On 13 June 1944, a week after D-Day, the British 7th Armoured Division pushed into Villers-Bocage, west of Caen in Normandy, to get round the Panzer Lehr Division. German Tiger tanks ambushed its leading column beyond the town, and the British broke off the fight. Early that day the first V-1 flying bombs hit England.
Battle of Villers-Bocage
13 June 1944 · 82 years ago
A hook round Panzer Lehr
Ellis's British official history gives Montgomery's intention as an attack through Villers-Bocage and Noyers, across the Odon, to seize the high ground above Evrecy. Ellis's source note for the orders of XXX Corps cites an operation instruction of 9 June named "Perch". Stacey's Canadian official history describes the plan, set out by Montgomery on 9 June, as a "pincer movement" to take Caen, with the 7th Armoured Division driving through Villers-Bocage towards Evrecy west of the city and the 51st (Highland) Division attacking east of the Orne towards Cagny.1
On 10 and 11 June the Panzer Lehr Division held up the 7th Armoured Division around Tilly-sur-Seulles. On 12 June the division was switched across the Aure to hook round Panzer Lehr and take Villers-Bocage, while the US 1st Division advanced on Caumont on its right. Ellis writes that taking the high ground behind Panzer Lehr "might compel its withdrawal or surrender". By ten that night, he writes, the leading troops of the 22nd Armoured Brigade were at Livry, five miles from Villers-Bocage.2
Ambush on the Caen road
Early on 13 June the 22nd Armoured Brigade group wheeled left, led by the Sharpshooters (4th County of London Yeomanry) and a company of the Rifle Brigade, and in Ellis's words "Villers-Bocage was reached without difficulty". Harrison's US Army history writes that the town was entered that morning, and Stacey that the division was in Villers-Bocage on 13 June.3
According to Ellis, a squadron of the Sharpshooters, their regimental headquarters and the Rifle Brigade company drove through the town and out along the wooded road rising to Point 213 on the way to Caen. The tanks went ahead while the rest halted behind the crest, "when Tiger tanks swept the column with fire from roadside woods and destroyed all its vehicles". German tanks and infantry also covered the eastern exit of the town, and the rest of the Sharpshooters could not break through. The squadron found Point 213 held by tanks and infantry and, after a fight of some hours, was surrounded and overwhelmed.4
The 1/7th Queen's cleared only the western half of the town, Ellis writes, and prisoners came from the infantry of the 2nd Panzer Division, evidence that another armored division was coming into action on the southern flank. According to Ellis, the divisional commander, Major-General G. W. E. J. Erskine, with his corps commander's approval, decided to break off the fight for Villers-Bocage and strengthen his position on the high ground by Tracy-Bocage.5
Three versions of the withdrawal
Stacey writes that on the evening of 13 June the 2nd Panzer Division counter-attacked and drove the British out of Villers-Bocage, and adds in a footnote that only its infantry fought there, since the division's tanks did not reach the area for several days. Harrison writes that the 2nd Panzer Division, with two infantry regiments and two artillery battalions but no tanks, counter-attacked on 13 June, that the 7th Armoured Division withdrew that afternoon to high ground about two miles west of the town, and that on the afternoon of 14 June renewed attacks led to a further withdrawal of about five miles north.6
In Ellis's account the division held on at Tracy-Bocage and Amaye-sur-Seulles, beat off German attacks on the evening of 14 June, when the fire of something like 160 British and American guns probably settled the issue, and began to withdraw half an hour after midnight. The move was covered by the noise of more than 300 Bomber Command heavy bombers, which dropped over 1,700 tons on German concentration areas at Aunay-sur-Odon and Evrecy, and at five in the morning on 15 June the division reported that it had disengaged. Harrison writes that Villers-Bocage remained about six weeks in German hands.7
"I had to think again"
Ellis prints extracts from one commanding officer's account of that fighting, which his source note traces to the war diary of the 1st Battalion, The Rifle Brigade: "this time it was we who were sitting still and the German tanks who were moving and ... quite a number of them were brewed up".8
On 14 June Montgomery wrote to the Chief of the Imperial General Staff that when the 2nd Panzer Division suddenly appeared "it plugged the hole through which I had broken" and "I had to think again", as Ellis quotes him. Stacey quotes the same letter: the event put "a different complexion on the problem", and the pincer on both sides of Caen gave way, for the moment, to a single blow west of the city.9
Counting the tanks
"In all 25 tanks, 14 armoured trucks and 14 Bren carriers had been lost in the engagement," Ellis writes, a figure for the whole action on 13 June. The division's main tank, he notes, was the Cromwell, with Sherman Fireflies roughly one in four.10
The German reports, in order of publication: on 14 June the Wehrmacht report announced that an enemy armored reconnaissance group that had pushed into the area south of Caumont "wurde restlos vernichtet" ("was completely destroyed", our translation), with no figure and no name. On 15 June the Delftsche courant printed an Interinf report that "pantserjagers" (tank destroyers) had destroyed a strong British reconnaissance force at Villers-Bocage of 15 tanks and numerous armored scout cars. On 26 June the Deutsche Zeitung in den Niederlanden reported that Hitler had awarded the Oak Leaves with Swords to the Knight's Cross on 22 June to SS-Obersturmführer Michael Wittmann, commander of a heavy tank company in the SS Panzer Division "Hitler-Jugend"; its headline credited him with his 138th enemy tank, a career total; the article gave no figure for Normandy.11
On 29 June Het nationale dagblad printed the SS war reporter W. Vergragt, who called Wittmann a company commander in a Tiger battalion and wrote that on the morning of 13 June he and his four-man crew had "21 Britsch-Amerikaansche pantserwagens onschadelijk gemaakt" ("put 21 British-American tanks out of action", our translation); the article does not name Villers-Bocage. Vergragt describes Sherman and Churchill tanks of regimental strength with a battalion of motorised infantry. In Ellis's account the column that drove through the town was a squadron of the Sharpshooters with the regimental headquarters and a Rifle Brigade company, and the division's main tank was the Cromwell. Stacey records that Wittmann, as "commander of the 101st S.S. Heavy Tank Battalion", was killed near St. Aignan on 8 August.12
Battle of Lowestoft, 1665: the day the Eendracht blew up
13 June 1665 · 361 years ago
In the Second Anglo-Dutch War, a great Dutch fleet under Lord Obdam engaged an English fleet of similar size led by James, Duke of York, off Lowestoft. Obdam was killed and his flagship exploded; England won a major victory, though most Dutch ships escaped.
Read the full story of Battle of Lowestoft, 1665: the day the Eendracht blew up ›Also on this day
1944: the first flying bombs (V-1s) fell on England. In his despatch, submitted in 1948, Air Chief Marshal Sir Roderic Hill, who had commanded Air Defence of Great Britain in 1944, wrote that the first came down at Swanscombe, near Gravesend, at 0418, and three more at Cuckfield, Bethnal Green and Platt within the hour; the only casualties were at Bethnal Green, where six people were killed and nine injured. Collier's official history writes that ten were launched, five crashed almost at once, the fate of a sixth is unknown and four reached southern England. Ellis gives four killed and nine injured.13
1944: according to the US Army's official histories, the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division counter-attacked US paratroops at Carentan. Harrison writes that the attack struck the 506th and 501st Parachute Infantry at about 0630, and both he and the War Department's Utah Beach to Cherbourg, on which Harrison draws, record that it drove them back to within 500 yards of the town, that armor of the US 2d Armored Division arrived at 1030 and that the Germans were thrown back with an estimated loss of 500 men.14
