Chapter 17
CHAPTER 17: BACK TO THE BOCAGE
It was quite a relief to return to our familiar orchards, woods and hedges, after being bombed and shelled continuously in the open fields south of Caen. Not that there was any rest for the Division. On 31st July we were launched into an attack to capture the high ground of Mount Pincon. We recalled dimly that this had been an objective to aim for on D plus One, nearly two months before, if we had met little opposition.
We had now parted company with one of our leading tank regiments, the 4th County of London Yeomanry. This regiment was far below strength after the losses at Villers Bocage and the later tank battles. They left us to be amalgamated with the 3rd CLY in the 4th independent Armoured Brigade, the only other formation to boast a desert rat as its badge. Theirs was black instead of red and faced the other way from our jerboa. In place of the CLY we were given the 5th Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards, the ‘Skins’, newly arrived from England to see their first action since 1940.
Back again in the Briquessard area, we had the strange experience of trying to recapture ground which we had first occupied a week after D-day, and had lost in the retreat from Villers Bocage. It wasn’t any easier now. The Germans fought a bitter defensive battle, taking full advantage of the bocage countryside, now heavily mined. The Division continued to suffer many casualties: one of our Troop Commanders, the quietly spoken Robert Whitley, was killed by shell fire when manning an O.P. But yard by yard, with their left flank crumbling before the threatened American break-out, the enemy withdrew.
Even when the Germans withdrew, the pace of our advance was slowed down by the extent of destruction. Two towns on the line of advance, Villers Bocage of vivid memory and Aunay-sur-Odon a few miles to the south, had been reduced to vast heaps of rubble by heavy shelling and bombing. They were vital road junctions but no roads were visible among the ruins. Before the Division could make headway, bulldozers had to clear a way through or around the mountains of rubble, while the air was thick with dust rising from the fallen buildings. By 9th August the Division had slowly and painfully gained the Pincon objective. The infantry and tanks were withdrawn from the front for rest and refit. As usual, the two artillery regiments of 3rd and 5th RHA did not share this experience. We remained in action to support 43rd Division which had taken over our sector of front. At this time there were changes in the senior command of the Desert Rats. Our genial General Bobby Erskine was succeeded by Major-General Verney from the Guards while Loony Hinde handed over 22nd Armoured Brigade to Brigadier Mackeson.
It appeared later that Monty made these changes because he was dissatisfied with the performance of the Division. To his eyes it appeared that we had lost the adventurous aggressive spirit that had inspired our success in the desert. Other commentators, more distant from the battle, have expressed the same view. It may be that we were beginning to suffer from battle weariness. Certainly our commanders were less willing to send their men in to be killed and wounded unnecessarily, as they saw it, than were new generals anxious to win their spurs. Monty’s rare orders to capture an objective ‘at all costs’ were never taken literally.
The whole Division, to a man, resented these changes in command. We didn’t want Generals and Brigadiers who hadn’t got their knees brown in the desert.
I saw these new men at hastily convened field conferences that I attended with Colonel Peter. I thought they were poor stuff. Verney had had little battle experience with tanks. He was hesitant and indecisive when rapid action was demanded: at one point when the battle turned to pursuit he wasted a vital half hour making up his mind. Mackeson, from the well-known brewing family, was a stupid man whose bluster failed to conceal his incompetence. Both Verney and Mackeson were in turn replaced before the winter. After the war Verney wrote quite a good history of the Division and Mackeson became a Tory M.P. I think it was a tragedy that Erskine and Hinde were replaced just at the time when their experience of mobile armoured warfare would have been of most value.
By 14th August the Germans realised that they could no longer contain the bridgehead, and were in retreat on all fronts. The Canadians had at last broken through south of Caen on the extreme left of our line. On the right, the German counterattack towards Avranches on the American front had been thrown back with fearful casualties, especially from air bombing. In the centre, our task was to advance south towards Falaise, before wheeling left and heading for the Somme.