The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe by William I. Hitchcock Read Free Book Online

coordinate aid to the wounded. The firefighting equipment was destroyed. “ The population was literally crazed, seized by panic, and trying to flee the city into the country- side. People were running about in nightshirts, bare- foot, without having had the time to put on the least clothing. The city was enveloped in a yellowish smoke and dust from all the shattered buildings. It was an in- fernal scene.” The best he and his civil defense teams could do was try to get the wounded to Le Bon Sauveur,
    and gather up the horribly mutilated corpses and pile them up at the Central Commissariat. “ Where, when, how would we bury them?” 23

    Had the liberating troops arrived in Caen on June 9 or 10, with offers of aid, food, medicine, bulldozers to clear rubble, manpower to restore public services, then perhaps Caen’s liberation would have gone down as merely one of many sad chapters in a war that took so many civilian lives. But Caen’s travails were far from over. By June 10, the Anglo- Canadian troops north of Caen were no closer to taking the city than they had been at midday on June 6. Indeed, with the Germans pouring reinforcements into Normandy, and espe- cially north and west of Caen, the city lay just behind an ever-strengthening German perimeter. With the Americans heavily engaged in the Cotentin peninsula, where they were trying to seize the port of Cherbourg, the British slugged it out with the Germans for every inch of ground around Caen. After the initial assault of June 6–8 had failed, General Montgomery directed another major attack in an attempt to outflank Caen, aiming his tanks at Villers-Bocage, a small town some 12 miles southwest of the city. Historian Max Hastings has called this battle a “wretched episode,” in which the British were thoroughly outfought by the German defenders; but Monty tried again on June 26, sending
    three divisions—60,000 men and 600 tanks—crashing into the German line west of Caen, running out toward Tilly-sur- Seulles. This was Operation Epsom. It too failed. 24

    The implications of these military operations on the western outskirts of Caen were grave indeed for the civilians in the city. German concentrations in and around the city were under assault from the air or from artillery, and the city endured near-constant fire. Thousands of the city’s inhabitants sought shelter in the hospital of Le Bon Sauveur and other points des- ignated as welcome centers (centres d’accueil ) by the city authorities; the thick walls of the old churches like Saint-Etienne offered shelter to thousands of citizens, sprawled amidst the pews on beds of straw. But op- erations to provide basic services, shelter, and medi- cal care were severely compromised by the shelling. Aid workers painted red crosses on the grounds and buildings of Le Bon Sauveur and on the Lycée Mal- herbe, a school across the street whose cafeteria had been turned into a hospital ward. Even so, on June 9–10, two hundred artillery shells, intended for Ger- man positions on the outskirts of town, landed on Le Bon Sauveur and fifty-seven hit the Lycée; more than 50 people were killed. On June 12, a huge artillery shell struck the superb steeple of the church of Saint-Pierre,
    a beloved landmark in the center of town. It crashed down in pieces, a Gothic masterpiece wiped out in a flash. On June 13 and 14, the shopping districts, cafés, and hotels of the center of town were all set ablaze, and without water the firefighters had no hope of contain- ing the flames. Le Bon Sauveur, which in normal times handled 1,200 patients with a staff of 120 nuns, was now packed with 2,000 refugees and 1,700 wounded. Work- ing around the clock with few supplies, no electricity, and only what water could be pumped manually from the wells, a handful of doctors tried to treat the worst cases. They achieved great things, conducting some 2,300 operations between June 6 and August 15, relying on a patched-together staff of 31 doctors,