The Bloody Battle for Tilly: Normandy 1944 by Ken Tout

Author:Ken Tout [Tout, Ken]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: World War 2
ISBN: 9780752499857
Google: WfE7AwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 1860868
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2000-11-25T10:00:00+00:00

Seven

Operation Totalize – Eating Dust

Our countrymen faced this enemy in our fathers’ time, by which the whole army earned as much glory as its commander. They faced them again more recently in Italy.

(Julius Caesar, 58 BC)

‘I have no doubt’ (said Crerar) ‘that we shall make the 8th of August 1944 an even blacker day for the German armies than is recorded against that same date twenty-six years ago.’

Night. Midnight. Black dark. Then bleeding green and red. A desecrated land. Littered with defunct bodies, animal, human and mechanical. Stench of putrefaction, human and animal; of burning rubber, scorched steel, reeking explosives. Noise: monstrous, inhuman drumsticks beating on eardrums. Motion: constant, juddering, sickening. One night. Unique. 7/8 August 1944.

The night was terrifying enough for tank crews, trained to grapple with the fear of being trapped inside a travelling incinerator. It was worse for . . . those driving cumbersome ‘Crabs’, lumbering tanks festooned with jibs, rotors and weighted chains to flail the ground for mines. . . . But it was probably worst for the infantry. Many of them were not walking but had been piled suddenly into open-topped armoured vehicles which would be called Kangaroos . . . . There, cramped in groups of ten they were made to ride through the night . . . knowing the rapidity with which such vehicles could catch fire. ‘All the ingredients of a Horror film’, thought one.1

This grand march was supported by attacks by heavy bombers designed to obliterate the towns that eluded capture during Atlantic and Spring. Totalize was an extraordinary offensive, of such Cecil B. DeMille proportions that it overwhelmed senior officers in briefings.2

We were formed up in dead ground just south of Caen by 2210 hrs on the 7th August. It was a perfect summer’s evening and the tightly packed column looked as though it was drawn up for a ceremonial parade. We crossed the Start Line at 2330 hrs. . . . All went well for the first mile, but, as soon as the barrage started, the column was immediately enveloped in a dense cloud of dust which made it impossible even to see the tail light of the tank in front. The Regimental Navigator had so far not heard a sound from his beam wireless and his compass started swinging wildly in all directions. He could see nothing in the thick haze and his light tank very shortly ditched itself in a bomb crater about ten feet deep.3

I was rolling along in formation, watching the ranks of tanks ahead when they hit a very bad patch of mist. I was astounded when the four vehicles ahead, being very confused, divided themselves conveniently to the four winds, N, S, E and W, and were never seen again. . . . Two flail tanks had collided, with booms interlinked, like two fighting elephants with their tusks jammed together.4

The tank commander in front and someone in the slit trench have thrown grenades at each other. No more movement down there. Commander in front points energetically down right.

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