944 So they had a purpose filled jump suit, designed specifically for the airborne forces They carried gas masks with all the equipment that went with it
12:26
The chaps all carried these which were anti-gas braziers They were hooked on this loop went through the shoulder strap and they were painted with a special treatment so in the event of poison gas being in the air, they’d turn red so you would have an instant warning of poison gas
12:42
The equipment was the standard American fighting rig
12:48
with ammunition pouches specifically depending on roll So in this case it carried ammunition for the M1 Garand rifle This was actually a very good piece of kit because unlike most other armies who had bolt action rifles the M1 was semi-automatic So what that meant was that you could fire eight rounds straight off and then it would spit the clip out at the end while everybody else is still working their bolts The bayonet for the rifle carried on the scabbard on the belt
13:16
was obviously for that moment when everything else was getting to the point when you’d run out of ammunition and you needed something just to finish the job The heavily-encumbered airborne soldiers had now reached their jump points our routine training called for us to get a 20 minute red light, But all we ever got was a bell And a bell just means unarse this airplane So the Jump Master threw the bundle out and out we went Have you ever been to one of these er places
13:50
where they have fireworks at night? Well that’s what we jumped in As a matter of fact you could see the stuff going through your parachute because there were tracers all around we were going very fast, very low one and a half oscillations and slam, into the water So that was a, an exhilarating experience there to get us going John Marr was one of many who landed in fields flooded by the Germans Dozens drowned under the weight of their equipment Others dropped straight into German-held villages
14:30
where one American, according to an eyewitness, had a remarkable escape One of them got hung up on the church tower And he pretended to be dead That's why no one realised he was there
14:48
Many who survived the jump landed miles from where they were supposed to be John Marr made landfall around 2 am the first objective was to, er, was to find, er, my platoon and the equipment bundles get organised and go fight as a platoon That didn’t happen we were the worst scattered regiment in the entire drop of two divisions Things had gone better for the British 6th Airborne
15:24
On the invasion’s east flank, in an extraordinary feat of glider piloting a small detachment landed alongside two vital canal bridges and quickly captured them
15:37
Reinforcements then flew in to help defend these crossings against German counterattack
15:45
Glider pilot Bill Higgs made a dangerous approach into his landing zone The Germans weren't daft. They put posts in to stop us landing And I hit one of them halfway through the wing and knocked my right-hand starboard wing right off But I was down alright Although the bridges were taken in a lightning assault airborne troops were soon under pressure, defending against determined counterattacks
16:19
It was crucial they held out until the troops arriving by sea could reach them men now preparing to take on a formidable chain of beach defences commanded by one of Germany’s most brilliant generals
16:40
In the early hours of 6th June 1944 a furious aerial bombardment hammered the coast of northern France 5 Km from Valognes it was already getting light, I said: ‘Look, up there, what is that?’ And we saw planes approaching. And out of those planes we saw these little sticks falling. And I said ‘What is that?’, and one of the others said ‘That is carpet bombing.’ And we could only watch how all of Valognes was smashed to pieces.
17:21
Meanwhile a vast Allied armada of more than 6,000 ships of all sizes was approaching the Normandy coast
17:31
You could see the outline of the French coast And I’m saying, my God, there’s France. Wow, we’re gonna be there. We’re gonna go in It was pretty damned exciting I say I felt pretty good about the whole thing
17:46
Hitler knew an Allied invasion was coming that summer and that northern France was its most likely destination Therefore he'd entrusted its defence to one of his most brilliant and charismatic commanders
18:01
Field Marshal Erwin Rommel won a reputation as one of Germany's most gifted generals during the defeat of France in 1940 while in North Africa, his cunning against the British won him the nickname 'the Desert Fox'
18:18
Erwin Rommel was one of the most famous German generals in WW2 and he was a spectacularly effective general in North Africa His great strength was the ability to manoeuvre to manipulate and move quickly before the enemy could react to what he was doing Rommel was for us, I’d say, like a father
18:42
He had a great sensibility for his soldiers. And he could be very jovial
18:56
Rommel was famed for bold, aggressive action but now he faced a very different challenge
19:04
With two-thirds of Germany's army on the Eastern Front, Rommel had to hold the Channel coast with 35 divisions just 6 of which were in the vicinity of the Allied landing zone 5 infantry divisions, and the 21st Panzer Division But many units were undermanned or considered unreliable
19:26
There were either static divisions made up of old men or young men, or Soviet deserters or other troops the Germans didn’t quite trust or units that had come from the Eastern Front, worn down by the fighting Normandy was their rest and recuperation These units had one advantage the so-called 'Atlantic Wall' a chain of coastal defences stretching,in theory, 2,000 miles from Norway to Spain
19:55
Hitler personally appointed Rommel to improve the Atlantic Wall defences in preparation for an invasion Rommel believed that the only way to stop the Allied invasion was to hit it when it was most vulnerable, the moment of coming ashore So he made strengthening beach defences his top priority Under his watch, three times as many mines were laid and half a million beach obstacles put in place
20:24
The number of heavy guns protected by covered concrete emplacements was also greatly increased
20:35
But in most places, the Wall was far from the impregnable fortress of Nazi newsreels as soldiers such as Hans Heinze found out. In front of the coast road there was what we'd call a trench and it was prepared like in the times of the Alte Fritz (Emperor of Prussia) 3/4 metre deep maximum and maybe every 20 metres a steel or aluminium dome
21:07
and we went in and saw in one there was a Belgian MG and in the next a Czech MG
21:16
we didn't take the time to check if they had the right ammunition and next to the trench there was a wire obstacle and my commander was wearing long trousers for some reason we climbed over it
21:35
and he didn't even rip his trousers and thats what we saw there of the Atlantic wall
21:43
The most powerful German units in France were the armoured, or ‘panzer’ divisions Rommel wanted these stationed on the coast. But he was only given three the rest were held back as part of a strategic reserve which could only be used with Hitler’s approval The two most important generals in the Western theatre, Von Scheppenburg and Von Rundstedt were reluctant to release the panzers, and wanted to keep them as a mobile reserve near Paris
22:11
But Erwin Rommel had experienced allied air power in North Africa and he knew that keeping the reinforcements so far away from Normandy meant that they would get cut to pieces when they did eventually try to move up to the front
22:26
Allied soldiers tasked with breaching Rommel's new defences began transferring to landing craft Rough weather, which had already forced Eisenhower to delay the invasion by 24 hours made it a hazardous operation
22:43
the boats were going up and down, you know the big boat and the landing craft so you had to watch yourself or you’d get your feet caught between the bo-, 2 boats and you get injured And actually some people fell in to the water and drowned when we were lowered over the sides of the ship with davits and ropes when the little boats hit the water, they were thrown around like matchsticks The English Channel happened to be 15 foot waves at the, the, on D-Day so we were all soaked with the
23:18
icy cold English Channel, and being that the LCAs had very low sides the water was coming in, the bilge pumps could not get rid of the water so we had to take off our steel helmets and bail out the water in order to stay afloat As dawn broke, Allied soldiers in the landing craft witnessed an awesome display of firepower to soften up the enemy And the battleships started bombing and I’m saying, my God what is going on? This is incredible, guys I hope to God I live long enough to remember
23:55
this so I can tell somebody about it Franz Gockel, a soldier with 716th Infantry Division on Omaha Beach had hoped this moment would never come
24:07
A comrade, who was on duty was shouting into the bunker: "Alarm! Alarm!" and we turned around and shouted at him and said ‘Leave us alone, we want to sleep.’ And it wasn’t long before our corporal came running into our bunker and shouted and screamed: ‘Boys, it’s getting serious.
24:35
Well the big guns were shooting at targets away far in and all we could hear was this (noise)
24:44
Due to local tides, US landings began at 6.30am one hour ahead of the British and Canadians
24:54
At Utah, landing craft carrying troops of the US 4th Division landed in a weakly-defended stretch of coastline and were soon advancing inland with just 197 casualties But off Omaha, things quickly began to go wrong Here the beaches were held by experienced German troops from the 352nd Infantry Division And the preparatory bombardments had failed to dislodge them US bombers, nervous about hitting their own ships dropped their bombs far inland, and missed the beach entirely
25:33
While thousands of rockets fired from landing craft fell harmlessly into the sea Not one rocket shell fell among the damn or hit the beach line. They all dropped off into the water As the Landing Craft, carrying 1,450 men of the assault wave, neared the beach they started taking heavy fire The Eastern half of the beach was assaulted by the battle-hardened 1st Division ‘The Big Red 1’ When we came off of that boat I lost one man alongside of me, my radio man was hit and I believe killed
26:14
because the radio itself which was on his back was hit which means that the bullets would have had to come through him to get to the radio i can remember looking at him and as I stepped over him
26:34
and at that point I didn’t hesitate I had already told the men when the ramp went down I turned around and yelled at my two squad leaders that were behind me Go straight in you could hear the machine gun bullets going off the ramp you know ‘cause they, the Germans were traversing like this, hitting all the boats coming in I didn’t get but about 20 or 30 yards when the bullets were hitting around me on my feet and
27:06
there was an obstacle there, there that I made for and I went down on one knee behind the obstacle for a short time but just for seconds because one bullet and one instance actually hit the steel. The Western half of the beach was assaulted by men of the untested 29th Division I was the fifth man on the left side of our little craft behind Clarence Riggs of Pennsylvania and he was gunned down on the ramp and went face down into the water
27:44
And I dove in behind him and I was neck deep in bloody red water with my rifle over my head the jerrys just opened up They knew we were gonna be there, they were waiting for us And in effect A Company and part of B Company were massacred right on the beach, there was nothing left of them
28:11
those were really poor souls down there the first one almost didn't hardly any of them got through none of them, you could say Our weapons were still all okay
28:25
Don McCarthy’s landing craft was swamped before it made the beach
28:31
He and his comrades had to swim for it
28:35
When I went in the water, I went down head first in the water but the air that was in the helmet pulled me back up top I got my CO belt, I got rid of everything All I’ve got in is my little 29th Division jacket, that’s it The combat jacket is gone The rifle is gone, my camera’s gone I’m saying, son of a gun, my dad’ll kill me, because I lost the camera and I said, God, please, please, please get me off this beach and I’ll do anything you want in my whole life if you just do this for me now
29:06
And the smoke came over, that was the miracle.
29:11
As GIs struggled to survive the first moments of the assault on Omaha Beach they were desperately counting on tank support in the form of specially-modified Sherman tanks
29:29
This amazing object is actually a DD Sherman tank It’s a tank that floated The whole problem was, for the allies to invade the German beaches we were gonna need tanks very very quickly to support the infantry If you put all your tanks in one landing craft and they go ashore and that landing craft is hit they all get sunk If you can spread the tanks out and let them float ashore then your spreading your risk and so they developed the Sherman and they call it the Sherman DD
30:00
Duplex Drive using something called displacement You put a canvas screen like we’ve got on this model here around the outside of this vehicle and it actually displaces enough water that you can float a 30 tonne Sherman tank The idea being the tracks can take you across the land but in the water they actually add propellers to the back of the vehicle to take it through the water and get onto the beach For the Germans, there’s accounts of them thinking these
30:31
tanks, as their coming to shore, are just canvas boats And suddenly that screen drops and there’s a 75 mm gun of a Sherman tank pointing at them And so that fear factor and the shock factor as well of those tanks coming ashore has an impact on the German defenders On Omaha, American commanders insisted on launching the DD tanks three miles out into rougher seas than anything they’d trained for The consequences were disastrous The water would come up roughly to where that black line is
31:04
and it’s got about a three foot free board It was considered safe to go in waves of up to a foot high, but nothing much higher
31:14
27 out of 29 tanks sank in 6 foot waves And with only 2 of the tanks making it to shore whole squads of infantry were mown down as they tried to cross 80 yards of open beach
31:31
With US troops at Omaha pinned down and taking heavy casualties at 0730 hours, British and Canadian landings began at Gold, Juno and Sword
31:44
Royal Marine Commando Vincent Horton who had already dodged bombs and bullets in Italy and Africa knew only too well the dangers that lay ahead you never expect to survive you always take the assumption that the first in are gonna take the casualties As the landing craft began their approach, the success of Operation Neptune hung in the balance another disaster like Omaha and the entire invasion could be headed towards catastrophe
32:20
I see a boat get a direct hit and you can see all the bodies going up in the air and I don’t think anyone lived out of that lot
32:30
As the first wave of British and Canadian soldiers approached the shores of Normandy they ran a gauntlet of artillery fire, beach obstacles, and anti-tank mines
32:43
My craft hit an obstacle out in the water and it blew the whole front of the, the landing craft up in the air there was nothing but water pouring in and guys up in the front they were all done for, They were, That was it for them, They were game over
33:03
British and Canadian troops thrown into the sea were encumbered not just by kit, but by their uniforms
33:12
The soldiers all had this rough hairy ur surge battle dress uniform, very hard wearing wool It was virtually water proof in a rain storm obviously, if you waded ashore you would be soaking wet But the whole thing was great, because it dried off as you moved around, you heated it up from the inside out For D-Day itself, some of the troops were issued with what was called the 1942 battle jerkin The intention of the designer was to have a one piece
33:36
garment that the soldiers could literally carry everything in one piece of kit Every soldier was wearing this very simple life belt which was worn around the neck and tied around the waist and they would then have the thing half inflated so that it already had a bit of air in and if when you came off the landing craft you were in deep water and you got in trouble you could then eject your fighting equipment and inflate this to actually keep you afloat until you manage to get ashore
34:00
But many men made a basic error, with fatal consequences Their lifesaving apparatus which they had round ‘em was quite often round their waist and instead of being under their armpits And because of their weight of their packs and ammunition and things they carried sometimes they got in deep water and they would just turn over and drown
34:23
Troops that made it to the beach were under strict orders to keep moving If you join particularly an infantry unit 30, 40 of you in a platoon you’re brothers, you are friends, you are brothers, and if one of you gets hit your instinct is to help, but your orders were to run on and leave him That’s quite a tough thing to do, to leave your friend laying there The scenes on Omaha are synonymous with the Normandy Landings
34:52
But in contrast, many British and Canadian units faced much lighter defences and were able to get ashore relatively unscathed Crucially, unlike Omaha, many DD tanks made it to shore we launched into shallowish water, and when we went off the ramp the screen was fully up, you see And so, and we were going through, avoiding the hedgehogs, which were these iron stanchions with, a 75 mm a German shell on the top or, or a mine and so we had to weave our way through those, motoring along on the bottom
35:35
Like the DD, other specialized tanks were used to bust through German beach defences Amongst them, the Crab
35:46
This is the Sherman Crab And the idea here is that on the front of the Sherman tank these boom arms are being led forward with a drum on The drum rotates at about a 142 revolutions a minute And it spins metal chains There’s 43 of them here, and they beat the ground and blow up mines ahead of the vehicle as it goes forward when they landed, everybody was doing their own thing the beach marshal was trying to set up his um his post with his, to control the beach The flail tank was getting on with
36:24
getting rid of the mines and the um, stretcher bearers were picking up the dead everybody had a little job to do, and that was the marvellous thing
36:37
Meanwhile at Omaha, survivors of the first two waves were still pinned down on the beach One problem was that most of their equipment was at the bottom of the sea They lost guns, they lost equipment, they lost Bangalore torpedoes which is one of the biggest losses Because without Bangalore torpedoes we couldn’t get through the barbed wire A Bangalore torpedo was a five-foot section of pipe filled with TNT that could be screwed to another section to create a pole
37:10
This could then be pushed under barbed wire, to blow a path through
37:20
Sergeant Reynolds found himself alongside one of the few men on the beach still carrying his torpedo He gets to the top of the shingle bank and he slides it under the across the top of the shingle bank where the barbed wire was The man took the second section of the Bangalore Clipped the two of them together, stuck a fuse into the end of the Bangalore, Pulled the cord which was the igniter and got back away from the torpedo And after five seconds it didn’t go off so anyway
38:05
he crawls right back up without any hesitation. Takes the bad fuse ladder out
38:12
Puts another one in, Looked back to see if he can back up Pulled the fuse ladder and started back and only made one little shove backwards But he was killed by either machine gun or rifle fire before the Bangalore went off my face is this close to his and and he's looking right into my eye when he died And he died by just He had a look on his face that to me at the time was pretty much like surprise And he just closed his eyes and dropped his head Now this all happened in about five seconds
38:52
time and then the Bangalore torpedo went off And of course it blew a hole in the and um, I was up immediately and through that barbed wire Harley Reynolds was the first man in his sector to make it through the wire and up the bluffs Along the beach, small groups of men fought their way out of the killing zone, and onto the ridge that overlooked the beach
39:16
One inspirational figure that morning was the 29th Division’s assistant commander Brigadier General 'Dutch' Cota
39:26
Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota was a career soldier and West Point graduate who preferred to be in the field with his men than sat behind a desk On D-Day he came ashore at Omaha with the second wave, and at 51 may well have been the oldest man on the beach As an amphibious warfare expert, he’d warned that Omaha would be tough Seeing the chaos that had engulfed the first wave, Cota rallied survivors and personally led a charge through the wire to restore momentum
40:01
In some sectors, navy destroyers came to the rescue, blasting German positions from close range The only thing that saved us was this US Navy Destroyer, the USS Frankfurt came in real close without running aground and started banging away at the hill, the Skipper saw puffs of smoke he figured it was machine guns firing, so he suppressed the fire up on the top of the hill and that’s what allowed us to, to get through the exit thing and get on up the hill US troops were in no mood for mercy
40:30
Although grievously wounded, Hal Baumgarten had fought his way into the German defences We got to a machine gun nest with about 5 Germans in it and they were holding us, our advance off these guys wanted to surrender But, we had one ranger with us and he had his submachine gun and he emptied his submachine gun into these Germans I wouldn’t fire into anybody like that But this ranger was so he had lost so much men on the beach, he just went wild
41:06
On each landing beach, Navy officers were tasked with keeping the invasion moving The way that man was acting, he was as cool as a cucumber Just standing there shouts out, come on. Come on! Get off! Get off! Get off the beach! Get off! and chasing them off the beaches as though he was there in the middle of the road, or school crossing As units did start moving inland German strongpoints, snipers and minefields slowed the advance to a crawl On the invasion’s western flank
41:37
American units advancing from Utah made contact with airborne forces For Lieutenant Frank Gregg and his platoon of paratroopers it was just in time to lend much-needed assistance I heard a tank coming up behind me I looked back and it was one of our tanks that had gotten coming over the beach so the Lieutenant rolled his tank up there and he, he, he yelled down at me, “Hey Lieutenant" "I got 30 minutes of fuel left in this thing. What can I do to help you?"
42:11
I said, “You see that road junction right up there where that firing is coming from?” He said, “Yes.” I said, “That is my i… my Colonel wants me to capture that road junction and hold it" "So if you could help us out sure appreciate it.” He says, “Okay.” He says, “I’ll throw a 75 millimetre shell in there" and that’ll should quiet ‘em down.” So I said, “Good.” He cut loose a 75, it went bang right into the position With each hour that passed, the Allied foothold in France became more secure
42:48
as reinforcements poured ashore from landing craft and ships The feared German counterattack had yet to materialise but German panzers were finally on the move Their orders, to drive the Allies back into the sea
43:09
Rommel had insisted that the Allies had to be defeated on the beaches, in the first 24 hours but no major German counterattack had yet been launched
43:24
Disastrously, Rommel himself was on leave in Germany having been assured by weather experts that an invasion was impossible that week
43:34
As he raced back to France by car the German panzer reserve sat idle all morning because the only man who could authorise its use, the Fuehrer, remained wary of Allied intentions
43:52
The main reason that people always hear and that you can find in the literature and in a lot of films is the fact that Hitler slept through the attack and no one dared wake him up because he was a man who liked to sleep very long There is some truth to that however there were also pure military reasons as to why the counterattack hadn’t launched The main reason for that is that the Germans were actually still expecting a second bigger, a major invasion somewhere in the Pas de Calais area
44:18
So because of that they kept back their strategic reserve because they regarded in the early hours of the D-Day landings, the D-Day landings only as a diversionary attack the high command level, at Rommels level and further up the Germans spent the whole day dithering about what to do and let go a prime opportunity to drive the allies back in the sea
44:41
It was left to General Marcks, commanding the 84th Infantry Corps in Normandy to take charge of the situation
44:52
General Erich Marcks was a highly skilled staff officer who’d taken part in the German invasions of Poland and France and helped plan Operation Barbarossa the invasion of the Soviet Union As a division commander on the Eastern Front, he’d lost a leg in combat but remained in the army, winning promotion to General of Artillery and in 1943 being given command of the 84th Infantry Core in Normandy D-Day, 6th June, happened to be his 53rd birthday
45:28
Marcks ordered his strongest available reserve the 21st Panzer Division, to make a counterattack His final words to its officers: If you don’t succeed in throwing the British back into the sea, we shall have lost the war
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In this situation General Marcks unleashed the 21st Panzer Division The 21st Div was his iron fist that he had in the Normandy area The other German divisions were all of particular low quality one or two exceptions perhaps but the other reserves he had were about 120km behind the beaches and it would take some time to bring these up to engage in the fighting not least because of attacks by French partisans or attacks by Allied air force so they understood these things would take time
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At 4pm lead units of the British 3rd Division, advancing from Sword beach through woods and hedgerows, reported German tanks on the move At this stage, the greatest threat came from the workhorse of the German armoured divisions the Panzer 4
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The Panzer 4 is a hugely effective tank and they made over 8500 of them During the course of the war It starts its life as being an infantry support vehicle, designed with a short barrelled 75mm gun but Hitler insists it has a long barrelled high velocity 75mm gun fitted to it Very effective for knocking out enemy tanks, and the other great thing about the Panzer 4 is that they were able to upgrade it when it was in service One of the reasons the Panzer 4 was considered
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such a successful and well-designed tank was about the crew ergonomics if we look inside the commanders position it’s actually right in the middle of the turret and he’s actually got an eye line on one side to his loader whose loading that 75mm gun and on the other side, to the gunner, whose actually doing the aiming and firing of the gun He can actually just about see through to the front of the tank where we’ve got the driver and the radio operator
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and why that’s important, in the stress of battle, if you talk to veterans that idea of a wink or a smile or a firm order at the right time, a calming voice that can be just as important as the technology that you’ve got around you
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The 21st Panzer Division launched its attack but quickly ran into heavy fire from British tanks and anti-tank guns By 9pm a handful of Germans had fought their way to the Channel coast just in time for an awesome spectacle
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A vast air armada approaching from the sea 250 Dakotas towing as many gliders This was Operation Mallard the arrival of the British 6th Airlanding Brigade to reinforce the earlier airborne landings
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out to sea the sky was black with aircraft as they say and you could see there looked like hundreds of planes coming in, Tyne gliders. And um as we set off a glider started coming down and a couple of them would burst through this hedge at the right hand side of the road As gliders began landing behind them, the German units retreated back towards Caen to avoid being cut off
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As D-Day came to an end, exhausted frontline troops slept where they could in scraped trenches or alongside their vehicles It was a strange first night on D Day because we didn’t attack anybody and nobody attacked us at least in my case I say to myself son of a gun we actually made it and I’m saying to myself hey mum and dad I’m really in France I’m here, I made it we finished flailing in that field and we just rolled up in our blankets and went to sleep By the end of D-Day, the Allies had
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gained a vital foothold on the French coast though they had failed to reach several key objectives including the city of Caen
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But crucially, 160,000 British, Canadian and US troops were safely ashore and in the days to come, that figure doubled
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Over five days, more than 54,000 vehicles and 100,000 tons of supplies were also landed
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But the human cost was high It’s been estimated that on that first day, there were around 3,000 British and Canadian casualties and 6,500 American about half of them at Omaha beach The number of German losses is unknown but it’s estimated that there were between 4,000 and 9,000 German casualties on that fateful day. Though the Allies were short of their objectives it was clear that Operation Neptune had been an overwhelming success In crossing the Channel and
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breaching the Atlantic Wall in a single day the Allies had overcome the greatest obstacle standing between them and Nazi Germany But for all the horror and heroism, D-Day was the first day in a bloody, three-month Battle for Normandy and only the beginning of a long and gruelling road to victory in Europe
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Following the enormous success of D-Day Allied forces faced a bitter struggle for the French city of Caen when third British tried to capture Caen in, in Operation Mitten They were slaughtered I knew it was me or him and when you’re like that you don’t think the bullets actually were ripping passed by my earhole I can tell you! a battle that would descend into weeks of bloody, attritional fighting a living hell for soldiers on the front line The fight went on for more than 14 days I believe,
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and who held Hill 112 changed on an almost daily basis One of the toughest battles in France I’ll never forget it I’ll never forget the experience
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June 1944 and Hitler’s Germany was on the back-foot In Russia, it had suffered disastrous defeats at Stalingrad and Kursk and now struggled to hold back Stalin's Red Army In Italy, the Germans had abandoned Rome and were retreating north While in northern France, on D-Day, 6 June Allied forces had opened the long-awaited ‘Second Front’ fighting their way ashore at Normandy in the largest operation in military history Now the region’s capital, Caen, became the focus of a gigantic slugging match
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between Allied and German forces For the Allies, Caen was the key to breaking out of Normandy but was proving a hard nut to crack Taking of Caen was a very important part of the operation Because by holding the town, you held the main routes in and out of Normandy rail and road Edwin Bramall was a 20 year old infantry officer during the Battle of Normandy who went on to become head of the British armed forces all our fighting to begin with was, was in sight of Caen really
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and which we’d hoped to get the first day but it didn’t work out like that
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Bruce Melanson from Nova Scotia, had lied about his age so he could be sent overseas with his unit in 1940 Montgomery and Churchill and and then our own generals at that particular time they informed us that we were gonna take Caen in two weeks, It took us almost two months
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The killing fields of Normandy were the first experience of combat for thousands of Allied soldiers often pitched against elite German units, in a costly struggle to break their resistance. As a young officer, Patrick Delaforce commanded a troop of four self-propelled artillery guns in Normandy everybody put a brave face on it, because we knew it was a war of attrition, that with a bit of luck if one of our chaps were being killed, with a bit of luck, maybe one of the Germans were being killed
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With the Germans rapidly sending reinforcements to Normandy the Allies now had to quickly build up their own forces fight off the expected German counterattack and launch their assault on Caen
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The task fell to commander of Allied land forces in Normandy General Bernard Montgomery
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Popularly known as ‘Monty’, Britain’s foremost general of the Second World War was a supremely professional and precise commander who distinguished himself early in the war by getting his division out of Dunkirk almost unscathed Rapid promotion followed and in 1942 ‘Monty’ was given command of British and Commonwealth forces in North Africa where he decisively defeated Rommel’s Afrika corp A prickly character, who many found unbearably arrogant he was nonetheless popular with his men
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Montgomery was an extremely capable commander with a massive ego who had the habit particularly after the war, of saying that he could pre-plan all his battles perfectly and the enemy never had any say in it, he just carried out his master plan The way the Battle of Normandy was fought, once the initial landings were over Montgomery focused entirely on the British and Canadian side and he left the Americans good alliance politics, to fight their own battle
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While US First Army, under General Omar Bradley, slowly fought its way through Normandy hedgerows on the Allied right flank Monty began planning the capture of Caen
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For the Battle of Caen, Montgomery would rely on Lieutenant General Dempsey’s British Second Army Initially it had just the divisions that landed on D-Day but more troops were landing in Normandy every day including Monty’s North Africa veterans the 51st Highland and the famous 7th Armoured Division The ‘Desert Rats’
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Monty’s men could also count on fire support from Royal Navy warships in the Channel including the heavy guns of HMS Rodney, and HMS Roberts
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And thanks to the Allies’ complete air superiority over Normandy there would be close air support from bombers and fighter-bombers
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The Allies were currently stalled 4 miles short of Caen Canadian attempts to take the city by frontal attack had been repelled by the 12th SS Panzer Division Hitlerjugend So Montgomery ordered a pincer attack to squeeze Caen from the east, with an attack by the 51st Highland Division towards Ranville and the west, with an attack spearheaded by 7th Armoured towards Tilly-sur-Seulles
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He had high hopes his North Africa veterans would soon secure Caen for the Allies But 7th Armoured’s advance soon ran into the difficult Normandy countryside known as bocage a labyrinth of sunken lanes and hedgerows
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The ‘Desert Rats’ were one of the few units equipped with the new British Cromwell tank There is a little tendency to judge tanks as if they are fighting other tanks and the Cromwell is never compared to something like a Panther as if it’s an equal match But it’s fast, it’s got the meteor engine in the back Its got Christies suspension, which means it’s a very smooth ride And it’s actually got the relatively powerful 75 milimeter gun on it Now one of the issues with the Cromwell
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we could call a design fault As you look at the vehicle, the driver has a hatch above his head But if the turret is turned, firing it can close over that hatch And if the gun, or the vehicle, is hit, that means that the driver can’t get out As 7th Armoured approached Tilly-sur-Seulles they ran into units of the Panzer Lehr Division an elite unit, drawn from armoured warfare instructors that had just arrived in Normandy
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It was as if you look at a map afterwards, and I have done it and if you drew a line across the map and said, “you’ve got this far, if you go any further, you’re gonna fight.” And, by golly, did we fight And we went into Tilly-sur-Seules, and we did fight, and that was our first real combat situation And I think they had 25 goes at that for before they eventually took Tilly-Sur-Seulles, it was a hell of a fight 12th Panzer Lehr were there
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They were not easy to deal with, they would put sticky bombs on on tanks and things like that if they had half a chance But um I was troop leader for regimental headquarters so I was further back, and C squadron was in front of us and one of their troops turned sideways down a hedge at right angles and every tank was knocked out, I saw them I saw them a week or two later and they still had bits of people inside The point I’ve often made to my friends who were there on D-Day
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when you got there was no Germans there, they didn’t expect you But they was expecting us and they had tanks and God knows what else you see
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I hit the deck and the bloke walking near me must’ve taken a direct hit ‘cause his hands landed in front of me as I hit the deck and a hand landed with me the whole arm, like that, landed with me and I screamed my head off Experienced German troops fought the British to a standstill But the situation changed on 12 June Attacks by the US 1st and 2nd Infantry Divisions on the British right flank found a gap in the German line 7th Armoured Division advanced through the hole
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making for Villers-Bocage in an attempt to encircle Caen from the southwest
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As British tanks arrived in the village of Villers-Bocage French civilians came out to welcome them and celebrate the end of 4 years of occupation And we came in, beautiful day people came out on the streets with flowers and cider and Calvados And we thought this was great, no sign of any Germans I wasn’t particularly worried myself because the French people said “oh no there's no German tanks actually in Villers Bocage it’s all in Tracy-Bocage" "and the other villages around"
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So, we got quite, we went through the town quite quickly and they told us “close up close up”. And so, I was only about 20, 30 yards behind the colonel’s tank But the French villagers were wrong and their celebrations were premature We’d been told to expect 30% casualties at D Day We didn’t get them till Villers Bocage Unbeknownst to John Cloudley-Thompson and his squadron they decided to pause the advance right next door to a company of the 101st SS Heavy Tank Battalion
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which was now approaching rapidly from the east I was rather busy looking at the map and trying to work out what was happening And then quite, very suddenly um the tank in front of me burst into flames. There was a big explosion Their column had been ambushed by one of Germany’s feared ‘Tiger’ heavy tanks I saw this tank coming. It moved the 88 millimetre just like that and then wham! And I was standing up within the turret looking through the periscope, I ducked down
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And I felt a tingling between my legs I thought lucky my legs were apart because I knew that the shot must have gone between In command of the 55-tonne steel monster was a Waffen SS legend Obersturmfuhrer Michael Wittman He earns his reputation on the eastern front and he’s an absolute gift to the German propaganda machine Wittman’s Tigers were in France in the Summer of 1944 and after the D-Day landings, they are moved up to try and block British advances around Caen
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As part of the advance, the British Seventh Armoured Division races forward to capture high ground around the village of Villers-Bocage Now Wittman’s Tigers have just been offloaded and they’re resting very near that village As soon as Wittman hears that the British Seventh Armoured are parked up on the side of the road he attacks, and he knocks out many British vehicles Wittmann’s 15-minute rampage through the town of Villers-Bocage knocked out 13 British tanks 2 anti-tank guns
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13 other armoured vehicles And that was actually pretty horrifying because you, you could see tanks being blown up and then you think well it could be me next time but then you have to dismiss that from your mind because that’s the way life goes Wittman’s Tiger was eventually disabled by an anti-tank gun but by then the damage was done We’d lost half the regiment in that one day in Villers Bocage which is really disastrous German news services quickly leapt on Wittman’s success
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Now the German propaganda machine immediately inflates this victory He’s interviewed on German radio that very evening This inflates the reputation of Michael Wittman and, of course, the Tiger Tank In actual fact, that battle was much more of a draw and Wittman had lost precious German assets, Tiger tanks that could not easily be replaced
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The following night, the British returned to Villers-Bocage when 300 heavy bombers unleashed devastation on the village and strategic crossroads We saw a lot of bombers coming over and clouds of smoke in the distance and masses of these British bombers coming over to bomb Villers-Bocage And that’s when, it became the most heavily bombed town in Normandy or anyway in the British sector during the war ever. It was very, very badly smashed.
