D DAY Through German Eyes 2

by Holger Eckhertz

Some of the French also hated General De Gaulle, who they described as a traitor and a coward. De Gaulle and his gang were our enemy too, so we had that in common. After the war, I was amazed that De Gaulle became the president of France!

I could feel the vibrations of their engines in the air . . . probably nobody can understand that sensation unless they have been under an air fleet like that, not with the modern jet engines, but the propellers from those days. The air itself was vibrating around us.

I recently spoke to another German veteran who mentioned that he was surprised that the Allies had brought no horses with them for the invasion. Yes, that was a surprise to us. We commented on it. If that had been a German army, even in 1944, there would have been a lot of horses and wagons there, in the supply element, because of the lack of fuel and trucks. In fact, one of our men stupidly asked one of the American guards, ‘But where are your horses?’ The Americans just laughed at this and gave him a cigarette.

when the Allies invaded Normandy, there were representatives from the Soviet Union among them. Yes, it’s true. Among the American and English troops, there were commissars from the Red Army, who were there specifically to search for the Russian defector troops. And when these Russian defectors were taken prisoner, they were immediately separated off and handed over to the Russian commissars, right there on the beaches. They were put on ships from Normandy and sent back to Russia via the Baltic, back to the Soviet Union. And when they got back, they were all immediately shot as traitors. There was no Geneva Convention for them. The Americans and English didn’t want them executed in France, because it would have been hard to explain after the war. So they handed them over to their deaths. Do you believe this is true? If it is not true, then where are the Russians from Normandy? There must have been ten thousand of them or more, some of us figured out. Did they all just disappear? Where are their graves?

I am not proud of it, but I personally shot up a row of Churchill tank men in that week after the invasion. They were dispersed behind trees in the bocage (hedgerow country), and they had made only basic attempts at camouflage. We got this information about their position from a local French civilian, in fact, who was passing us intelligence about the Allied locations.

The French gave you information about Allied panzer positions? Absolutely, yes. I know this for a fact. Remember, please, that the French were in two minds about the invasion at first: would it succeed, or would it fail? In the first days and weeks, it was by no means certain that the landings were a permanent lodgement, or that they would develop into a full invasion even if they were. Everyone remembered the peculiar attack on Dieppe, when the Canadians invaded but then left after a few hours. Was this going to be a repeat of that, but on a bigger scale? So, because of this uncertainty, many of the French in the Allied zone put their bets on both horses, if you see what I mean, and they played up to the Allied invaders while secretly passing information to us.

The fact was that quite a number of the French followed us out of France, rather than be paraded as ‘collaborators’ and the like by the Allies and the French patriots who sprang up all over the place after the invasion. Such French helpers were welcomed into the Reich, even though they gave us more mouths to feed.

We also passed a group of our soldiers who had survived the bombing, but who had been driven insane by the experience. These men were being kept in a stockade in the open, acting just like helpless lunatics in an old-fashioned asylum. And these were men from the elite Divisions, and SS men among them too, all reduced to this pitiable state.

Herr Lange, it seems to me that the war has affected you deeply, and you seem to be angry about it still. That’s a polite way of telling me I shouldn’t drink schnapps in the morning.

The Sherman began to emit smoke, and the turret hatches opened. Two men came out, and they appeared to be badly wounded and covered in soot. I am sorry to say that one of our men shot them with machine gun fire from a MG42, which was a very accurate and powerful gun. This caused an argument among us, because some of our boys shouted that this was the wrong thing to do, and others were shouting that we must kill all the enemy troops in whatever way possible. This argument did not help the two Sherman crew men, because they were lying dead on top of their tank as it caught fire.

The fact is that this phosphorous chemical went inside some of the men’s bodies, I think because they inhaled it as they struggled around. This stuff was burning them from inside, in their throat and lungs. It was actually setting fire to them from inside.

And yet you said that you admired the Canadians, that you would recruit them yourself? Yes, of course. They knew how to use violence, when to start it and stop it. I was impressed by all this. They were always very professional. To be quite frank with you, having been a prisoner of the Canadians, I would like one day to live in Canada. Of course, that will never be possible for me now. But it is just the way I feel.

We have to be honest today and say that the function of the coastal defences, I mean the emplacements on the shoreline itself, on the sea wall, was only to slow down an attack and give time for the alert to be sounded and a counterattack to be implemented. Of course, the infantry men inside those sea wall emplacements didn’t know this! On the contrary, they were told repeatedly that their mission was to drive the enemy back into the sea, to prevent them moving off the beaches, that not one enemy boot must step past the shore line, and so on. But this was purely to motivate them. We could hardly tell those boys on the sand, ‘You’re only there to slow the Allies down.’

Sorry to interrupt, but the British commandos were classed as terrorists? Yes, exactly; this was decided in late 1943, I think. After that date, all English commandos were executed; I mean, their commandos who operated secretly behind the lines, rather than on a battlefield. This policy was well known to us at the time. By the way, I knew someone who saw the result of a raid the English made on the Calais coast in 1943; the English commandos had used barbed wire as a garrotte to strangle and decapitate the German sentries. For this reason, they were called ‘Churchill’s Rats.’ All of this was going through my mind while I sheltered in the kitchen of that damned house among the floods.

My role as the gunner required me to clean the optics on the gun sight perfectly, and I got the glass ready and applied a small amount of soap to the gun sight lens. Sorry, but why was that? And why do you mention such a small act? This soap was to prevent the optic from steaming up with all the heat and fumes inside the Stug compartment. It was quite effective. I mention it because this was a ritual of mine, in getting the gun ready for combat.

How did this bomb function? How was it deployed? This was not a bomb that you could drop from an aircraft, you see. This early version of Typhoon was actually a very crude system. Essentially, it pumped a mixture of oxygen and coal dust into the interior spaces of buildings such as bunkers or tunnels. Our assault troops would force a gap into the structure, and then they released an oxygen-rich mixture into the inside. This mixture was released from steel canisters containing the oxygen and a pump which blew simple coal dust into the building. How could ordinary coal dust form part of a weapon system? Well, the intention was to replicate the conditions which existed in a coal mine leading to an underground explosion. In coal mines, the air is full of coal dust, which is highly flammable, and if the circumstances are right a spark can set off a catastrophic explosion in which all of the available air, being full of this flammable dust and oxygen, simply explodes.

The system was essentially an explosive vapour which was released into the open air. The vapour consisted of a kerosene base, similar to aviation fuel, blended with particles of charcoal dust and aluminium powder. The charcoal and aluminium particles, which are in themselves explosive, served to accelerate the force of the explosion, and also to make the vapour heavier and less likely to be dispersed by the wind.

And you must bear in mind that the Typhoon B system itself was evolving all the time and was greatly improved by mid-1944. We had developed a denser vapour, which was less likely to be thinned out by breeze, and a self-detonating canister which released its cloud of gas and then ignited the cloud itself as it hit the ground when it was empty.

And was it anticipated that the civilian population of the city would be evacuated before the explosion? That would have been impractical, you must understand. Even the German garrison soldiers themselves were unaware of the presence of the Typhoon system in France. There was no point in briefing them on our presence. If the port was captured, we then had to destroy the port; that meant that the garrison had failed in their task anyway, to be quite frank.

The Northern Irish were the most cheerful people I have ever encountered, before or since. Everything was a joke to them: the war, the world, life, everything was the subject of humour.