The American 5th Infantry Division, advancing just to the right of Roberts’s division, had begun to be squeezed into a narrower sector when Roberts seized the opportunity offered by the capture of ‘Dickie’s bridge’. Like the British, they too had encountered difficult hilly country and woods. It was a curious advance, with bouts of intense fighting, then moments of uneasy calm. The commander of one company described a strange experience as they advanced along a forest track. ‘The woods seemed to cast an eerie spell over us as though we were the subjects of a fairy enchantment,’ he wrote. He and his men suddenly heard a soft, gentle clapping. ‘As we came closer we could see the shadowy forms of French men and women and children, lining the roadway, not talking, some crying softly, but most just gently clapping, extending for several hundred feet on both sides of the road. A little girl came alongside me. She was blonde, pretty and maybe all of five years old. She trustingly put her hand in mine and walked a short way with me, then stopped and waved until we were out of sight.’ Even fifty years later he could still hear the sound of soft clapping in a wood.
The 5th and 35th Infantry Divisions were then transferred to Patton’s Third Army, and Vire was left to the 29th Division from XIX Corps. The American attack did not begin until dusk on 6 August, four days after Montgomery turned Roberts’s 11th Armoured away from the town. Vire, an ancient town on a rocky hill, had already been partly destroyed by bombing on D-Day itself. Meindl’s reinforcements gave a menacing assurance to the civilians who remained: ‘We’ll defend your town house by house.’ The American 29th Division faced a hard fight through the ruins.
While VIII Corps had advanced well on the right flank, Bucknall’s XXX Corps’s progress remained slow. Dempsey had warned Bucknall on the first evening of the offensive that he must push on faster for Aunay-sur-Odon. That section of the front was heavily mined, but this was not accepted as an excuse. On the following evening Dempsey sacked him, with Montgomery’s full support. To replace Bucknall, Montgomery summoned from England Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks, who had now recovered from wounds received in North Africa. Over the next two days, Dempsey also sacked Major General Erskine of the 7th Armoured Division and Brigadier ‘Loony’ Hinde. The 7th Armoured were shaken by the loss of their commander. ‘Everyone very depressed,’ a staff officer wrote in his diary. ‘It didn’t seem the way to treat the captor of Tripoli.’ But most senior officers felt that Dempsey should have wielded the axe after the Villers-Bocage fiasco in June. In any event, the arrival of Horrocks was widely welcomed.
A large part of the problem with the XXX Corps attack lay with the 50th Northumbrian and the 43rd Wessex Divisions. Their men were exhausted. Many were weak from dysentery and suffering from boils. They were also suffering from dehydration, since water, brought up in bowsers at night, was severely rationed. When the British attacked across a ripe cornfield, the Germans would sometimes fire incendiary shells and ‘the wretched wounded would get burned alive’. But the Allies could hardly complain, considering their use of white phosphorus and flame-throwing tanks.
Only a handful of experienced men were left in each platoon. The rest were all replacements. The padres were among the hardest-worked, evacuating the wounded and carrying out brief funeral services during the hours of darkness. ‘I could not help thinking of the line of poetry from the Burial of Sir John Moore,’ wrote the chaplain with the 4th Dorsets. “‘We buried him darkly, at the dead of night”.’
Under pressure from their commanders, the infantry battalions of XXX Corps kept pushing forward, taking a flattened Villers-Bocage, Jurques and Ondefontaine. Those August days were not pleasant for tank crews either. ‘In the small fields of Normandy among the cider orchards,’ wrote a tank commander, ‘every move during the hot summer brought showers of small hard sour apples cascading into the turrets through the open hatches. After a few days there might be enough to jam the turret. Five men in close proximity, three in the turret and two below in the driving compartment, all in a thick metal oven, soon produced a foul smelclass="underline" humanity, apples, cordite and heat.’ Their heads throbbed with noise: ‘the perpetual “mush” through the earphones twenty-four hours each day, and through it the machinery noises, the engine as background, with the whine of the turret [mechanism] and the thud and rattle of the guns as an accompaniment’.
Stanley Christopherson, commanding the Sherwood Rangers Yeomanry, was well aware of the strain on his men. ‘To be the leading tank of the leading troop of the leading squadron of the leading regiment of the leading brigade, with an axis of advance along a narrow lane leading into a village known to be held by enemy armour and infantry was then, as at all times, a most unattractive position. It almost invariably resulted in your tank being brewed up by an anti-tank gun or enemy tank which had seen you first. It must have been equally unpleasant for the leading infantry, but they could at least dive into a ditch and make themselves small, but not even the Almighty could diminish the size of a Sherman tank waddling down a narrow lane.’
Yet often the Germans allowed the first tank through, or even several, before opening fire. ‘It was a lovely morning and the sun was just about to break through and scatter the mist which surrounded the countryside,’ Christopherson wrote of 3 August. ‘We passed through the village of Jurques without meeting opposition, but the trouble started in La Bigne, a tiny village a little further on, when my two following tanks were knocked out.’ A newly arrived troop leader was killed instantly in one of them. ‘One of the burning tanks completely blocked the road and prevented any movement either way. However Sergeant Guy Saunders, displaying his usual calm and utter disregard for his own safety, jumped into the tank and drove it into the ditch, thus clearing the way. It was a most gallant action, especially as the shells in the fighting compartment had started to explode.’
Officers in the Guards Armoured Division did what they could to mitigate the discomforts of tank warfare, even if that meant taking a less than Guards-like attitude to dress regulations. With their pale brown tank suits, they began to wear silk scarves to mask their faces from the dust, and leather wellington boots from Gieves, ‘because they slip on and off easily’. A number of officers, disliking the army-issue sleeping bags, obtained a more comfortable version from Fortnum & Mason. The headquarters of the 6th Guards Tank Brigade also benefited from the foresight of their catering officer, Terence O’Neill, later prime minister for Northern Ireland. He had brought a flock of poultry and cages over from England ‘in the recesses of a LST’. His cousin, Jock Colville, who was Churchill’s private secretary, had dined with them just before Goodwood. ‘The Brigade of Guards,’ he noted in his diary, ‘as magnificent fighters as any in the world, saw no virtue in austerity on active service.’
Since Goodwood, the Guards Armoured had also greatly improved its infantry-tank cooperation. This had been helped by the installation of a handset on the back of a tank. The telephone allowed an infantry officer to talk directly to the tank commander, without having to climb on to the turret under enemy fire to direct the troop on to an enemy position. But a captain in the 5th Coldstream, who cranked the telephone wildly while bullets whistled around him, did not appreciate the compulsive flippancy of his brother officer from the 1st Battalion inside the Sherman: ‘The tank commander would always say on picking up his handset: “Sloane 4929”. Funny for him, but not so bloody funny for me.’
The Germans fought their deadly ambush battles with small combat teams, usually a scratch company of panzergrenadiers grouped around an assault gun. Yet German morale was suffering under the onslaught. Feldgendarmerie detachments at bridges seized stragglers and hanged them from trees nearby to act as a deterrent to others tempted by the idea of desertion.