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The Allies could take some comfort from the fact they’d not had to face these powerful German armoured forces on D-Day itself Army Group B Commander Erwin Rommel had wanted these elite units stationed on the coast ready to smash the Allied invasion on the beaches But he’d been overruled by Adolf Hitler who insisted the prized panzer divisions be held back as a reserve and used only with his explicit authority
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Under the Third Reich, Hitler wielded complete power over the military as both Armed Forces Supreme Commander and Army Commander-in-Chief He had no formal training as a tactical commander or officer and never rose beyond the rank of corporal during the Great War but from 1940 onwards, began to interfere more and more in military affairs By 1944 Hitler had certainly gotten very untrusting of the German high command and he wanted to make sure that they were doing what he wanted them to do
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That meant things like giving out stand fast orders where he refused to allow German forces to retreat telling cities to hold at all costs no matter what the allies did and generally getting down to a much lower level than the leader of Germany should have been getting Hitler only allowed Rommel three panzer divisions to place along the coast The rest were held back for a decisive counterattack once it was clear where the main Allied invasion was heading
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But on D-Day, Hitler’s order came too late for the panzer reserve to reach the Normandy beaches So, on D-Day itself, the Caen sector was defended by just one weak infantry division of 7th Army with 21st Panzer Division as a local reserve But within 24 hours reinforcements began to arrive from the First SS Panzer Corps and three weeks later, from the Second SS Panzer Corps These powerful formations were well-equipped, and highly-motivated
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The showcase divisions included a number of divisions of the Waffen-SS This was the Nazi Party's private army independent, at least in structure and organisation, of the German Army The Waffen-SS formed from originally what had been the SS, the people who stood as guards for Hitler when he was speaking in the 1930’s and they had grown up by 1944 into a force of about 30 divisions around the world
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Fighting in Normandy were two of the most remarkable of the German divisions the first SS Panzer, The Leibstandarte to Adolf Hitler, Adolf Hitler’s body guard These were men who were highly committed Nazi’s and very effective troops indeed and the division that was spun off from the first SS Panzer division, the Hitler Youth division, the 12th SS Division, Hitlerjugend When the Hitler Youth Division was formed in late 1943 they were looking for experienced officers and non-commissioned officers
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to build a cadre round which they would build this particular division The raids and fights would then be filled by very young men, that’s why it’s called the Hitler Youth Division, so a lot of people were well, around the age of 18 some of them even younger And most of these experienced cadres came from the 1st SS Panzer Division so there was a bit of a relationship between the two divisions They were führertreu, they were true to the Führer
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and their commitment to Hitler and their fighting abilities were second to none At the same time, that same commitment made them much more likely to shoot prisoners or kill civilians Now facing the cream of Hitler’s army it was more vital than ever that the Allies move reinforcements and supplies rapidly from ships, to beaches, and then to the frontline To achieve this, they’d set up a hugely sophisticated operation involving thousands of ships, landing craft and amphibious vehicles
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as well as two giant artificial harbours, codenamed Mulberry A and B A week after D-Day, the Allies were landing 30,000 troops, and 7,000 vehicles every day But freak weather was about to throw Allied plans into chaos
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On 19th June, the worst storm to hit Normandy in 40 years tore through the Channel
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June was selected to be the perfect month but it turned out to be almost disastrous The American harbour on the other side of Arromanches broke up so that was of no use, these massive concrete blocks that the harbours are made of were just tossed around by the sea The storm wrecked 800 ships and landing craft five times as many as were lost during the actual D-Day assault You had to realise that a 3,500 ton flat bottomed landing craft it’s a bit like a shoe box, you put it on the water
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and you blow at it, and it will go anywhere, and an LSC of that size it got blown, and we got well blown The beaches were strewn with wreckage and took days to clear The consequence of this particular storm was that Allied logistics was thrown into disarray Logistical re-supply of the Allied forces after the storm is down by 50% And this of course gives the Germans you might argue a bit of breathing space Of course, the Allies still have a sheer superiority in men and material
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but if they had both of these Mulberry harbours, things would have been even worse for the Germans The storm forced Montgomery to postpone a new offensive against Caen by five days He knew it could prove a costly delay, since according to top secret intelligence the enemy were about to receive major reinforcements
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The Germans had what they believed was an unbreakable code that they could use to communicate They used something called the enigma machine which looked like an oversized typewriter But one of those enigma machines had actually fallen into the hands of Polish intelligence during the German invasion of Poland in 1939, And the Poles got it to the British Once they got the machine, the British codebreaking unit at Bletchley Park worked 24/7 to break the German codes and make sure
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that they could read German messages For General Montgomery, what Ultra allowed him to do in the battle for Caen was understand what German units were arriving in the defensive lines and how he should respond to them Monty was determined to press ahead with his new offensive before German reinforcements entered the battle The attack, codenamed Operation Epsom began with a monstrous barrage by 700 guns including the heavy guns of four Royal Navy warships, firing at a range of more than 10 miles
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I've seen one Tiger tank that was hit by one of the shells from the Warspite it was turned over rather like a Dinky toy, but that was very rare Bombardments by both sides were steadily laying waste to the Norman countryside Hundreds of farm animals were caught in the crossfire, their carcasses left to fester in the summer heat That’s one of the worst things I can remember really And that was really disgusting but, you know, you couldn’t help yourself – you daren’t move
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You had to keep undercover. But you might have 4 or 5 dead cows in the field There’s nothing as ghastly as the smell of death
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In the wake of the massive bombardment two fresh divisions from British VIII Corps supported by nearly 600 tanks would attack south, cross the Odon River and swing round to encircle Caen Supporting attacks would be made by the Canadian 3rd Division at Carpiquet airfield and 49th West Riding Division towards Rauray
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But the Germans had organised a skilful defence in depth and casualties were high We had to go through, countryside, that was open fields So, the snipers were having a, having a ball You know, they was knocking mainly officers, because then when they first landed they had their pips up and their revolver and, you know, it was obvious they were officers And they were shooting them, we had to finish up with one officer There was a lot of, a lot of fire about
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tremendous lot of fire, anti-tank fire, artillery fire The 15th Scottish Division had a very difficult battle, they lost 250 men in the first hour We, ourselves, got shelled a lot and we also first met this awful weapon, the nebelwerfer which is a smoke thrower, and it’s called the Moaning Minnie, and that produced this awful humming sound
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And then all these mortar bombs covered an area about the size of a football field Luckily you had this warning, so as soon as you heard this awful moaning noise you took what cover you could – in a ditch or in a trench or something like that
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The supporting attack at Rauray also ran into fierce opposition We took a couple of villages and we suffered, we did three attacks and each one of them was large casualties as all the attacks in Normandy were And we were pushed back just as soon as we went forward If you made a gain of a hundred yards that was a major victory because fighting was beginning to become so terribly intense And our first three attacks we lost a lot of people
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It took two days of gruelling combat to get across the Odon River Then, on the far bank they faced a battle for a long, low ridge that soon became infamous Hill 112 It was the highest point on a series of rolling down land and it was called 112 simply because it was 112 feet above sea level It was in a commanding, a commanding position overlooking the city of Caen which you could see quite clearly Rommel himself said whoever held Hill 112 held Normandy
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We was in the 15th Scottish Division which was at the side of the hill and that was known as the Scottish corridor And the, before it was named Death Valley, we was losing there 100 - 150 men a day Time and again, British soldiers were ordered to advance across open wheat fields just waiting for dug-in German machine gun crews to open up with one of their most feared weapons Because the Germans had been there much, much longer than we’d been there they had proper
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positions that were mainly guarded properly with sandbags and what have you so they were difficult to get rid of And their machine guns was knocking our blokes out right, left and centre The British were up against the devastating MG42 nicknamed “Hitler’s Zipper” The German MG42 light machine gun was typical of the German design heavily overengineered, beautifully made, and used an enormous amount of bullets It was a very feared weapon there’s no doubt about that
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Allied soldiers remember the sound of it, it was just like the sound of tearing paper
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There is no machine gun that fires like an MG42. It’s a Brrp, Brrp, Brrp Like a string of Chinese fire crackers going off next to your ear that’s at once and it, dzh dzh dzh dzh dzh dzh And, they’re very rapid You have no options, once it starts you’ve got it you either get hit or you don’t get hit, One or the other But the MG42’s extraordinary rate of fire had its drawbacks
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It fired 1,200 rounds a minute, twice the rate of anything that the British used And the problem with that is that the more bullets you fire the more bullets you need to make, the more you need to supply, the more you need to transport the more you need to carry into action
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It was an air-cooled machine-gun, that could fire 3,000 rounds a minute, theoretically That was technically impossible because no one was capable of feeding 3,000 rounds into the gun in one minute There were three machine-gun men, one who had the machine-gun, and two others carrying the ammunition They had them in these boxes, and there were about 200 rounds in each box And you could haul two of these boxes. You can imagine how long it takes before you’ve fired 200 rounds
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So that ‘minute’ was only in theory In four bloody days of attack and counterattack British Eighth Corps suffered 4,000 casualties British Sherman tanks occupied the forward slopes of Hill 112 but then, astoundingly, they were pulled back They got up to the top which was a brilliant operation and then like the Duke of York’s Army they were told to come down again and nobody ever knew why and the answer was that Bletchley Park’s Ultra had told Montgomery that 2 powerful SS
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armoured divisions, Panzer divisions, were coming up from the south and if we’d stayed up there the whole division would have been cut off and Monty didn’t dare risk us at that early stage so we came down again Montgomery therefore took the decision to pull back slightly from the upper slopes of Hill 112 to the next safe position When the attack up what is called the Rauray Spur occurred the British were waiting for it and they halted it with heavy German casualties
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Montgomery was ready for them, that’s the difference Ultra made
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The SS Panzer Divisions’ counterattack was shattered by overwhelming Allied firepower
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anti-tank and artillery guns and strafing attacks by fighter-bombers
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But despite this, the Allies’ swift advance through Normandy had hit an impasse and Monty couldn’t afford to lose momentum What happened next was to be one of the most controversial episodes of the Normandy campaign Caen was still in German hands Montgomery’s first two attempts to take the city by envelopment had failed In July, he decided to send British First Corps straight up the middle Ahead of the assault, codenamed Operation Charnwood
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467 bombers pulverised the northern approaches to the city I watched the, the terrific aerial bombardment of Caen at very close quarters. I mean I could feel the whole ground, all the bombs coming over feel the whole ground shake. We were very close to the bombing One or two got hit by anti-aircraft fire I suppose And one was damaged but at least he got down and we all rushed up the hill to see if we could help but he said, “Keep away, we’ve still got bombs on board.”
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So we all ran back down the hill again
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It was blown to bits, Caen was. We always wondered why we’d bombed it so heavy
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because when you bomb a place, it makes terrific hiding for infantry, and it makes your job worse and worse German positions were then blasted by the 16-inch guns of HMS Rodney as well as the 6-inch guns of cruisers HMS Belfast and Emerald then strafed by RAF Typhoons
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And we had a, a real view of the Typhoons going into action and what we saw from where we were, we were on the plains overlooking it and we could see the Typhoons going in with their rockets firing on the tigers from behind, mind the firing they were receiving anti-aircraft fire was terrific, you know, it’s marvellous that they ever got through it
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They did such a, such a wonderful job those Typhoons Used to watch them coming, Zoom! Holy mackerel. Really made you shiver a little bit because of the fact they knew that the enemy was was down there accepting all this, you know
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British and Canadians slowly fought their way through German-held villages into the outskirts of Caen
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Between, the coast and Caen there were about 7 or 8 fortified villages where the Germans had fortified everything and based large numbers of artillery guns, field guns, anti-tank guns and Galmanche was one of these fortified villages And we fought twice at Galmanche and we had one day where we were without infantry, where our infantry had lost so heavily the colonel pulled the rest of them, their colonel pulled them out from there
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B Squadron, my squadron of tanks, was in there, one day and we were static The Germans were on the high ground in the village looking down on us and could see us, everything that was happening and every time we moved, they were shelling us and they were shelling us continuously for a period of about 4 or 5 hours when we were without infantry And we had orders to hold it and not to pull back so we had to literally sit there and be shot at A mortar come over and the most devastating
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blast I ever, ever heard in my life It landed right between Alec Duncan’s legs. He was the one in the middle
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I, I don’t remember, I don’t remember anything that happened except for a few minutes later Harold Burden, which was on the left of Alec Duncan, says “how you doing, Hook?” I says, “I don’t know, I don’t know how I’m doing.” I said, I said, “how’s Alec doing?” He said, “Alec is dead.” He’d lost both his legs. Both his legs
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On the right of the advance, in house-to-house fighting through the ruins of Caen the Canadians were again facing diehard fanatics of the Hitler Youth division And rumours were circulating of a massacre of Canadian prisoners
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In this Battle of Caen, we were up against Hitler’s toughest troops the SS troops Under General Kurt Meyer. And he’s the jerk that killed 24 of our Canadians in the Abbey, he murdered them Kurt Meyer, seen here, was convicted after the war by a Canadian court for his part in the murder of Canadian prisoners during the battle
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Well I’m still mad about it. I still feel that they, they didn’t fight fair I mean there’s a right and a wrong way to fight a, fight a war and sure get killed in action or shoot somebody and not necessarily after he’s taken prisoner, that’s, that’s wrong, that is, that is very wrong
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I don’t forgive and forget, I just put it in the back of my mind and say that’s the way they were and we’ll we’re not, we’re not gonna change history now Fighting around Caen assumed new levels of brutality with accusations of the shooting of prisoners by both sides One of the things that started happening in Normandy was the regular execution of Allied Soldiers by German divisions Some of this was from German units that had been brutalised on the eastern front
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and were extremely violent on the western front Some of this was from units that were more deeply Nazified and patriotic like the Hitler Jugend but the result was, as in the battle of Caen, where a number of Canadian soldiers were executed was that Allied soldiers were getting shot after they had surrendered The response on the part of the Allied soldiers was often to execute German prisoners in revenge
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After a day of heavy fighting, the pressure from the Allies was so great that Rommel decided to abandon northern Caen, and withdraw his forces across the River Orne On 9th July, the northern half of Caen fell to the Allies
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Not much of it was left
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Well, it was just a pile of rubble, now, the Air Force done a really good job on it because I don’t think there was a stone left standing there to be quite honest they’d more or less wiped it out altogether So, the combination of the 2 armies meeting and firing into a town in the centre, plus the fact that a thousand bomber raid was put on it meant that the town was a mass of ruin and rubble When we got through past the cobbles we saw the Cathedral was standing
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and there was a hospital place beside it with Red Cross marked on it and that had missed the the bombing had missed that and that’s where most of the French people who were in the town had gathered in this hospital and so they escaped There were a lot people were killed but not as many as would have been if it hadn’t been for the sheltering in the hospital which our bombs had been avoiding
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There was no let up for the Germans,the next day, Montgomery launched Operation Jupiter This time, the 43rd Wessex Division would attempt to capture the strategic Hill 112
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We were asked to gain the summit hold it and keep it But the Germans were quite equally determined that we were not going to do so So, it was a battle of attrition mostly between armour and armour but the infantry were expected to advance over open fields
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The fight went on for more than 14 days I believe, and who held Hill 112 changed on an almost daily basis Sometimes we were up there, sometimes the British or the Canadians, who were on active service up there It was a battle with many losses, And the woods up there were unrecognisable after that
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The fight around Hill 112 was an incredibly violent and intensive fight The Germans had built up a substantial defence in depth centered around machine guns anti-tank weapons, high velocity anti-aircraft and anti-tank guns tanks armoured personnel carriers and the allied soldiers had to fight all the way through it They knew if they popped their head up even from a mile away a German tanker gun might shoot it off And so, they had to slog their way through
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it, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day taking enormous casualties as they went
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The inexperienced Wessex Division were up against Waffen SS troops, supported by Tiger tanks of the 102nd SS Heavy Tank Battalion
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And it became an almost a mantra that if you don’t know what to do next go down dig down and get your head under, under ground level
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The struggle for Hill 112 decimated the Wessex Division and still they couldn’t take its summit - left a no man’s land strewn with dead men and destroyed vehicles
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We took around about 4,000 casualties on that period on that battleground which was the villages as well as the hill As the fighting raged, the Allies struck a lucky blow, with potentially huge consequences Rommel’s staff car was strafed by a Canadian Spitfire and driven off the road The driver was killed, and Rommel was left unconscious for a week The consequence of that are severe because Rommel had been the driving force in the defence of North Western France
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behind the establishment of defence positions and of course he had a clear view of how he wanted to fight the Allies because he fought them before The moment he is wounded the German command structure is not really thrown into disarray but one of the big problems is that the commander von Kluge basically now has to double hat not only is he now responsible for the command of all the forces in North western France but he also takes over Rommel’s position as well
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He becomes an extremely busy man you might say, and his way of fighting differed quite severely from the way that Rommel wanted to fight
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With German high command in confusion cautious, methodical Montgomery planned a final push on Caen one which he declared would lead to the long-awaited breakthrough
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But for Allied infantry and tank crews, the fighting would be as brutal as anything they’d faced yet The offensive began on 18 July 1944 Codenamed Operation Goodwood the first phase would be an attack west of Caen, to suck in German reserves Then, the main assault would be launched east of Caen spearheaded by 750 tanks of the British 7th, 11th and Guards Armoured Divisions
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Meanwhile, in Operation Atlantic Canadian Second Corps would take the southern half of Caen
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Allied bombers rained thousands of tons of high explosives onto German positions
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The raid was followed by a gigantic artillery barrage
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Then Allied infantry and armour began their advance What caused most harm to German soldiers was the enemy’s material superiority First with artillery fire, which preceded the advance, in this case, of their infantry At first there was rapid progress through shattered villages, and cratered fields as German soldiers, dazed by the bombardment, gave themselves up But then, from camouflaged positions, the feared German 88s opened up picking off British tanks one by one
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Facing the British armoured attack at Goodwood is a very strong German defence in depth Not only have they got fortified farm houses, they’ve got assault guns hidden they’ve got weapons like the famous pact 43 anti-tank gun, that’s one of these ones here behind me It’s an 88mm gun And it can fire a solid shot armoured piercing round that would penetrate one of the British Sherman tanks out to about 2 and a half kilometers away so you have the situation that British tanks had been knocked out
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and they can’t even see the enemy that is firing at them This exceptionally powerful anti-tank gun had been designed to take on Allied bombers They were the ones we always feared, the 88s They could be used, the 88s, even as anti-aircraft guns They were an all dual-purpose gun they could fire at tanks, against tanks, and aircraft They were a marvellous weapon they were The Germans first use the 88mm gun as a flak gun, in other words, an anti-aircraft gun
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And the idea there, is they’re firing rounds such as this one here to an enormous height, to try and knock down a bomber, something up to about 20,000 feet Now when in the 1940 campaign Rommel says to some flak gunners aim your guns not in the air, but down at some approaching British tanks and then the gun becomes a really effective anti-tank gun
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The 88, you would not hear it till it would explode and then you'd hear the sound of it coming, That’s how fast it was That’s the one I told you was unbelievable. That 88. The ones that knocked our tanks out just like that
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By the end of the day, the British had advanced 3 miles While the Canadian 2nd and 3rd Divisions encircled Caen and completed its capture the following morning
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At long last, Caen was in Allied hands
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But Montgomery also wanted the heavily-defended ridgelines south of the city as a springboard for his breakout from Normandy For two days, British and Canadian tanks and infantry struggled to advance in the face of heavy machine-gun and anti-tank fire Neither envied the others situation I never wanted to be in the tanks and the guy in the tank never wanted to be the infantry man either cos he looked and saw us with no protection, it’s the same with every guys’ job, even the guys
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in the fighter planes planes would look at us and think, god, thank god I’m not down there and I’d think thank god I’m not up there At least I could dig a hole in the ground, you can’t do anything, you’ve got to stay there and take it The British and Canadian onslaught was relentless giving battered German divisions no time to recover or regroup German units were at breaking point Divisions moved to the rear for much-needed rest suddenly found themselves thrown back into the front line
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to fend off the latest Allied attack They had very little support in terms of reserves coming up they had more or less exhausted their reserves for Normandy and simply they were under orders to hold to the last man and in many cases they did this was a combination of extreme bravery and just the nature of young men put in a situation in which if you retreat your own side will shoot you, and if you don’t the other side will shoot you It’s an appalling situation
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And it was due to Hitler’s order to halt in place and face the firepower that the allies could bring to bear against them The six-week Battle of Caen was won at a high price Operation Goodwood alone cost 5,500 British and Canadian casualties and more than 300 tanks The German army also suffered heavy losses but incomplete records mean the true number will never be known Dead bodies would be picked up by the, by the medical people, you know, afterwards
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The smell, the stench, that was the battle of Caen
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that’s what you experience, that’s what you’re seeing, that’s what you looked at German bodies, Canadian bodies, British bodies everything was right there to look at amongst the pigs and the horses and the cows and everything else That’s war, that’s war, that’s what Caen was like As many as 20,000 French civilians also lost their lives during the Normandy campaign most in Allied bombing raids
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Their villages, awful, they were totally destroyed And no reason really why the, the people who live in Normandy should be particularly grateful, we destroyed their countryside Caen, their big city, Villers-Bocage, we destroyed them all the RAF smashed Caen which really wasn’t strictly necessary and we could see it happening
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The capture of Caen did not lead to the dramatic breakout Montgomery had promised The British and Canadians were still penned in by the heavily-defended ridges south of the city and Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of Europe, was way behind schedule But what the Battle of Caen had achieved was to force German commanders to commit their reserves, and their most powerful panzer units to the eastern sector of the battlefield, just to hold the line
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Now 30 miles to the west, General Omar Bradley’s US First Army was about to reap the reward By pouring in all of their reinforcements toward Caen the Germans substantially weakened their defensive lines facing the American First Army further south And what that meant as Bradley readied his offensive around Saint-Lo was that there wasn’t that many Germans facing him on the defensive
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On 25 July 1944 General Bradley and the US Army launched Operation Cobra They would achieve the great breakout that had eluded the British and Canadians at Caen and prove their sacrifices had not been in vain
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The D-Day landings had taken Hitler by surprise.
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But 7 weeks on the Germans had reinforced their defenses, and successfully contained the Allied beachhead.
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The Allies were bogged down in heavy fighting across Normandy and needed to get inland to begin the liberation of France.
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It would be a fierce and bloody journey, against a tenacious enemy, in a challenging landscape. You felt as though it was, like a continuous death sentence that if you went to sleep at night you wouldn’t, next day would be the last day. This is the story of the Normandy Breakout.
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By 1944, after four and a half years of war, Nazi Germany was under pressure from all sides. On the Eastern Front, Stalin’s Red Army had launched a gigantic offensive in Byelorussia. In Italy, the Germans had abandoned Rome, and were retreating north.
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While in Normandy, in northern France, following hard fought success of D-Day, the Allies had landed almost a million troops.
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The war might be moving in the Allies’ favor, but 7 weeks on from D-Day, their forces were still bottled up in Normandy.
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They had to find a way to breakout and get the so-called ‘Second Front’ moving or risk becoming a sideshow to the Red Army’s great offensive in the East. But any advance inland was going to be difficult for the Allies. Once the Germans had realised that D-Day, was the main landing and there would not be a second landing, the Germans had moved reinforcements into that particular part of France and, on paper, the German forces looked particularly strong
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so they have 7 tank divisions, a very large concentration of Waffen SS Divisions which by that stage most of them can be seen as the elite forces with very heavy equipment, so on paper, a very, very strong force. By mid-July, British and Canadians were locked in a brutal slugging match around the city of Caen. And it would fall to US First Army, under General Bradley to attempt the desperately-needed breakout. The 51-year-old Omar Bradley
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was a former head of the US Army Infantry School at Fort Bragg, who’d overseen the creation of America’s first airborne division, the 82nd. Having commanded a division, and then an army corps during the Allied landings in North Africa and Sicily, he was given command of US First Army for the invasion of Europe. He was accustomed to working closely with Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower, his former West Point classmate.
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Omar Bradley was a pretty solid General. He was tough, smart and experienced. But he methodical and perhaps a little bit slow. And Commander of America’s first Army he was also subordinate to General Bernard Montgomery, and their relationship wasn’t the best. Montgomery often felt that he was getting blamed for Bradley’s slowness. Allied attacks by British Second Army around Caen had drawn the bulk of German forces off in that direction. The German line opposite US First Army
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was therefore relatively weakly-held. Bradley planned to launch a powerful attack on a narrow front near the town of Saint-Lo, using heavy bombers and artillery to blast a hole in the German line. American infantry and tanks would then pour through the gap, capture Avranches, and secure a route out of Normandy. The British and Canadians would simultaneously launch another major attack around Caen, pinning down German divisions, so they couldn’t be moved to face Bradley’s attack.
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The Allies had total control of the skies over Normandy, allowing their aircraft to bomb, strafe and rocket German ground forces at will, with almost zero risk of interference from the once mighty Luftwaffe. Josef Schröder was a German machine gunner who had fought on Omaha Beach. I will never forget that, how depressing it all was for us. We could do nothing to stop it. There wasn’t a single German fighter plane in the air or any anti-aircraft fire. Nothing.
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A rather grim joke told by the Germans at the time was aircraft recognition. You look up and if the underside of the aircraft above you is painted silver its American, if its painted black, it’s British, and if it doesn’t show up at all, it’s German. The Allies might have complete control of the skies, but on the ground the terrain favored the Germans who were now entrenched in Normandy’s bocage landscape. Bocage country was made up of small fields, about a hundred or two hundred meters square,
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bounded by earth banks with hedges on top
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Cecil Newton was a tank gunner who came ashore on D-Day. The terrain of the Bocage no-one knew about it beforehand. No-one knew about the deep lanes, the high hedges. Hadn’t got a clue and it came as a great shock,
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The roads were covered on both sides by high bushes, and you end up with these sort of ditches on either side, which were overgrown. These ditches were quite deep, 1.2 metres, sometimes a bit more. They were great protection for us, we would just fall into them. If they fired at us, the rounds would just pass over. Or there were these sunken lanes. There were many of those. You couldn’t see into them from above because the trees covered them
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It was like a tunnel. American troops also struggled in the giant hedgerows.
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Some of them were up 4, 5, 6 feet high, and each, each field was completely surrounded. So, in effect, what you had to do, you had to fight your way from one hedgerow to the next. What the Germans have got is a naturally occurring trench system. They can use the hedgerows to move men down and they can use the churches, the farmhouses, and so on as strong points. And this ground has to be fought over very much like the trench systems of the first World War,
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and for some Americans who had served in the Pacific, it reminded them of fighting through the jungle. But some Allied units also learned to take advantage of the terrain. Hedgerow worked both ways. It was very difficult pushing forward in the hedgerows, but by the same token you had as much, about as much cover as the enemy did, and so you were protected,
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Invasion planners thought Allied troops would push through the hedgerows and into open country within a few days of landing.
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The US 29th and 35th Infantry divisions faced some of the worst terrain around Saint-Lo, which had to be captured before General Bradley could launch his attack, codenamed Operation Cobra.
