"When they bombed St. Lô," Dad said, "they blew a path through it something like five miles wide and two miles long."
Almost 18,000 bombs fell.
Imagine each bomb as a dynamite-packed car engine falling from the sky.
Now imagine 18,000 such car engines falling and exploding as they hit, churning every foot of ground, digging into history yet filling the air with flying razor-sharp metal casing fragments, subsonic wickering steel.
The Americans on the ground remarked on how lazy the ordinance looked tumbling down and how confidently and slowly the planes flew. The Allies owned the skies. "I don't understand how any of (the Germans) even survived," Lt. Wilson wondered. "Bomb craters big enough to swallow a jeep were so close together in some areas it was difficult for our tank drivers to zigzag through."
Keegan quotes Panzer Lehr commander, Major General Fritz Bayerlein: "...back and forth the bomb carpets were laid, artillery positions were wiped out, tanks overturned and buried, infantry positions flattened and all roads and tracks destroyed. By midday the entire area resembled a moon landscape, with the bomb craters touching rim to rim.... The shock effect on the troops was indescribable. Several of my men went mad and rushed around in the open until they were cut down by [bomb] splinters."
Panzer Lehr was not an easily rattled formation. They did not ordinarily run around like madmen. "The strongest armored division in the German army," Keegan rates it. "Perhaps the best." These were Nazi bad boys, a well-armed, disciplined, ideologically hardened gang capable of living off raindrops and maggots.
But even Panzer Lehr had never seen anything like this: carpets of bombs landing unobstructed — with every watch tick: twenty bombs a second — in one extended blast that flipped entire fields. "The planes kept coming over as if on a conveyor belt," reported the grief-stricken Bayerlein. About 1,000 of his men died, "and at least 70 per cent of my troops were knocked out — dead, wounded, crazed or numbed."
"What Germans were still alive were so shaky they couldn't hold a gun," Dad said. "You couldn't believe the noise. You couldn't distinguish an individual motor. It was just one continuous roar."
Sixty tanks were promised to Bayerlein as reinforcements. Five made it through.
Confronted with a hold-or-die directive from his superior, Bayerlein countered: "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. You may report to the Field-Marshal that the Panzer Lehr Division is annihilated."
Review by Boston University Professor of Humanities, Robert Wexelblatt: "One of the most extraordinary autobiographies I've ever encountered. It is unimpeachably honest, insightful, intimate, touching.... An exceptional book."