The first advancing GIs passed disabled German vehicles, shattered corpses, and disoriented survivors-but they also found veterans of Panzer Lehr “doing business at the same old stand with the same old merchandise-dug-in tanks and infantry,” Captain Belton Cooper said. Private Gtinter Feldmann of Panzer Lehr later recalled that “the first words I heard from an American were ‘Goddamn it all, the bastards are still there!’ He meant my division.”
German artillery fire on the GIs was also heavy, as some of the dug-in German artillery survived. As darkness came on July 25, little or no gain had resulted from the air strike. Cobra looked to be another Goodwood.
BUT IF THE GIs and their generals were discouraged. General Bayerlein of the 12th SS Panzer Division was in despair. When an officer came from army headquarters conveying Field Marshal von Kluge’s order that the St. Lo-Periers line must be held, that not a single man should leave his position, Bayerlein replied, “Out in front every one is holding out. Every one. My grenadiers and my engineers and my tank crews-they’re all holding their ground. Not a single man is leaving his post. They are lying silent in their foxholes, for they are dead. The Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated.”
July 26 was a day of suspense. The Americans attacked; the Germans held. On July 27 the thin crust of Panzer Lehr disintegrated.
First Army had accomplished the breakthrough, in the process developing an air ground team unmatched in the world. Now, along with Third Army, it was finally going to get into a campaign for which it had been trained and equipped. Now the most mobile army in the world could capitalize on its mobility.
WITH AN OPEN road to Paris, Patton was activated, and all his pent-up energy turned loose. He had come over in time for Cobra, to set up Third Army headquarters. He took command of one corps in Normandy and had other divisions coming in from England. Meanwhile, General Courtney Hodges succeeded Bradley as First Army commander, while Bradley moved up to command Twelfth Army Group (First and Third armies). First Army pressed south as German resistance collapsed.
The Wehrmacht was out of the hedgerows, trying desperately to get away. Patton’s tanks mauled them; the Jabos terrorized them. Destroyed German tanks, trucks, wagons, and artillery pieces, along with dead and wounded horses and men, covered the landscape.
Captain Belton Cooper described the Allied air-ground teamwork. When two Panther tanks threatened his maintenance company from across a hedgerow, the liaison officer in a Sherman got on its radio to give the coordinates to any Jabos in the area. “Within less than forty-five seconds, two P-47s appeared right over the treetops travelling like hell at three hundred feet.” They let go their bombs 1,000 feet short of Cooper’s location: he and his men dived into their foxholes.
The bombs went screaming over. The P-47s came screaming in right behind them, firing their eight .50-calibre machine guns. The bombs hit a German ammunition dump. “The blast was awesome,” Cooper said. “Flames and debris shot some five hundred feet into the air. There were wheels, tank tracks, helmets, backpacks and rifles flying in all directions. The tops of trees were sheared off and a tremendous amount of debris came down on us.”
“I have been to two church socials and a county fair,” said one P-47 pilot, “but I never saw anything like this before!”
THE RETREAT was turning into a rout, and a historic opportunity presented itself. As the British and Canadians picked up their attack, Patton had open roads ahead, inviting his fast-moving armoured columns to cut across the rear of the Germans-whose horse-drawn artillery and transport precluded rapid movement encircle them and destroy the German army in France, then end the war with a triumphal unopposed march across the Rhine and on to Berlin.
Patton lusted to seize that opportunity. He had trained and equipped Third Army for just this moment: straight east to Paris, then northwest along the Seine to seize the crossings, and the Allies would complete an encirclement that would leave the Germans defenceless in the west. Patton could cut off German divisions in northern France, Belgium, and Holland as he drove for the Rhine. That was the big solution. But neither Eisenhower nor Bradley was bold enough to risk it. They worried about Patton’s flanks; he insisted that the Jabos could protect them. They worried about Patton’s fuel and other supplies; he insisted that in an emergency they could be airlifted to him. But Ike and Bradley picked the safer alternative, the small solution. They wanted the ports of Brittany, so they insisted that Patton stay with the pre-D-Day plan with modifications. It had called for Patton to turn the whole of Third Army into Brittany: when he protested that he wanted to attack towards Germany, not away from it, Eisenhower and Bradley relented to the extent that they gave him permission to reduce the Brittany attack to one corps, leaving two corps to head east.