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On D-Day the 29th had received a bloody baptism of fire on Omaha beach. Now they faced a different kind of hell. Any road or pathway could be mined or covered by concealed enemy positions
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In the bocage you had to be careful where you walked. You had to be very cautious. You had to stay spread apart. as an infantryman you had to use great judgement. The Americans would have to improvise ways to break through the dense hedgerows but it wouldn’t be easy. We had Bangalore torpedoes with barbed wire. You don’t blow hedgerows with a thing. You talking about a mini mountain that’s been growing for couple of centuries of land that the Normans had been using.
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So, in US armored division workshops, engineers began using the thousands of left-over German beach obstacles to weld crude steel tusks to their tanks. The Americans nicknamed them, Rhinos. It kinda looked like a lawn a lawn rake upside down. Of course it weighed probably a ton. With their modified tanks leading the charge, American troops began fighting their way through the hedgerows, towards Saint-Lo. But constant Germans ambushes inflicted a huge toll on frontline units.
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We landed on June the 6th, on June the 9th, we were supposed to take Saint- Lo. It took 6 weeks to take Saint- Lo... Fighting through all those hedgerows We tried to make as much noise as possible with our weapons. And when we had fired enough, we moved 50 or 100 meters back to the next hedge. They were lifesavers for us, those hedges, otherwise we would never have made it through. And we moved back 50 - 100 meters so the Americans would now fire at the position that we’d been defending earlier.
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And we sat 200 to 300 meters further back. During July, in a two-week struggle to reach Saint-Lo, US 19th Corps suffered 11,000 casualties and advanced just 5 miles.
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And we went into another field that, Germans had been dropping, mortar shells and that’s when I saw my colonel, Colonel Terry, he just kept on walking and on, then he was hit by a a sniper and he hit the ground, his helmet flew off and he was dead. And, and about 25, 20 minutes later, a half hour I guess, I was hit by a piece of shrapnel from a mortar shell and I was on my way back to England too.
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On the same day Major Howie, commanding a battalion of the US 116th Infantry Regiment, assured his commander that his men would take Saint-Lo. Major Howie was killed moments later by an artillery shell.
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The following day, when his men finally captured the city, they laid his body, draped in the American flag, on the rubble of its cathedral.
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Lessons were learned from Saint-Lo, and Bradley decided to employ overwhelming firepower to give Operation Cobra every chance of success.
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Crucially, his attack would have the full support of the US 9th Tactical Air Command around 400 aircraft.
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Operation Cobra, would be led by Seventh Corps of the US First Army, with 9th and 30th Infantry Divisions making the initial assault, to be followed up by 2nd Armored and 1st Infantry, as well as units of Eighth Corps. Standing by was US Third Army under General George Patton, and US 3rd Army ready to exploit any breakthrough made by First Army.
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Bradley’s US First Army would launch Cobra at the same time as British Second Army’s latest offensive against Caen, Operation Goodwood.
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On 18th July, Goodwood went ahead as planned, but Cobra had to be delayed when heavy cloud ruled out air support.
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The operation began a week late at 9.30am on 25 July. The first phase of the attack was to be a massive bombing raid on German positions, in a box 4 miles wide and one and a half miles deep. 1,500 B-17 and B-24 bombers rained more than 4,000 tons of high explosive on the target area.
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There were so many bombers there that it was like a conveyor belt. And as far as you could see from here directly overhead. For as far as I could see with my binoculars.
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Just bombers.
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The elite Panzer Lehr division caught the brunt of the bombing, losing around a thousand men a third of its total strength. The frontline troops were really hit hard by these bombs, to use a First World War expression they’re completely shell shocked, and they’re basically not able to function anymore, so that had a huge impact on morale of these particular people. It is hell, it is like hell.
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You just lie down and wait, “acquiescently”, for the end or to be hit. You don’t even realise if you are thrown through the air. And many were pushed downwards in these craters through the force of the explosion.
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It was one of the most devastating ground support missions of the war but not all bombs hit the right target. The winds had had shifted. They were supposed to only drop their bombs into the the markers that put off smoke in different colours. But they couldn’t see them and they were bombing our own men. Quite a few of the bombs fell short. Indeed 100 Americans were killed straight away, and one of these was General Lesley McNair, the most Senior American ground commander
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to actually be killed during World War Two.
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Despite the friendly fire casualties, the bombers had done their job. The air force had blasted a four-mile wide hole in the German line. Now it was up to Bradley’s US First Army to smash through it and begin the breakout, before the Germans could recover.
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US infantry began their advance.
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The faced units commanded by a highly experienced German Field Marshal, Günter von Kluge.
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Von Kluge was a Prussian officer of the old school, and a favorite of Hitler’s for his performance during the invasions of France and the Soviet Union. In early July, he was appointed Commander-in-Chief in the West after Hitler sacked von Rundstedt, and became Commander of Army Group B as well, when Field Marshal Rommel was injured in an Allied air attack.
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Hitler was counting on von Kluge for a miracle, but the veteran commander had bad news for the führer.
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He writes to Hitler almost immediately saying exactly what Von Rundstedt and Rommel had told Hitler a month before; that they’re reaching the point at which they just can’t hold the line, they’d being worn out, they’re running out of ammunition, they’re running out of men. Von Kluge was relying on 7th Army to deal with any American attack. But some of its units had been in almost constant combat since D-Day and were understrength and exhausted. All units were short of fuel and ammunition.
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Panzer Lehr division, which had arrived in Normandy six weeks ago with more than 200 tanks, now had 31 left. But Panzer Lehr and the 2nd SS Panzer Division ‘Das Reich’, were elite units, and dangerous opponents in any circumstances.
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To add to Kluge’s problems, the devastating US air raid, followed by an intense artillery bombardment, made it almost impossible for him to communicate with forward units, or to find out what was happening at the front. By comparison, US forces brought cutting edge technology to the battlefield, that made their command and control significantly more effective. This piece of American Technology revolutionized battle communications, unlike other armies which were still using radio sets
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with big long aerials which pointed directly to the radio operators and gave positions away, American Commanders could now carry their own radios and be in direct contact with other units. The Germans on the other hand were still using First World War technology. They’d failed to come up with a decent wireless technology before the Second World War, they were pretty much using field telephone sets with cables run out to all their Command posts and headquarters.
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And of course, when the American aerial barrage started, and the artillery started blasting their positions. Those telephone cables were very quickly cut and very soon they were out of contact with each other and weren’t able to command their troops in the field. And what's more allied forces were able to use radio communications to coordinate between ground and air forces. This all started at Saint Lo when, when the Air Force bombed us at Saint Lo twice. They had no control with the aircraft.
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They finally come up with air ground control and they formed the 9th Air Force and the P47’s were designated to support the Infantry. The Thunderbolt, I think it had eight 50 calibre machine guns in the wings, eight of them big sucker, I mean a real heavy duty thing and that was assigned mainly to the Infantry and when we called in strafer missions out in front, they go right over us, right over us and then open up when they get beyond. Or they’d come in parallel with the frontline.
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But the new system did have its teething problems.
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The American tanks had their own radios but they were on a different frequency than the fighter bombers flying overhead. Because of that the American had to put air force radio men in the tanks with special radios that could actually talk to the P47 and the P51 pilots.
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On the first day of Operation Cobra, US VII Corps’ progress was disappointing, just a mile and a half. But the next morning, General Bradley committed Sherman tanks of the 2nd and 3rd Armored Divisions to the attack.
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Reports began to come in that past the front line, American troops were encountering only sporadic resistance.
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On the morning of the third day, commander of the 30th Infantry Division General Hobbs reported, ‘This thing has busted wide open.’
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That same day American troops had reached Coutances, Cerisy-la-Salle, and Villebaudon, and threatened to cut off half of German 7th Army pocket around Roncey.
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The trapped German units, including remnants of the 2nd SS Panzer Division Das Reich, tried to fight their way out under cover of darkness
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They ran straight into US 2nd Armored, and after a night of furious, chaotic fighting, their columns were left decimated. Few managed to break through.
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In the face of the overwhelming US onslaught, on the ground and from the air, German 7th Army began to collapse. Only after the bombardments the breakthrough succeeded, and when the Allies advanced to Avranches we realized that we wouldn’t be here for much longer. I was to take part in an attack on Avranches but it was aborted.
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Germans began to surrender in droves 7,000 in a single day.
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German prisoners blocking the roads were now causing more delay to the American advance than enemy resistance.
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On 30th July, US 4th Armored Division took Avranches, and the next day captured the strategically crucial bridge at Pontaubault intact. The bridge was the gateway to Brittany and beyond.
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Now was the time to unleash General Patton, and US Third Army. From early in his career Patton had the idea that that movement and firing were the main duties of a soldier. And if you weren’t moving and you weren’t firing, you weren’t much of a soldier. Now he was going to have the opportunity to lead his third army across the river into Brittany. The big right hook, which would help to unhinge the German defense and outflank the enemy. In just three days,
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7 US divisions crossed the bridge at Pontaubault, heading west into Brittany, south towards the Loire river, and southeast towards Le Mans.
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In Brittany, German forces didn’t hang around to face the Americans in open country but withdrew to the heavily fortified Atlantic ports. Their heavy coastal guns, so well protected they were virtually immune to artillery and air attack, kept US forces at bay for weeks. While US infantry encircled the ports, Patton’s armored divisions were free to resume their advance across the French countryside at astonishing speed.
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Key to the Americans’ rapid advance was the use of ‘mechanized’ forces.
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This is one of the American half-tracks that were made in the second world war. Just as before the war began the Americans had been experimenting, knowing they were going to mechanize their army if a war came. And just before the War begins, they take the M2 front of a scout car and add it to a longer body with tracks on. Many different companies end up making variants of this half-track and they get to the point that by the end of the war the American have made fifty-five thousand
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half-tracks like this. Propaganda from the Nazis make us believe that the Germans are the ones that have a fully mechanized force, when in actual fact about eighty percent of their transport is actually managed by horses, not armored vehicles or trucks. They have 11 million horses in service service and that’s actually how they get an awful lot of their supplies and men around the battlefield. And that contrast just shows the ability of the Americans to turn on a tap
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with their car and automotive industry to produce so many of these amazing reliable, simple and effective vehicles.
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Operation Cobra had been a complete success. Finally, after nearly two months pinned down in the Normandy bocage, the Allies were on the move. Hitler was furious when he received news of the American breakout. 10 days before, on the 20th July he’d narrowly survived an assassination attempt when a bomb exploded at his headquarters in East Prussia. 4 soldiers had been killed, but the Führer escaped serious injury. Here he can be seen visiting some of the men seriously wounded by the blast.
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His would-be assassins turned out to be army officers. For the battle of Normandy most German generals including Rommel, knew that the war was lost, and they were looking desperately for some way to preserve Germany and their own militaristic life with the German Army. Hitler’s fraught relationship with his generals sank to an all-time low. A substantial number of them had been involved in the bomb plot and so Hitler not only distrusted them but began purging
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large swathes of the German High Command. Even Field Marshal Rommel, Hitler’s favorite general, was implicated in the plot. He receives a visit by two German generals who take him in a car and put it to him that now might be a good idea to commit suicide because if he didn’t do that, he would be taken to Berlin would be interrogated and we all know what that means. So he decided to commit suicide in the car as he’s driving along with these two generals. One of the effects of the purge
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that Hitler carried out after the July bomb plot was that it substantially reduced the number of experienced and effective generals he had to use on the western front. And so not only was Hitler micro-managing in the military operations, he was also finding it hard to find someone who could command them effectively. For weeks, German commanders in France, first von Rundstedt and Rommel, now von Kluge, had pleaded with Hitler for permission to withdraw from Normandy to a new defensive line
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along the Seine River. Now it was the only realistic option left. But to Field Marshal von Kluge’s horror, Hitler instead ordered a counterattack. Hitler told Kluge to gather the last few panzer divisions in Normandy, and attack from Mortain towards the coast at Avranches, to cut off Patton’s Third Army to the south. The counterattack was codenamed Lüttich.
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But the Allies knew it was coming, thanks to their ability to decode German military communications sent using their famous Enigma machine a top-secret intelligence source known as ULTRA
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But this time, warning of the German counterattack, led by 150 tanks and elite units of the Waffen SS, didn’t reach American front-line units until the last minute.
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In desperate fighting around Mortain, a battalion of the US 30th Infantry Division, dug into Hill 314, was surrounded.
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Despite heavy losses, they held their ground, using their vantage point to call in artillery and air strikes on the German armour.
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American and British fighter-bombers made pass after pass. Within 24 hours, the German offensive had been stopped in its tracks.
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Worse, Hitler’s intervention had left his forces vulnerable to an Allied counter-strike.
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The best German divisions were now concentrated at the western tip of an exposed salient. Montgomery saw the potential for a huge envelopment of German forces in Normandy. Patton, advancing rapidly towards Chartres and Orleans, was ordered to divert one corps north to Argentan. While the newly-formed Canadian First Army would push south - towards high ground overlooking the town of Falaise.
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The advance, codenamed Operation Totalize, was to be led by Major General Guy Simonds’ Canadian II Corps, made up of Canadian, British and Polish forces. Their first obstacle was the formidable Verrieres Ridge, where two previous attempts to break through had already failed, at a cost of nearly 3,000 casualties.
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Simonds planned an aerial bombardment to prepare the way for a mechanized assault.
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But with a shortage of armored personnel carriers the dilemma was how to protect the infantry.
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One of the problems the allies faced early in the Normandy campaign was when the tanks advanced they sometimes lost contact with the infantry. So the Canadian commander came up with a brilliant suggestion. Let’s take some redundant self-propelled artillery, basically artillery pieces on a tank chassis, take the guns out, plate over the front, and we’ll make a heavily armored, armored personnel carrier.
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And they used that for the first time as part of Operation Totalize. Having a section of infantry in a tracked armored vehicle that can keep up with the tanks going forward. And that leads to the innovation of taking redundant tanks, such as this ram tank, the turret is taken off, and a section of aid infantry could be carried in here with two crew members in the front as well. And that means they have got a level of protection as they go forward into battle
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that the other soldiers just don’t have.
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Ian Hammerton from Kent was a tank commander and fought from D-Day to the end of the War. Operation Totalise was pushed out, to take place at night. There would be an RAF night bomber, Lancaster bombing raid on the German lines first. That would be followed by all the Allied ground artillery following up with a huge barrage and then we went in at night at around about 11 o’clock. It was pitch black, it was a pitch-black night.
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As the bombardment was lifted the mechanized columns moved forward, feeling their way to their objectives through the darkness. The attack was going to be all on tracks, I mean, tanks. And the infantry would come later. It was arranged for 4 lines of tanks, led by flails in case we came across minefields and to help us on our way a Bofors anti-aircraft gun would fire bursts of 5 rounds of tracer so it gave him his direction
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Thanks to careful planning, the Canadian night attack was a success, and Verrieres Ridge was in Allied hands by noon.
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Tanks were then sent forward to exploit the breakthrough. In the lead, the Canadian 4th Armored and Polish 1st Armored Divisions. As the battle became more confused, friendly fire once more became a serious hazard as Allied aircraft hit friend and foe alike. So, I looked up here they’re coming a whole gang of them, I thought boy! So, I just took my helmet off here and I “give them hell boys” and then I clapped the helmet back on fast
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because the bomb doors opened and here’s the bombs whistling coming down! I looked over there was a little German slit trench that the German had dug and I dove in there like a rabbit! The largest number of casualties from this friendly fire was from the 1st Polish Armored Division.
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The coalition of forces under Eisenhower for the campaign in Northwest Europe didn’t just consist of the British, the Americans and the Canadians. There were other nationalities involved with their own ways of fighting and their own political ambitions. Second French Armored Division played the leading part in liberating Paris for political reasons. There were also forces from Belgian, from the Netherlands and from Norway. And perhaps the most extraordinary fighting division on the Allied side
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was First Polish Armored Division made up of Poles who had either escaped from the country in 1939, or later, or who had come from around the world to fight for Poland. That they had been equipped by the British and they fought as part of First Canadian Army. The Germans were terrified of Polish troops out to settle scores. He was a young a young Hitler Youth chap. And we’d caught him through the knee We got as much out of him as we could, but he wasn’t in a fit state really.
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So I thought he needs some medical attention and the Polish Armored Division were just about to move through us for the next phase of the attack. So I walked to, a half track with a red cross on, spoke to the doctor and said I’ve got a man here who needs attention. And he sent 2 of his men with a stretcher and he, and he plonked it down beside this boy, because he was a boy, he was 15.
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And, they bent down to pick him up to put him on it and he saw their flash Poland.
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He did not want to go with them. “No no no no!”.
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But they picked him up anyway and donked him on this stretcher and carried him off. I’ve often wondered what happened to him.
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It was 12th SS Panzer, the infamous Hitler Youth division, that now led the German counterattack against Operation Totalize. They were supported by seven Tiger tanks led by famous SS tank ace Michael Wittman. The Allies had once regarded these heavy German tanks as almost unstoppable, but now they had a weapon that was able to take them on. One of the problems the British had was how to fit their new 17 pounder anti-tank gun into a tank. So as an improvisation, they got the 17-pounder,
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squeezed it into the Sherman. Now the 17-pounder gun, when it was fired discarding sabot, ammunition, that meant it had greater penetration on it than the Tigers 88mm gun. With the British attack in Operation Totalize, they’d advanced overnight, and they spread themselves out either side of the main Caen to Falaise road. Now the Germans naturally, it’s in their doctrine, they react to that attack very quickly and put in a counter attack. Wittman in his Tiger tanks
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drives up the middle of the road between two sets of roads on either side. As Wittman’s Tigers head up the main Caen to Falaise road, he’s taken on by the tanks of the Northants yeomanry. A young gunner, Joe Eekins, is in one of these Firefly’s and drives the tank, out of the wood, takes on the rear German tiger. He then works his way along the line of German vehicles. And at the same time from the other side of the valley, fire is coming in from the Canadian tanks.
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Now there seems a slight irony about this about the communal effort of the British and Canadian forces taking out what is the German propaganda icon, Michael Wittman, this famous SS tank ace. The following day, 9th August, Canadian troops pushed on towards Falaise. The Germans were now in a desperate situation, but fought ferociously for Quesnay Woods, and Hill 195. Well we lost a bunch of guys as it was, we had about twenty killed. Our sergeant, he, he was,
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at my side or not, not too far away from me one minute and the next minute he was gone and I didn’t know what had happened to him. Adair’s unit was forced to pull back. In fact, despite its early successes, Totalise had ground to a halt all along the line.
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Allied commanders hoped to seal off German forces in a pocket, by taking Falaise, so far, they’d not been able to close the trap.
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But Simonds wasn’t done yet. By 14th August, British, Canadian and Polish troops were ready for a new push an attack that Allied commanders hoped would seal the fate of German forces in Normandy.
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Hitler meanwhile seemed interested only in ordering more futile counterattacks. It wasn’t until the last moment that he finally accepted the danger of encirclement and authorized a retreat.
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Nevertheless, he sacked the man who’d been urging this course of action for weeks, his Commander in the West, Field Marshal Von Kluge. Convinced that Kluge had failed him and also that the reason for Kluge’s absence from his headquarters might have been that he was negotiating with the Allies, Hitler summoned him back to Berlin. Kluge knew he was doomed. He wrote a long rambling letter explaining why this was not his fault and blaming everybody else he could think of and he committed suicide.
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On 19th August, the Polish 1st Armored Division made contact with the US 90th Infantry Division at Chambois and the trap closed around fifteen German divisions.
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For 2 days, elite German SS units and paratroopers fought to force open an escape corridor. All the while under relentless Allied bombardment. It’s terrible. You know there's no way to describe it. Especially in Falaise there. That noise and that. All those guns firing. The steady roar all the time you know. And you're trying to. Well you couldn’t hear commands. You'd just followed and hoped you were going in the right direction. RAF Typhoons flew sortie after sortie,
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wreaking havoc on the cornered German forces.
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First tested in 1940, this powerful, single seater fighter-bomber was a challenge for even skilled pilots.
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Just to give you an example a Hurricane motor was about 1300 horsepower. This motor in the Typhoon was 2400 horsepower so it was a monster of a big fighter. And a Hurricane weighed about two and a half tons. Typhoon weighed seven tons. It was a big aircraft.
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The Typhoon packed a devastating punch of four 20-millimeter cannon and 8 unguided rockets, each with a 60-pound warhead.
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We’d dive in at probably 50, 60 degrees you get down to 2000 feet or 3000 feet.
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Fire your rockets.
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Fire your cannon and, and when you got too close to the ground you started to pull out.
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On 21st August, the Allies closed off the last escape route. And from all sides, the encircled German 7th Army was subjected to an unrelenting barrage of artillery fire, and air attack.
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For German soldiers the Falaise pocket became hell on earth. Thousands were killed. The survivors, 50,000 of them, surrendered. Soldiers on both sides were sickened by the slaughter. I want to go home. Home. He kept saying home. Home. I knew what he was thinking. Same thing as I was thinking. Let’s get this damned thing over and get back home.
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We would give them cigarettes and water or whatever they want, we didn’t have any animosity towards them. We did a little bit of looting, taking their watches and, and money or whatever they had, we thought that was alright.
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We didn’t see anything wrong with that.
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But, we respected those guys cause they, they did what, what they had to do. When it was over, they were just as glad it was over, and we were glad that, they were quitting too.
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Those who surrendered left behind the bodies of 10,000 comrades. As well as hundreds of abandoned vehicles and guns. And thousands of horses, used as transport by an army that had run out of fuel. Awful, chaos with all the Germans. I mean, they had, the numbers of equipment and dead people all over the place, vehicles wrecked. If we felt any pity for the Germans we felt it then, because they were being, it was like a slaughterhouse.
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When you watch the Falaise Gap, you started to feel really sorry for them because they’d been trapped by silly orders from Hitler and you began to feel, I mean, the most terrible thing but I mean there were some very fanatical soldiers and you knew they’d show, they would show no mercy. When Allied Supreme Commander General Dwight Eisenhower visited the battlefield, he described it as ‘unquestionably one of the greatest killing fields of any of the war areas,
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it was possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh.’
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There was more bad news for Hitler at the height of the Battle of Falaise, the Allies landed 150,000 troops in southern France, in a huge amphibious operation codenamed Dragoon. The strategic result of the breakout toward Falaise, and then Paris, and the landing of American forces in southern France in operation Dragoon, was to completely destroy any German hopes of holding onto France.
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As a result, what was really going on was a rout. German forces were simply trying to get Eastward as fast as possible to a place where they could set up any kind of defensive line.
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As the Falaise Pocket collapsed, Patton’s units were already establishing bridgeheads across what German commanders hoped would be their next defensive line, the Seine River.
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Patton’s main problem was no longer German resistance, it was keeping his forward units supplied with fuel. Across France, Allied troops were now advancing faster than the Germans had with their Blitzkrieg invasion of 1940. liberating villages and towns every day.
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The French population were beside themselves with love, kindness, kisses, wine booze oranges. they had a nasty habit of throwing fruit at us; and there were a lot of tank crews with black eyes from apples and the… So, it all meant very well and the screaming, loving it, singing the Marseilles, singing hallelujah, God Save the King. Anything that they could think of. we’d never come across it before. But the terrible destruction and suffering caused by Allied bombing left some locals with mixed
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feelings towards their liberators.
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People were so jubilant when you got there, except the French were a little bit but we could understand that, they’d, they’d suffered heavily in the bombardment of Normandy so I don’t think they particularly liked us all that much at that stage but then later on they, they got very friendly The French capital posed a particular challenge for Allied commanders While not a strategic target Paris was a political prize and its liberation had symbolic value
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Eisenhower decided to liberate Paris but he made the critical mistake of not allowing the one French armoured division under general Le Clerk to lead the charge into the city Le Clerk decided to disobey orders stole a march on the rest of his allies and entered Paris as the leading unit of the Allied liberation force
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As shooting broke out on the streets between French Resistance and the German garrison the German governor of Paris, General Dietrich von Choltitz had a decision to make Hitler had ordered him to hold Paris to the last man and, if necessary, burn the whole city down But Choltitz didn’t want to do that and he defied Hitler and made the decision to surrender Paris rather than defending it to the death There was to a degree admiration for French culture, French society and French language
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so he didn’t really want to carry out this order There’s also another reason, of course, why he decided not to do that Because just like anyone who’s of open and clear mind he did realize that Germany would no longer be able to win the war and there was just a complete scorched earth policy for no absolute military or any other reason whatsoever and of course he also did realise that if he did carry out that order and was then later captured by the Allies that would not look particularly good or
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reflect particularly well on his performance So he was trying to cover his own back to a degree as well On 25 August, after four years of Nazi occupation Paris was liberated there were still many German snipers behind but our movement was on to the Champs Elysees just behind the Arc de Triomphe and we would come on German snipers in apartment buildings and we had to fire at them But, also, the French weren’t worried about that, they were trying to greet us
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and greet their, their countrymen who had come with General Leclerc’s army and it was a joyous occasion
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the French ladies were generous with their flowers and their kisses and we fought it off the best we could Two months of attritional warfare in Normandy were behind the Allies The long-awaited breakout which began with Operation Cobra had triggered a collapse in the German Army in France And within days Eisenhower would be looking at plans to push on to Germany itself But many more hard battles lay ahead The German army remained a formidable enemy
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experienced, well-led and now fighting to defend its homeland from invasion
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September 1944. The Western Allies were closing in on the German heartland. But now the formidable defenses of the Siegfried Line stood in their path.
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So, the Allies came up with a daring plan to bypass the German defenses and cross the River Rhine in a single bound with the largest deployment of airborne infantry ever seen. We all knew that market garden was a very big deal, from the moment we saw the airborne going over our head. But the elite Allied soldiers sent into battle soon discovered the plan was badly flawed. it was a disaster, you know from beginning to end. And that it was never wise to underestimate the German army.
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You was in for a fight. No two ways about it. There were an awful lot of Germans in the Netherlands, and we found them. This is the story of Operation Market Garden.
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The D-Day landings of June 1944, had been followed by weeks of grueling fighting in Normandy but finally the Western Allies had forced the German army into headlong retreat. German losses were enormous, 400,000 men killed, wounded or captured, as well as thousands of vehicles and heavy weapons destroyed. That September, the German army was still desperately rebuilding its forces in the West and preparing for a final battle to defend Germany itself.
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But, just at the moment the Germans seemed beaten, the Allies were running into their own difficulties. In September 1944, the Allies were suffering a severe supply shortage because their supplies still had to be brought to the frontline from the Normandy beaches. The Germans knew about this and they knew that the Allied advance had slowed mainly because of lack of down supplies. What the Allies needed to solve their supply crisis was a Channel port but they were either still in German hands
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or, like Cherbourg, had been comprehensively sabotaged by the Germans before their liberation.
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The Allied supply lines were now 300 miles long and could no longer deliver enough fuel and ammunition to frontline units to sustain the pace of the advance. But British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery had a bold plan. One which he believed would allow the Allies to sidestep the supply crisis and end the war by Christmas 1944.
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Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, or “Monty” had commanded all Allied land forces during the D-Day landings and the Normandy campaign. But now US troops outnumbered British and Canadian, it was no longer politically acceptable for a British general to command them. So, Churchill promoted Monty to Field Marshal, while he was effectively demoted to command of the mostly British and Canadian 21st Army Group.
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Allied intelligence reports indicated that the German’s northern flank, opposite 21st Army Group, was lightly defended. So, Monty proposed that his force attack north from Belgium into the Netherlands, bypassing Germany’s strongest defences along the Siegfried Line, to encircle Germany’s industrial heartland in the Ruhr Valley, and pave the way for a direct advance on Berlin. He named his plan Operation Market Garden.
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But Monty would have to sell the plan to the Supreme Allied Commander, American General Dwight Eisenhower, who had his own plan for the advance. Eisenhower was content for political reasons and for alliance reasons to keep the advance more or less even across the front. This is the so called broad front advance, that everybody would share the risks and share the achievements. This is very much Eisenhower’s style. But there simply weren’t enough resources for this. What Montgomery wanted
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was to divert the resources to a northern arm, the so called narrow front attack. and he believed that if this was done then he could get through to the Ruhr early enough to end the war in a matter of months. But if Monty was going to get extra supplies for Operation Market Garden, someone else would have to lose out. The personal politics of Market Garden are also quite fascinating. Montgomery lobbied Eisenhower ruthlessly and without end to carry out this operation.
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Montgomery knew that any resources given to him would be taken away from the Americans, like Patton, further South. And he lobbied Eisenhower until Eisenhower finally gave in and gave Montgomery his pet airborne operation.
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Montgomery got his supplies as well as use of the First Allied Airborne Army, an elite force of 40,000 British, American and Polish soldiers, ready to be dropped behind enemy lines by parachute and glider. Montgomery made these troops the cornerstone of a bold, ambitious plan that required clockwork precision.
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British Thirtieth Corps was to advance 64 miles along a single road from the Belgian border to the Dutch town of Arnhem. But their route crossed several rivers and canals, including two major branches of the Lower Rhine. So, three Allied airborne divisions would drop ahead of the ground forces to seize key bridges along the route, including two major bridges over the Lower Rhine Nijmegen and Arnhem, before the Germans could destroy them or organise their defence.
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The bridges were well-defended by anti-aircraft guns, to ward off Allied bombers, so the airborne troops were to land several miles from their targets and complete their approach on foot. The airborne assault was codenamed Market; the ground attack - Garden.
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The spearhead of Lieutenant General Horrocks’ Thirtieth Corps was the Guards Armored Division with 268 tanks, mostly Shermans. They’d be supported by the 43rd Wessex and 50th Northumbrian Infantry Divisions, tanks of the 8th Armored Brigade, and Royal Engineer bridging units. Airborne troops were under the command of Lieutenant-General Browning’s British First Airborne Corps made up of British 1st Airborne Division, Polish Parachute Brigade and two US divisions attached for the operation
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the 82nd and 101st Airborne. The Royal Air Force and US Army Air Force would provide 1,500 transport aircraft and 500 gliders to get troops to their targets. Lieutenant General ‘Boy’ Browning commanding the Allied Airborne troops was Britain’s senior airborne officer, married to the famous novelist Daphne Du Maurier. Seen by some as difficult to work with, relations with his American boss, first Allied Airborne Army Commander, Lieutenant General Brereton were particularly strained.
