Germans fell all around. The survivors waved a white flag. Coyle told his men to cease fire, stood up, and walked down the lane to take the surrender. Two grenades came flying over the hedgerow and landed at his feet. He dove to the side and escaped, and the firing opened up again.
The Americans had the Germans trapped in the lane, and after a period of taking casualties without being able to inflict any, the German soldiers began to take off, bursting through the hedgerow with hands held high, crying “Kamerad!”
Soon there were 200 or so men in the field, hands up. Coyle went through the hedgerow to begin the rounding-up process and promptly got hit in the thigh by a sniper’s bullet-not badly, but he was furious with himself for twice not being cautious enough. Nevertheless, he got the POWs gathered in and put under guard. He and his men had effectively destroyed an enemy battalion without losing a single man.
It was difficult finding enough men for guard duty, as there was only one GI for every ten captured Germans. The guards therefore took no chances. Corporal Sam Applebee encountered a German officer who refused to move. “I took a bayonet and shoved it into his ass,” Applebee recounted, “and then he moved. You should have seen the happy smiles and giggles that escaped the faces of some of the prisoners, to see their Lord and Master made to obey, especially from an enlisted man.”
E COMPANY’S experience on June 7 was unique, or nearly so-an unguarded German flank was seldom again to be found. But in another way, what the company went through was to be repeated across Normandy in the weeks that followed. In the German army, slave troops from conquered Central and Eastern Europe and Asia would throw their hands up at the first opportunity, but if they misjudged their situation and their NCO was around, they were likely to get shot in the back. Or the NCOs would keep up the fight even as their enlisted men surrendered.
Lieutenant Leon Mendel, with military intelligence, interrogated the prisoners Coyle’s platoon had taken. “I started off with German,” Mendel remembered, “but got no response, so I switched to Russian, asked if they were Russian. ‘Yes!’ they responded, heads bobbing eagerly. ‘We are Russian. We want to go to America!'”
“Me too!” Mendel said in Russian. “Me too!”
The Wehrmacht in Normandy in June of 1944 was an international army. It had troops from every corner of the vast Soviet Empire- Mongolians, Cossacks, Georgians, Muslims, Chinese-plus men from the Soviet Union’s neighbouring countries, men who had been conscripted into the Red Army, then captured by the Germans. In Normandy in June 1944 the 29th Division captured enemy troops of so many different nationalities that one GI blurted to his company commander, “Captain, just who the hell are we fighting, anyway?”
By no means were all the German personnel in Normandy reluctant warriors. Many fought effectively; some fought magnificently. The 3rd Fallschirmjdger Division was a full-strength division-15,976 men, mostly young German volunteers. It was new to combat, but training had been rigorous and emphasized initiative and improvisation. The equipment was outstanding.
Indeed, the Fallschirmjdger were perhaps the best-armed infantrymen in the world in 1944. So in any encounter between equal numbers of Americans and Fallschirmjagers, the Germans had from six to twenty times as much firepower.
And these German soldiers were ready to fight. A battalion commander in the 29th remarked, “Those Germans are the best soldiers I ever saw. They’re smart and don’t know what the word ‘fear’ means. They come in and they keep coming until they get their job done or you kill ’em.”
These were the men who had to be rooted out of the hedgerows. One by one. There were, on average, fourteen hedgerows to the kilometre in Normandy. The enervating, costly process of making the attack, carrying the attack home, mopping up afterwards, took half a day or more. And at the end of the action there was the next hedgerow, 50 metres away. All through the Cotentin Peninsula, from June 7 on, GIs heaved and pushed and punched and died doing it-for two hedgerows a day. It was like fighting in a maze. Platoons found themselves completely lost a few minutes after launching an attack. Squads got separated. Just as often, two platoons from the same company could occupy adjacent fields for hours before discovering each other’s presence.