Why the Allies Won by Richard Overy

Author:Richard Overy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448112388
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2017-06-25T16:00:00+00:00

7

A WAR OF ENGINES

Technology and Military Power

‘… modern imperialist war

is a war of engines

– engines in the air and

engines on the land.’

N. Voznesensky, Chairman

of the Soviet State Planning Commission, 1940

* * *

ONE OF THE most famous of the German armoured divisions, the Panzer Lehr division commanded by General Fritz Bayerlein, experienced in 1944, at the height of the struggle for Nomandy, the full weight of Allied technical might. The hapless division, reduced after 49 days of continuous fighting to a mere 2,200 men and 45 serviceable tanks, held a stretch of French countryside 3 miles wide south of the town of St Lô. It sat right in the path of overwhelming American forces poised for the breakthrough – Operation Cobra – which destroyed the German front in France.

On the morning of 25 July waves of American Thunderbolt fighter-bombers swept over the division, every two minutes, fifty at a time. They dropped high explosive bombs and napalm incendiaries. They were followed by four hundred medium-bombers carrying 500-pound bombs. Then from the north came the sound every German soldier dreaded, the heavy drone of the big bombers – 1,500 Flying Fortresses and Liberators. From their swollen bomb-bays 3,300 tons of bombs obliterated almost everything on the ground. Finally, the German line, or what was left of it, was pounded by three hundred Lightnings carrying fragmentation bombs and more of the new incendiaries. It was an awesome display of power, numbing and terrifying for the soldiers and French civilians who lay under it. One survivor remembered that everything shook so much ‘it was like being at sea in a force 10 gale’.1

Almost half the Panzer Lehr remnant perished in the bombardment. Hundreds more were killed or blasted by the barrels of ten thousand American guns that opened up as the last aircraft disappeared from view. Bayerlein later told his captors that the experience of that morning was the worst he ever saw in battle. In front of him stretched a moon-like landscape, so filled with dust that German artillerymen were forced to fire blind at the oncoming enemy. All communications were destroyed. He could see no human life left where the bombs had fallen. To the astonishment of the Americans the bemused and wretched dregs of Panzer Lehr fought on, until they were swept aside by American armour the following day. Bayerlein reported that evening the utter destruction of his division. The same night the American General Hobbs, leading the assault, reported his success: ‘This thing has busted wide open.’2 Panzer Lehr’s few survivors joined the general retreat across France. When they were regrouped beyond the Seine they could find only twenty tanks and six self-propelled guns and a handful of lorries. From then until the end of the war this elite Panzer division averaged a strength of only 22 tanks instead of the 74 it should have had. Most of those who joined the division in 1944 soon became casualties, victims of an exceptional disparity in firepower and mobility between Germany and the western Allies.

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