The Battle for Normandy 1944 - extract from forthcoming book

Richard Hargreaves · Post by **Richard Hargreaves** » Fri Jun 13, 2003 6:00 am

This is just a tiny extract from my forthcoming book "We Buried Our Best on Foreign Soil: The German Defeat in Normandy 1944" to give those of you who are interested an idea of what to expect.
The finished book is about 300 pages (100,000 words) and should be out early next year (once I find a publisher!!!)
Thanks for all the comments of support so far.
The extract which follows focuses on the aftermath of the fall of Caen and the plight of the ordinary landser...

Amid the carnage of battle southwest of Caen, few landsers found time to reflect upon the enormity of the struggle they had been sucked into. Hauptscharführer Ernst Streng drove through St Martin, "a dreamy little pleasant village on the northeast slope of Hill 112". By the time the Waffen SS and British had finished tussling over St Martin the village "consisted of nothing but ruins" and "broken stones". St Martin and other towns and villages around Caen were subjected to destruction reminiscent of the great battles of materiel of a generation earlier on the Somme, at Passchendaele, at Verdun. In these towns and villages lay burned out armour, their dead crews still inside in most cases. Clouds of thick black smoke tumbled skywards above the burning houses and vehicles. Where once great forests and woods stood, there were merely the blackened stumps of the trunks left. And across the battlefield drifted "the sickly smell of corpses", recalled Erich Werkmeister, of the 10th SS. The troops ate "sweet, hot peach soup". The smell of the dead did not allow them to eat anything else. Frundsberg staff officer Ewald Klapdor marvelled that men could endure this infernal, modern battlefield:

This unimaginable, mad barrage of fire paralyses all life in the area affected. For hours on end there's this dull rumble - monotonous - and the howl and bursting of heavy shells. The earth trembles for many kilometres. And then these gentlemen attack, thinking that our destruction is complete. They break in, or rather break through at one spot, but then the journey to the afterlife begins for them. An unbelievable quantity of ammunition, enormous losses, not the least gain. The moral strain on our men is very great and yet they have chased the English back. They achieve the unbelievable.

Most landsers put their faith in their Führer, their leaders and their comrades. "There's no reason to paint too black a picture," one soldier wrote home. "There are so many good and elite divisions that we must get through somehow. It must turn out alright in the end." The German soldier endured because he had to, because he did not know any differently. "It was a situation for despair," 116th Panzer Division's operations officer Heinz Günther Guderian explained, "but there was no alternative but to keep one's nerve." Some men were motivated to endure. SS battalion adjutant Untersturmführer Eduard Kalinowsky was convinced of the justness of the Nazi cause. He believed the propaganda of 'wonder weapons' and a change in Germany's fortune. "We simply must stick it out," he wrote to his wife. "It is very hard for the soldiers here, for the English and Americans employ an enormous quantity of material, there is almost no end to their air attacks. But these too have abated in recent days and now it's our turn to give them proper hell." Kalinowsky's comrade Untersturmführer Fritz Stamm was similarly convinced of victory. He wrote home:

When I see how they are working here at home and with what composure development of wonderful new weapons is being pursued, then my confidence is strengthened. With its accomplishments, such a nation has no need to be ashamed before the front. Who could conquer such a people may not depend on his guns and tanks alone, but the enemy does nothing else.

Kalinowsky and Stamm were the exception rather than the rule. Most German soldiers believed in the cause, possibly even in victory, but what drove them on was not ideology or propaganda, but what the Nazis called Volksgemeinschaft - spirit of community - that indefinable bond between soldiers in battle, or as one SS panzer commander described it, "sympathy for one another, reliability, loyalty and courage, the invisible bond of the comradeship that units men of different birth, differing age and different rank...In some way, we were a 'family' for ourselves." Most evenings, the men drank and sang songs together to keep their spirits up, but they could never erase the backdrop of battle. "We had a little 'soldier's hour' and sang our soldiers' and folk songs into the night," one landser wrote to his wife. "The evening sky glowed with fire and explosions. One always thinks the earth brings forth new life, but now it is death. What new order will emerge from this devil's symphony?" To endure the strains of battle, Ernst Streng wrote, needed "a touch of shrewdness, a touch of courage, obedience and comradeship and a touch of human understanding". Company commander Emil Ebner found it increasingly difficult to justify counter-attack after counter counter-attack against an enemy superior in men and material. He watched silence as his friend, one Leutnant Roeder, led a flamethrower assault towards American lines north of St Lô:

We made this flamethrower company move to the spearhead of the attack. All that it produced was a ghostly image and I asked the battalion chief why he made such soldiers advance like this in the dark, without preparations. He told me that it had been ordered this way by division. As I had feared, it was a failure. After roughly 10 minutes, you could hear the fire of tanks coming from the direction where our flamethrower section was supposed to be. Then there was a deathly silence. We no longer heard the clatter of battle, even where our grenadiers had made progress in attacking. Leutnant Roeder did not return with his flamethrowers. He was killed. His was probably the first vehicle destroyed. The manner in which we attacked there was irresponsible and I feel angry when I think of it.

The simplest way to survive, one oberscharführer recalled, was to ignore the hell raging around you:

The worst thing which could happen to a soldier was to wait for an attack - if you had time to think about imminent events and become aware of your situation and the consequences. Worse still is if you were surrendered to your fate, helpless, without any chance of being able to do something to counter it. As long as you are geared towards reacting in battle and immerse yourself in it, then you have no time to think about the situation. Our nerves could hardly cope with what was demanded of us during these days. [Report by SS-Oscha Stettner, re: 9/7/44. Stöber, Hans, Die Sturmflut und das Ende: Geschichte der 17 SS Panzergrenadier Division Götz von Berlichingen, Band I, p.165]

Extract from Ch.8 of "We Buried our Best on Foreign Soil: The German Defeat in Normandy 1944" (C) Richard Hargreaves 2003. To be published 2004.

sid guttridge · Post by **sid guttridge** » Fri Jun 13, 2003 10:53 am

Hi Halder,

Interesting stuff.

Slightly off topic - I would advise being fairly explicit in the title. There is a danger of your proposed title being reduced to "We buried our best on foreign soil" and the rest reduced to a sub title. This would make it difficult to identify the subject. I would suggest something a little more direct. "The German Defeat in Normandy 1944" is not as literary, but it is more to the point. Something on those lines might make the book easier to identify over the net, for instance.

I come to this conclusion because for several years I looked for a book on Romania in WWII, only to find that one already existed called "Third Axis - Fourth Ally". The sub title "The Romanian Armed Forces in the European War, 1939-45" (or something like it) was more to the point, but tended to get lost.

Cheers,

Sid.

Commissar D, the Evil · Fri Jun 13, 2003 5:18 pm

How about "Band of German Brothers"?

Cheers,
~D

Richard Hargreaves · Post by **Richard Hargreaves** » Mon Jun 16, 2003 5:04 am

Hmm, Band of German Brothers? Might be sued for copyright! Like the idea though.

I could try "Armageddon in Normandy: The German Defeat in France 1944"

Any more suggestions gratefully received.

Commissar D, the Evil · Mon Jun 16, 2003 9:04 am

Actually Halder, I kind of liked you original idea for a title. I think you should stick with it.

Cheers,
~D

Tom Houlihan · Post by **Tom Houlihan** » Mon Jun 16, 2003 3:17 pm

I printed this off for ease of reading, and finally got to it this afternoon. I liked it. I wanted to turn the page for the rest of it! Keep it coming!!

Commissar D, the Evil · Mon Jun 16, 2003 4:49 pm

Yes Halder, forum rules require that a least a chapter of any upcoming book be posted here!

(Do you think he'll fall for that Tom?:)

Best Regards,
David

Tom Houlihan · Post by **Tom Houlihan** » Mon Jun 16, 2003 9:48 pm

Hey, it can't hurt to try! We'll just tell him that it's in the fine print. Besides, you're a Commissar. He can either believe you, or be shot! I'd just go ahead and post the chapter...

heinz kling · Post by **heinz kling** » Mon Jun 16, 2003 10:06 pm

May be just call it Die Fahne hoch.