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In the run up to the operation, reports arrived that German SS Panzer units had been seen near Arnhem, the British airborne objective. British Intelligence Officer took the reports to Browning. The Corps Intelligence Officer, a chap called Brian Urquhart, he warned us that there were 2 SS Panzer Divisions, lined up from Arnhem to Zutphen,
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and, that he had warned General Browning about this and he said that Browning’s plan for the operation would fail unless he altered them to take account of these two divisions. And Browning had told him that he was not to tell any of us about it And, and that he did not believe that the tanks really were operable because they’d just been fighting in Normandy.
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If there were German Panzer units near Arnhem, the entire operation would probably be called off. And Browning, and many others in the elite Airborne Corps, were determined to press ahead.
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The Netherlands had fallen to German Blitzkrieg in May 1940 but since then, the country had remained relatively unscathed by global war. It was just like peace. In Holland the world seems fine. The roads were great, loads of trees growing alongside them, alleys, so you could move along them during the day. We were safe from airborne attacks, at least that’s what it seemed like. You weren’t discovered as easily. But on the night of 16th September, British and American bombers
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struck German airfields and anti-aircraft positions across the Netherlands.
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At 9:45am the next day, thousands of aircraft of the First Airborne Army took off from their bases in England and set course for their drop zones.
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The vast air armada formed up in two columns, 3 miles across, and a staggering 94 miles long.
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There was still planes still taking off in England while men were dropping in Holland. That’s how vast it was. You could actually step over from one plane to another all the way across the Channel to Holland from England.
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Johnny Peters was in one of the leading British gliders, with clear views ahead.
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Right when we went over the North Sea, we could see the air sea rescue boats in there. There were channel men. So, it was very reassuring to see these air sea rescue boats in case we ditched in the sea. It was a beautiful flight, blazing sun, a huge convoy about 3 miles wide all full of planes. Extraordinary sight, wonderful sight.
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One of the largest gliders taking part in Market Garden was the Airspeed Horsa.
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A British design built mostly of spruce and plywood, its prefabricated sections were often put together by furniture makers.
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The Horsa carried two pilots and 25 troops or loads such as a jeep or a small anti-tank gun.
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Allied gliders were towed towards the landing zone by transport aircraft or bombers, then released to glide silently down towards their target.
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Although they weren’t guaranteed a smooth landing,
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gliders did an excellent job of dropping a unit onto its target without scattering them, as often happened in parachute drops.
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As the first wave of Operation Market reached the Netherlands they discovered that plenty of German anti-aircraft guns had survived the previous night’s raid by Allied bombers. The ack-ack gunners firing in front of us, shortly afterwards a cry went up from the back of the glider, , “the tail’s coming off”. Now this was relayed from the back to the front. I was sitting at the front behind the pilots. And my sergeant was sitting opposite. And he relayed that back to the pilot.
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He sent Ralph Maltby to have a look. He came back. Big grin on his face say, “you're alright, the fabric’s been hit. It’s only flapping about but the tail’s not coming off”. So, he sat down. We were very reassured about that. It was a narrow escape for everyone on board. But as Johnny Peter’s glider approached the landing zone, they came under more fire and the co-pilot was hit. I knew he’d died by the look on Sergeant Watson’s face. Then you think to yourself well what would happen
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if the pilot get killed. None of us could pilot the glider.
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The German machine gunners were firing their bullets and they were coming through the glider and, one bullet, only one bullet, hit a bloke named Private Hughes in the leg. But we made a good landing. In most landing zones German air defenses were light and caught off guard. Most gliders touched down safely in open farmland.
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Parachute drops went almost exactly according to plan.
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Of the one thousand transport aircraft used on the first day just 27 were destroyed.
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We weren’t under fire at all coming in. It was really nice. It was on a Sunday afternoon, about one o’clock, sun was shining, And, it was an ideal type of operation, I call it.
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The British 1st Airborne Division landed 6-8 miles northwest of Arnhem with near total surprise.
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It was a perfect summer’s day, we landed with no opposition at all.
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The US 82nd Airborne, landing near Nijmegen, were immediately welcomed by Dutch locals.
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While we were picking up our equipment, all the Dutch civilians were coming out of the tree line and they’re all speaking perfect English and I said to my buddy, “Are we still in England or is this Holland?” They spoke perfect English. They wanted to tell us where the Germans were and we wanted to get them off the landing zone so they wouldn’t get hit.
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Meanwhile the US 101st Airborne landed further south near Eindhoven. Second Lieutenant Frank Gregg received a less friendly reception.
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I landed right on the drop zone, and it was filled with big Holstein cows, milk cows. And they panicked, of course, when all these parachutes started coming down. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh man I’d hate to have to write home from the hospital to say that I was severely wounded by a big Holstein cow, or something like that, or even killed by one,’ because they were really running around in the pasture. The US airborne troops quickly took control of the road between Eindhoven and Nijmegen.
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The Netherlands had been under Nazi Occupation for four years, and the arrival of the Allied forces came as a huge delight for its citizens. Especially for members of one of the best organised resistance groups in Europe.
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I got all my troops to the bridge, and about the time I got my foot on one end of the bridge, a Dutchman and a very pretty girl stepped on the other end. They were in, black leather coats like the Germans wore, and both carrying submachine guns slung over their shoulders, and I said, “I’m not sure these people are friendly.” So, anyway, the girl came up, came bursting over toward me and said, “We are from the Dutch underground and we are here to help you in any way you need help.” I thanked her,
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and so forth. She gave me a briefing on the, that there were no enemy in town. It was clear of Germans The airborne part of the Operation had started well most troops had landed on or close to their intended drop zone. Now they needed to secure the vital bridges along Thirtieth Corps’ route to the Rhine. But the Allies didn’t have it all their own way. A dash to the Arnhem bridge by British paratroopers in jeeps hit a German roadblock: most were killed or captured.
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The paras would have to reach the bridge on foot but it would be a hard slog.
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One of the first mistakes that Browning made, he dropped us 7 miles from the bridge and we were all carrying about 80 pounds worth of equipment and weapons. You can’t run all the way, merely walking will take about 4 hours. Problems were developing elsewhere, too. North of Eindhoven, German engineers and Luftwaffe trainees blew up bridges over the Wilhelmina Canal before US Paratroopers could reach them. 30 miles northeast at Nijmegen, more bridges across the Mass-Waal canal
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were blown before the 82nd Airborne got to them.
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Back in Arnhem, British 1st Airborne was about to run into the SS Panzer units that Major Urquhart had tried to warn of. Fortunately, they were well below full strength. One of the legends, should we say, about Operation Market Garden was that First British Airborne Division which dropped at Arnhem, was dropping on top of two SS armored divisions, two SS Panzer Divisions. That is true in the sense that Ninth and Tenth SS Panzer Division were in the area but they had been so badly destroyed
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in the Battle of Normandy in the subsequent retreat they were really only as strong as what the Germans called ‘kampfgruppe’ that is to say something about the size of a weak division with not too many tanks.
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the Allies were taking a risk which really only made sense if the Germans weren’t going to fight. And they did. Another surprise for British 1st Airborne was that they’d landed almost on top of German Army Group B headquarters from where Field Marshal Model would orchestrate a rapid German response. Model was Germany’s youngest Field Marshal, and greatly admired by Hitler and other senior commanders for his performance on the Eastern Front. He had been nicknamed the Führer’s Fireman
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for his ability to salvage apparently disastrous situations, even when his forces were heavily outnumbered. The fact that he is a completely driven also a committed soldier, is summed up by many accounts that we see that he was very tough and very hard against his own troops because he wanted to achieve things, but also very hard and tough against himself and for that the people admired and respected him.
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As German commanders planned their response to the landings, they were handed a gift. In the wreckage of a crashed Allied glider, German troops found a complete set of orders for Operation Market Garden.
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Model saw that if he could hold the Allies at Nijmegen, the British paratroopers at Arnhem would remain cut off, and the Allied operation would fail. He split II SS Panzer Corps into kampfgruppe, or battlegroups. Kampfgruppe Hohenstauffen was to hold Arnhem and its bridge against the British. While Kampfgruppe Frundsberg raced south over Arnhem Bridge to prevent the Allies crossing at Nijmegen. The concept of battlegroup or Kampfgruppe in German is a very specific
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concept that you could find in the German Army in the Second World War. The idea was that, whenever the need arose, you would form ad-hoc formations out of existing formations quite often of broken up formations or formations that have already received or taken a lot of casualties and form a new fighting body out of these. Improvised Kampfgruppe helped Germany make the most of its dwindling military strength and respond rapidly to new threats. We were told to get down there,
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they said we had to hurry. Destroy anything that gets in your way. And form a pocket with the others that arrive there. The swift German response meant Allied airborne troops were soon engaged in heavy fighting.
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At 2.35pm, the Allied ground attack began. Tanks of British Thirtieth Corps crossed the Dutch/Belgian border on the road to Arnhem. Working to a strict timetable, they needed to reach Eindhoven by the end of the day. But the single road through open country was highly exposed. Within 10 minutes, they were hit by a German ambush, and lost several tanks. We were being fired on from the flanks as we pushed up the road. I don’t know if you know Holland but it was then,
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just a series of country roads. There was nowhere to go. The tank couldn’t go off the road, he’d sink because Holland was built on water. You travelled on dyke roads most of the time. And traveling on dyke roads in the dark and the wet is not very comfortable at times. With air support from Typhoon fighter bombers, the British tanks pushed on, along what soon became known as Hell’s Highway.
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Thirtieth Corps only managed to advance 5 miles on the first day, failing to reach Eindhoven, which remained in German hands.
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Just 24 hours into the Operation and Market Garden was already behind schedule.
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Allied airborne units were now in heavy fighting for a series of bridges, that Thirtieth Corps would need for their advance through the Netherlands into Germany itself. The 101st Airborne Division had successfully captured the crossings at Eindhoven. The 82nd, tasked with capturing the bridges at Nijmegen, were just South of their objective, at Grave. But at Arnhem, British 1st Airborne was in trouble. About 5,000 men were scattered west of town, in heavy fighting with local German forces,
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as well as the Waffen SS troops. Only around 300 men had managed to reach their objective, the Arnhem road bridge, and were now dug in at its northern end, under the command of Lieutenant Colonel John Frost.
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John Frost was an experienced officer and one of the first to join the newly formed Parachute Regiment in 1941. He’d led daring missions into German-held territory before including the successful Bruneval Raid on the coast of occupied France to steal top secret German radar equipment. Now he was in command of the tiny force of British paratroopers who had got through to the objective.
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As night fell, John Frost radioed divisional headquarters that they had secured the Northern end of the bridge.
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He was ordered to hold his position until 30th Corps reached him. Around 9pm Frost was reinforced by a group led by Major Tony Hibbert. We had been ordered in the brigade orders that our job was to capture Arnhem Bridge and hold it for 48 hours until we were relieved from the south. We’d actually done the job, we’d captured the bridge, we held the north end of it which was the only bit that was necessary.
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On day two of the operation, Frost’s small force remained dug in around the north end of Arnhem bridge, cut off from the rest of their division. There were about nearly 600 chaps at,
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John Frost’s disposal and he disposed them into a tight perimeter, but he could only go so far as he had chaps. Then the paratroopers heard the sound of vehicles approaching from the south.
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It must be Thirtieth Corps come to relieve them. We thought that the, tanks were in fact our own tanks coming from the south, the ones that were actually going to relieve us and, and, we were quite extraordinary, we had as I say about a hundred and sixty people on the bridge and they all took off their helmets and put their berets on and came out to, to cheer them forward. And, of course, it wasn’t until they came up to the top of the bridge that, we saw that they’d got the wrong insignia on.
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The vehicles belonged to an SS reconnaissance unit. When they realized the bridge was in British hands they tried to rush it, but the paratroopers were ready. And you could see the fear on their face what they were running into. We had 3 Para under there and they opened up and they, killed all those people that charged over the, the bridge. The German column was wiped out in a barrage of fire from small arms, anti-tank guns and the British army’s unique anti-tank weapon, the PIAT.
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For the first two years of the second World War the British had a really ineffective anti-tank rifle. But in August 1942 the Projector Infantry Anti-Tank or PIAT was introduced.
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It’s an unusual looking weapon, and very cumbersome, it’s very heavy. It’s about 15 kilograms in weight. It was really important that you got very, very close to the target. Ideally, if you’re trying to knockout a tank, you want to be to the side of it, on its flank, or, even better, behind it. You’d then site it using this very simple upright foresight. So, you’d pull the trigger, the spring would shoot forward, hit the detonator at the back of the bomb, the bomb flies forward,
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the detonator would then re-cock the spring ready for the next round to be put in it.
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One of the problems with it was that the tail end of the bomb was hollow, so it acted like a rifle barrel. So, as it exploded it would then fire the remains of the detonator straight back towards the PIAT Operator. So, you’d have to duck out of the way as soon as you’d fired. They were incredibly effective. There were some Unit Commanders that said that this was the most effective weapon that their section carried. It was also successful. There were more tanks knocked out
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with PIATs than there were by rocket-firing typhoons and tempests
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On Day 2, major British airborne reinforcements set off from England, after a four hour delay due to morning mist. This second wave had no element of surprise, and, as they approached the landing zone west of Arnhem, they came under heavy anti-aircraft fire. Bill Higgs was one of the glider pilots.
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The Jerries had already sized out where we were going to land then because the landing again was a big open space you see, miles. And, And, of course, they, the Germans soon surrounded it with their guns, and they were knocking them out in the air, and and as I was flying over you could see a puff there, the puffs there and a puff there. I don’t want to say it was like clay pigeon shooting, that wouldn’t be the right way to put it, but at first we just couldn’t grasp the fact
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that this was what they were really doing.
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Not only were the British under fire on the way in but, on the ground, they found the Germans already attacking the Landing zones themselves. They were all around and they were really knocking us for six. But I got down, by these trees and I thought I can get in by the trees, so if I can get to the trees I haven’t got far to run, you see. So...
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The surviving reinforcements gradually assembled, ready to move out. But there was another problem. The commander of British 1st Airborne Division, Major General Urquhart, had landed on day one, but was now missing in Arnhem, which was swarming with German troops. To make matters worse, British radios weren’t working.
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Frost’s men at the bridge couldn’t reach division headquarters, just 3 ½ miles away, or core HQ near Nijmegen. When we got there the signals didn’t work so that was a waste for a start. I felt that because I, I couldn’t even talk to my men that,
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I wasn’t doing my job.
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One of the things that caused Market Garden to go wrong almost immediately was the complete chaos and lack of communication in most of the drop zones. Especially around Arnhem, the paratroopers had been scattered so widely and so far away from their targets that they had little idea of where they were or what to do. In addition, their radios proved not to work all that effectively, and so they couldn’t even talk to each other and figure out what was going on.
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By the time of the Market Garden operation the radio sets that were taken to Arnhem, there were four different types and the set that was used between the companies and battalions was the wireless set 68. That was very, very similar to this 18 set which was the standard infantry radio set. It had lengths of copper aerial that slotted together. Wireless operators always used to say it was like having an enormous neon sign above you with this huge great aerial
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waving around, telling the enemy where you were, which wasn’t very popular.
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There were many problems with the radio communications in Arnhem and a lot of those were known about before they set off. The whole thing was a gamble and they gambled on the fact that radio equipment which really wasn’t quite up to the job would just about do the job. They gambled on the fact that they’d got enough radio operators because, inevitably, being an airborne operation, they cut down on the amount of people that they could take with them. And the problem with that, of course,
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is once radio operators started becoming casualties and were killed and wounded, there were no trained operators to replace them. Some of the radios had batteries which were disposable and obviously the problem with that is re-supply in the middle of a combat zone. Other radios had rechargeable batteries, and again in a combat zone that was a very tricky thing to do, to gather radio batteries, get them back to a place where they could be recharged. But the big problem was procedure,
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in a lot of instances, they simply didn’t follow the agreed procedure. The whole division changed their frequency for the radios, but by that stage the divisional headquarters were already out of contact with the Brigade that was trying to get through to Arnhem bridge. So, when they changed their frequency, there wasn’t a hope of getting back in contact with them because they’d got no idea that the frequency had been changed. Tony Hibbert set up 8
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large wireless sets at his headquarters near the bridge. But the problem was that they had been set up really for work in the open and from the moment we reached Arnhem we were out of touch. While Frost and his men remained cut off at the north end of Arnhem bridge, the rest of the 1st Airborne Division battled to reach them in vain. The casualties were starting to mount. You know, you was in for a fight. No two ways about it. And the Germans knew that they were
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reinforcing quicker than what we were. Our medics were filling up. Now and again the General would say. “Bloysie, go and see what the check is.” You know, and you’d go in.
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Sometimes you’d shout to them and they’d give you by signs, numbers. And that sometimes you went in there and,
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and these chaps be laying all round the wall. You couldn’t get any more in there.
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Meanwhile, 40 miles southwest of Arnhem, Thirtieth Corps had reached their first objective, the Dutch city of Eindhoven, and linked up with the US 101st Airborne.
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Jubilant Dutch civilians cheered the British tanks as they passed through half a day behind schedule.
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Their next objective was Nijmegen. But the city and its bridge were still in German hands. When we got to Nijmegen the Grenadier Guards in Shermans were in the lead but when they got there the American paratroopers had not captured the bridge which meant they had to fight for the bridge.
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An attack on the bridge would mean more crucial hours lost, but there was no other option. On day 3, a combined assault by British tanks, infantry and US paratroopers attempted to seize Nijmegen and its bridge but ran into fierce German resistance. The attack failed.
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Back in Arnhem, Lieutenant General Urquhart had managed to rejoin his division. But breaking through to John Frost’s men at the north end of the bridge looked increasingly unlikely. The rest of the division was now surrounded in the western suburb of Oosterbeek, struggling to hold its own position. Colonel Frost’s force, just a few hundred strong, clung on desperately at the bridge as German attacks intensified. We were doing very well for the first 3 or 4 hours and then of course the Germans
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put their artillery units on the other side of the river and from that moment onwards we were under a continual,
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artillery attack and on the next day they started to bring up their tanks.
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As the battle at the bridge became increasingly one-sided, the Germans sent a captured British engineer back to Frost’s men, with a message. This engineer has come back over the bridge waving a a big piece of white. Waving it away. And he said, “oh the Germans, want a surrender sir”. So, he said, “well tell them to do it properly. I want two officers with a white sheet to come over
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and with no arms”. “No sir”, he said, “I didn’t mean it that way", he said, I meant they want you to surrender”. He said, “tell them to sod off”. So, so he said, “do you want me to go back?”. He said, “do you wanna go back?”. He said, “no I don’t”. For all Frost’s determination to fight on at Arnhem, his fate and the fate of his men rested with Allied forces 10 miles to the south at Nijmegen, where the bridge remained in German hands.
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But the commander of the 82nd Airborne had come up with a plan.
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Brigadier General James Gavin had bene decorated for his role in the invasion of Sicily in 1943, made the night jump into Normandy on D-Day and just six weeks before Market Garden was given command of elite 82nd Airborne. He was an admired and charismatic leader who insisted that his officers be the first out of the airplane door and the last in the chow line’
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Faced with stubborn German resistance, Gavin proposed to have the 504th Parachute Infantry Regiment cross the Waal 2 miles downriver, so they could then launch an attack on the bridge from both ends.
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The crossing had to be made in collapsible wood and canvas boats, under heavy enemy fire. Half the soldiers in the first wave were either killed or wounded.
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But with men across the river, the Allies could launch their simultaneous attack on both ends of the bridge.
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The Germans tried to blow the bridge, but the explosives failed, and the surviving defenders fled. The road to Arnhem was open but the Allied advance along Hell’s Highway had been long and arduous, and they were now 30 hours behind schedule. Operation Market Garden’s all-important timetable was in tatters. Ray Cumbley was driving one of the Welsh Guards’ Cromwell tanks, frustrated by their slow advance. As we crossed it was almost dusk and we knocked two German tanks out,
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but then we were at a standstill overnight before we advanced the next day and, of course, when we advance ever, we couldn’t do it and, of course, the Airborne were being closed in by the SS, there was no chance for them and we were, we were determined; we thought we could get there, but we couldn’t. At Arnhem, Lieutenant Colonel Frost and his dwindling band of paratroopers still clung onto the north end of the bridge. But as each hour passed, more German reinforcements arrived in Arnhem,
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and they were now under sustained attack from German artillery, infantry and armour. The Germans, having dealt with other pockets of resistance, are now able to regroup their forces and together with tank support including Tiger tanks to launch the last and final attack onto the bridge and quite quickly they then manage to overrun the British positions, merely because the British are running out of ammunition and supplies and because a normal paratrooper unit is not equipped
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to deal with German Tiger tanks.
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On 20th September, after holding the bridge for 4 days and 5 nights, Frost’s men learned that there was no hope of them being relieved as planned. They requested a ceasefire to help with their enormous number of casualties. Brigade Major Tony Hibbert was an eyewitness to the grim scenes. We had over 300 wounded in the hospital and the building was on fire and the, the
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the flames were out of control. So, we had to ask the Germans not only for the ceasefire but to send, for them to send us,
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some of their men to help us get our wounded out,
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that took about two hours, And, and at the end of that time, the Germans had infiltrated the perimeter that we’d been defending. With no ammunition left, Frost’s men began to surrender but some decided to try and rejoin the rest of the division, held up in Oosterbeek, 2 miles west.
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There was no point in trying to defend the bridge. So, I split them up into parties of, ten. to try and make their way back to the main perimeter in Oosterbeek.
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But, there were, But, there were, well, there were too many Germans, wherever we went we ran into Germans and, we were all taken prisoner.
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During the truce, the German commander sought out his British counterpart. Colonel Frost, he’d been badly wounded on the second day, was still able to talk. The German commander came up and said, “Colonel Frost I salute you. We’ve, we’ve just come back from Russia”, where they’d been fighting for 2 years, he says and, he said, “I’ve never seen people, any people as brave as yours.
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I salute you”. Which was nice.
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The courage and tenacity with which Frost and his men had held their ground had not been enough. Arnhem had proved a bridge too far.
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21st September. Day 5. With Frost’s command eliminated, Arnhem bridge was back in German hands.
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The rest of the 1st Airborne Division were dug in around Oosterbeek, on the wrong side of the river from British and American forces pushing up from Nijmegen
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But Thirtieth Corps’ progress along Hell’s Highway remained painfully slow. And now British tanks were taking fire from one of Germany’s most lethal weapons. You were sitting ducks, as you might say, because the 88-millimetre guns, those were the anti-tank the German had. I think it was the finest gun ever
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for, for tank warfare, in particular.
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Facing the British armor attack is a very strong German defense in depth. They’ve got weapons like the famous PAK 43 anti-tank gun. That’s one of these ones here behind me. It’s an 88-millimeter gun and it can fire a solid shot armor piercing round that would penetrate one of the British Sherman tanks out to about two and a half kilometres away.
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So, you have the situation that British tanks had been knocked out and they can’t even see the enemy that is firing at them.
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Each time a German anti-tank gun picked off the lead British tank, the rest of the column was stuck behind it on the single road, until the destroyed vehicle could be cleared. Corps commander Lieutenant General Horrocks ordered his infantry forward. But they too ran into fierce German resistance.
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We were desperate to relieve the airborne at Arnhem. The Germans were equally determined that we would not reach them, that they would surrender before we had a chance to cross the River Rhine and, and get back to them, get them out. And so, it was a battle of attrition for four or five days. Thirtieth Corps was running out of time. At Oosterbeek the British Airborne were critically low on ammunition and water. Attempts to resupply them by air were only partly successful,
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with most canisters falling behind German lines.
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And they remained under relentless attack from all sides.
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We knew we were losing the battle because we were getting pulled into, into a perimeter. Getting smaller and smaller. So, we knew we ain’t gonna win this. Thirtieth Corps began looking for alternative ways to reach the airborne troops at Oosterbeek. Their reconnaissance units, using small country lanes, found a route to the river that bypassed the main German defences. And at Driel, made contact with the 1st Polish Parachute Brigade, who’d been dropped as reinforcements on Day 3.
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Over the next few days, Thirtieth Corps made several attempts to cross the river and link up with the paras. We sent the company above, 4th Dorsets, across the river to form a bridge head the other side so that when the paratroopers were coming back, they knew where to get, they’d get across But as airborne resistance north of the river began to collapse, any reinforcements who made it across risked sharing their fate. I think they sent the whole company across, and not many of them came back.
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They didn’t all get killed but they got captured. It was increasingly clear that Operation Market Garden had failed. The British priority became rescuing as many airborne troops as possible from the far shore of the Rhine. The real issue on the ground at the time, was, were the Germans about to overrun First Airborne Division’s positions with perhaps a resulting massacre. The British knew there were SS troops involved. They were afraid there might be a massacre. In fact, there wasn’t.
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The Waffen SS troops were generally so impressed with the way that the paratroopers and glider troops had fought that they treated them rather well. But, again, in the big picture it wasn’t just about getting across and into Arnhem. It was about getting much further north into Holland with substantial forces and that clearly was not going to happen at this stage. So, the decision is taken to withdraw those forces across the Rhine,
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rather perhaps sarcastically entitled Operation Berlin. The word came through they were gonna pull out at 11 o'clock at night. But, don’t tell these Dutch people, because we think they’re pro-German, because they live near the border with Germany. And so, And so, don’t tell them we’re pulling out in case they tell the Germans, you know. So, we were in this trench and, there were, oh, across the river the Royal Artillery were firing two guns on the extreme right and left. Each one was a tracer.
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So, we’re told keep within them tracers, you know, otherwise they're shelling outside there. And we got to the river at the church. Cross the river. And now that was horrendous there. The Germans knew we were getting out. Apparently, they thought at first the Poles were coming in across the river but then realised we were getting out. So, they shelled this place. That was the worst night of my life. And I have nightmares about that.
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Many of them.
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They managed to get about 2,400 Allied troops across the Rhine that particular night which practically ends the fighting in the Arnhem area and the Germans of course claim this as their victory. The Battle of Arnhem ended amid death and chaos, and a humiliating British retreat. The recriminations began almost immediately. I felt ashamed that being English that we was losing the battle through incompetence The British performed poorly because they didn’t listen.
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They were good soldiers. Oh hell, they were brave. But, the command they were crazy. Dropping those people over there knowing that German armour was over there.
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The Dutch people told them and the British insisted that they were wrong. Characteristically, Montgomery refused to accept any blame. Montgomery was an extremely capable commander with a massive ego who had the habit, particularly after the war, of saying that he could pre-plan all his battles perfectly and the enemy never had any say in it, he just carried out his master plan. He also said he never lost a battle. When asked about Market Garden it was claimed it was a 90% success.
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That was very typical of the man. Monty’s master-plan had not got the Allies across the Rhine and into Germany, as promised, and the war would not be over by Christmas. Instead, Eisenhower’s broad front strategy would resume, once the Allies had resolved their supply crisis a crisis that had only been exacerbated by Operation Market Garden.
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Market Garden drew substantial amount of supplies away from other areas of the Allied front. Most importantly the southern American armies, like Patton’s Third Army, were starved of fuel and had to slow their advance as a result. Market Garden also distracted Montgomery from other important areas of his responsibility. Most importantly, although the port city of Antwerp was captured, Montgomery neglected to capture the areas leading into the port.
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The Germans control the estuary between Antwerp and the sea, and that meant that the Allies couldn’t start using the Antwerp port to bring supplies in for much longer time than they should have.
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Operation Market Garden was one of the war’s great what-ifs? A chance to shorten the war, and so save many thousands of lives squandered through poor planning and in spite of the heroism and skill of many who took part. We jumped 17 September and we were relieved by the Canadians on the 11th November. We just sat there facing Germany, just sat there ‘cause it was, it was as you British say, it was a cock up, it was a cock up, it was a mess. Really. In September 1944,
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along the Dutch-Belgian border, the Allies began a desperate battle, to clear well-entrenched German troops rom a key strategic waterway.
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The Germans had been there for four years, they knew the areas wholly like the back of their hand. And regardless of what you hear,
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they were very formidable.
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Possession of the Scheldt Estuary was vital for the Allied advance into Germany. But German forces held both shores and would use every advantage offered by treacherous terrain. Every time you made an advance the Germans would blow the dykes and flood the land. It was strewn with mines, everywhere there was a minefield. The month-long gruelling campaign for this estuary would be Canada’s bloodiest battle of WW2. This is the story of the Battle of the Scheldt.
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By September 1944, Hitler’s Germany was staring defeat in the face. That summer, Stalin’s Red Army had smashed through German forces on the Eastern Front, and advanced as far as Poland, and Romania. In the west, the Allies had liberated France, and were closing in on the River Rhine, and the German frontier. But then an Allied supply crisis brought the advance to a grinding halt. The Allied industries back home in the United States and Britain were producing enormous amounts of supplies:
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tens of thousands of tanks, millions of rounds of ammunition and millions of gallons of fuel. The challenge was getting all of those supplies to their frontline troops. The Allies had five armies in the field, two and a half million men, advancing on a broad front towards the Rhine. But their supplies still came from their Normandy beachhead, 300 miles to the rear.
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Frontline troops were no longer getting the fuel and ammunition they needed to continue the advance. Modern warfare needs lots of petrol. Tanks gobble up petrol more than, than our cars do. This is where there was this great argument about how
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the allied forces should make their next move, because they were running out of supplies.
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Then, on 4th September, the British 11th Armored Division captured the Belgian port of Antwerp.
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Crucially, with the help of the Belgian resistance, the British were able to capture the port intact before the Germans could sabotage it. At first glance, it seemed as if all the Allied supply issues would soon be at an end.
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There are miles and miles and miles of docks there. Antwerp is the biggest, or was then, the biggest harbour really in Europe. It was the biggest plum for the British Army. We had Antwerp and, our harbor was intact. There’s still cranes and everything could be used. And most of the other places, like the other ports we took, the Germans had blown up the trains and stuff, couldn’t use the ports properly.
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But there was one major problem Antwerp is connected to the sea by a 45-mile long estuary of the River Scheldt, which was still heavily mined and defended by the Germans.
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The Allies couldn’t land supplies in Antwerp until the Scheldt had been cleared.
