The WWII General Who Broke All The Rules The D-Day Files | Race For The Rhine | S03E01

[00:00:06]August 8th, 1944, 12:31, the call for Les Road, just south of Saint-Aignan-de-Cramesnil.

[00:00:14]SS-Hauptsturmführer Michael Wittmann is driving north.

[00:00:20]No escort, no infantry, two Tigers behind him, 50 m back.

[00:00:25]He has known this road since June. On this axis, he has destroyed more British tanks than any other commander in Normandy.

[00:00:35]135 kills, the man the propaganda machine made immortal, is driving without reconnaissance into a gap he does not know is not one. In the undergrowth east of the road, three Shermans and a Firefly are waiting.

[00:00:50]A squadron, 1st Northamptonshire Yeomanry. They have been waiting since morning.

[00:00:56]Trooper Joe Ekins is at the Firefly's sight.

[00:00:59]He sees the Tiger on the road. He breathes out. He waits until the angle is right.

[00:01:05]First shot.

[00:01:09]Wittmann's Tiger loses a track, slews half off the road.

[00:01:13]Second shot. The turret. The vehicle burns from the inside out.

[00:01:21]First the light, then the smoke, then the jet of flame from the open hatch.

[00:01:27]The crew does not get out.

[00:01:32]Michael Wittmann, 30 years old. His body is not found until 1983 in a field near Santo.

[00:01:40]The Tiger is still burning when, 10 km to the south, a new kind of war begins, not Wittmann's, one he never knew.

[00:01:49]What dies on that road is not only a man, it is the last counteroffensive of a division that has been bleeding since June.

[00:01:56]SS-Brigadeführer Kurt Meyer sent Wittmann because he has nothing else left.

[00:02:02]What Meyer still has, he will need over the next 3 days to hold a line without which Falaise falls open.

[00:02:09]And Falaise cannot fall, not yet. Behind it stands an army group.

[00:02:13]By the end of August 1944, a pocket will have formed between Falaise and Argentan, enclosing over 100,000 German soldiers.

[00:02:22]Two armies, dozens of divisions, all the heavy equipment of Army Group B in Normandy.

[00:02:28]The Allies need two jaws of a vise to close it. Patton is coming from the south. The Canadians must come from the north.

[00:02:35]Operation Totalize is the first grip of the northern jaw, not the last, but without it, the vise does not close.

[00:02:42]Lieutenant General Guy Simonds, commanding the Second Canadian Corps, knows this.

[00:02:48]He also knows what every Allied attack south of Caen has had in common. They have failed.

[00:02:54]Epsom, Goodwood, Spring. The same structure every time.

[00:03:00]The same result every time. The German line holds.

[00:03:04]Simonds changes the structure.

[00:03:06]July 30th, a chateau northwest of Caen.

[00:03:09]Simonds assembles his commanders in the map room. Complete silence.

[00:03:13]>> Gentlemen, the hinge.

[00:03:14]>> What he lays before them has not existed in this war before.

[00:03:17]>> solid plan.

[00:03:18]>> The German defense south of Caen runs on a rhythm. Thin outposts forward, armored reserve behind.

[00:03:24]Overrun the outposts and you run into the reserve. Wait for artillery to destroy the reserve and you lose the moment.

[00:03:31]No Allied attack since the landings has solved that problem.

[00:03:35]Simonds solves it differently. He attacks when the reserve is asleep, at night, and the infantry rides along, not on foot, but inside.

[00:03:44]Since June 6th, thousands of Allied infantrymen have crossed open ground on foot, under fire, without cover, the last 200 m alone. That is the norm of this war.

[00:03:56]Simonds breaks it.

[00:04:01]67 M7 >> Easy now.

[00:04:03]>> Priest self-propelled guns are converted.

[00:04:07]Guns out, armor plating in. Kangaroos, improvised armored personnel carriers, 20 men per vehicle.

[00:04:14]For the first time, infantry rides armored to within 180 m of the objective. Then, dismount. Then, assault. What used to be called a massacre is now called a dismount.

[00:04:27]But, how do you navigate at night through bog and through dust through a front with no clear line?

[00:04:33]Simonds has a system for that.

[00:04:35]Bofors 40 mm guns fire orange tracer bursts to the south every 30 seconds. A glowing thread drawn through the night, always in the direction of advance.

[00:04:44]Artillery fires marker rounds that flare in the sky. Searchlights are aimed from behind onto the cloud cover. No direct glare, just a diffuse glow that brightens the night like a dull full moon. Artificial moonlight, enough to read the horizon, not enough to be a target.

[00:05:00]Somewhere in the assembly areas north of the front, Lieutenant Colonel Donald Worthington is sitting with his commanders over the map that same evening.

[00:05:08]His orders, Hill 195, 6 km south of Sint taken before dawn. The map shows two hills that look alike. In the dark, that becomes a problem.

[00:05:20]The map shows 6 km to the first German line. The night shows nothing.

[00:05:27]2300 hours, August 7th. A thousand British bombers saturate the flanks of the corridor. Not the front, the flanks.

[00:05:34]The corridor stays clear for the columns.

[00:05:38]At 23:30, the first wave moves out.

[00:05:44]What Trooper Allan Hollman of the Fort Garry Horse sees from his Kangaroo is at first nothing.

[00:05:50]Dust. The tank ahead of him throws up chalk earth, white, dense, impenetrable.

[00:05:56]Visibility cuts out at 30 m.

[00:05:59]He drives by compass, holds the needle on southwest, corrects when the vehicle drifts sideways.

[00:06:04]To his left, somewhere in the dust, the other columns must be running. He cannot hear them. He cannot see them.

