Goodwood War Walks

MUSIC: "In The Mood" by Glenn Miller

In July 1944, the British Army staged its biggest-ever tank attack.

Many hoped that it would be the great breakthrough,

a charge to shatter the Germans and win the battle for Normandy.

Referring to the glories of British horse racing, it was codenamed "Operation Goodwood".

On the 6th of June 1944, the Allies landed in Normandy in the greatest-ever seaborne invasion.

In the days and weeks that followed, they poured in men and equipment.

Some of them landed here at Arromanches

at the artificial Mulberry Harbour whose durable remains are behind me.

There were two harbours.

Each as big as the port of Dover, they enabled the landing of men and equipment on an unparalleled scale.

By the end of June, less than a month after the landings,

the Allies had 875,000 men and 150,000 vehicles in Normandy.

MUSIC: "In The Mood" by Glenn Miller

But they were going nowhere.

Landing in Normandy was relatively easy. Breaking out into France was much more difficult.

The landings, along a 50-mile stretch of Normandy coast, had been a huge success.

But the Allies found it hard to exploit their advantage and were slow to begin their advance inland.

I'm going to follow the route the Allies took in early June as they attempted to move inland,

beyond the coast they'd seized on D-Day.

Their forces moved west of Caen into the countryside known as Bocage.

It's made up of fields surrounded by hedges growing out of high banks.

In 1944, it covered a huge area, and the Allies had no choice but to fight their way through it.

There's less "bocage" than there once was, as ancient hedges get grubbed up to make big new fields.

But we can still gain a very vivid sense of how terrifying it must have been to fight here

with minimal visibility and knowing the enemy might be round the corner.

The area seemed made for defence and the Germans pinned the Allies down.

In this war of attrition, the Allies had a big advantage over the Germans in that they had many more tanks.

But tanks were of limited use in the labyrinth of the bocage, and were very vulnerable.

This is cheap and simple. It's called a "Panzerfaust" - tank fist.

This shaped charge will go through the armour of a Sherman tank.

To fire it, you simply flip up the sight - it's only sighted to 60 metres - cock it, aim and fire.

You chuck it away and grab another.

Germany infantry used these in their hundreds in the bocage,

taking on tanks from point-blank range and then scampering back to another hedgerow to try again.

This fighting style wore men out and led some Allied commanders to wonder how they'd EVER get out of Normandy.

Their tanks were obviously not going to get them through the bocage, so the Allies relied on their infantry.

For them, it was every bit as dangerous as the First World War. They suffered very high casualties.

But after four weeks of fighting,

they were still stuck fast, just a few miles from the sea.

This cemetery at Bayeux is the largest Second World War British cemetery in Europe.

It is tragic evidence that by July 1944 the Allies had suffered severely.

The British had lost nearly 25,000 men, killed and wounded.

When considering what to do next,

British commanders were anxious to let armour plate bear the brunt.

The British Army was simply running out of men.

In the air, however, it was a different story.

Allied fighters and bombers enjoyed absolute command of the skies.

The Allied commanders planned a new break-out that would utilise their air power.

Their target was the city of Caen, the historic capital of Normandy.

It's a thriving city today, showing little sign of the horrors that it witnessed in 1944.

But the town's new university is symbolic.

It represents the resurrection of a city that was all but obliterated by the Allies who came to liberate it.

I'm up on the battlements of William the Conqueror's castle in Caen, just a few miles from the sea.

Caen had been a D-Day objective, but the Allies had failed to take it.

A month after the landings, it was still in German hands.

Allied bombing proved to be a blunt instrument.

Caen and its people suffered badly; the Germans, scarcely at all.

Andre Heintz was a resistance worker in Caen.

-You were here during the war?

-Yes.

-How many aerial raids do you recall?

-Well, I remember at least 24 after D-Day until the liberation of Caen.

-And which was the worst?

They were all bad, but especially the four that involved more than 300 planes.

-Were many people killed?

-Probably 6,000, which is a lot,

but at one time, we thought there might be many more than that.

-What did people do while all this was going on?

-The people all rushed towards that church over there -

the Abbaye aux Hommes, the men's abbey.

There were at least 16,000 people sheltering there.

On the night of the 7th of July,

the city was pounded by 460 heavy bombers.

The British hoped to obliterate the Germans, take the city and then sweep into the open country beyond.

The bombing produced so much rubble that the advance ground to a halt.

Caen's southern suburbs remained in German hands.

Yet another Allied breakthrough attempt had failed.

The need to achieve the elusive break-out

was becoming an increasing problem for the Allied ground forces commander, Sir Bernard Montgomery.

Montgomery set up his headquarters here at Creully, near the invasion beaches.

It was typical of the spartan Monty to live, not in the chateau itself, but in a caravan in the garden.

His armies, Bradley's Americans to the west and Dempsey's British and Canadians to the east, were stuck.

Montgomery was under pressure to do something.

In mid-July, he wrote that he'd decided to have a real showdown

and to send three armoured divisions into the country south-east of Caen.

We can't be sure if he really expected to break through,

or simply to attract German armour so that the Americans could stage an attack of their own called "Cobra".