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Once the Scheldt Estuary was cleared, the Allies could turn that into their main supply port, which would be sufficient to supply pretty much their entire war effort for the remaining campaign as they drove into Germany. And, of course, the Germans knew that as well. The Germans had built heavy coastal gun batteries on Walcheren Island, dominating the West Scheldt Estuary, and making it impossible for Allied ships to reach Antwerp.
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The guns along the Estuary were protected by thick concrete bunkers, almost impervious to air attack.
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They could only be taken by ground assault, across a landscape of rivers and open mudflats, with approaches covered by artillery and anti-tank guns, and beaches strewn with barbed wire and minefields.
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This hugely-challenging assignment was given to the First Canadian Army, a multi-national force made up of two Canadian and two British Infantry Divisions, with one Canadian and one Polish Armoured Division.
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The army included Normandy veterans but their hard-won combat experience was now being diluted by the arrival of raw recruits to replace casualties.
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Some of them hadn’t been in the army less than six months. They brought them overseas, crossed the Channel, onto the trucks and up to the front and dumped them on us. As we were trying to whip everybody into shape, they didn’t know how to load a rifle, they didn’t know how to prime a grenade, they knew nothing about infantry work. In command of the Army was Lieutenant General Guy Simonds
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Simonds was a born soldier who’d won the Sword of Honour at Canada’s Royal Military College. An expert in the evolving art of mechanised warfare, his rise to senior command had been meteoric, leading a division in Sicily, and a corps in Normandy. When his boss, Lieutenant General Crerar, commanding First Canadian Army fell ill, Simonds was the obvious replacement, and at 41 became the Western Allies’ youngest army commander by 7 years.
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A very British Canadian – he had been born in Britain, his father had been an officer in the British Army, his Grandfather had been an officer in the army of the East India Company. Very highly regarded by Montgomery, by Eisenhower and by Bradley, perhaps in contrast to the actual commander of First Canadian Army, General Sir Harry Crerar, a Canadian who was found to be a little difficult to work with. The other way of looking at that is that they regarded Simonds as a good officer
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because he thought much the same way that they did. That Montgomery found Simmonds easier to cooperate with and so did many others.
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Simonds’ job was made more difficult by fierce disagreements about Allied strategy that autumn.
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The Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, favored an advance against Germany on a broad front.
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But British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery believed that a single thrust across the Rhine River would get the Allies to Berlin and end the war by Christmas.
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Such a move, if successful, would make German defenses along the Scheldt irrelevant. So that September, Simond’s advance on the Scheldt was put on pause, while Montgomery launched his ambitious airborne operation, codenamed Market Garden.
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But Market Garden ended in disaster.
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The paratroopers took the bridges and held them until we got there.
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We took over from the American paratroopers at Nijmegen and the next one after that was Arnhem and that’s the one they couldn’t get. And that’s where our paratroopers dropped and we got slaughtered.
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And, of course, they had Market Garden, the Airborne, bridge too far. They had that and that failed, so they said, “well, we’ve got to get Antwerp open”.
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The failure of Operation Market Garden not only cost lives and resources. By delaying the Canadian attack on the Scheldt, the task had been made significantly harder.
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The Germans made good use of their four weeks’ breathing space moving thousands of reinforcements into position along the Estuary.
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By the time Montgomery accepted that clearing the Scheldt Estuary must be the new priority, German defenses were more formidable than ever.
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That October, the Western Allies were relying on First Canadian Army to get the job done. It was up to them to clear German defenders from the Scheldt Estuary, so that the urgently-needed supplies and reinforcements could make it through to the port of Antwerp.
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Until now First Canadian Army’s efforts had been overshadowed by events elsewhere but no longer.
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The Canadian plan involved four phases: Phase 1 2nd Canadian Infantry Division, supported by 4th Canadian Armored, would push north from Antwerp, to secure Woensdrecht and Bergen op Zoom, at the neck of the South Beveland peninsula. Phase 2 3rd Canadian Infantry Division and 1st Polish Armored would eliminate German forces along the south bank of the Scheldt.
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Phase 3 Canadian troops would advance up the narrow South Beveland peninsula, before Simonds launched phase 4: an attack on Walcheren Island by land and sea.
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One of the biggest challenges facing the troops would be the treacherous landscape. The terrain was wet and boggy with open country crossed by dykes and waterways. The land around the Scheldt was polder territory, this meant that it had been reclaimed from the sea. The land was divided up by dykes and between them it had been flooded by the Germans. They had flooded the land and you were in water all the time. the only protection you had was if you tried to get too high on the,
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on the what you call it, the dykes? Then you’re a target.
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The dykes themselves were steep embankments, like ramparts, about 14 feet high, and made ideal defensive positions for the Germans. With hardly any usable roads for tanks, the struggle for the Scheldt would be overwhelmingly an infantry battle.
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Why didn’t the air force go and flatten the place? Just flatten the place; you got all kinds of ammunition. No send the infantry in there.
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Geez; terrible, terrible.
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More than ever, Canadian soldiers would rely on weapons and equipment they could haul forwards themselves over the flooded plains and steep embankments.
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The Canadian Army in 1944 were equipped and armed almost identically to the British Army, and that went for the tactics and training too. Every platoon, most men were armed with the No.4 Lee Enfield rifle. The section Commanders were all armed with Sten sub machine guns but unlike the German’s, which was very, very beautifully made, high precision engineering, these were cheap. The whole thing made for 15 shillings. There were only two pieces which were machines, the barrel and the breach block.
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The rest of it just made out of stamp steel welded together. But actually, they weren’t that reliable.
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The main infantry support weapon was the Bren like machine gun. The Bren was an incredibly accurate, beautifully designed weapon, completely reliable and was quite capable of putting two bullets through the same hole with a well-trained gunner.
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These weapons and tactics which had been honed in the fighting since Normandy, suddenly meant nothing in the fighting in the Scheldt because the land was flooded, there wasn’t the opportunity for maneuver and the troops were funnelled through drainage ditches, through dykes and across causeways, so they were having to advance on an incredibly narrow front and on the other side the Germans knew exactly where they would be coming from. Those German defenders were being exhorted to ever greater
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levels of sacrifice by their Führer, who had implemented a new strategy: the ‘Festung’, or Fortress City. Hitler designated certain areas as fortress zones or fortress cities, and his goal was really to invigorate the defenders of those cities, to make them fight to the last man, to not surrender, to sell themselves as dearly as possible and really to destroy the usefulness of those areas in the process. He did this with a number of port cities, he did this with the estuary outside of Antwerp
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and the goal was really to slow the Allies down as much as possible. But that summer, But that summer, the German army had suffered disastrous losses in men and equipment, both in France and on the Eastern Front. It was now relying increasingly on teenagers and second-rate conscripts. The ragtag mix of divisions holding the Scheldt typified the Wehrmacht’s diminished strength. 64th Division, defending the south bank of the Scheldt, was the strongest, with 11,000 men
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and a large number of heavy weapons. The three divisions of 67 Corps, holding the area north of Antwerp, were at half-strength, and most were poorly trained. While 70th Division, holding Walcheren Island, was made up of men who, until recently, had been classed as medically unfit for service.
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Previous fighting and huge casualties had inflicted so many losses on the German Army that there were simply not able to find enough recruits to to refill their ranks. So, what they did at that particular time is that they would go into hospitals, to military hospitals, and also draft people who up to that point had seen, had been medically unfit and would draft them into specific units. You see what are called Stomach Battalions of men who were otherwise fit but who need a special diet;
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Ear Battalions of men who have ear damage or hearing damage who need special doctors; or Foot Battalions. All of these are simply being put back into the line, not as first-class infantry but as men who can still fight.
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On the 2nd October the Canadian 2nd Infantry Division opened the Battle of the Scheldt with an attack north from Antwerp. Their objective was to secure access to the South Beveland peninsula, isolating German forces from the Dutch mainland. But they would need to fight their way through the villages of Hoogerheide and Woensdrecht.
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At first the Canadians made steady progress, overcoming sporadic German resistance and liberating several small villages on the Dutch-Belgian border. But as they neared their objective, they ran into a strong defensive network of roadblocks, anti-tank ditches, and assault guns. It was typical of the well-planned German defences the Allies encountered throughout the battle. The Germans had lots of time to prepare for us coming. I can remember they even had numbers on top of the roofs,
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264 or something, and that was the, the infantry would see that number and call back for artillery fire. And they, would be able to, very quickly be able to know exactly where that was. And, so, they used to shell us but they had, they had lots of time to prepare.
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On 7th October, bitter fighting erupted around Hoogerheide and Woensdrecht, with the Germans determined to keep control over the crucial access to South Beveland.
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The town of Hoogerheide which over, overlooked,
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Woensdrecht
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and, they had heavy artillery and mortars at a very, very short distance. You could see the, almost you could see the people operating the weapons on that hill.
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The German 15th Army had clear orders from its commander: The people and Führer of Germany were watching, they were told. The Scheldt defenses must be held to the end. That commander was General Gustav-Adolf von Zangen. An experienced officer who’d led a division on the Eastern Front, he’d been given command of 15th Army in the Calais region of France six weeks earlier.
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Despite heavy Allied attacks, he’d successfully withdrawn his units to Holland, and established a formidable defensive line around the Scheldt.
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He was a very driven commander and he made clear to his troops that the fighting in the Scheldt Estuary was of the utmost importance for the future conduct of war and the future of Germany. Contrary to the impression given by newsreel propaganda, by autumn 1944, German tanks were in short supply.
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The very few armored units at Von Zangen’s disposal would instead rely on simpler, but highly effective, mobile assault guns.
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At the beginning of World War II, the Germans have developed a vehicle called an assault gun or Sturmgeschutz and the idea is really that you get a tank chasse, you put a support howitzer in it with a superstructure on the top and that helps the infantry to attack prepared positions.
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After the invasion of Russia in June of 1941, Hitler makes a suggestion that the 7.5 centimeter anti-tank gun is added to the Sturmgeschutz chassis. And that changes the vehicle into a great tank killing weapon. One of the issues with the Sturmgeschutz is it’s low in profile because it doesn’t have that turret and that means it’s an effective weapon to be able to hide and it’s also because it’s smaller a harder weapon to hit.
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As the war progresses, the Germans are trying to thicken the armour but they are losing some of their production facilities. So, if you actually look at this example of a Sturmgeschutz, this extra armour that has been placed on the front is actually concrete, just to thicken the levels of protection for the crew inside. The problem of course is this, cannot be turned on like a 360 turret, so it’s great in the defensive role but less good in the attack.
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The assault guns that stalled the Canadian advance at Hoogerheide belonged to a German Kampfgruppe, or battlegroup.
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The near complete destruction of of the larger organization of the German army in the West, meant that there were a lot of units that were not with who they’d started out with, were not organized, had suffered heavy casualties, and the Germans found that the best way to use them was simply to put them together into an informal group, a kampfgruppe, and send them back out to fight together. This particular Kampfgruppe is a very good example of it. Kampfgruppe or Battlegroup Chill,
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were named after their commanding officer, Generalleutnant Chill.
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The Canadian intelligence report classed him as a very skillful and very driven military commander. They assembled a battlegroup, kampfgruppe, of about 3,000 men, consisting of remnants of 3 infantry divisions and particular the 85th infantry division, together with a number of paratroopers and these 3,000 men became known as the German’s called them, the “Fire Brigade” of the Scheldt estuary. They were the one of most powerful and experienced combat formations the Germans had and whenever
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there was heavy fighting, this particular unit would be sent. Kampfgruppe Chill put up fierce resistance, and launched fast-moving, hard-hitting counterattacks whenever possible. The Canadians suddenly found themselves in the hardest fighting they’d seen since Normandy. The intensity of combat threatened to overwhelm some units, and for one regiment, would lead to complete disaster.
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The Canadian Black Watch had a reputation as an unlucky regiment. In Normandy, in one disastrous attack, it’s two senior officers had been killed, and the regiment cut to pieces.
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On Friday 13th October, the same regiment was ordered to lead an attack on a railway embankment held by paratroopers of Kampfgruppe Chill.
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It would go down in Canadian military history as Black Friday. They held the high ground on the right and we were in the, down in the, down on the flat lands with two or three polders as our protection. The Germans had the the last polder. They had the very last polder. And as soon as you put your head up there’d be a grenade come at you. And there was the railway tracks on the left with high ground there, which, they also occupied. Our purpose was to advance past those polders.
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Advance past those polders. Get to the railway station and cut off the enemy’s movements on the road and the railway. We couldn’t do it. We lost all those men. Black Friday 13th. The four attacking companies of the Black Watch lost 150 men, killed, and the embankment remained in German hands. One of the main problems that the Canadians are facing which lead to these very high casualty rates is the fact that communications are very poor. When C Company starts its attack,
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the preliminary bombardment comes in too early, and so it comes in 30 minutes before the infantry actually starts its attack which of course gives the Germans enough time to get back into their positions and prepare their weapons for the advancing Canadians.
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The Canadians attacked again three days later. Finally, through tenacity and sheer weight of fire, they fought their way into what remained of the Dutch village of Woensdrecht.
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At high cost, the Canadians had cut off the South Beveland peninsula, and the 15,000 Germans defending it.
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Meanwhile, Simonds had launched the second phase of the battle on the south west bank of the Scheldt dubbed the Breskens Pocket. The Canadians’ first obstacle was the Leopold Canal.
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General Simonds believed the attack to clear the Breskens Pocket, codenamed Operation Switchback, would take four days. It began on 6th October with an assault across the Leopold Canal. For some companies, the crossing was carried out in eerie silence. We were under orders not to shoot unless we were attacked, and we’d suddenly realised the Germans must be under the same order too because they see us but they’re not shooting anything either, so it was a kind of a silence on the canal.
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A few Canadian companies got across the canal without coming under fire. But others were not so lucky, and ran into fierce opposition, taking heavy losses.
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Allied intelligence, it later emerged, had seriously underestimated the strength of German forces in the Breskens Pocket.
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Slowly, the Canadians carved out a bridgehead on the far bank of the canal. Walter Balfour, a machine gunner with the 4th Canadian Armored Division spotted a German artillery observer, guiding fire onto his unit.
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So, I opened up on him with the bren gun. I had rolled down off the top of the dyke because they opened up on the machine gun right away and I’m trying to cut the top of the dyke but, later on my other troops farther up said they saw two stretcher bearers, German stretcher bearers, come out very cautiously wondering whether they might, you know, whether they were gonna be shot or what, they could get and didn’t bother them, they said they went up to where this brush pile was and
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loaded a guy on the stretcher and took them out but that solved the problem for these guys who were on the bottom of the, the canal bank, that guy he was creating a lot of havoc, a lot of rough times for them. As the attack across the canal ran out of momentum, Simonds launched the Canadian Highland Brigade in a daring, amphibious flanking attack on Hoofdplaat. The attack would be made with the help an extraordinary new amphibious vehicle, originally designed for a somewhat sunnier climate.
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This Vehicle is what is called a ‘Buffalo’ and it was developed from a design to pick up people in the Florida everglades. The idea being that it can float but it’s also got tracks. The tracks were developed in a way that they have these scoops on so as they turn, they can propel a vehicle through water.
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Now the American military liked the idea and the British and Canadian forces used them as well. So, to clear the Scheldt Estuary and the island of Walcheren at the end of it, a number of operations took place and that’s when the Buffalo, with its amphibious capability, its ability to take men across boggy ground, crossing rivers, dykes, even the open sea, it came into its own. But the Canadians had had almost no time to train with the new amphibious vehicles,
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forcing the operation to be postponed by 24 hours.
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When the attack went ahead it was a complete success, Canadian infantry landing behind the German lines virtually unopposed. The Germans immediately concentrated every available gun against this dangerous new bridgehead.
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Doug Vidler was a mortarman with the Canadian Highland Brigade. It was a bad night. We had been up all night. We didn’t get to bed until eight o’clock or something in the morning. But it was around 11 o’clock a shell hit the top of our barn and, shrapnel and dust, and everything all came down. And Bob was laying beside me and we were laying under a,
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a manger kind of thing, and the word went out, anybody hit? And Blackie said he was hit. He got hit in the knee. So, with that I shook Bob. I said, “Bob, Blackie’s hit.” And with that Bob rolled over. He had one little piece of shrapnel in his head, just one little piece that hardly bled at all. He was gone.
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For three days, Doug Vidler and his comrades held onto their fragile bridgehead. Finally, tank destroyers and infantry of 4th Canadian Armored Division broke through to relieve them. The German position in the Breskens Pocket was now hopeless. But the German commander ordered his men to fight on, even though many frontline units had lost two-thirds of their men, and most of the survivors were ready to give up.
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Canadian 3rd Division began a relentless, methodical advance across the Pocket, smashing any point of German resistance with concentrated artillery fire and air strikes.
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Okill Stuart, a D-Day veteran, entered what he took to be a recently liberated Dutch village. Everything was deathly silence as I got into the town, not a soul, not a sound.
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And just behind me out of the windmill came the Bergermeister with about twenty of his town people and so I went over to them, they hugged me and kissed me. And I said, “did you not get all this hugging and kissing out of your system when the infantry came through yesterday?” "Oh... you’re the first one. The infantry were repulsed by the Germans, they’re back a mile or so, you’re the first one.”
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On 3rd November, the Pocket finally fell, with the surrender of the German divisional commander and the rest of his troops. The Canadians were slowly tightening their grip on the Estuary, though at a heavy price.
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Now it was time to launch their final assault, on Walcheren Island and the coastal guns that dominated the Scheldt.
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For both sides, autumn on the Dutch coast promised to be wet and freezing cold.
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There wasn’t a guy whose main objective wasn’t to find a warm, dry place, where he could have a good sleep. Never mind a German, where can we find a warm dry place to have a good sleep, we were all half-conscious. It was cold. There was ice forming on the edge of the canal. Green grass covered in white frost. Soldiers fought a daily battle to get warm, stay dry and find hot food. The Scheldt was freezing cold. The Canadians finding themselves having to fight in
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great coats, in the thick woolen great coats, they’re wearing balaclavas, they have leather jerkins on, anything to keep warm and try to keep the water out.
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The Canadian and British rations weren’t very imaginative, in fact nowhere near as exciting as the menus that the American army often had. Amongst the things they got in their 24 hrs ration packs were ten of these biscuits, which was basically a bread substitute, and these could be broken and used for for making breadcrumbs and other things. There would be meat extract, blocks of meat, oatmeal blocks, there were two bars of chocolate, boiled sweets, chewing gum, some salt.
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So, all sorts of things to make very, very simple food. And you would cook these on a little hexamin stove which you carried around in your pack, which opened out like this. You’d have a hexamin block which is the fuel which would sit in the space underneath, and once you’d lit it, you could then put your and cook it off. Another innovation of the time was self-heating tins of food like this tin of Mock Turtle soup and the idea here was that you’d take your army jack-knife,
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you would punch two holes either side of the lid, lever off the cap and then light the fuse inside leave it for 5 minutes, and when you cut it open it would be steaming hot soup ready to eat.
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Added to the general discomfort of Canadian troops, was a growing crisis of combat fatigue. The Canadian 2nd and 3rd Infantry Divisions had been in almost constant combat since Normandy. And because of a Canadian law governing overseas service, they weren’t getting enough replacements from home. The Canadian army was starting to experience substantial manpower issues late in 1944. In addition to the casualties they’d had experienced during the earlier fighting. The Canadian army in Europe
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was built out of people who had actually volunteered to leave Canada and fight in Europe. Not everybody did that and that meant that the Canadians were facing a shortage of people who were willing to fight in Western Europe. In addition to the shortage itself, the Canadians troops who were actually in Europe were beginning to get a little worn down. And there was no relief in sight. More and more Canadian soldiers began to breakdown under the strain, whether physically wounded,
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physically ill, or battlefield exhaustion. In the First World War they called the guys shell shocked, we called it battle fatigue.
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Guys got battle fatigue if couple of weeks after we get into action and were no good anymore, most of them, they sent them back to what they call, we called anyway, a sleep camp. And they’d give a guy a needle and put him to sleep for a day or 2 days and give him a chance to rest up.
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Keep him there for 3 or 4 days and send him back up.
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Well the theory was, 2 trips to the sleep camp and you went into a labour battalion,
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but we were so short of men we had no labour battalions that I ever heard of, so they kept sending them back. And you know it was a damn disgrace. Some of the guys deserted, I had a guy who was a very close friend of mine, and a tip top soldier but once the mortar shells start coming in, he’d get up and start running around in a circle and I’d have to jump on him and put him down and sometimes punch him out to keep him quiet. Despite the growing crisis of manpower, 2nd Canadian Infantry
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were now given another vital role to play in the third phase of the Battle of the Scheldt.
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General Simonds wanted them to attack west along the narrow peninsula, as part of Operation Vitality, ahead of the final assault on the coastal batteries of Walcheren Island.
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So, the weary Canadians prepared for another attack across the broken dykes and flooded fields.
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They would be facing soldiers of the German 6th Parachute Regiment. Many were as exhausted, physically and psychologically, as the Canadians. But even though the struggle to hold the Scheldt looked increasingly doomed, the Germans continued to fight doggedly. They had at least been safe from Allied air attacks for the last few weeks, thanks to heavy cloud and bad weather. But whenever the skies cleared, Hawker Typhoons and Supermarine Spitfires armed with rockets and cannon swarmed in
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to strafe German positions. John Thompson was the Canadian pilot of a rocket-firing Typhoon.
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To anybody on the ground it sounded like an express train coming.
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Particularly a salvo. And, the Germans, they were very leery about when they got attacked by Typhoons. They didn’t like the noise. Several of the German prisoners would say well the noise of those rockets is pretty terrifying.
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In late October, the Allies used radio intercepts to pinpoint General von Zangen’s headquarters and sent four squadrons of Typhoons to wipe it out. The attack killed 74 German officers, and left 15th Army Headquarters in chaos for days. The Canadians hoped to take advantage with a fresh attack along the peninsula. They had learned the lesson of Black Friday this time German defences were blasted by a massive artillery barrage before the infantry went in under cover of darkness.
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We moved in there about two o’clock in the morning, and laid in a ditch, on one side of a road until about six, when we were told to charge,
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the charge was across about a thousand yards of beet fields, flat as a pancake, nothing there but beets,
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and to take a dyke on the far side being held by the German. We hardly got across the road when we had to retreat back into the ditch because of the machine gun and the firing was so heavy you couldn’t move. Somehow or other we worked our way across that beet field to the dyke at the end.
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There was very few of us left when we got there, and we couldn’t do much, but we spent the rest of the day throwing grenades back and forth. Germans on one side and us on the other side and, it was just murder, the wounded were laying out in the field hollering and yelling. The Canadian infantry struggled forward, and by the end of the first day, they’d breached the first line of German defences and taken 120 prisoners. But the next obstacle was even more formidable the South Beveland Canal.
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The German defence in the South Beveland sector is centered around this particular canal. The canal is a big obstacle to the Allied forces and makes it very difficult for them to cross this under fire. And the Germans therefore include this as an integral part into their defensive plan.
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Rather than tackle the canal head on, General Simonds ordered an outflanking attack by the 52nd Lowland Division, using Buffalos to land at Hoedenkenskerke.
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At a stroke, this bold amphibious operation bypassed the canal, and made it worthless as a defensive position. The German troops hurriedly pulled back to Walcheren Island itself where they would make their last stand, protected by concrete fortifications and coastal batteries.
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Four weeks in to the battle of the Scheldt, the Allies were closing in on their goal. The naval guns of Walcheren Island.
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Blocking the end of the Scheldt Estuary was island of Walcheren. Walcheren was heavily defended by the Germans, it was basically very flat and low lying and surrounded by a dyke and the Germans had built concrete pillboxes and guns emplaced along the top of that dyke. Until Walcheren Island was taken, and its heavy guns neutralised, no Allied ships could sail up the Scheldt to Antwerp and the advance on Germany remained stalled, through lack of supplies.
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By now General Daser, commanding what Hitler optimistically termed ‘Scheldt Fortress North’, could call only on the remnants of 70th Infantry Division, the 89th Fortress Regiment, and two battalions of naval gunners.
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Their orders form the Führer remained clear fight to the last man.
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Meanwhile Canadian commander Guy Simonds was devising another bold amphibious operation for the final assault on Walcheren Island.
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First the RAF would bomb Westkapelle, destroying the island’s outer dyke and allowing the sea to rush in and flood the interior. Then he would launch two amphibious assaults, by Scottish infantry and Royal Marine commandos, landing at Vlissingen and Westkappele. While second Canadian Infantry attacked from the east, across the narrow channel separating Walcheren from the mainland.
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Montgomery built up a massive assault force to take the Walcheren fortress. Lots of landing crafts, lots of buffalo amphibious vehicles and thousands of men. And the plan was essentially a replica of what had happened at Normandy on June 6th 1944. A massive initial bombardment followed by waves of landing crafts and amphibious vehicles taking the soldiers ashore to capture the fortress and finally open up Antwerp to Allied supply ships. The Canadians began their attack on 31st October.
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But reaching the channel, they soon found it was too deep to cross on foot, and too muddy for assault boats.
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The only option was to advance up the Walcheren Causeway, a single narrow road a mile long, connecting the island to the mainland. Company after company was sent up the causeway, only to get pinned down by heavy German fire. They lined the guys up in rows, and send them across this damn thing, and you couldn’t move, the Jerries were sitting at the far end, machine gun fire, they had all French 75-millimetre cannons shooting them like machine guns down the middle.
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And they kept sending more and more guys, and we were giving covering fire. I smoked the can of 100 cigarettes in about three hours, believe it or not, just lighting one after the other, we were just changing barrels on the Bren gun. Between their guys and ours they finally got a half a dozen guys or so to the far end. But that was it. With the Canadians pinned down on the causeway, the success of the attack would depend on Simonds’ amphibious landings.
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The RAF bombing raid had been a success, blowing giant gaps in the dykes, and flooding the island. The way was clear for Allied amphibious vehicles to strike at the heart of the German defensive positions. When the attack went in, amphibious vehicles like this ‘Buffalo’ could go through those gaps and round the rear of the dykes and attack the German defences from behind. And the Buffalos would be perfect for this, because not only could they carry men ashore,
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they were armour plated on the front on this LVT-4 model buffalo and they were given guns, so it’s got a 20 millimetre polsten cannon and Browning machine guns on it, that would help put suppressing fire down on the German positions as they come ashore and release the infantry to finish the attack. Royal Marine Jim Kelly was part of the Buffalo assault wave, but things didn’t go quite to plan. They were put into tank landing craft and we got into the buffalos inside the tank landing craft,
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so that we were loaded inside the buffalo, but the buffalo was an amphibious, box. We came out the landing craft in this thing and right away it was bogged down in the water. We never got any further we had to get out and wade ashore. It was just the same, same old wet landing. A freezing cold day, 1st November.
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At Vlissingen, the island’s main port, the Germans were caught off guard, and British troops landed almost unscathed.
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But resistance intensified as they moved inland. They were soon engaged in fierce street fighting that would last several days. Meanwhile off Westkapelle, a covering force of landing craft took on the heavy German shore batteries with rockets and cannon. They were taking on the batteries but it was a bit of a one-sided fight, that was, and they lost quite a few, but at least they did the job, they took the fire away from us. So that we were able to get in and get on top of the batteries.
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Under the cover of this barrage, the marines got ashore with only light casualties. On the beaches and dykes, they faced no more than sporadic resistance from the Germans. But occasional mortar shells, and mines, claimed a steady toll. German S-Mines, known as Bouncing Betties, were lethal. We’d actually go over the top, just come over the top of the dunes and then start trotting towards the, And take a chance on the mines. But what we used to do really on the minefields was,
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upskirts and at them, Because the faster you ran, if you stood on a mine the better the chance you had of getting away with it, because, it, took about four seconds
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to pop up out of the ground to about six foot high before it exploded in, in, in shrapnel balls. So, if you ran fast enough, you could get away with it, which you did, it worked.
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The fighting on Walcheren Island lasted 8 days. Then on 8th November, the Germans began to surrender.
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The next morning, they would come out with all their gear packed and their little haversacks and whatnot, and they’d come out and just surrender.
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With the German coastal batteries neutralised, Royal Navy minesweepers went to work, making the Scheldt estuary safe for Allied supply ships.
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On 28th November, the first Allied convoy sailed up the Scheldt to unload its precious supplies at Antwerp docks. The first ship to unload was from Canada.
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The opening of Antwerp was a serious blow to the Third Reich.
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The significance of the Scheldt and Antwerp is really underlined by the enemy reaction. More V2 Rockets were aimed at Antwerp than any other place during that part of the war. Antwerp was also highly significant in the terms of Hitler’s final offensive of the war. The Ardennes’ Offensive because the objective there was to retake Antwerp, cut off the supplies and undermine the whole of the Allied war effort on the Western Front. The Battle for the Scheldt was a hard-fought five-week campaign,
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led by Canadian troops, who paid a heavy price for their success. Around 7,000 of the 12,000 Allied casualties were Canadians. The battle cost the Germans between 10 and 12,000 men, and more than 40,000 prisoners.
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Victory transformed the situation for the Western Allies and ensured their forces would have the fuel and ammunition they needed for the final push into Germany. But it was a victory for which many Canadians believed, then and now, that their country never received proper recognition.
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The first ship up the Scheldt was a Canadian destroyer, and a lot of dignitaries from the different regiments,
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somebody said “where are the Canadians?” Nobody invited us.
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Even though we took, did a lot in the Battle of the Scheldt Estuary.
