Six Armies In Normandy by John Keegan

Author:John Keegan
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781446498132
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

Yeomen of England

CAEN, FIRST-DAY OBJECTIVE of the British Liberation Army, still lay on July 6th just beyond its grasp. It had been outflanked to the east, where the ‘airborne bridgehead’ ran along the shallow valley of the Orne under the commanding chimneys of Colombelles, since D-Day itself. And to the west, where in late June the Scots of the 15th Division had clawed their way to the left bank of the Odon and where the Canadians on July 4th had driven their outposts to the open plateau of Carpiquet airport, it was now overlooked by the Allies from the high bocage. Its necklace of outlying villages, St Manvieu, Norrey-en-Bessin, Villons-les-Buissons, Anisy, Périers-sur-le-Dan, Blainville, Ste Honorine-la-Chardonnerette, now marked the forward positions of an almost complete encirclement. But the chef-lieu of the département du Calvados, capital of the province of Basse-Normandie and seat of the duchy from which William I had taken ship to add England to his lands, still lay in German hands.

Its month-long isolation from the battlefield had not meant its escape from the reach of the fighting. At 3 p.m. on D-Day, after leaflets had been dropped to warn the inhabitants that the railyards and electrical generating station were going to be bombed, 600 aircraft of the Eighth USAAF had run in over the city and released their loads on to its historic centre. The medieval quarters of St Pierre and St Jean had been reduced to ashes and rubble, the distinctive houses à pans de bois burnt, the stone buildings tossed to pieces and the enormous blocks of the white pierre de Caen of which they were built thrown down to choke the roadways. Fires took hold among the ruins and raged for eleven days, during the first of which the survivors who remained were tortured by the cries of hundreds entombed in the cellars of their collapsed houses. Piecemeal destruction continued meanwhile. Standing far out to sea, the heavy ships of the bombarding force were constantly called on to lay down fire on the city. ‘Interdicting fire’ was the technical term, designed to deny the use of the routes through the city to the enemy. But most of the routes were already impassable and the shelling merely added to the destruction. On June 9th the spire of the church of St Pierre, to which Pugin had brought fellow Gothic Revivalists to study the original in its most perfect form, was hit by a shell from HMS Rodney fourteen miles offshore, and felled. Sixteen direct hits struck the near-by convent of le Bon Sauveur, a mental hospital in which 400 nuns cared in normal times for 1,500 women patients. Their number was swelled in the first week of the invasion by 4,000 refugees who believed that its status would protect them from bombardment. When the shelling continued the Mother Superior led the occupants in a mass exodus from the city. The sane found refuge with the 10,000 other fugitives who had taken shelter in the caves of

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