In any event, this was the genesis of Operation Goodwood.

Goodwood was to be a tank battle on a scale never seen before in Western Europe.

The British had 2,500 tanks in Normandy.

Montgomery planned to use them to take the pressure off the infantry.

The workhorse of Allied armoured divisions in Normandy was the American-built Sherman.

The Allies had almost limitless supplies of Shermans, with thousands leaving American production lines.

Victory in Normandy would depend on the performance of the Sherman and its crew. Men such as Ken Tout.

-Well, Ken, shall we look inside?

-Why not?

Ken, you were a Sherman gunner in Normandy. Who else was in the crew?

You had five on the Sherman, which had this 75mm gun.

There would be the commander - Ken Snowden from Darlington - whose knees would be stuck in my back,

and where you are, there would be the loader, Tommy Tucker, who was always eating.

In front was Rex Jackson, who got the Military Medal, and lives in Braintree.

Rex was the co-driver with his own machine gun, and the driver was Stan Hickin.

The five of us were a family living together, in touch with each other.

What did your job actually involve?

Well, as the gunner, you were simply concentrating on this gun.

You had a periscope here to look through

which gave you a sort of camera angle on the outside.

You could then control the gun here, which is fired by triggers.

I've got two little triggers down here - left foot or right foot.

What was it like living in a tank?

You had the stench of the cordite as the tank gun opened up and ejected all the gas and smells.

You had the sweaty smell from fear and unwashed bodies - you didn't often get the chance to shower.

You had the difficulty of natural functions - you couldn't get out to do the toilet.

So you'd take an empty ammunition tin and you'd discreetly do a pee in the corner.

All that together and worse things - it's not unknown to vomit with fear.

This, after say 24 hours, in this little space, accumulated a smell which is undescribable.

It was only equalled by the smell outside of literally thousands of dead cattle unburied

and bodies unfound and unburied, which pervaded the atmosphere from the beaches upwards.

This was the Allied front line.

Goodwood was to take place on the 18th of July, south-east of Caen.

The landscape is open, rolling plain. It was good tank country.

It was the best option for a break-out, led by the armoured divisions.

The plan was for a massive aerial bombardment to breach German lines,

then British armour would pour into the open country beyond.

Montgomery may not have been confident of a breakthrough,

but the Goodwood creator, General Dempsey, was optimistic.

"It's more than possible," he wrote, "that the Huns will break."

The Germans had fortified a belt of villages running across the plain

and extending about six miles in depth.

Most villages had a small garrison made up of tanks, artillery, infantry and anti-tank guns.

They were to be attacked by three full-strength British armoured divisions, following 2,000 bombers.

The effect was to be shattering.

MUSIC: "Four Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten

The bombardment was on a vast scale, many times greater than the raid that had devastated Caen.

The villages themselves were almost wiped off the map. Centuries of history obliterated in a morning.

The school in Demouville may look old, but it was rebuilt from a pile of rubble after the war.

So many of these Norman villages were completely destroyed and only rebuilt after the war.

The war memorial lists the civilians killed, including the mayor.

It was hellish even for the Germans. Their tanks were thrown like toys.

One remembered how it was a regular carpet bombardment,

"Amongst the sound of the explosions

"we could hear the screams of the wounded and those driven mad."

To take advantage, the British had to quickly launch their tanks.

But there was a problem.

Most still had to cross the Orne and the Caen Canal to reach the plain.

The British built three pairs of bridges - one here, one upstream and one downstream -

to ferry the three attacking divisions.

There were over 8,000 vehicles in all.

Surprise was essential for the success of Goodwood.

But the Germans could observe the area from the chimneys of a factory outside Caen.

So the river crossing had to be made at the last minute.

It was a bottleneck and the armoured divisions were crawling forward

when they had to be at full speed.

To make matters worse, this area, which the attackers had to cross, was a minefield.

Some narrow gaps had been made, and at 7.45 the two leading regiments -

3rd Royal Tanks and the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry - squeezed through.

This is an anti-tank mine. It is buried just below the surface.

It supports the weight of a soldier, but blows up when a tank crosses it.

Ironically, it's a British mine. The British laid hundreds of mines here in the weeks before Goodwood.

They hadn't marked their position properly and the whole area had been disturbed by shell-fire.

Of the first British tanks blasted, many were blown up on British mines.

I've walked about two miles south from the minefield.

In 1944, there was a railway line here and the leading tanks got this far with little difficulty,

passing ruins and shell-shocked Germans with British artillery fire falling just in front of them.

The battlefield was so narrow that the attackers were stacked behind a single regiment, 3rd Royal Tanks.

Just behind them were the Fife and Forfar Yeomanry with Lance Corporal Ron Cox.

"We moved forward some distance behind a barrage and then stopped.

"I remember opening a new tin of jam and spreading it thickly on biscuits and passing them round the crew.

"We exchanged banter.

"I think the humour was a bit forced for we were all aware that this would be something big.

"My own emotion was a kind of numbed fatalism."

The Allied tank crews knew the dangers that lay ahead.