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In September 1944, as American troops reached the German frontier they faced a bitter struggle to break through a massive network of defences that stretched from the Netherlands in the North to Switzerland in the South – known to the Allies as the Siegfried Line We said to ourselves, we’re putting up a defence here because the Americans have practically penetrated into our homeland It would be the longest continuous battle fought by the US Army in World War Two
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with a devastating physical and psychological toll on its troops This is the story of the Battle for the Siegfried Line
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By the Autumn of 1944, Hitler’s Germany was under direct attack on two fronts On the Eastern Front, Stalin’s Red Army had advanced as far as Poland, and Romania In the west, British and American-led forces were nearing the German border and preparing to attack along a broad front to break through into the German homeland in the Allies’ path lay the Siegfried Line, known to Germans as the Westwall a belt of fortifications stretching nearly 400 miles from the Netherlands to the Swiss border
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The Westwall or, as the Allies called it, the Siegfried Line was a German defensive structure erected in the inter-war period mainly in the 1930s on the German French border as a defensive measure to protect Germany territory against the French It was only in 1944 that the Germans realised or remembered that they had this defensive structure. The problem was that the defences were inadequate and they also hadn’t been maintained and so the Westwall offered a little bit of support to the Germans
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but it was not the threatening defensive line that the Allies thought it was Very much as with the Atlantic Wall, areas were stronger or weaker, but it did at least provide the Germans with fortifications on which they could rest for the winter of 1944, 45
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As the Allies drew near, the Germans worked hurriedly to reinforce the Siegfried Line defences hey had the potential to pose a formidable obstacle - a fortified zone of concrete bunkers and pillboxes minefields; barbed wire; and concrete obstacles known as dragon’s teeth that were impassable to tanks I remember the Siegfried line very easily as we were coming up to it was a lot of concrete emplacements already there waiting for somebody to attack, and there were
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underground passages connecting these to them and they had a lot of artillery firing at us
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The Allies needed to bust through these defences to advance into Germany’s industrial heartland – the Ruhr But to everyone’s surprise, on 11 September 1944 a US patrol approached a section of the Siegfried Line near the German-Luxembourg border and found it deserted Within hours, they’d become the first US troops into Germany - without a shot fired
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The commander of US Seventh Corps saw an opportunity too good to miss and drew up a plan to break through the Siegfried Line before the Germans could reinforce it That commander was General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins
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Joseph Lawton Collins was one of the few generals to see action in both the European and Pacific theatres-of-war having commanded an infantry division during the Battle of Guadalcanal, in the Solomon Islands, in 1943 His division’s nickname in the Pacific, Tropic Lightning, led to his own nickname, Lightning Joe Just before the D-Day landings, General Eisenhower gave the 47-year-old Collins command of VII Corps making him the youngest Corps commander in the US Army
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He was a very aggressive and very smart guy who modelled himself to a certain extent on George Patton and was one of the new wave of much less cautious, much less methodical American general officers who were beginning to appear at that point in the war
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Collins’ VII Corps was one of three that made up General Courtney Hodges’ US First Army VII Corps had two highly experienced infantry divisions, the 1st and 9th which had both seen action in North Africa, Sicily and Normandy While the 3rd Armoured Division had been in combat since June and was boldly and aggressively led by General Maurice Rose Collins turned to General Rose’s 3rd Armoured to lead the attack through the Siegfried Line with the division operating as two ‘Combat Commands’, A and B
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The American combat command system started up in the 1930s, and into the 1940s and it was at least in part a reaction to the new requirements of industrialised warfare The Americans discovered that they didn’t always need full sized divisions to do everything that they were thinking about Or that full sized divisions didn’t have everything they needed within them So, what they started to do was put together combat commands which might draw from an armoured division
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draw from an infantry division, an artillery, an engineer division and put together units as one big fighting force commanded by someone who could use them in whatever way was best The initial American penetration of the Siegfried Line had been made just south of Aachen Now 3rd Armored’s two Combat Commands would attack northeast near the German town of Roetgen Once the tanks had broken through, they’d continue the advance to Stolberg
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while 1st Infantry Division swung left to capture the high ground east of Aachen and 9th Infantry pushed into the Hurtgen Forest, to secure VII Corps’ right flank On 12th September, Combat Command A and B began their advance against the Siegfried Line
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With tanks providing fire support infantry working their way forward to outflank pillboxes and bunkers and engineers clearing obstacles the Americans began fighting their way through the fortified zone
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Over four days of combat, the 3rd Armoured advanced an average of 2 miles a day fighting its way methodically through the belt of defences But as US troops neared Stolberg, they ran into a second chain of Siegfried Line defences at the same time as they were hit by a series of German counterattacks There was even a rare appearance from the German Luftwaffe That’s where I was bombed. Had 250 pound or 500 pound – there’s not much difference in them when they get that big
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hit the front yard of the building, only 20 to 30 feet from the building itself I had only made it about half way down the stairway when the bombs hit and this concussion from it and so forth blew me the rest of the way down against the wall and I turned around a couple of times cos it blew me down And I came out on the floor on my hands and knees sliding across the floor and the German woman that lived there in that building
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after it was over with and the plane is gone and of course by this time – and she looks at me and she sort of grins or laughs like, and points at me, you know, because she thought it was so funny the way I came down that stair on my hands and knees on the floor General ‘Lightning Joe’ Collins believed his men had a golden opportunity to charge through the Siegfried Line, while its defences were still only half-occupied But instead, he was informed that the vital
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supplies his men needed to continue their offensive were to be diverted elsewhere
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After four days of combat, General Collins was forced to suspend his attack on the Siegfried Line The cause was a severe Allied supply shortage that even ingenious logistical improvisation couldn’t solve Because they don’t have enough rail capacity, the Americans at the end of August establish what’s called the Red Ball Express which is they treat French roads as if they are railway, they make them one way only and establish a circuit for trucks travelling
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at their height apparently, one every 15-30 seconds Down the road to drop off its load and come back again as rapidly as possible And that lasts through into October But ultimately the Allies just can’t sustain the number of men with the fuel, with the equipment, with the ammunition they need to maintain the broad front without slowing down The Allies only had enough supplies for one major attack at a time and priority was now switched to British Field
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Marshal Bernard Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden This was a plan to outflank the Siegfried Line to the north advancing through the Netherlands, over the Rhine and into Germany in a single, bold operation The plan relied on airborne troops seizing and holding several key river bridges but Monty believed if it succeeded, it could win the war that year The fall out was that Lightning Joe’s Seventh Corps and other units in the area
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would no longer get the fuel and ammo they needed to continue their own attack
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The Allies had handed exhausted German forces a crucial breathing space one their new commander would use to completely overhaul German defences
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That new commander was Field Marshal Walter Model a man so adept at fixing a crisis that he’d been nicknamed ‘the Fuhrer’s Fireman Widely regarded as Germany’s best defensive general, he was also known for his loyal support for Adolf Hitler and unsympathetic, no-nonsense attitude to those under his command He did an awful lot in a short space of time, reorganising units and preparing the defence And in this his experience was an ideal background
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because he had fought so many defensive battles on the Eastern front The fact that he is a completely driven, also committed soldier summed up many accounts that he was very tough and very hard against his own troops because he really wanted to achieve things but also very hard and tough against himself and for that the people admired and respected him
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Model’s Army Group B was responsible for defending the Belgian and Luxembourg frontier with Germany The area around Aachen was held by the 81st Corps of General Brandenberger’s Seventh Army Many of its divisions had been almost completely destroyed during the fighting in France and remained severely understrength The corps’ two panzer divisions could muster barely twenty tanks between them But through September, reinforcements continued to arrive, including replacement tanks
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and new Volksgrenadier Divisions In the autumn of 1944, the Germans built a new type of force and these forces were the Volksgrenadier divisions The problem was for the Germans was the manpower shortage of 1944 So, the Volksgrenadier divisions had a lower number of infantry battalions so the manpower was quite low. They tried to at least in theory overcome that by equipping them with more machines - in particular, infantry weapons What they also tried to achieve was that you would
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have a very experienced cadre of officers and NCOs around which you would then form a body of men, maybe recruited from people back from the Reich who hadn’t been drafted before, and, also in particular from surplus numbers from the air force and from the navy that were not being used anymore This was the theory. In reality, it didn’t really work that way So even though on paper these are very formidable formations in reality they were not as formidable, not as strong, not as
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good as perhaps the standard units that you would find in the army Totally cobbled together You could see the different uniforms, right. One of them was wearing an air force uniform, others were marines While US forces paused their attack on the Siegfried Line Nazi officials began to evacuate civilians from the city of Aachen now threatened by the Allied advance For Germany, Aachen had limited military value, but great symbolic importance Aachen was a deeply historic German city
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It had been in existence for hundreds if not thousands of years It was Charlemagne’s capital during the Frankish Empire and so the Germans really treasured the city as a historic monument to their nation, to their history In addition, it was the first major German city that was being attacked by the Allies and so there was this sense of Germany herself was now under threat
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But Gerhard von Schwerin, commander of 116th Panzer, had already drafted a letter surrendering the city to the Americans But he never sent that letter because German reinforcements are rushed into the area and a counter attack is ordered which stabilises the front for some time which then leads to rather heavy fighting in that particular area This letter, say, was never sent but it did make its way towards, or through the channels you might say, towards Hitler who basically wanted Schwerin
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persecuted and probably shot but he very narrowly escaped that particular fate, so he was very lucky Meanwhile to the north, after a week of intense fighting, Montgomery’s Operation Market Garden ended in failure as British troops were unable to break through to airborne units holding Arnhem bridge Lightning Joe’s Seventh Corps would now get the supplies it needed to resume its attack on the Siegfried Line around Aachen They’d be joined in the battle for the city by US Nineteenth Corps
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September’s advance by Collins’ VII Corps had left it holding the ‘Stolberg Corridor’ southeast of Aachen North of the city, XIX Corps launched its attack across the Wurm River near Übach with the intention of swinging south to link up with US 1st Infantry east of Aachen, cutting off the city
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Nineteenth Corps’ attack was preceded by major air strikes But fighter-bombers failed to register a direct hit on a single pillbox While the artillery’s high explosive shells weren’t powerful enough to penetrate the concrete bunkers They would have to be taken by infantry assault US Combat Engineers trained infantry units for challenges like this We’d take a, an Infantry platoon and have them get a sheep sheep and take the sheep and put it inside the
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pill box, and then go out and then have a sample assault where we’d assault the back door flame throw into it, fire a bazooka into it then put the 20 pound, six pound charge down and send it in And as soon as that charge went off then we had the Infantry run inside and told them to get that sheep And when they brought it out, they found the sheep was bleeding from its ears and eyes from the shock and concussion And the Infantrymen all decided they didn’t wanna be inside of a pill box
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Using tactics like these, 30th Infantry Division captured 50 German pillboxes on the first day But it was slow attritional fighting, and by the third day, XIX Corps had taken 1800 casualties On 8th October, VII Corps’ 1st Infantry Division joined the attack taking Crucifix Hill east of Aachen But as the noose tightened around the city, there were fewer signs than ever that the Germans were about to give up Aachen was the first German city under attack
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and the population of the city itself was German German troops were not only defending their homeland but German civilians themselves Both of those things made the German soldiers very motivated to fight hard and fight for a long time By the 11th of October, US forces had surrounded the city An ultimatum from the commander of the US 1st Infantry Division for the city to surrender, or face destruction - was rejected And so American aircraft and artillery began to
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pulverise German positions in and around Aachen Most civilians had been evacuated, but around 20,000 remained in the city now trapped by fierce fighting American infantry evolved new tactics for advancing through the streets They made use of their overwhelming firepower to demolish entire houses, if need be, to silence German resistance points The cut-off German defenders, 5,000 men from a mix of units, fought stubbornly But without outside help, their situation was hopeless
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And so, east of Aachen, German forces launched a counterattack to try to break the American grip on the city A regiment of the US 1st Infantry found itself facing the latest German heavy tanks more powerful than even the legendary Tiger Despite the impressive nature of the Tiger 1, the German military stops making them in the summer of 1944 and they move onto an even more impressive beast, the King Tiger, or Royal Tiger, Tiger II and that’s built because Hitler insists that the newer 88mm gun
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which is even longer, even more powerful, is put on a tank chassis Hitler’s idea is that every year the German military must have a superior vehicle than whatever the enemy are going to be fielding When Frank Camm arrived at the front, he met comrades who had been there when the dreaded Tigers came rolling in I visited the engineers up there and they told me about a Tiger tank that could just run right over their tanks, friendly mines and roll down the street
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and stopped at each building and fire a round into the basement of the building and kept rolling along and then turned around at the end of the road and came back firing into building on the other side of the road And they were so tough that they couldn’t stop ‘em So those things were scary But the Germans only had a handful of these powerful tanks not enough to turn the tide of the battle Eleven days after the US ultimatum, with much of the
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city in ruins, Aachen’s last German defenders surrendered It was the Western Allies’ longest battle for a city in World War Two Both sides suffered about 5,000 casualties, with 3,500 German soldiers taken prisoner But the battle to break the Siegfried Line was not over yet and the next phase would prove an even more challenging environment 10 miles southeast of Aachen, the Siegfried Line wound through the dense pines and steep ravines of the Hurtgen Forest
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Efforts to break the line here would lead to some of the most gruelling and costly fighting on the Western Front
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While Seventh Corps’ 1st Infantry Division had been fighting in Aachen the 9th had plunged into the Hürtgen Forest, an area covering around 50 square miles South of Aachen Corps Commander Major General Lighting Joe Collins had decided that if the forest remained in German hands it would give the enemy an ideal base from which to threaten his southern flank, as his men advanced east from Aachen But the American decision to fight through this almost impassable terrain puzzled the Germans
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We, on the German side actually kept wondering why the Americans were trying to advance through the Hürtgenwald forest. They had a superiority in tanks of say twenty to one or even more From Aachen, with their tanks, they could have advanced across the plain to the Rhine in just a few days. But no, they were determined to go through this dense forest Hidden amongst the thick pine woods were concrete pillboxes supported by minefields, trenches and wooden bunkers
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The few routes through the forest wide enough for tanks were littered with mines One American unit counted a German anti-tank mine every 8 paces for three miles
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In the face of such formidable defences, it took the 9th Infantry ten days to advance just 3,000 yards at the cost of 4,500 casualties
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It set the pattern for weeks of gruelling combat as more and more units were committed in an effort to bludgeon their way through the forest
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In late October, the worn out 9th Division was relieved by fresh troops of the Pennsylvanian 28th Infantry in preparation for a new phase of the American battle to break through the Siegfried Line
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The 28th Division had arrived in France a few weeks after D-Day Its three infantry regiments had seen heavy fighting in Normandy before marching down the Champs Elysees in the parade to celebrate the liberation of Paris but Hürtgen Forest would be unlike anything the division had seen or trained for The 28th Division was to play a key role in the Allied advance towards the next objective, the Roer river It would make a preliminary attack through the Hurtgen
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Forest, to capture the important crossroads town of Schmidt and secure the flank of the main advance This would be followed by the main attack, codenamed Operation Queen which would see Seventh Corps and Nineteenth Corps push east towards their objective - the main town of Düren on the Roer But a US advance through the Hürtgen Forest would threaten secret German preparations for a major winter offensive in the Ardennes Forest Unbeknownst to the Americans their advance on Schmidt
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presented a serious strategic threat to the Germans The Americans captured Schmidt they would actually be able to threaten the German build-up areas for the Ardenne counter offensive And so, the Germans realised they had to both defend both the Hürtgen Forest and Schmidt itself against the American assault as otherwise the entire counteroffensive would become difficult, if not impossible The US 28th Division would face heavier resistance than expected
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and its commander already had serious concerns about his orders The Division was led by General Norman ‘Dutch’ Cota, a career soldier and West Point graduate who’d become a D-Day legend after coming ashore at Omaha Beach with the second wave and personally leading a charge through the enemy wire He’d won the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions that day and two months later was given command of the 28th Infantry Division after its previous commander was killed by a German sniper
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Cota didn’t believe his division was experienced or strong enough to clear the Germans from the forest But his complaints fell on deaf ears, and on 2nd November, the 28th Division began its attack
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Many GIs advanced through the forest with a sense of dread We didn’t of course know, where we were, had no idea what we were in Each of us was wondering the same thing. Which one of us is going to get killed first Is one of us going to get that million-dollar wound to go home Is one of us going to get an arm blown off We’re going into combat and they’re, they’re shooting real bullets up there One regiment immediately walked into a large, unmarked minefield
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Another was ambushed by expertly camouflaged German pillboxes in the forest and pinned down The Americans attacked, they didn’t see us, we were very well camouflaged and we were attacking infantry in the dark, in a fog and in these weather conditions and they were just sitting in entrenched position. It was pure hell for them On the 3rd of November, American infantry took the town of Schmidt Model, alarmed at the threat to preparations for the German winter offensive through the Ardennes
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immediately ordered powerful counterattacks At dawn the following day, German infantry attacked supported by tanks of the 116th Panzer Division The single American battalion holding Schmidt had no tanks or anti-tank guns to take on the panzers, just bazookas It was clear that the 28th Division was going to lose all its gains without immediate tank support But getting 35 tonne tanks up the forest trails had so far proved impossible
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Army engineers were now given just a few hours to make the forest trail to Schmidt passable using hand tools and a single bulldozer Three Shermans finally made it up the track just in time to help fight off the German panzer’s counterattack But the lead US regiment was under sustained assault by the best part of two German divisions
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The Germans retook Schmidt, while the Americans desperately held out in the neighbouring village of Kommerscheidt The forest was so dense it was impossible to maintain a frontline so infiltration and flanking attacks by small squads of infantry were a constant threat General Cota, for all his famed courage, was struggling to hold his division together issuing orders for counterattacks that were so unrealistic, some junior commanders simply ignored them
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We had been let down by the senior officers. They simply didn’t understand what was going on They’d wipe out a company and then they’d send another company in to take do exactly the same attack that had failed before. They didn’t seem to be learning from it Bad decisions led to thousands of casualties Up to a third were classed as ‘non-battle’, and included trench-foot, frostbite and dysentery But combat took its toll in many ways
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and prolonged exposure to battle resulted in psychological disorders
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26% of all US troops who served in combat units between June and November 1944 reported sick with combat fatigue at some time or another
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As more and more men broke down because of combat fatigue rather than being punished they were taken off the line, they were treated some of them were sent back home for good, a lot of them were given a chance to recover but the army handled them pretty effectively over the long term because they knew that this was just something that happened to every soldier eventually
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The other thing about combat fatigue was that the other soldiers recognised it and weren’t dismissive or contemptuous of the men who experienced it To a certain extent there was a sense that, “oh this could be me” So, they tended to treat those folks who broke down mentally in combat with a kind of rough kindness In extreme cases, the misery and dread of frontline service drove some soldiers to go absent without leave Desertion was also a serious problem. And the
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only US soldier to actually be shot for desertion during the course of the war was private Eddie Slovik And that was the result of this campaign The decision to execute Eddie Slovik was approved by Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander deeply concerned by low morale among US units that winter Slovik had been part of the ill-fated 28th Division which continued to struggle forward through the Hürtgen Forest General Lightning Joe Collins had planned for Seventh
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Corps to reinforce the division as part of a major attack codenamed Operation Queen on 5th November But bad weather delayed the preliminary air bombardment for day after day The 28th Division were left in the forest to bear the brunt of the German counterattacks on their own Then, in the midst of the fighting, along a fiercely-contested supply route through the forest known as the Kall Trail there was a moment of rare and courageous mercy
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We went to the Americans with a white flag, they were on the other side of the river, the Kall Three times a day for five days, both sides paused the fighting and came together to help evacuate wounded soldiers Dr Günter Stüttgen was a medic for the German 89th Infantry Division I had a bunker, and I always had American medical orderlies who helped me take care of American soldiers and then I had to make it clear to them that they weren’t prisoners and that they could go back
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They even devised a way of sharing the water of the Kall river without the fear of being attacked
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I went to the responsible officers and proposed that the Germans would wash themselves from 8 to 9 and you from 9 to 10 And we came to an agreement and it was kept. Looking back at it
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it was more like a game
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But the respite was short-lived
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On 16th November, with no end to the bad weather in sight, General Hodges ordered Operation Queen to go ahead with or without the bombers Miraculously, after thirteen days of constant rain the weather cleared at the last moment More than 1500 heavy bombers poured high explosive onto Siegfried Line defences and towns along the Roer River valley
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The effects were devastating, the towns that were hit by the bombers were basically obliterated the communication lines were cut and the effects on the morale, particularly of the inexperienced soldiers, was quite severe Having said that, in the combat zone itself, where you had more of the experienced German soldiers, the effects were far less there are a number of reasons for this, um first of all the bombing wasn’t all that accurate in that particular area
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and also a lot of the more experienced soldiers and their morale were not hit that badly and it’s interesting that after the bombing raid even the Allied commander said that the bombing had not lived up to their expectation In the aftermath of the bombing raid, Collins’ Seventh Corps launched its attack through, and north of, the Hürtgen Forest They’d have to fight their way through a series of well-defended villages with the aim of securing new, priority objectives
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the Roer River dams, the significance of which had only just been grasped During the fighting the Germans were thinking of blowing the dams of the River Roer The idea behind that was that by blowing the dams first of all, they would create a ‘water-wall’ which would move towards the Allies and hopefully sweep away some of the troops But even more importantly it would create a bit of, you might say, a swamp area and would widen the River Roer to about one and a half
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kilometres which made it very, very difficult for the Allies to cross so creating a rather severe water obstacle to the advancing allies The Americans knew that the Roer dams were there but they had sort of lost focus on them in an attempt to secure their flank by taking Hürtgen Forest General Hodges of the American Army wasn’t the most intelligent, most aggressive commander and he was having trouble tracking everything that was going on in the process the dams sort of got lost in the mess
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US commanders finally understood that they could not safely cross the Roer River while the dams remained intact, in German hands But the shattered 28th Division would take no part in this attack Cota’s men were finally being pulled out of the line I felt, oh my God we’re getting out of this meat grinder
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And the next day we got on the trucks and away we went down the mountains, over the rivers, through the woods. It was like luxury
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But for the veteran US 1st Infantry Division it was the start of their Hürtgen Forest ordeal
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On the first day of Operation Queen, they attacked the village of Hamich Where Harley Reynolds and his unit encountered a lethal new German infantry weapon The Germans had developed a pistol that shot a grenade and they had developed this pistol. The idea was was there all the time but never we’d never run up against them until this night And they had developed the. It was a flare gun Shoots a flare just like you carry on your boat for example if you're out on the water
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But instead of a flare it shot a, it shot a grenade Now this is close quarters. You're talking about 20 to 30 yards. But that was one wicked thing. And it was our first time to ever run up against it And they just slaughtered us It was 23 people that was left from the company It took 4 days for the 1st Division to take Hamich at the cost of 1000 casualties Fighting the terrain as well as a well-entrenched and skilful enemy American infantry advanced at a snail’s pace
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about a mile and a half in five days
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American armour struggled in the muddy, heavily-mined tracks of the forest What’s more, they were stalked by German infantry equipped with hand-held anti-tank weapons
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So, the Panzerfaust can be used by units like the Volksgrenadiers in the Hürtgen Forest They can creep up on tanks, through the woods and this very simple weapon, can penetrate the armour on the front or the sides of a Sherman tank So literally pennies are being used to knock out thousands of pounds worth of equipment All units in the Hürtgen Forest suffered a horrifying rate of attrition For those on the front line the nightmare seemed unending
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Americans had given the forest a grisly nickname - the Death Factory And with winter closing in, conditions were only getting more miserable
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I would have to describe it in this way. In the beginning of winter back in Virginia where I grew up it starts with a very cold blowing wind. And just snowflakes Just here and there. But the flakes aren’t actually flakes. They're in little balls like pellets that was all I saw of snow in the Hürtgen Forest while I was there. We knew the winter was coming
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November 1944. The US First and Ninth Armies were waging a grim winter offensive along a 15-mile front in an attempt to push through the Siegfried Line to the Roer River and then on to the Rhine itself On the southern flank of the advance, US infantry were pinned down in the Hürtgen Forest unable to make any headway through the wooded maze of ravines, minefields, and bunkers
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Because everything was lying on the ground there was always something snapping so they couldn’t actually move quietly at all They kept making noises. There was always the sound of a breaking branch somewhere. It would be noticed by both sides and that was where you would open fire One US regiment lost 200 men in a single day and all three of its battalion commanders Losses were so bad that some companies got through three or four commanding officers in a month
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Many were well below half their normal strength of 190 men
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The need for replacements was more urgent than ever But when new recruits were sent to frontline units to replace the casualties they often struggled to fit in amongst the veterans The American manpower system was one of the great failings of American organisation during World War Two the Americans rather than pulling units off the line when they experienced heavy casualties and rebuilding them would simply send out individual soldiers as replacements And this I.R.R. Individual Ready Replacement
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system turned out to not work very well at all Among other things, it meant that they were sending new soldiers to veteran units who didn’t know them, who had no connection to them who had no chance to train with them ahead of time, so those units weren’t terribly welcoming
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But the veterans weren’t simply trying to be cruel they were protecting themselves
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So, these new replacements would come out, and they would be incredibly vulnerable the first couple of weeks with the new unit. Cause they just didn’t know what they were doing They didn’t know what the sound of a German machine gun was like compared to the sound of an American They didn’t know how to move through forests quietly And so not only would they get themselves killed, they’d get the other soldiers killed One of the results of this in a kind of horrifying way is that a lot of the
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veteran soldiers refused to even learn the name of the replacements until they’d been with the unit long enough, that those veteran soldiers had some sense that they would survive It wasn’t worth getting to know the new guy if he was just going to be dead the next day
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You know big boys don’t cry and all and err you’re not supposed to get so attached And that’s the thing, we, we tried not to do because we get new replacements get to know them by their first name, 2 days later they’re dead. And we’re talking about 70% turnover all the time If we had an 8-man squad which is supposed to be 12; we thought that was a big deal Never had, never hardly ever remember being full strength They just, just killed us all the time
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In the last week of November fresh attacks were made by V Corps towards Grosshau at the Eastern Edge of the forest, and the town of Hürtgen
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American infantry faced all the usual problems of fighting through the Hürtgen Forest At Grosshau, just two Sherman tanks made it up the trails to support the attack Both were immediately knocked out by German assault guns At Hürtgen, American tanks coming up the road encountered craters and anti-tank mines the lead tanks were soon immobilised, blocking the road for those behind But thanks to a sudden break in the weather, Allied fighter-bombers were able to strafe and bomb German positions
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and US infantry eventually took both villages
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The American advance was inching forward at the cost of enormous casualties and still the Roer river dams were not in sight And so allied commanders turned to air power to destroy them In early December, RAF bombers attacked the dams three times But there was no repeat of the spectacular Dambusters success The dams were made of packed earth, and almost impossible to hit amid constant winter cloud cover They would have to be taken by ground troops after all
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Frank Camm’s unit arrived at the front on the 13th December and quickly got a taste of the fog of war in the freezing forest We had several different Infantry platoons attack that first night of the 13th of December And our, some of our soldiers got caught behind German lines and while it was dark, they had to try to get out and started they came across a German trench and were walking through the German trench when they ran into German soldiers And the Germans would say something to them,
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and they just grunted back (grunt sound) and kept on going. And they walked through the German lines and then came on out So sometimes you engage them and if they don’t know who you are, you’re alright
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Germans soldiers were also under immense pressure and faced the terrifying might of Allied firepower That night I was alone, communications were completely gone, there was only the sound of gunfire I can only say, to put it simply - that was the night when I learned to pray
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US troops, with the advantage in numbers and firepower, made steady progress towards the Roer River while Hill 400 – a crucial vantage point - was taken by an elite US Ranger battalion in a head-on charge After months of bitter fighting, US First and Ninth Armies finally reached the Roer River Siegfried Line defences, the horrors of Hürtgen Forest and a skilful German defence meant they’d been forced to pay an exceptionally heavy price and still hadn’t made the breakthrough they’d hoped for
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But as American commanders prepared for yet another assault towards the Roer dams on 16th December, 25 miles to the south Hitler launched a surprise midwinter offensive through the Ardennes Forest It was the beginning of the Battle of the Bulge, Germany’s last great offensive in the West and meant troops in the Hürtgen Forest would be left holding their positions for the rest of a harsh winter At that point the Battle of the Bulge was triggered which went from December
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of 1944 into January of ‘45. They had pulled away all of our artillery support
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all of our air support, and we had to dig in at the Roer River
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It was cold and miserable, and fighting through the elements was a war in itself for us It was an indecisive end to a deeply-flawed Allied campaign Hürtgen forest was probably one of the bigger setbacks for the Allies on the western front It was intended to really break through the Siegfried line in that area, and it didn’t do that. And, in addition, the Allies took massive casualties fighting their way through the terrain of the forest itself And, so, the final result is that they didn’t
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really achieve what they were aiming for and they lost almost, more than 30,000 casualties doing it The defence of the Hürtgen Forest can be seen as a German victory Because the Germans inflicted higher casualties on the allies, the Americans, than they sustained themselves The Germans lose somewhere in the region of about 28,000 casualties whereas the Americans lose about 33,000 casualties plus about 9,000 non-combat casualties
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So, some of the units have 25% casualty rate which is extremely high for American Units So, at that particular level yes, you might say it was a victory, It also slowed down the allied advance and the Germans were able to hold on to more of their territory From an operational and strategic point of view the answer is probably different, you might say well, operationally it didn’t really achieve all that much whereas strategically it didn’t have any effect at all, and Germany still lost the war
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The duration and intensity of fighting in the Hürtgen Forest would traumatise survivors on all sides
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I can still see all the dead lying there American soldiers and German soldiers all mixed up together. Whole fields full of them
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General ‘Dutch’ Cota’s battered 28th Division who’d been left out on a limb in Hürtgen Forest were moved south to a quiet sector, to recover But in a grim irony, they found themselves in the path of Hitler’s surprise winter offensive through the Ardennes
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Not until the Battle of the Bulge had been won could Allied forces along the Siegfried Line resume their offensive and begin the final advance into the heart of Nazi Germany
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In 1944, World War Two was reaching its dramatic climax Rocket ships firing, aircraft flying overhead As the Allies waged total war to liberate Occupied Europe This was a war in which all sides were learning as they went From the beaches of Normandy The water was full of blood, The water was bright red to the forests of Germany I can still see all the dead lying there Both sides deployed weapons of ever greater power and sophistication
