Although the British 3rd Division had captured most of the defensive positions which had held them up on D-Day, the most powerful of all still held out on their right flank. This was the Luftwaffe radar station near Douvres-la-Délivrande, which had been turned into a veritable underground fortress. It also possessed a buried landline back to Caen, so its defenders could act as artillery observers. The Canadians who tried to reduce it faced a hard fight. They also had to clear the woods near the heavily defended radar station, which were ‘honeycombed with trenches, shelters and tunnels’.
The 21st Panzer-Division, following its unsuccessful attack on the late afternoon of D-Day, was put under the 1st SS Panzer Corps. Its commander was Obergruppenführer Sepp Dietrich. Dietrich had been an apprentice butcher, then a front-line soldier in the First World War. In the chaos after the Armistice, when Germany was on the edge of civil war, Dietrich joined the Freikorps. An early member of the Nazi Party, he became commander of Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard in 1928. This later formed the basis for the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, which fought under Dietrich in France, the Balkans and on the eastern front. Goebbels deliberately portrayed him as a hero for ordinary people to counterbalance the aristocracy in the regular army. Although more honest than most of his senior Waffen-SS comrades, Dietrich was a brutal and unintelligent field commander. According to General der Panzertruppen Heinz Eberbach, who replaced Geyr von Schweppenburg later, ‘under his command the Leibstandarte killed thousands of Jews’.[20]
Dietrich had been in Brussels with I SS Panzer Corps headquarters early on the morning of 6 June when news of the landings arrived. Rundstedt immediately summoned him to Paris. Dietrich was to take under his command the 12th SS Panzer-Division Hitler Jugend, the Panzer Lehr Division, the 21st Panzer-Division and the remains of the 716th Infanterie-Division. The corps was then to attack the British around Caen at dawn the next day and sweep them into the sea. But the effectiveness of Allied air attacks, together with the delayed start of both the Hitler Jugend and the Panzer Lehr Divisions, played havoc with the plan.
Dietrich reached the headquarters of Feuchtinger’s 21st Panzer-Division at Saint-Pierre-sur-Dives that night. Feuchtinger was away at the command post of the 716th Infanterie-Division in a tunnel on the edge of Caen. Dietrich exploded when he heard that Feuchtinger had forgotten to take a radio with him. In his place, the divisional chief of staff, Oberst Freiherr von Berlichingen, a descendant of the knight with the iron fist, ventured to suggest that two panzer divisions were not enough to throw the British and Canadians back. Surely they should wait for the Panzer Lehr Division to join them. Dietrich replied in no uncertain terms that only the two formations were available and he should liaise immediately with the Hitler Jugend Division to plan their attack.
Brigadeführer Fritz Witt, the commander of the Hitler Jugend, sent Standartenführer Kurt Meyer to see Feuchtinger and Richter in the headquarters tunnel on the edge of Caen. Meyer, the commander of the 25th SS Panzergrenadier-Regiment, was an utterly devoted Nazi and a ruthless fighter. Tall, blue-eyed and good-looking, he was the beau ideal of a Waffen-SS leader. His men called him ‘Panzer Meyer’ in admiration. He finally found the 716th’s headquarters in the very early hours of 7 June. The entrance was crammed with wounded. He told Richter, ‘It has taken about eight hours to reach you here. I spent more than four hours in road ditches because of air attacks. The march columns of the division are suffering heavy losses.’ The Hitler Jugend referred to Allied fighter-bombers as ‘meatflies’.
After studying the marked-up map during their briefing, Meyer arrogantly dismissed Feuchtinger’s concerns about enemy strength. ‘Little fish!’ he said. ‘We’ll throw them back into the sea in the morning.’ But the great counter-attack had to be postponed. The Panzer Lehr Division coming from the south continued to suffer even more from air strikes than the Hitler Jugend. The disastrous loss of fuel to Allied air attack also meant that it needed to take almost all of Richter’s own reserves. In addition, Richter claimed that he had to move the division’s field hospital back to near Falaise because, despite being ‘clearly marked with red crosses’, it was bombed and strafed constantly by Allied aircraft.
The complications of the German command structure added greatly to the confusion. The Seventh Army was responsible for the coast, yet I SS Panzer Corps became part of General Geyr von Schweppenburg’s Panzer Group West. Geyr himself wrote later, ‘At a moment when everything depended on rapid action, orders were issued to just two and three-quarter Panzer Divisions by the following headquarters: I SS Panzer Corps, Panzer Group West, Seventh Army at Le Mans, Army Group B, OB West and OKW.’
Geyr, who believed like Guderian in the importance of a massive panzer counter-attack, was shaken to find how effective the Allied bombing of key towns had been in blocking approach routes. Having strongly opposed the idea of deploying panzer divisions close to the coast, he still refused to acknowledge that Rommel’s healthy respect for Allied air power had been more prescient. Geyr was to suffer for this hubris when Ultra intercepts identified the exact location of his headquarters a few days later.
At the end of D-Day, British commanders in the Sword beachhead had played down their failure to take Caen with the misplaced optimism that ‘we can always take it tomorrow’. The repulse of the 21st Panzer-Division had raised exaggerated hopes. They had not yet come up against the Hitler Jugend and they also failed to appreciate that the most effective weapon in the 21st Panzer’s armoury was not its tanks, but its twenty-four 88 mm anti-tank guns.
Whether it was the retreat of the 21st Panzer, the constant fighter-bomber attacks on the roads, or the naval guns taking on targets well inland, panic-stricken rumours that Caen had fallen spread among German rear troops. On 7 June, these ‘fright reports’, as the I SS Panzer Corps called them, prompted its chief of staff to send detachments of Feldgendarmerie to the roads leading into Falaise. Those fleeing in this ‘faint-hearted rabble who, in the West, had grown unaccustomed to war’ were rounded up. In any case, the I Panzer Corps despised the British for failing to strike while German forces were unable to bring up reinforcements quickly enough.
Apart from the problems created by the prolonged defence of ‘Hillman’ and insufficient armoured units to fight through to Caen, the British I Corps commander, Lieutenant General John Crocker, had made a grave error. On the afternoon of D-Day, fearing a major counter-attack east of the River Orne, he took the 9th Infantry Brigade away from its task of attacking between Caen and Carpiquet, and switched it to support the airborne division. This transfer also contributed to the dangerous gap between the Canadians and the British 3rd Division.
On 7 June, the attack towards Caen was renewed with fighting near its northern edge, around the village of Lebisey and its woods. But even with heavy artillery support, the 185th Brigade suffered heavy losses. The 21st Panzer-Division had sorted itself out and established effective positions on the higher ground in front of Caen and forward to Bénouville, where Major Hans von Luck’s panzergrenadiers were still launching counter-attacks against the 6th Airborne.
Montgomery’s old regiment, the 2nd Battalion of the Royal Warwicks, formed part of the attack near Lebisey. On their brigadier’s orders, the anti-tank platoon, with six Bren-gun carriers towing their guns, charged up a sunken road with high banks. The firing went right over their heads and they could see little. Suddenly they found themselves in Lebisey in the middle of a 21st Panzer-Division grenadier regiment. They went past a Mark IV, drove right on through to their rear and halted in a wheatfield to deploy their anti-tank guns. ‘Action rear!’ the lieutenant yelled. His Birmingham lads swore merrily as they brought the guns to bear and fired. But then a shell blew up his carrier and the blast knocked them all flat.
20
This was probably at Taganrog in southern Russia. At the beginning of 1942, the division also murdered 4,000 Soviet prisoners.