They tried to slip back to their own lines but were captured and marched back to Lebisey wood. The panzergrenadiers were very nonchalant and ‘elegant’. They asked their prisoners what they would like to drink, milk or wine. Then shells from HMS Warspite began roaring overhead. The German guarding them said to the lieutenant, ‘I think we better dig a hole, don’t you?’ and the two of them began digging together. They sat in the trench side by side as the bombardment continued, both shrinking each time a shell came over. ‘You will be back in the sea in a few days,’ the German remarked. ‘No, I am sorry,’ Bannerman replied. ‘We will be in Paris in a week.’ Agreeing to disagree, the panzergrenadier showed a snapshot of his fiancée. The lieutenant repaid the compliment by producing a photograph of his wife. He could not help thinking that just half an hour before they had been trying to kill each other.
General Crocker had then moved the 9th Brigade back to its original sector, just to the right of the 185th Brigade. This area, like the Canadian sector, consisted of gently rolling country with wheatfields, stone farmhouses surrounded by an orchard, and copses which hid anti-tank guns. Farmers had brought in their cows and horses, hoping that they would be better protected in barns and yards. Some watched the fighting from a loft, while their family sheltered in the cellar. Yet much of the fighting and shelling was concentrated on buildings. In the hamlet of Gruchy, near Buron, nine out of ten houses were destroyed or badly damaged. Germans looted cider and Calvados from their cellars, several drinking themselves into a stupor.
The 2nd Battalion of the Royal Ulster Rifles made a brave charge across open cornfields towards the village of Cambes. They fought their way in, but a newly arrived detachment of the 12th SS Hitler Jugend forced them to retreat. The Ulster Rifles had to leave their wounded from D Company in a ditch outside the village. They were certain that the young soldiers from the Hitler Jugend shot them all as they lay there afterwards.
Further to the right of 9th Brigade, the Canadians also came up against detachments of the Hitler Jugend when they renewed their advance on Carpiquet airfield. After Standartenführer Meyer had set up his command post in the Abbaye d’Ardennes, his 25th Panzergrenadier-Regiment was due to attack at 16.00 hours to the west of the railway line from Caen to Saint-Luc-sur-Mer, while the 21st Panzer-Division were to advance on the east side. But the approach of the Canadians made him decide to attack immediately. The order was passed to the Hitler Jugend tank battalion: ‘Panzer, March!’ They took the Canadian armoured regiment, the Sherbrooke Fusiliers, unawares and rapidly recaptured the village of Authie. But in their triumphant rush forward, the Hitler Jugend tanks were surprised in their turn by well-sited Canadian anti-tank guns. Meyer soon sent the tanks which had withdrawn back into another firefight, this time concentrated on the village of Buron. The fighting that afternoon ended in a bloody draw, with British, Canadian and German attacks brought to a standstill.
The British had a much better day on the Bayeux front to the west. Patrols during the night had established that the small city had been almost entirely evacuated by the German administration. So the Essex Regiment and the South Wales Borderers, supported by the Sherwood Rangers, were able to liberate Bayeux on 7 June with little damage. ‘We were the first troops into the town’, wrote Stanley Christopherson, who commanded A Squadron of the Sherwood Rangers, ‘and were most relieved to find that except for isolated strong-points in the town and the odd sniper no Germans were to be found, which prevented any damage to the beautiful and historic buildings. We were given a most enthusiastic and spontaneous reception by the inhabitants who appeared genuinely delighted to welcome us and demonstrated their joy by throwing flowers at the tanks and distributing cider and food among the men.’
In the south of the town, one enemy machine-gun post held out in a house, which caught fire when a Sherwood Ranger tank shelled it. ‘After a very short time the clanging of a bell heralded the arrival of the Bayeux fire brigade, manned by a full team all wearing shiny helmets. Regardless of the machine gun fire, they held up the battle, entered the house, extinguished the fire and brought out the German machine gun section.’
The next day, 8 June, the Sherwood Rangers rejoined the 8th Armoured Brigade to advance south. Bypassing anti-tank guns, they occupied some high ground seven miles to the south-east of Bayeux known as Hill 103. It overlooked the villages of Tilly-sur-Seulles and Fontenay-le-Pesnel, which British squaddies dubbed ‘Piss in the Fountain’. The main danger on the way had been the odd rifleman shooting at the heads of tank commanders. But on the next day the Sherwood Rangers and the 6th Durham Light Infantry suddenly came under attack.
The Panzer Lehr Division had finally arrived at the front. Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein, its commander, was still furious after Generaloberst Dollmann’s order to move during daylight hours. Rocket-firing Typhoons from the RAF and American Lightning squadrons had appeared overhead almost immediately on the afternoon of 6 June and destroyed a number of vehicles. Bayerlein’s men pushed on through the cover of darkness, expecting to go into camouflaged positions before dawn, but General Dollmann ordered the division to keep going. The first air strike had hit them at 05.30 hours the next morning. Tanks and half-tracks, already camouflaged with leafy branches, sprinted for the cover of woods and orchards, but there were too many open spaces. According to Bayerlein, his men nicknamed the straight road north-east from Vire the ‘fighter-bomber racecourse’. He claimed that by the end of the day the division had lost five tanks, eighty-four half-tracks and self-propelled guns, and 130 trucks, but this was almost certainly a gross exaggeration.[21]
When the advance elements of the Panzer Lehr Division attacked northwards from Tilly-sur-Seulles on the morning of 8 June, the Sherwood Rangers and the Durham Light Infantry towards Lingèvres received the full force. ‘It was a terrible day for the regiment,’ wrote Christopherson in his diary. His squadron on Hill 103 lost four tanks. One of his troop leaders was killed and also his second in command, the poet Captain Keith Douglas. Douglas, who had been reconnoitring on foot, ‘was hit in the head by a piece of mortar shell as he was running along a ditch towards his tank’. He died instantly. Douglas had been the odd man out in this yeomanry regiment. He did not hunt, ride or show any interest in countryside pursuits. In his poem about the regiment, entitled ‘Aristocrats’, he had written:
Yet the regiment always remembered Douglas for his bravery as well as his awkwardness. In North Africa, he had abandoned his post back in Cairo, risking a charge of desertion, to rejoin his squadron when the fighting was at its fiercest. ‘I like you, sir,’ said his soldier servant. ‘You’re shit or bust, you are.’
Christopherson wrote in his diary, ‘In action he had undaunted courage and always showed initiative and complete disregard for his own personal safety. At times he appeared even to be somewhat foolhardy — maybe on account of his short-sightedness which compelled him to wear large thick-lensed glasses.’ The regimental padre, Leslie Skinner, who remembered their conversation on the Sunday before D-Day, when the young captain had talked of his imminent death, buried Douglas by the hedge where he had died.
21
The commander of Panzer Lehr’s repair and maintenance company later wrote that the figure of eighty-four half-tracks lost applied to the whole month of June.