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And this tank suddenly gives the American a real big advantage It’s a very effective beast This is the story of the Western Allies’ final campaign told by the men on both sides who were there You did what you did, You fire and you maneuver
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He was my brother
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16 December 1944 Hitler unleashed his final gamble in the West a surprise counterattack in the dense forest of the Ardennes
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He hoped it would change the course of the war and force the Allies to the negotiating table Hitler’s last order was not to win territory, but it was important to destroy the enemy
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This is the story of America’s deadliest battle of World War Two the Battle of the Bulge
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By early December 1944 German soldiers were fighting a desperate battle to halt the Red Army’s advance on the Eastern Front as the Russians closed in on Germany But in the West, recent German successes against Montgomery’s airborne operation Market Garden and on the Roer River against the Americans had brought a brief period of respite They had now assembled a formidable strike force to carry out the Fuhrer’s plan for a counteroffensive through the Ardennes forest of Belgium and Luxembourg
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to take out a critical Allied supply port The plan that was proposed by Hitler was that the German troops would advance through the Ardennes and reach the port of Antwerp the big logistical hub of the Allied forces and cut off the Allied supply of the troops fighting in and around the German border The second objective was a political one and by launching this offensive, Hitler wanted to show the western Allies that there was still a lot of fight left in the Germans
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Germans and he was trying to convince them it would be a good idea to make peace with the Germans and form an alliance with the Germans and fight together with the Germans against the Soviets The German army would attack through the same region where it had won its brilliant blitzkrieg victory against France in 1940 the Ardennes a rugged landscape of forest and hills spanning Belgium, France and Luxembourg If you got into the Ardennes you would go back to the 15th and 16th century
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It had castles with moats and, and wooden drawbridges and things like that And, and it was just absolutely beautiful Allied forces were thinly spread in this area a quiet sector where units battered and exhausted after spending weeks in the bloody fighting along the Siegfried Line, could recover
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We came to relieve the 4th Infantry Division that was in Hürtgen Forest, they had lost 6000 men The 2nd Infantry had lost 2000 men, They were all sent there to recuperate get replacements, get back up to force But this quiet sector was about to bear the brunt of the most ferocious German offensive since D-Day Unknown to the allies, more than 200,000 men, 1,400 armoured vehicles 1,000 aircraft and 2,600 guns and rocket launchers had been assembled for the task ahead
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Adolf Hitler personally selected the best troops available and officers he trusted 6th Panzer Army, under SS-Oberstgruppenführer Sepp Dietrich included two of the most powerful formations at Germany’s disposal the 1st SS and 2nd SS Panzer Corps General von Manteuffel’s Fifth Panzer Army also contained several experienced panzer formations They were supported by the Seventh Army, under General Brandenberger and Fifteenth Army, under General von Zangen
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The lead role in the attack was given to 6th Panzer Army assigned the shortest route to the primary objective the critical Allied supply port of Antwerp They had priority for supply and equipment The Fifth Panzer Army was assigned to the middle sector with the objective of capturing Brussels In the southernmost sector the Seventh Army’s task was to defend the flank of the main assault The Fifteenth Army, located on the far north of the Ardennes battlefield
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was tasked with holding U.S. forces in place with the possibility of launching its own attack if things went well
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But Field Marshals Walter Model and Gerd Von Rundstedt who were in charge of the operation had serious concerns Hitler wouldn’t hear of them There were a number of problems they saw with the plan for the Ardennes Offensive The first one was that they thought the German troops were simply not strong enough Germany had assembled pretty much the last reserves, you might say, for this big offensive but were still being outnumbered by the Allies The second thing was that logistics
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was not really on the German side, The Germans actually in their plans made sure and pointed out, they would have to capture Allied petrol depots in order to keep the German tanks rolling Fuel was a major part of the German supply problem in the latter part of the Second World War, the major issue was that the Russians had now overrun the Romanian oil fields, Germany had barely enough fuel to keep her tanks running and her planes in the air If the Germans were to achieve any success
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the high command knew they would need complete surprise and hoped the winter weather would be on their side negating the Allies’ overwhelming air superiority But above all they needed to reach objectives quickly before the enemy could organise their response and bring in enough reinforcements to halt the advance
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The main thrust would be under the command of one of Hitler’s most trusted officers Sepp Dietrich
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Josef ‘Sepp’ Dietrich was a staunch Hitler loyalist who held the most senior military rank in the SS In the early days this decorated WW1 veteran had been Hitler’s chauffeur and bodyguard and participated in the purge of the Nazi party known as the Night of the Long Knives in 1934 He enjoyed the Fuhrer’s complete trust For his exploits as a corps commander in Normandy Hitler awarded diamonds to Dietrich’s Knight’s Cross Nazi Germany’s highest decoration
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But his lack of education or training created problems at higher command it was said he was unable to read a military map German morale was high recent successes against the Allied advance had been dubbed ‘the miracle in the West’ Some even believed the tide of the war might be about to turn You really had the feeling at the time, now we can do it now we are making progress again, now we can win now we actually have a chance of winning the war Planning and preparation was meticulous
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and the build-up went ahead with every precaution for maintaining secrecy The Germans minimised the use of telephone landlines and forbade the use of wireless transmissions that might be intercepted Freezing fog prevented the Allies carrying out air reconnaissance As a result, the Allies were virtually blind to the German build up The ground froze hard, making it excellent going for heavy German tanks on the move It was the moment they had been waiting for On 16 December 1944, at 5:30 AM
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one thousand six hundred German artillery guns opened fire It was an incessant roaring, shrieking, humming of shells and rocket launchers, It was a wall of smoke that rose over the field and in this smoke the detonations flashed out in various different colours It was a right ghastly inferno
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90 minutes later, the Germans attacked US positions along a 40-mile front
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I had never seen anything like it before. And we had all the tanks and everything new tanks, and had drawn the artillery together. The Americans were extremely surprised Some had left hot coffee in the pots and bacon and scrambled egg on the table That's how they ran, they were so surprised US 2nd and 99th Infantry Divisions suddenly found themselves in the path of the German spearhead Kampfgruppe Peiper Commanded by an officer who represented everything the SS stood for
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Only 29 years old, Joachim Peiper was a dedicated Nazi who’d turned 18 the day Hitler came to power and secured a place in Sepp Dietrich’s elite Leibstandarte SS division in 1936 He was close to many of the Nazi hierarchy and had served on the personal staff of Reichsfuehrer Heinrich Himmler head of the SS, second only to Hitler himself But Peiper was no desk jockey His combat record earned him a reputation as a bold and aggressive leader the admiration of his men
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and Germany’s highest military decoration, the Knight’s Cross
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He was also linked to many atrocities committed by the Division against civilians and prisoners of war Peiper’s unit became known as the Blowtorch Battalion a nickname that was said to come from the slaughter and burning of Soviet villages
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The coming days would only add to Peiper’s savage reputation
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Peiper’s battlegroup was 600 vehicles and 5,000 men strong including a detachment of formidable King Tiger tanks
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Despite the impressive nature of the Tiger 1, the German military stops making them in the summer of 1944 and they move onto an even more impressive beast, the King Tiger, or Royal Tiger, Tiger II and that's built because Hitler insists that the newer 88mm gun which is even longer, even more powerful is put on a tank chassis For the Ardennes attack one of the biggest problems the Germans faced was logistics keeping tanks like this King Tiger on the road was the real problem
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The supplies, keeping them moving forward, despite the fact that the Germans had stockpiled fuel Albert Speer, the Armaments Minister, sees these stockpiles are still at some of the railheads They haven't moved forward to the front-line troops
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To protect such valuable vehicles in the opening stages of the battle infantry were pushed forward to clear the way for the tanks
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The first place enemy resistance was expected was the tiny Belgian village of Lanzerath on the edge of the Ardennes Forest Peiper held his tanks back while German infantry secured the area
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Lanzerath’s tiny American garrison was hopelessly outnumbered but opened fire on the approaching German troops
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The German troops withdraw and they start basically digging in and stay in their positions for several hours 12 hours later, and behind schedule Peiper and his tank column arrived on the scene
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At that point, Peiper gets very angry and he pushes forward with his battlegroup to find that the Americans have withdrawn several hours earlier and that the wood had been empty and no Americans had been there for quite some time So, this episode throws into turmoil the German plan for the advance
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After the costly delay at Lanzerath Peiper’s armoured column made rapid progress and a few kilometres further on at Honsfeld, they ran into one of the 99th Division's rest-centres full of bewildered American troops, many of whom were soon taken prisoner Then he made a detour north to Bullingen
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At Bullingen Kamfgruppe Peiper captured a large Allied fuel depot which made it possible for this particular unit and subsequent units to continue their advance Here, Peiper’s column also found use for the captured American soldiers They suddenly realise that they have Allied fighter planes overhead And what would normally happen is that these would now engage and start strafing the German tank column so the Germans take a number of the American prisoners they have
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and basically use them as human shields and put them in front of their vehicles to prevent the Americans from attacking And this is exactly what happens, so the account we have is that American pilots in frustration are circling around are circling over the German formation but do not engage and Kamfgruppe Peiper manages to get away
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Peiper continued his advance west unaware that if he had turned north he had an opportunity to flank and trap the entire US 2nd and 99th Divisions Later that day his force ran into a US artillery unit at Baugnez
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The American column of 26 vehicles was hopelessly outgunned and had no choice but to surrender
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The men were taken into a nearby field along with other P.O.W.’s that had been captured earlier Everybody was lined up in the field then and the German soldiers were coming by, you know halftracks and vehicles and then after that the foot soldiers were coming by too The prisoners suddenly found their captors were covering them with machine guns which then opened fire
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I got hit in both legs there from the machine gun fire Then, they started coming through and anybody who would holler or say something, they would shoot him laying there I thought, “Good God, I hope they miss me!” And they did While some, like Albert Valenzi, had a lucky escape in the chaos at least 84 out of 125 prisoners were killed many later found to have been finished off by a shot to the head or a rifle butt The Malmedy Massacre was the largest single massacre
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of prisoners by Peiper’s men in the Ardennes campaign but not the last The way I think, that they were on a timetable, that’s the only thing I can think They didn’t have time to be fooling around with prisoners or anybody That’s the only thing I can think, they were in a big hurry
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The Waffen SS who in some cases regarded what other people saw as war crimes as part of their style of warfare And this shows up very clearly in the Battle of the Bulge The actual orders given are that prisoners should not be allowed to delay the advance And German army units largely interpret this to mean disarm prisoners and demand them to march east, possibly under an escort but don’t spend any time trying to do too much with them The Waffen SS interpretation is that prisoners are to be shot
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Word of the massacre quickly spread among Allied forces
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Some American troops took matters into their own hands carrying out reprisals against German SS prisoners
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Many decided that now they’d rather fight on to the end, than risk being taken prisoner
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The very next day, Peiper’s column would commit an even greater atrocity this time upon unarmed civilians at the village of Stavelot
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At dawn on 18 of December Pieper’s armoured column attacked a US anti-tank unit, driving them out of Stavelot
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They rolled into a village that was now undefended leaving only the villagers Peiper’s whole column passed in front of my house Tanks, half-track vehicles and then the panzer grenadiers, We didn't dare to show ourselves We were really scared Peiper’s column opened fire on the villagers Mama shouted out in German, “We’re civilians” but they shot all the same And then they came back a second time, and went on shooting, because there were some of the victims who still moved
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A few days later, US forces entered the town and found horrific scenes And the first house I went into
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I walked in and I saw an elderly couple, a man and a woman, they were real old And they were lying on the floor in a pool of blood. And the blood was frozen, and I looked at them and examined them they had been shot through the head And, their throats were cut, So they were, it was frozen blood and I was
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very shocked to see this, there was a woman in there who didn't have any clothes on and her left arm was hacked off And, and there was a baby in there that was dead And every house that I went to was, was just like that over and over
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Peiper’s SS added to their grim record murdering more than 100 Belgian civilians in and around Stavelot
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The Allies had worked out that the Germans were relying on captured fuel to keep their vehicles moving So, they hurriedly began to destroy all the fuel dumps that lay in the path of the German advance While Peiper, moving west out of Stavelot completely missed the main American fuel dump just north of the village
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Peiper’s progress depended on events on the Elsenborn Ridge a line on the North shoulder of the battle The key for Peiper and his advance is if he can make sure that not only is he pushing forward but that his lines of supply and reinforcement are protected . And the problem is that those lines are dominated by a geographic feature called the Elsenborn Ridge which is held by American units
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There's a German force that is tasked with knocking the Americans off of that, the 12th SS Panzer Division and this is really the key to whether Peiper can keep going, if they can, if the 12th can knock the Americans off of there Peiper’s got a much better chance of making a deep penetration If they can’t, then his advance is going to stall out even before it’s started But the 12th SS Panzer, supported by the 506th Heavy Tank Battalion were in difficulty
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held up at the twin villages of Krinkelt and Rocherath It was an intense battle that was costing them dearly in blood, tanks and time All that day and into the night, the battle raged with SS tank and assault guns hitting the villages from the east, supported by a barrage of Nebelwerfer rockets While from the west, came a hailstorm of American artillery shells fitted with special fuses One thing that we had that was superior to Germany
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we had a proximity fuse on our artillery pieces, proximity fuse was a device if you wanted the artillery to explode 100 feet above ground, 200 feet, whatever distance above ground you could set it and it would explode without ground contact, Germans had nothing like that American artillery threw back repeated German infantry assaults while howitzers and anti-tank teams took out German panzers
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US forces withdrew to positions on the Elsenborn Ridge and dug in along a new defensive line They had no intention of yielding more ground to the German advance
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But US troops found their entrenching tools hardly made an impression on the frozen ground leading to a drastic new approach They gave us quarter pound blocks of TNT, The engineers had little blocks of TNT and they finally wised up that there was no way we could dig through this frozen tundra so they issued us these blocks of TNT and we’d put them in the ground and they would slowly blow the whole opening, get the top part off then you could sort of dig a little bit
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But that’s the only way we got the foxhole dug Peiper’s spearhead, meanwhile, had run into fierce resistance as US engineers blew up bridges in front of and behind him Not only threatened with being cut off from supply and reinforcement German troops knew they’d be sitting ducks for Allied aircraft as soon as the clouds cleared One American spotter plane managed to fly under the cloud cover and locate his column directing fighter bombers to the attack
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Peiper’s battlegroup could advance no further and was forced onto the defensive Just three days into Hitler’s offensive, the stubborn resistance of a mixed bag of US units had frustrated Hitler’s main hope for the battle
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We had a lot of casualties from artillery and everything but we didn’t go out on combat patrols, we had none of this going out beyond the line, we just sat where we were, you know, held the line With Peiper bottled in, all hopes of achieving a breakthrough now hinged on Hitler’s other major strike force the 5th Panzer Army
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Attacking simultaneously with Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army in the north the offensive here offered a real chance of German success
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Their objectives included the towns of Saint Vith and Bastogne, and ultimately, the Belgian capital Brussels On the night of the attack, the Germans bounced searchlight beams off the clouds, to create artificial moonlight for the advance
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A brief artillery barrage further warned the Allies that an attack was on its way In command was one of Germany’s best panzer generals
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Nicknamed ‘Kleiner’, Little One, because of his short stature, General Hasso Von Manteuffel was a highly decorated and skilful commander arguably the best of the German generals involved in the Ardennes Offensive As an early exponent of armoured warfare, he had his own ideas on how best to achieve a breakthrough and was sceptical of Sepp Dietrich’s plan to attack along a narrow corridor He had decided that his 5th Panzer Army would instead attack on a broad front
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on the basis that, as he put it, ‘if we knock on ten doors, we will find several open’
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Standing in the path of 5th Panzer Army’s advance were two thinly-spread US infantry divisions the 28th, and the inexperienced 106th The initial response of the American commanders in the area, people like Bradley and Eisenhower was that this was just a minor counter attack, straightening of the lines, or something local that the Germans were doing They didn’t think that the Germans were capable of, or wanted to mount a counter-offensive in the Ardennes
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and so among other things, they had actually put second line troops in that sector. Troops in need of rest, inexperienced divisions US 28th Division were veterans of the Battle for Hurtgen Forest, where they’d suffered heavy losses They’d been sent to the Ardennes to rest and rebuild, but their respite would be short-lived One 10 mile stretch of front was held by just two battalions – 2,000 men about to face 31,000 Germans along the main road to the strategically-vital town of Bastogne
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Whole regiments found themselves isolated by the advancing German forces And to sow further confusion among US troops , the Germans had launched a clandestine operation codenamed Greif It was headed by legendary German commando Otto Skorzeny seen here being interrogated by his American captors after the war Operation Greif involved disguising English-speaking Germans in American uniforms even riding in captured Allied vehicles
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Dubbed Panzerbrigade 150, their objective was to cause as much havoc as possible cutting cables, moving road signs and minefield warnings, and gathering intelligence
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They were sitting in the jeep, chewing gum, they had American cigarettes I spoke to one of them, they had English newspapers too, or American ones “What are you doing?” They were rather reserved, actually. They just had this grin on their faces So, there was a lot of infiltration going on And as that word got around that we were being infiltrated any little sound that you heard you just automatically assumed it was somebody sneaking up on you So the, the nervousness increased quite a bit
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Very, very few of them actually could stand a check and of course the Americans had a terrible time asking each other trick questions about who was Betty Rable’s husband or what’s a Texas leaguer, it’s a baseball term by the way They knew about Lou Gehrig and they knew about the Yankees and the Giants and many of them had lived in the United States at one time so they were able to get by and then the troops behind them were accepted if they had similar kind of equipment even though
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they didn’t speak English they could get by One way you could spot these men was that they were so short of equipment that they would drive with four people in a jeep. The Americans had so many jeeps if they had four men, they used two jeeps Three was the maximum Probably the most important effect was that General Eisenhower in effect, imprisoned by his own staff in his headquarters because they were afraid that these men were going to drive
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all the way to Paris and Versailles, perhaps, and try and assassinate him And Eisenhower eventually got fed up with this and announced that somebody could shoot him if they wanted to but he was going to get out and find out about the battle
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This paranoia caused by Skorzeney’s men translated into a hard attitude towards some German prisoners We wanted to know where more of the Germans in American uniforms were because that was necessary to save our skins if you know what I mean So, we said we will give him five seconds to answer the question and if he didn’t, we were gonna blow his brains out, and in some cases we blew his brains out I said you know after that we had no problem at all getting all the answers we wanted
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Most of the German infiltrators were soon caught and faced only one possible sentence It was a suicide mission for those lads And we probably would not have behaved any differently , if we had caught Americans in German uniform after they had done so much mischief
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And I needed that information to save the people in my platoon as well as my battalion And I had no hesitation. And I’d seen what they had done to us And what they did to our people in Normandy especially had no sympathy for any of them Events were moving quickly – but not quickly enough for the Germans St Vith was a key crossroads on the boundary between Sepp Dietrich’s 6th Panzer Army and Manteuffel’s 5th Panzer army The Germans had planned to take it
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on the second day, but it held out for five With so many armoured vehicles, horse-drawn artillery and troops moving along the forest roads traffic jams also began to slow down the German advance and prevent much-needed supplies reaching forward units
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To ease congestion on the roads, the Germans needed to take control of the crossroads at Bastogne and Manteuffel’s forces were heading straight for it Allied commanders scrambled for any means to slow down the German advance on Bastogne Reserves were rushed forward – among them the famous 82nd and 101st US Airborne divisions hard-bitten veterans of D-Day and Operation Market Garden
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A runner came down to where I was in, one, one of the barracks there, and he says, “The Colonel wants to see you right away.” Well, he didn’t have to tell me which Colonel, I knew which Colonel, he was my Battalion Commander So, I took off up the road. I knew something was serious And he says, “We are moving out as soon as we can load the trucks which are coming in now and going to a town called Bastogne cos we gotta get there before the Germans do, and
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hold the, stop the railroad, stop the highways” Some paratroopers were on their way to Paris for some R&R after 72 days on the line in Holland The military police picked us up 12 miles outside of Rheims while we were heading to Paris and said we had to come back to get on trucks to go somewhere where we didn’t know. Nobody knew where we were gonna go So, sure enough, we got on these trucks rolled for two or three days. And dismounted just south of the town of Bastogne
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And nobody knew what the situation was. If they was they wasn’t gonna tell And we double-timed about ten or 12 miles through, into through the town of Bastogne and took up a perimeter position This hurried deployment would have a crucial impact on the outcome of the battle Once the Allied High Command realised that this was a substantial German attack Eisenhower gathered his main commanders: Montgomery and Bradley and Patton, among others , at a meeting to start strategizing about how to react
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The American forces standing in the path of the German offensive belonged to the US First Army, commanded by General Courtney Hodges To the North was British 21st Army Group commanded by Field Marshal Montgomery To their South was the US 3rd Army under General Patton The decision was that Montgomery would turn his forces southward to attack the northern edge of the German salient, and that Patton would turn his forces northward against the southern edge of the salient, and both
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relieve American defenders, but also pinch off the bulge that the Germans had created When Eisenhower asked Montgomery how long it would take him to get moving Montgomery, who was normally obviously a very cautious guy, said about 2 weeks to turn his forces and head southward When Eisenhower turned to Patton and asked the same question, Patton said 48 hours And Montgomery chided him, ‘George, you can’t do that. You know you can’t do that’, and Patton said ’48 hours’
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And so Eisenhower said ‘ok, I don’t believe you, but ok’ And Patton confessed to Bradley that he had actually started the Third Army moving northward, turning towards the attack even before the meeting with Eisenhower, because he was pretty sure what Eisenhower was going to ask him to do And that’s one of the aggressive, self-confident things that really made the legend of George Patton
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A week before Christmas 1944, the US 101st Airborne arrived in Bastogne to shore up the line. Not a moment too soon
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Refugees were coming into Bastogne from the way I was going, and I knew what that meant: the Germans weren’t very far behind As the 101st arrived in Bastogne, rumours spread among the troops that they were already cut-off the Germans had surrounded the town We were cut off and our whole medical company that was on the tail end of our command was cut off. They were captured. The whole command Oh, it went from bad to worse. When we arrived at Bastogne there was no snow on the ground at all
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The next night it started snowing. And it snowed before it stopped about knee-deep In these freezing conditions, the 101st Airborne would have to hold out with dwindling supplies and buy the Allies desperately-needed time
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US paratroopers were sent to Bastogne in such a rush, little thought was given to winter clothing or the freezing conditions they’d encounter
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17 degrees below zero. We had no shelter whatsoever except foxholes We had almost nothing. I mean absolutely nothing. We had no overcoats We had no overshoes. We had no gloves. That’s where we got into Bastogne In the winter of 1944/45, the American army find themselves fighting the Battle of the Bulge hopelessly unprepared for weather which was well below zero. Most of the men were still wearing their 1943 patent combat jackets which had been excellent for fighting throughout the summer months
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but were just not up to the job for the winter The men were issued with greatcoats, but again once these were soaking wet, sitting in foxholes and having to sleep in them at night and you’re freezing cold all of this just helped add to the misery And despite being issued with scarves and gloves and woollen jumpers, it just wasn’t enough in conditions which were almost -18 degrees The entrenching tools that they were issued were worse than useless
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Even picks and shovels were making no impression on ground which was just like concrete at this time of year Whenever possible, American soldiers would take clothing items from dead or wounded German soldiers or prisoners of war Because the Germans had been fighting on the Russian Front in the East for the last few years and the Germans by then knew a thing or two about winter clothing
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In the worst winter weather in living memory, Bastogne’s defenders without hope of resupply or tactical support from the air, were on their own They were outnumbered approximately 5 to 1 and lacking not only cold-weather gear but also food and medical supplies They had some artillery, but very little ammunition
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Among the defenders were the 333rd Field Artillery Regiment an African American combat unit 11 of its soldiers had been cut off during the retreat to Bastogne, captured, tortured and murdered by the SS
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The commander of the 47th Panzer Corps, Heinrich Von Lüttwitz ordered his infantry to attack Bastogne, with half the tanks of the Panzer Lehr division while the rest bypassed the town and continued the advance westwards In a further sign of Lüttwitz’s confidence, on 22nd December, he sent a message to the US commander in Bastogne Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe, demanding his surrender
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He wrote
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There is only one possibility to save the encircled U.S.A. troops from total annihilation that is the honourable surrender of the encircled town. In order to think it over a term of two hours will be granted beginning with the presentation of this note If this proposal should be rejected one German Artillery Corps and six heavy A. A. Battalions are ready to annihilate the U.S.A. troops in and near Bastogne The order for firing will be given immediately after this two hours term
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In a Battle of the Bulge legend, McAuliffe simply replied
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NUTS!
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The Airborne units around the perimeter were subject to repeated and determined attacks by German infantry and armour But despite the cold, lack of supplies and shortage of ammunition, the defenders of Bastogne continued to hold out
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In a few cases, the extreme cold could be a life-saver
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All of a sudden out of clear blue sky apparently a mortar shell had a tree burst on this tree we were under. few seconds after the tree burst Stein said to me, “are you hit?” And I said to him, “no, I don’t think so”. I said, “are you hit?” He said, “I don’t feel “I don’t feel I was hit but I feel this stuff.” “Gimme your hand.” And he gave me my hand and I felt this blood on his leg. And, sure as hell, he was hit and it was gushing. A piece of shrapnel had severed his artery in his leg
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And it was so cold that the blood was very slow oozing it out of it. Saved his life Frank Gregg was also hit I was standing in the window, with my field glasses looking out to try to see where this firing was coming from And while I was standing there a shell hit the windowsill. Blew me about half way across the room, my right eye was the, the medics bandaged it up as quickly as they could, cos they thought I was gonna lose the eye
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We held on, and then the Germans attacked again and again, but not at my position
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If the Germans had attacked in two places at one time, they would have run all over us But they attacked at a single place each time and we m-managed, we managed to stop ‘em since it was only one place. We’d take troops from over here and put ‘em over there For the first week of the German offensive, heavy winter cloud cover had denied the Allies use of one of their greatest assets air support Finally, on the 23rd of December, the skies over Bastogne cleared
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Allied air forces were able to drop ammunition, medical supplies and food to the besieged defenders
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We got a break in the weather, and some C-47s came in and threw out some bundles, of ammo And we got the ammunition in and er distributed, and they got then there was a little food, and they had about, oh I guess there must have been five medical officers came in, and parachuted in And we sent them to the aid station, and they started working on the aid doing the people who had been wounded, our people And um, and I was glad I did because two days later I was back there [LAUGHING] myself
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By the 23rd, the Germans had seized the crucial crossroads at St Vith and some units had managed to advance as far as the river Meuse But the battle was now starting to turn against them
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While units of the German army had made it to the Meuse, they hadn’t made it in any kind of strength And there was no ability for them to actually get over the river, either in terms of numbers or in terms of the supplies and fuel that they had And while St.Vith had fallen, the American forces had only dropped back as far as the nearest geographic feature behind it a ridge behind St.Vith itself, making the town much less useful as a way of getting forces forward
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Meanwhile, Kampfgruppe Peiper had been cut off for 4 days and had had to abandon their tanks
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The survivors were now trying to make their way back through the forests to the German lines
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Patton’s Third army was now fighting its way towards Bastogne from the south making a deep inroad into the ‘Bulge’ or salient created in the Allied lines by the German advance the Bulge that later gave its name to the battle The classic way to deal with the kind of salient, the kind of bulge that ended up after the German offensive had taken place, is actually not to push it back from its farthest reach it’s to pinch off the shoulders. That is to try to cut the neck of the salient
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and force the German forces within that to surrender On the 26th December 1944, Patton’s armies broke through to the villages around Bastogne The following day a corridor was opened to get supplies and reinforcements in, and casualties out of the town itself The week-long siege of Bastogne was over You understand the 101st were… we were glad to be relieved at Bastogne. I was down to my last box of ammunition. We had no food and we were hurting, but we were a cohesive unit
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We were relieved and not rescued. Because as soon as we were refitted with ammunition, food and got new weapons and so forth, we moved out into the, and to cut off the German salient And that’s where we, had our killing time so much in the Bois Jacques woods, where we, where we cut ‘em off Despite mounting evidence that the battle was lost, Hitler ordered German soldiers to continue their attacks He had one last wild gamble to make, before he was prepared to call off the offensive
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On New Year’s Day 1945, in a desperate effort to regain the initiative Germany’s depleted Luftwaffe launched a large-scale, surprise attack on Allied airfields in Belgium and Holland
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The Allies, caught off-guard, lost 276 aircraft damaged or destroyed but 304 German aircraft were destroyed – effectively wiping out the Luftwaffe
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A few days later, Hitler called off the offensive, ordering the withdrawal of German forces from the Ardennes including the few remaining SS-Panzer divisions But fighting continued for another 3 weeks
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Throughout January, Allied counterattacks from the North and South pushed the Germans back, and vital crossroads were recaptured By January 25th, the Battle of the Bulge was over
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Allied victory came at a high cost The number of American casualties has been estimated at 75,000 with 29,000 killed or missing , making it the deadliest battle fought by the US Army in World War Two
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A lot of the people who were wounded because of the cold, died before they could be attended to in, in other words you go in to shock and you freeze to death
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Sub-zero temperatures added to the suffering on all sides with numerous cases of frostbite and trench foot
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Hospitals were filled with GIs with frozen feet. And when you get Trench Foot they just, they just amputated it
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German casualties numbered between 67,000 and 98,000 with at least 34,000 killed or missing They lost more than 600 tanks and assault guns, and the Luftwaffe was now a spent force In contrast to the Allies, these were losses that Germany could not replace With the failure of the Ardennes Forest, even any kind of negotiated peace was clearly off the table and the German government began to think about how the war was going to
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end, and whether unconditional surrender was the best possible way to go It’s at this point that Hitler really begins to descend more into fantasy. He doesn’t want to concede that the war is lost and so he begins to really become delusional about what’s going on Hitler’s last desperate throw of the dice in the war in the west had failed Now, with the Russians moving into central Germany, the Nazis were getting ready to make their last stand
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March 1945. Nine months on from D-Day, the Western Allies had reached the last great natural barrier between them and the German heartland: the Rhine River. Psychologically it was very important. The die is really cast. We’re now, we’re getting into the heartland of, of the 3rd Reich. This was where the Wehrmacht planned to make its last great stand in the West. Everything comes at once. It was a mixture of patriotism, loyalty, a sense of duty, persistence, call it what you will.
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While Allied soldiers lived in desperate fear of being killed with the end in sight. You knew you had to still be prepared to lay down your life but you, you weren’t quite so keen to do it as you been earlier on ‘cause the war was going to be over. This is the story of the Battle for the Rhine.
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In January 1945, Hitler’s last offensive in the west, known as the Battle of the Bulge, had ended in catastrophic defeat. In its wake, the Allies were able to fight their way through the Siegfried Line fortifications that defended Germany’s frontier from invasion. In the east, Stalin’s Red Army was just 50 miles from Berlin. To most, Nazi Germany’s defeat seemed inevitable, merely a matter of time.