Most German tanks had better guns and the Sherman had a fatal tendency to explode as soon as it was hit.

The worry was that you knew just behind you - that distance away -

you had a massive engine and petrol tank notorious for exploding

and you'd just seconds to get out.

It'd go up in flames. The Germans called the tank a "Tommy cooker",

which was funny unless YOU were the Tommy involved.

The depressing thing was that the Allies' tanks were not as powerful as the German tanks.

You knew you were a featherweight going up against Mike Tyson.

It was horrifying that there was a Tiger tank out there

that could knock you out from a mile and a half.

-What range would you have to get to?

-With this gun, about 200-300 yards!

The Allies expected to lose at least five Shermans for every Tiger they managed to destroy.

It was a dreadful rate of exchange, but the Allies could afford it much better than the Germans.

By mid-morning, the attacks seemed to be going well for the British.

3rd Royal Tanks had passed Cagny, just in front of me,

and the Fife and Forfars were coming on between here and that hamlet.

At this stage, Major Hans von Luck, a regimental commander in 21st Panzer Division, arrived.

Luck reached Cagny to see four 88mm Luftwaffe guns, barrels skywards.

He told them to face the tanks, but their captain wanted to hit bombers.

Luck drew his pistol and told the officer that he could win a high decoration or die on the spot.

The officer did the rational thing and soon that field was filled with burning Shermans.

MUSIC: "Four Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten

The 88s firing from here were anti-aircraft guns

and these huge brass shell cases pushed their shot out at thousands of feet a second.

This is what did the damage.

It's a steel, armour-piercing shell.

When it hit a Sherman, it almost never failed, in the jargon of the day, to "brew up".

3rd Royal Tanks were clear of Cagny when the Luftwaffe 88s opened fire.

The regiment crossed that railway line and immediately came under fire from anti-tank guns in this village.

Major Bill Close remembered that they dealt with some German guns simply by running over them.

"The anti-tank guns were a different matter.

"At very close range, they hit three of my tanks which burst into flames

"and I could see that the squadron on my left also had several tanks blazing."

The Royal Tanks had orders to bypass the village

and pushed on under another railway line using tunnels like this.

The regiment could now see its final objective, the Bourguebus ridge.

By midday, the British were making slow but steady progress across the battlefield.

Yet if the bombing had at first anaesthetised the Germans, its effects had now worn off.

The defenders of the villages ahead were ready for the British attack.

Worse still, the experienced 1st SS Panzer Division crept round Caen

and by midday, its tanks and assault guns were in position on that ridge.

Despite earlier losses of about 12 tanks apiece,

the Royal Tanks and the Fife and Forfars still had 40 tanks each.

Early in the afternoon, they began to attack that ridge.

The Royal Tanks on this side of the line made for Hubert-Folie and Bras.

One officer wrote...

"I saw many Shermans in flames and thought there'd soon be nothing left."

MUSIC: "Four Sea Interludes" by Benjamin Britten

Wounded crews came back here to the embankment.

The Royal Tanks had lost 41 of their Shermans. It was clear that, for the time being, the attack had stalled.

Regiments in the rear were still advancing when wounded men and crippled tanks began to limp back,

withdrawing from the ferocious German fire.

Thick pillars of smoke marked the fate of the two leading regiments

when the 23rd Hussars advanced in the hope of supporting them.

Lieutenant Geoffrey Bishop described hearing his squadron leader give his orders in an excited, clear voice.

They were to be his last.

Then it was the familiar story of Shermans brewing up. The regiment lost 26 very quickly.

Lieutenant Bishop was about here.

He describes how "the medical officer had fixed up a dressing station in a signal box

"and casualties started streaming back from the burnt-out tanks.

"The chaps were all blackened, their clothes burnt.

"A tank which had survived came roaring back with the wounded."

The Northamptonshire Yeomanry made the last charge of the day and lost another 16 tanks.

By now it was perfectly clear that there wouldn't be a breakthrough.

The British, however, held their ground and managed to push further forward over the next two days.

The total advance was just seven miles, but it was a valuable gain.

Montgomery issued a press release extolling the success of Goodwood.

But when it emerged how small the advance had been for such losses,

he found himself in hot water with the politicians and his superiors.

One historian called Goodwood, "the death ride of the armoured divisions".

The British and Canadians lost 400 tanks and nearly 6,000 men.

The battle was more a blood bath than a breakthrough.

The best we can say of it is that it brought the Allies one step closer to liberating Normandy.

This memorial on Montormel commemorates the Allies who died at the end of the battle for Normandy.

Less than a week after Goodwood, the Americans began Operation Cobra and soon broke out deep into France.

In early August, the Germans were trapped between the Allied armies down there in the Falaise pocket.

In these killing fields, the Germans were strafed by aircraft and bombarded by artillery.

About 10,000 of them were killed and 50,000 were captured.

By the end of August, the struggle for Normandy was over.

A historian must never say "never", yet we may hope it marks the end of a barbarous dynasty of battles,

which had ruled Western Europe for more than five centuries

since English archers and French knights fought to the death on the field of Agincourt.

Subtitles by Keir Murray BBC Scotland - 1996