[00:06:11]Then, through the dust, orange. The tracer thread from the Bofors guns, thin as a line, running south. Holman aligns the bow of his vehicle on it, holds it, drives.

[00:06:23]2 km south of the start line.

[00:06:27]Muzzle flash, left 50 m.

[00:06:30]Holman turns his head. Too late for a thought, too early for a decision. The Sherman to his left is on fire.

[00:06:39]An anti-tank gun position in the sunken lane beside the road heard the column through the dust before it saw it. The gunner reloads.

[00:06:49]Holman's driver floors it. No evasive move, no room, no visibility. Straight ahead. The Kangaroo rams the embankment beside the lane, crashes through the undergrowth, tips half into the ditch, engine still running. Holman is still inside.

[00:07:06]Behind him, a second Sherman breaks from the column, traverses its turret onto the muzzle flash.

[00:07:11]Fires blind into the lane, fires again.

[00:07:14]The anti-tank gun stops firing.

[00:07:17]Holman climbs out, puts his shoulder against the hull of his Kangaroo, three men with him. The vehicle comes upright.

[00:07:23]He climbs back in, drives on.

[00:07:32]The column behind him closes the gap and drives over the burning Sherman.

[00:07:37]At 05:30, the infantry of the 51st Highland Division reaches Sante Nyanga Criminelle.

[00:07:42]Dismount 180 m from the edge of the village on foot the last stretch and they overrun the outpost line before the first flare goes up. The German forward positions never heard the columns coming. Too much engine noise, too much dust, too much night.

[00:08:01]By 1200 hours on August 8th, the entire Verrières Ridge is in Allied hands, 7 km. The line that destroyed Operation Spring has fallen. 1400 hours.

[00:08:13]August 8th, Simonds' orders, phase two.

[00:08:19]The 4th Canadian Armoured Division and the 1st Polish Armoured Division launch the daylight attack.

[00:08:25]At the same time, American B-17s appear over the German positions. Two groups bomb short, 300 casualties among their own troops, including nearly 100 men of the North Shore Regiment positioned in the rear near Caen.

[00:08:39]General Keller is seriously wounded. No radio contact between ground and air.

[00:08:44]The bombers cannot be stopped.

[00:08:46]The momentum of the first night is broken, not by the enemy.

[00:08:51]Matters now is Meyer.

[00:08:53]Kurt Meyer is at the front himself on the morning of August 8th.

[00:08:58]He sees the Canadian spearhead, sees the gap, acts without waiting for a headquarters.

[00:09:04]Remnants of the 12th SS are consolidated with the arriving 85th Infantry Division. Forêt d'Eawy, a dense forest complex between Bretteville-sur-Laize and the main road, becomes the last barrier before Falaise.

[00:09:16]Two Canadian regiments attack. The 12th SS waits until they are within shouting distance.

[00:09:22]Then opens fire from three directions.

[00:09:25]>> Take cover.

[00:09:26]>> 44 dead, 121 wounded. The wood holds.

[00:09:31]That night, Worthington leaves his assembly area. He drives through German lines in the dark with radio interference on both sides.

[00:09:39]Somewhere between Cintheaux and the objective, the column loses its bearings.

[00:09:45]Hill 195 and Hill 140 are 6 km apart. On the map, they look similar. In the dark, with dust and interference and German positions on both sides, they are not distinguishable.

[00:09:58]Worthington halts on Hill 140, reports his position, waits for reinforcement.

[00:10:05]The reinforcement is looking on Hill 195.

[00:10:08]It does not find him.

[00:10:11]At dawn on August 9th, Kampfgruppe Wünsche reidentifies what is standing on the hill.

[00:10:17]Obersturmbannführer Max Wünsche, 12th SS, sees an isolated combat group without communications, without a route out, on the wrong hill.

[00:10:25]He closes the ring from three sides.

[00:10:31]Worthington fights with what he has. His tanks take up positions along the crest, covering every approach. No air support.

[00:10:38]The radio link to the fighter-bombers is not working. No artillery getting through reliably. No relief column finding the way because no relief column knows where he is.

[00:10:49]Requests go out. Answers do not come back. Between Worthington and the rest of the Canadian Army lies a strip of ground nobody controls and a radio that is giving static.

[00:11:03]Morning becomes afternoon. Ammunition runs down. Wounded are collected in a hollow. Worthington holds the line, shifts positions when a sector gets too thin.

[00:11:13]At 1700 hours, a mortar round finds him.

[00:11:16]He falls on the hill whose name he never knew.

[00:11:19]What comes after him is not an ordered withdrawal. It is a breakout in groups at night through German-held ground. 32 men here, 15 there, individual vehicles running without lights. The last survivors reach their own lines in the night of August 12th.

[00:11:37]232 men, 47 tanks, a navigation error of 6 km.

[00:11:45]On August 11th, Simonds calls off Operation Totalize. 9 km gained. Falaise still 16 km away.

[00:11:54]The corridor between the Canadian Army to the north and Patton's Third Army to the south is narrower, but it is open. A German Army Group is still moving east through it.

[00:12:10]Meyer held what he needed to hold. The 12th SS bled white since June, stopped the Canadian Army with what was left of it. Quesnay Wood is still standing.

[00:12:19]Falaise is still German.

[00:12:22]What Totalize leaves behind? A Verrières Ridge in Allied hands, a 12th SS Division pinned in place, a start line 9 km closer to Falaise. That is not the victory Simonds planned. It is the foundation the next attack stands on.

[00:12:39]The northern jaw has gripped, but the corridor is open, and as long as it stays open, an Army Group can escape.

[00:12:49]Who closes it and at what cost is Operation Tractable.