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But not all Germans were ready to give up. They are now fighting on German soil so they’re defending their own homes, their families, their own territory against an invader. Another reason is fanaticism, particularly amongst the younger ones that are now getting drafted into the army, so the 16, 17 year olds, because these are people, young people, who have only known the Nazi State, who’ve only known Nazi propaganda, so to them slogans like ‘Germany must live even if we die’,
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‘you are nothing your people is everything’, actually do mean something. So they are quite willing sacrifice themselves.
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Adolf Hitler hoped that the River Rhine, the last great natural barrier between the Western Allies and the German heartland, could be used to inflict a crushing defeat on British and American forces transforming the strategic situation.
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Hitler’s still fighting on out of a mixture of calculation and delusion. The calculation is that if the Germans can hold the Western Allies at the Rhine, they can potentially split apart this kind of awkward alliance between the western democracies and the Soviet Communists. But there’s also a strong sense of delusion in what Hitler’s thinking. He’s fantasizing about units that got destroyed months ago, he’s trying to organize things that simply aren’t going to work. He’s refusing any
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kind of thought about surrender or about peace. The Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D Eisenhower, knew full well that the Germans would mount fierce resistance along the Rhine not just a formidable natural barrier, but a hugely important symbolic frontier for the German people. The aura of the Rhine played a large part. Many people thought it would be a national disaster if the enemy managed to cross the Rhine because then people would ask “Where else can we stop the enemy if not here?”
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In the spring of 1945, Eisenhower commanded one of the most powerful armies ever assembled.
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By March, its three army groups had entered Germany and reached the banks of the Rhine all were now vying with each other to be the first across. In the North was 21st Army Group under British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, comprising First Canadian Army, British Second Army and US Ninth Army. In the centre US General Omar Bradley’s 12th Army Group, with US First and Third Armies. And further South, General Devers Sixth Army Group, with US Seventh and French First Army.
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Since the breakout from Normandy, Eisenhower had wrestled with two competing strategic options. One of them was the narrow front, or the knife thrust approach which was to pour all the resources he had into a very narrow assault towards Germany and towards the Rhine river. The other was what was called the broad front strategy which was to parcel out his resources among men of all of his armies, and all of his units and advance in an extremely broad front
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across the whole of Western Europe towards Germany. Eisenhower ended up choosing the broad front and having everybody advance at the same time. Sometimes not to the liking of his best generals. Both Patton & Montgomery were very strongly in favour of a knife thrust although they differed, unsurprisingly, about who should be the one to carry that out. Each Army Group was given the freedom to organize and pursue its own approach to crossing the Rhine and did so according to form.
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Montgomery began planning a giant set piece operation to get 21st Army Group across the river involving airborne drops, and huge amounts of artillery and engineering support. Further south, Patton would rely on speed and initiative to get Third Army across wherever an opportunity arose. The Allied dream was to capture a major bridge over the Rhine intact. But it was thought to be a huge long-shot the Germans could be relied on to blow every bridge as soon as they’d retreated across the river.
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The Germans were desperate to destroy the bridges over the Rhine because once the Allies had crossed the Rhine it would be very, very hard to stop them because the Allies would be able to use the still existing and still useable infrastructure that the Germans had including, for example, the motorways, the Autobahns. So, this really was the last line of defense that the Germans could expect to perhaps hold against the Allies in the West. But a bit of luck and American improvisation
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was about to hand Bradley’s 12th Army Group one of the greatest opportunities of the war at a town called Remagen.
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On 7th March, scouts of the US 9th Armoured Division arrived on a hill overlooking Remagen. They were stunned to see the 350-metre-long Ludendorff bridge still intact.
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Here was a chance for the Allies to leap the Rhine in a single bound.
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But the town of Remagen and the bridge itself was crowded with retreating German soldiers, refugees and vehicles.
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And I can remember seeing people running, soldiers and civilians going across the bridge, German soldiers and German civilians crossing the bridge. And at the other side of it, it went, it was a high hill and the railroad track went through a tunnel, and so it was a good view that from where we were over there. General William Hoge, commander of Combat Command B of 9th Armored Division arrived on the scene. An experienced engineer officer, veteran of D-Day and the Battle of the Bulge,
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he quickly took charge of the operation to seize Remagen and rush the Ludendorff bridge before the Germans could destroy it.
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Fortunately, his division could call on the newest model of American tank a much-needed replacement for the iconic, but vulnerable M4 Sherman.
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The M26 Pershing tank is one of those ‘what might have been’ stories of World War Two. As soon as the Sherman tank went into production, the American military starts designing a replacement vehicle. But the Americans fighting in Europe have a major set of issues. If they start importing different tanks to Europe, bigger tanks, there’s going to be transport and logistics issues. So, the Pershing actually only gets into production in later in 1944. 20 of them
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are rushed across to Europe as something called the Zebra mission. They are almost being tested out in combat. And this tank suddenly gives the American a real big advantage. It’s got this massive 90mm gun on it. The firepower of this is better even than that on the King Tiger. It’s got a powerful new engine. It’s got wider tracks, and thicker armour at the front so the crews feel safer when they’re going into combat. With Pershing tanks quickly silencing enemy opposition,
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Remagen was soon taken, and the Americans turned their attention to the bridge.
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Unknown to the Americans, the Germans had already tried to blow the bridge once, but the explosives had failed to detonate.
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A second attempt had only damaged it, due to a lack of the right explosives
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They asked for 600 Kilograms of explosives, but they were only given 300 and they do find out that these 300 are actually of lower quality than the normal explosives they would have expected. These were from mines so were used to blow blow mines rather than blow up bridges. That’s the only bit that explodes and it leaves the bridge intact. In the aftermath of the explosion an American infantry company was ordered forward to take the bridge. An American soldier suddenly
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appeared out of the last street in Remagen and made for the bridge. He was alone and walked with his gun at the ready, past a wall, step by step,
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securing the area for about 250 meters. And nothing happened. I was watching all this and then an American tank appeared next to the bridge on the Remagen side.
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Then I knew it was time for me to leave. A Pershing tank helped to clear a path for the infantry. The infantry come under fire from machine gun nests that are positioned in the towers either side of the bridge. The Pershing tank fired back at those towers knocking out the machine gun positions. US soldiers venturing on to the bridge knew the Germans might try and blow it again at any minute, and this time, succeed. They were joined by three army engineers led by Lieutenant Hugh Mott.
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He was later interviewed for Allied newsreels.
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After the infantry had taken the town of Remagen, the task force commander Lieutenant Colonel Engeman called me up and ordered me out on the bridge to do some reconnaissance. I was to find out what demolitions were on the bridge and if the bridge would take traffic and, if not, how long it would take to repair the bridge for traffic. Later in life, Mott recalled his feelings, walking onto a bridge that might be blown to sky high at any minute. There wasn’t a whole lot of firefighting really that
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first afternoon there. In fact, the firing was a little firing here and there. And you was asking about a feeling you had,
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when I went out on that bridge: I felt as I just laying back in the shelter saying, “Come on, come on baby, come on across here and we’ll get you and the bridge both at the same time.” That’s the kind of feeling that you had.
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Under nothing more than sporadic sniper fire, the first American squad reached the end of the bridge without a single casualty.
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Along the way they and engineers disabled as many charges as possible.
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Some of our friendly engineers from the 9th Armored Division, running along the bridge and when they see a wire they reach down and pull it out.
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9th Armored Division had crossed the Rhine.
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Reinforcements were soon on their way. I received orders to cross the bridge as rapidly as possible. We had some of our infantry across before us, but I was the first complete Allied or friendly company across because I had my cooks with me. The infantry who were with us had their cooks back with the battalion trains behind us, so my company cooked the first hot meal on the far side of the Rhine.
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Just 24 hours after the capture of the bridge, local commanders, with Einsehower’s support, had got 8,000 troops across the river.
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But engineer Frank Camm had concerns about how long the bridge would stay up.
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The bridge was, obviously damaged. As we went across there were holes in the bridge and we dodged, dodged around them driving across. And also, as we crossed, I looked up on the right and I saw on the truss there was a big break in the truss that the Germans had exploded. And I could tell if that truss were to go all the way the bridge would collapse. So as soon as we got across the river I went up to the Colonel of the regiment I I was supporting, I said, “sir, that bridge
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needs engineer work on it, do you want me to have my Company stay back and work on that bridge or do you want me to support our Infantry that are forward up here.” He said, “stay with us.” And I said that was good. I felt safer that way. While American troops fought to enlarge their bridgehead across the Rhine. Behind them, engineers worked round the clock to shore up the damaged Ludendorff bridge. They also set up more crossing points, using landing craft, boats and pontoon bridges,
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to get more troops across the Rhine as quickly as possible.
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Hitler was furious when he heard that the Allies had captured a Rhine bridge intact. He immediately ordered reinforcements be sent to wipe out the American bridgehead, and the bridge be destroyed at all costs. He also demanded that the officer responsible or it falling into Allied hands was shot. You have to realise that Hitler had someone who would pass the guilty verdict on a person of his choosing. Therefore, you could assume from the start
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that there would be one guilty person, if not two, three, four, five guilty people. The man held responsible for the loss of the bridge was Major Hans Scheller. His wife remembers the moment she learned his fate. Lunchtime at 2 o’clock, it came on the news, the military news.
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They said that
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he had been arrested and sentenced to
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execution for cowardice in the face of the enemy and refusing to carry out orders. The sentence had already been carried out.
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The Germans were much more aggressive about punishing their own soldiers very harshly. They shot tens of thousands of their own men during the course of World War Two. The majority on the Eastern front but thousands on the western front as well for offenses ranging from desertion, to stealing, to rape, to cowardice, for all sorts of things. But in comparison to the Allied armies where only a few, if any, soldiers were executed for crimes of any sort
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the Germans were quite willing to shoot their own men and did it tens of thousands of times. One officer who was not shot but only sacked was the German commander in the West, Field Marshal von Rundstedt, a convenient scapegoat for the blunder at Remagen.
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He was replaced by a defensive specialist with a brilliant record in Italy.
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Albert Kesselring was a Luftwaffe general who’d won a reputation as a skilled commander of both air and ground troops. His masterful defence of Italy against two Allied armies prompted Hitler to bring him back to Germany to organise its defence against the Western Allies.
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Able though he was, Kesselring now faced an impossible strategic situation.
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To try to hold the Allies at the Rhine, Kesselring had at his disposal: Army Group H in the Netherlands under General Blaskowitz, Field Marshall Model’s Army Group B, And Army Group G in the South West: under General Hausser.
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There was a fundamental issue because a lot of the the troops that they were fighting on the Western Front were either very old men who hadn’t been drafted into the Army beforehand, or extremely young people who had just now been drafted out of the Hitler Youth.
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The core of the German army, the very experienced and non-commissioned officers and also officers, most of them had by that stage disappeared, so the army as a fighting organization is actually is not performing particularly well because they don’t have the right manpower, don’t have the right training, and also they don’t have enough of the needed material and the equipment. Kesselring’s first priority was to eradicate the American toehold across the Rhine, at Remagen. The Americans had moved
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thousands of reinforcements into the bridgehead, using the Ludendorff bridge itself, as well as pontoon bridges their engineers had built alongside it. The Germans now mounted a series of increasingly daring attempts to destroy them.
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Everything they had they threw at it trying to bring the bridge down. To use air power and they used some of the very latest planes that they have. These included the world’s first operational jet-bomber the Arado-234 Blitz. With a top speed around 460 miles per hour, the Blitz could outrun Allied fighters, and ground fire to deliver its 1.5 ton payload. The jets flew nine sorties over six days but never hit their target.
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To protect their prized crossings, US First Army assembled the greatest concentration of anti-aircraft guns seen in the entire war, nearly 700, as well as fighter cover.
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US forces claimed to shoot down more than 200 of the 367 aircraft sent to attack the bridge.
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With the Luftwaffe unable to get through, the Germans brought up a Karl Gerat 540mm mortar, of a type seen here, to shell the bridge.
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It missed its target 14 times before breaking down. So, it was time to unleash one of Hitler’s terrifying new wonder weapons.
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Hitler then orders the rocket V2 to be launched and fired at the bridge which really concerns and surprises a lot of the German military because they know that the accuracy is quite low, so they fire 11 of them in total. Now they all miss, the only thing they do hit is a number of German towns killing German civilians but again the bridge remains intact. Finally, Otto Skorzeny, the legendary head of a shadowy SS special forces unit, despatched seven Waffen-SS frogmen down river with explosives,
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to blow up one of the pontoon bridges.
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But the Allies had a secret weapon of their own.
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This is the canal defense light. It was given that name because it was a secret project. The idea was that in a barbette or like a turret on the top there, there would be a carbon-arc light in there which puts out about 13 million candle power. And they could actually set off a shutter that would flash across the light once or twice every second, and that would lead to almost blinding the person who was looking back at it.
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The Canal Defense Light on the American side did play a very important role in preventing the bridge from being blown up because they spotted the frogmen as they were approaching. Having said that it’s a combination of factors that really that so resulted in the frogmen not being successful. And in addition to the search light it’s also the simple fact that these frogmen were exhausted and extremely cold so not really able to react particularly rapidly to new situations and to being
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caught in the search light. The SS frogmen never stood a chance in the freezing river. All were either killed or captured.
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Ten days after its capture, in the middle of the afternoon on 17th March, Lundendorff Bridge collapsed.
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The German demolition charges, the strain of constant use by troops and heavy vehicles, and near misses from German bombs and shells, had finally taken their toll. 28 US Army engineers were killed in the collapse, men who had been working on the bridge to make it safe until the last minute.
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Dozens more had to be pulled from the river, many with serious injuries.
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By the time the bridge collapsed, the Americans had got 25,000 men over the Rhine at Remagen using the Ludendorff bridge, pontoon bridges, ferries and landing craft.
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And on the far shore, they’d carved out a bridgehead 25 miles wide, and 8 miles deep. But to bring their full might to bear on Germany’s defenses, the Allies would have to find more places to cross the Rhine. It was one bridge, and the Allies couldn’t get all of their forces across a single span over the Rhine. With the broad front strategy that Eisenhower was following, the allies didn’t need just one bridge they needed lots of bridges and lots of ways across the Rhine
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to get all of their forces over. About 80 miles north of Remagen, the British 21st Army Group under Field Marshal Montgomery was preparing its own Rhine crossing near Wesel.
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But here the Germans had successfully blown up rail and road bridges in time.
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So, Monty had come up with Operation Plunder the largest British-led operation since D-Day, involving more than 1.2 million men.
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While Monty didn’t have a bridge, he did have a very powerful and experienced force. The Rhine crossing would be led by the British Second Army, the strongest army Britain had ever put in the field… alongside First Canadian Army, US Ninth Army, and the US Eighteenth Airborne Corps.
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This was very much a Montgomery style battle in that he provided as much fire power to cover the assault as possible, and in addition, a further airborne drop. The lesson of Market Garden, which perhaps hadn’t needed to be learnt was that airborne forces functioned best when they could link up with ground forces as rapidly as possible.
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Operation Plunder, and its airborne element, Operation Varsity, was a vast undertaking, requiring 60,000 tons of ammunition, 59,000 engineers and 30,000 tons of engineering supplies as well as the transport of hundreds of landing craft and amphibious vehicles to get the assault troops across the Rhine. To Monty’s great irritation, a few hours before Plunder was launched, he got news that his arch-rival, General Patton, had beaten him across the Rhine. In the south, near Mainz,
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his 5th Infantry Division had made an improvised crossing in a mix of assault boats, landing craft and amphibious vehicles. They’d required no assistance from artillery, bombers or airborne troops all of which Patton’s boss, General Bradley, was keen to point out in his communiqué.
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But Monty was not to be distracted. Not even by a visit from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who was determined to witness the historic crossing of the Rhine in person.
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At dusk on 23rd March, 3,500 Allied guns began blasting German positions on the far bank of the Rhine.
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Three hours later, Operation Plunder got underway, as troops of the 51st Highland Division plunged into the river aboard their Buffalo amphibious armoured transports.
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The idea is that this Buffalo would be capable of carrying, as I say, 36 infantry or a load of supplies, with a 3-man crew we were able to use these quite effectively. The idea being that if you’re on a river with a fast-flowing current, you have to aim for the opposite bank at an angle of about 45 degrees so that when the current catches you it takes the rear end down with the flow of water and you are then at right angles to the bank.
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One of these pioneering amphibious vehicles is today housed at the UK’s Tank Museum.
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The Buffalo could take thirty soldiers under some form of protection, down the steep banks of the Rhine, into that fast-flowing river that’s sweeping off towards the sea. It powers them across and on the far side of the bank, it can release its ramp at the rear, and let those soldiers off into the attack.
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So, the attack went in first thing in the morning, 600 Buffaloes were used to take about thirty soldiers per trip across the Rhine, up the other side, and some of them sat there and gave covering fire with their polsten cannons. As we approached the river in these buffaloes, we were all very cheerful. And as we got near to the river,
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the buffalo was bumping us about a little bit, but it was all prepared and everything was organized, everything was under control.
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We got to the river and then the Buffalo reared up in the air, nose-dived down into the river, and, deep into the river with the small draft
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separating us. And all of a sudden, everything went quiet. And then David Reed, started to play his mouth organ.
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And then the next thing, the boys in the Buffalo started to sing. And the cheerful atmosphere feeling returned, and we went across the Rhine to the accompaniment of the mouth organ and everybody singing, in good heart, in good spirits. As British and American infantry crossed the Rhine in the early morning of 24th March, Allied tracer fire and shells streamed overhead, to keep German heads down, and to mark out landing spots. Trooper Peter Davies was driving one of the Buffalos across the Rhine.
6:25:11
Monty had put down such a tremendous barrage with artillery, as he did with most major attacks. And the barrage over the Rhine was tremendous, and then of course, well the smoke screen was put down and we were were given the order to go, and we were loaded up with infantry, we got to the other side, we took the first load straight in and got them out of the bank.
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German defenders were outnumbered and outgunned and put up only sporadic resistance in the face of the Allied onslaught.
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The man responsible for co-ordinating German defences along this stretch of the Rhine was General Johannes Blaskowitz, commander of Army Group H. He initially had a promising career but after speaking out against SS atrocities in Poland he was sidelined for 4 years, finally being given command of German forces in southern France in 1944. An experienced and capable commander, he knew full well that he faced a nearly hopeless task in defending the Rhine frontier.
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Blaksowitz’ Army Group H looked impressive on paper, but most of its divisions were only 3 to 4,000 strong compared to a typical Allied divisional strength of 16,000 men.
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What’s more, his troops were desperately short of artillery and tank support. The entire Army Group could muster barely 200 tanks and assault guns against the might of five Allied armored divisions, with more than a thousand tanks.
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Most of them had very little in the way of equipment, or tanks or vehicles left. German industry had been destroyed for the large part by occupation or by the strategic bombing, and so the German army in 1945 is really a shadow of its former self, fighting more out of habit, more out of loyalty, more of a lack of anything else useful to do and in the desperate hope that maybe Hitler would come up with a wonder weapon that would transform the war.
6:27:29
That maybe they could preserve their families and their home societies. But with no real strong hope for the future. Few German soldiers wanted to die, when the end of the war was clearly in sight.
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We fought but no longer had any hope, put it that way. Each of us hoped that he would be able to go home again, that nothing would happen to him
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anymore and we acted accordingly. We weren’t fighters anymore.
6:28:05
With German industry in ruins, priority was given to a cheap, easy-to-produce weapon for taking on Allied tanks. At the same time as Germany was developing massive tanks like Jagdtiger, they also developed and produced a number of simpler weapons, one of which is this Panzerfaust. The idea of this Panzerfaust is that it’s this hollow charged weapon, that they could mass produce. And the idea of a hollow charge weapon, there is a cone of explosive in this head lined with copper,
6:28:40
by having a blast charge inside this tube, you aim at an enemy tank about maybe 60 meters away. You press down the ignition charge.
6:28:51
That forces this projectile towards the enemy tank. It’s a very simple principle. When it hits armour, it explodes and it melts a copper lining that will jet through metal. Tends to leave on an armour plate just about 2 ¼ inch hole, and that copper jet goes inside the vehicle, and quite often ignites a fire inside. So as a simple weapon they could mass produce this. By later 1944 they were making 300,000 of these a month and the simplicity of it meant they could issue it to home guard units,
6:29:31
Hitler youth. All sorts of people could use something as simple as a panzerfaust.
6:29:38
But despite its crude effectiveness, the panzerfaust wasn’t enough to halt the overwhelming might of the Allied attack.
6:29:48
You should have seen the Americans, how many resources they had. It was like a rich man fighting someone who had been in prison for six years and was almost an invalid. Against scattered, demoralized defenses, 21st Army Group’s crossings went like clockwork. Casualties were light. Some units lost more men to friendly fire than to the enemy.
6:30:24
As the morning progressed, the Allies launched more amphibious vehicles and landing craft across the Rhine.
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By 10am, it was clear to Monty that the landings were going better than anyone could have dared to hope.
6:30:39
NARRATOR But the next stage of his plan was the most risky, the massive airborne drop behind German lines, codenamed Operation Varsity.
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It would be the last and largest airborne operation of the war bigger than D-Day or Market Garden.
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The aerial armada would consist of nearly 4,000 transports and gliders, escorted by nearly 900 fighters, and carrying almost 22,000 airborne infantry.
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At 9.45 Allied artillery fell silent, to avoid hitting their own aircraft, and all eyes strained skyward.
6:31:34
It was daytime, ten o’clock in the morning, that was the H hour I was a Company Commander by that time, I had been given command of B Company in the First Battalion and the ride was again, pretty much like the Normandy ride, people were probably even more confident than they were on the Normandy shore.
6:32:00
At first ground fire from the Germans was light. But as they realized what was happening, more and more guns opened fire.
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The approaching Allied aircraft were easy targets: slow-moving, flying low, unable to take evasive action during their drop run.
6:32:22
The Americans were also about to discover a deadly flaw in the design of their new transport aircraft. During the actual drop, not in my regiment but, the sister regiment, jump regiment 513th,
6:32:39
lost quite a few flamers and they were jumping the C46 that had two doors, one on each side. They were jumping both doors out of it. It had fuel systems in it that were much more vulnerable than the C47.
6:32:58
When punctured, the fuel tanks leaked back into the fuselage, turning some into fireballs.
6:33:07
After the paratroopers came the gliders slower lower and even more vulnerable on their approach. In all, nearly one hundred Allied transport and glider aircraft were destroyed.
6:33:23
Airborne soldiers who made it to the ground scrambled to untangle themselves from parachutes or wrecked gliders, often under fire.
6:33:34
The elite airborne units quickly got organised and started to fight back. Within hours they had seized most of their objectives and were linking up with ground forces who’d crossed the river that morning. The 6th Airborne Division, they’d landed deep on the gun lines and I remember joining up with them at about 10 in the morning, but they’re glider borne people had terrible casualties. I mean I don’t know how many gliders were shot down in that operation, and an enormous number of men killed.
6:34:08
But the rest of the operation went pretty well.
6:34:13
For all its horrors, the airborne drop had been less costly than anticipated, while the river crossings had proved a stunning success. Monty had parts of 4 infantry divisions, as well as swimming tanks and 2 airborne divisions across the Rhine.
6:34:31
General Blaskowitz, now alert to the scale of the Allied operation, committed his only reserves in a desperate battle to save the Reich.
6:34:42
The 15th Panzergrenadier Division counterattacked at Rees. While the 116th Panzer Division was ordered to seize back control of the Issel river crossings from Allied paratroopers.
6:34:57
But with roving Allied fighter-bombers hitting the German build up at Issel, as well as fire support from Allied guns on the west bank of the Rhine, the German counterattacks were over almost as soon as they’d begun.
6:35:13
Blaskowitz had played his last hand, and all it had achieved was to hold up the Allies for a few hours.
6:35:23
Meanwhile Allied engineers got to work building bridges over the Rhine.
6:35:29
The engineers would build first a bridge that could take individual infantry men across it and then they would slowly build it out from there, using pontoons, using steel segments, using all sorts of different equipment to put the bridge together. And so, this quite remarkable engineering achievement has kind of been left in the historical shadow, but it was just as critical as the capture of Remagen to how the Allies got across the Rhine river.
6:36:00
When Churchill met Eisenhower on the 25th March, there was plenty of cause for optimism.
6:36:08
The British Prime Minister even crossed the Rhine himself at a quiet sector, spending 30 minutes on the far shore before returning. By the following day, 21st Army Group had 12 bridges in place over the Rhine, and Allied units were beginning to make serious inroads into German territory.
6:36:31
German divisions facing the Allied crossing had either been destroyed or were now abandoning their positions to escape the Allied onslaught.
6:36:41
We just went through Germany that was going, like going on a coach trip really ‘cause there weren’t no one there. They were just gone They knew they’d lost the war. And they just retreated. Their fighting spirit broken at last, German soldiers began to surrender in ever increasing numbers. We started advancing about eight to ten miles a day,
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capturing hundreds of Germans every day. In fact, there were so many of them that our soldiers were would just wave them on the roads and have them go back to the roads without guards sometimes.
6:37:21
I remember one time when we were over the Rhine and I saw this group of prisoners here the same as everybody else did I’d expect. 200 of them coming down and they were running, running like hell and I thought ‘Cor that’s good.’ Now when they got passed us, we realised the person driving them on was our little Sergeant Major and he was going ‘Come on you buggers, come on you buggers.’ But there were also still many die-hards, willing to fight to the end for Hitler’s Germany. Some were only boys.
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There was one young boy, 14 year old, he held us up. And when they found him, well they couldn’t do nothing to him, he was only 14. But he was holding, he held a whole battalion up that boy. He got some machine gun, or something. He was firing all over the place. We daren’t go through. In the end they found him. And he’d got this machine gun and he was just firing it anywhere. In just 3 weeks, a mix of American improvisation, and Monty’s cautious, methodical approach,
6:38:31
had allowed the Allies to break through Germany’s last great natural barrier on a 200-mile front. More crossings of the Rhine quickly followed, from Strasbourg to the Netherlands. Soon some Allied units were advancing 50 miles a day, infantry catching rides on tanks, German towns decked out in white linen to signify surrender.
6:39:01
Eisenhower, to Monty’s fury, decided to leave Berlin to the Soviets.
6:39:07
But the Nazi empire was fast crumbling.
6:39:14
As Allied units made massive inroads into the German heartland, they uncovered the horrifying crimes committed by the Nazi regime.
6:39:25
British troops liberating the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen found scenes of unimaginable suffering.
6:39:37
We didn’t know anything about concentration camps, never heard of them. Nobody had ever heard of them.
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What we didn’t realise that on one side was the male concentration camp; on the left was the female. That there were a total of 60,000 there that what we could smell and see
6:40:03
were rags all over the place, rags, they weren’t rags – they were dead bodies or dying bodies. And the smell was appalling and if you concentrated on anything, you see that tree there at the bottom of it something occasionally there would be a little twitch that person might not actually be dead.
6:40:26
As Allied soldiers fanned out across Germany, they sometimes came across the palatial homes of Nazi leaders.
6:40:36
Mönchengladbach turned out to house the home of Paul Joseph Goebbels, the propaganda minister under Adolf Hitler. We captured this area and didn’t really know whose it was or, except there was a lot of wine and cameras, Goebbels was apparently a big camera and wine collector.
6:40:59
For Jewish soldiers of the 29th Division, an opportunity to celebrate Passover at Goebbel’s mansion with survivors of the camps, became an act of defiance.
6:41:11
They wanted to go back to that service because that Passover service in the Jewish faith is the story of the Israelites’ freedom from Egyptian slavery 3,000 years ago. They were just liberated from their own slavery in modern times, under Nazi Germany.
6:41:31
During the Passover service, the chaplain, Poliakoff, was moved by the presence of what he saw in his congregation there, not just American soldiers and, but the, folks who were in concentration camps who had survived and they were there in pitiful condition, and many of whom actually, when we taking, trying to take them back afterwards, they, several died on the way, we didn’t, didn’t have a chance to do anything except let them do what they begged to have done,
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to be there at the Passover service.
6:42:13
Six weeks after the Rhine crossings, the Soviets were masters of Berlin, and Hitler was dead.
6:42:22
Eight days later, on 8th May 1945, the war in Europe ended following the unconditional surrender of Germany. I had been defeated. I had been defeated, and it took a year, or a year and a half until we heard about everything that had happened, the Holocaust and so on. And then a radical change followed in people’s opinion, how wrong all of it had been and how horrific it was. But initially I didn’t feel liberated. I didn’t. I’m sure many did, but I didn’t.
6:43:03
It was a great anti-climax. It was like a drug. You are on a high of fairly controlled excitement. And my God it was exciting. And then suddenly it stopped. It all, Germans all quit. For the young men who’d risked life and limb, it would soon be time to leave their comrades, and return home, taking memories and experiences that would stay with them forever. When it was over, well what now? Kind of a flat feeling. I’m gonna miss the comradeship of all those guys. And
6:43:45
how they got the job done? I don’t know. I don’t know. But I’m very proud,
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to have served with those guys.
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We knew each other better than most people know their own family.
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Because we went through hardships together and we helped each other survive.
6:44:15
The war is over. We have survived. That was the underlying feeling. When, I look back on 11th March when the Americans marched into Leubsdorf, the underlying feeling was the war’s over, thank God.
6:44:34
The question of whether we’d been defeated or liberated wasn’t something we thought about until later. I opened the front door because my mother always left the front door open and I walked in and I said, “hi mom”. And she blew up. She just you know. I was home.
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That’s my story. There was one of my sisters that was on the front porch and she saw me top that rise and recognized me immediately.
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And she let out a scream that I can hear all the way back in Virginia even now, that ‘Harley’s home!’
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Getting off that train and all these people were cheering and hollering and clapping and so glad to see me. I didn’t know half of them, I knew a lot of them but
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and my mother was crying, I think I was crying. I knew how short life was and to live through something like that, shows you that life is important. Now that’s I’ve been in it and through it for 5 years and 3 months,
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I’m happy that the Lord let me live through this.
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