America in WWII - (Page 33) on Hill 314 to a grand and disturbing sight: all around the hill flowed the traffic of the Lüttich counterattack—troops, tanks, trucks, and artillery. One of the Americans atop the hill was 2nd Lieutenant Robert Weiss, a forward artillery spotter with a radio and four-man crew. He immediately began radioing fire missions to the American artillery. By the time the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division was tasked with taking the hill, the artillery spotters were already making a severe nuisance of themselves. Weiss’s batteryoperated radio was arguably the most important piece of signal equipment in Europe, and the Germans wanted it shut down. T HE DEFENSE OF HILL 314 TURNED OUT TO BE an epic of American arms. The so-called Lost Battalion held out against repeated and determined German assaults. Over and over, Weiss called down the artillery on the advancing Germans, breaking up their assaults. The Germans returned the compliment by plastering the American positions with fire from tanks, 88mm guns, and other artillery. Even before Lüttich had gotten under way, Patton was already devising and then launching his masterstroke of the war. The VIII Corps battle for Brittany was a relic of the Overlord plan. It was time to adapt strategy to the evolving reality of the battlefield. The real opportunity for the Third Army, according to Patton and Bradley, was an end run to the east, around the rear of German Army Group B. Patton ordered Major General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps and Major General Walton Walker’s XX Corps to head east with the eventual goal of reaching Le Mans and making a giant encir- clement of the enemy via Paris and the Ile de France region. This entailed fast armored movement and the capture of terrain ideal for establishing tactical air bases. By the day of the Lüttich attack, elements of the Third Army had moved south to the Loire River, poised for a massive sweep east. Haislip’s XV Corps made a brilliant dash from Mayenne east to Le Mans. On August 10, elements of the Fifth Panzer Army were reorganized into a strike force to reinvigorate the stalled Lüttich operation. Designated Panzer Group Eberbach after its commander, Major General Heinrich Eberbach, the strike force was given the job of breaking through to Avranches. Meanwhile, the Fifth Panzer Army came under the command of Colonel General Josef “Sepp” Dietrich, an old-time Nazi comrade and street fighter. Eberbach had difficulty pulling his strike force together, so he petitioned Hitler for permission to delay his offensive against Avranches until August 20. Meanwhile Kluge was looking at the maps and noting the Third Army’s wide sweep across his rear. It was beginning to look like the Americans meant to encircle Army Group B. Cut off from reinforcement and supplies, such encirclement would mean the destruction of Kluge’s command. Rather than pressing on to the west against ever-stiffening resistance by the US First Army, Kluge thought it was a good time to withdraw from Normandy and make a stand east of the Seine River. Hitler would have none of it. He demanded that the assault on Avranches be renewed. But on August 11 Kluge, Hausser, and Eberbach again asked Hitler to call off the Avranches thrust—but only to preserve troops for future offensive operations. Their wording appeased Hitler’s aggressive instinct. The Führer assented. Above left: Seen from an American aircraft on August 7, 1944, tank tracks reveal German tank drivers’ desperate but doomed struggles to out-maneuver US fighter-bombers and save their equipment and lives. Ultimately, 22,000 German tanks and vehicles of every description were destroyed when Army Group B got caught in a pocket by Allied flanking movements in Normandy. Above right: GIs use a rocket launcher in hedgerow combat on August 2 before the Allies broke through from Normandy’s “bocage” terrain into the open. OCTOBER 2007 AMERICA IN WWII 33
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