Richard Hargreaves · Post by **Richard Hargreaves** » Mon Jun 16, 2003 11:50 pm

Thanks for everyone's encouraging words. Maybe 12 years' research have not been in vain after all!
I won't print an entire chapter, (nice try guys) but here's a short excerpt from the tail end of the chapter on the Falaise pocket...

Ewald Klapdor and his men dashed down the gentle slopes and towards the valley floor. With each salvo from Allied artillery, the Waffen SS men buried themselves in the ground as best they could. The staff car suffered a direct hit and blazed uncontrollably, its dead driver behind the wheel. To stay in open ground was to court death. The remnants of the Frundsberg headed for the Dives. But not all of them. By now many men were resigned to their fate. Death or captivity. "For several days now we have been inside the pocket," one forlorn medic jotted in his diary. "We are supposed to fight our way out. Our comrades of the infantry fall like flies. There is no leadership left. I don't want to fight anyone, it is so useless. God grant that we get out of this alive." Near the eastern edge of the pocket, Klapdor came upon a sunken road. Salvation was maybe a few miles away, but many men refused to accept it.

There's a scene of devastation - all manner of burned and wrecked vehicles. Soldiers have dug into the slope's sides so deeply that you fear the holes will collapse. Some have been killed in their foxholes by splinters from trees; others crawl into the holes and shelter next to the dead. The floor of the hollow is littered with the dead. No-one buries them. We have to clamber our way over the corpses of horses, which already smell.
We order individual soldiers to come with us. But they merely stare at us not understanding, fear and terror written all over their exhausted faces. They are simply waiting for the moment that they are led away into captivity - the moment of salvation.

It was early afternoon when von Lüttwitz reached the River Dives before the village of St Lambert, a few miles upstream from Trun. The Dives was the last major natural obstacle barring the Germans' exit from the Falaise pocket, a few feet deep, a few feet wide. But almost every bridge over the Dives had been destroyed. At St Lambert, one still stood. Here was the exit from the Falaise pocket. "The crossing of the Dives was particularly grim," Lüttwitz recalled. "Men, horses various equipment was thrown from the bridge into the Dives where they formed a macabre mess." The bridge running into St Lambert was proving to be a bottleneck, as Ewald Klapdor noted:

A vast cemetery of vehicles spreads out in front of the bridge. Blackened, burned out wrecks, overturned horse-drawn carts, the corpses of horses all over the place and on top of each other. Leaning against a burned-out heavy truck there's a motorcycle, its burned rider still sitting on it. Terrible! Here in front of the Dives bridge, death has reaped a terrible harvest.
Things are no different on the road to the village. Slowly we make our way. Everywhere there is this sweet smell mixed the smell of something still burning.

Extract from Ch.11 of "We Buried our Best on Foreign Soil: The German Defeat in Normandy 1944" (C) Richard Hargreaves 2003. To be published 2004

Commissar D, the Evil · Tue Jun 17, 2003 7:09 am

Excellent Halder! I'm an Ostfront sort of guy myself, but for this book I'll take the plunge and start saving up my ducats. Best Regards, David
(P.S. Please stick with the original title.)

Richard Hargreaves · Post by **Richard Hargreaves** » Tue Jun 17, 2003 7:38 am

Excellent Halder! I'm an Ostfront sort of guy myself, but for this book I'll take the plunge and start saving up my ducats. Best Regards, David
(P.S. Please stick with the original title.)

I'm glad people like the snippets I've posted. So many books on WW II are either just plain wrong (if I see VON Paulus one more time I'll scream) or dull, going into the minutiae of battles but missing the point of the big picture and what it was like to be there.

I'll stick with the original title as long as someone can prove to me it's a genuine WW II saying. I think it is "We buried so many of our best on foreign soil", but I cannot find the reference.

Any thoughts on my next book? It's either going to be the opening months of WW I from all sides, or the Battle of France 1940, although I may be tempted to tackle Kursk which there isn't really a truly great book on in English.