Vimoutiers in 1944 during the Battle of Normandy

Vimoutiers (Orne)

The Tiger I 224 tank from Vimoutiers.
Photo: DR

• Liberation: 21 August 1944
• Deployed units:

Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada, 5th Canadian Infantry Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division

18th Armoured Car Regiment, 12th Manitoba Dragoons, 2nd Canadian Corps

2. SS Panzer-Korps

• History:

On June 7, 1944, the day after D-Day, multiple air raids targeted Normandy towns that could serve as transport hubs for German reinforcements to reach the coast. The Vimoutiers railway station was not spared by the Allies. Less than a week later, on June 14 at 7:50 a.m., another bombing raid hit the center of the village: 16 B-26 Marauder aircraft dropped their bombs, some of which did not explode until the evening. The population, who had been invited to take shelter in the countryside before D-Day via leaflets, had returned to their homes after several days without raids. More than 170 residents were killed and 376 homes were destroyed. The hospital was damaged by this bombing, and some of the 400 wounded were taken into care at Vimer Castle in Guerquesalles.

A few weeks later, on July 17, a German Horch model 830 BL car was machine-gunned by an Allied fighter-bomber in the immediate outskirts of Vimoutiers, near the village of La Gosselinaie, shortly after 4:30 p.m. On board were four occupants: Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel, commander of Army Group B, accompanied by his aide-de-camp Hauptmann Lang, Major Neuhaus, Feldwebel Holker, and Oberfeldwebel Daniel, who was piloting the Horch. Hit by a 20mm shell, the vehicle struck a tree on the shoulder and overturned. Rommel was seriously injured (he lost an eye, suffered a fractured skull, and a concussion), and the driver died a few hours later. The Generalfeldmarschall was transported aboard a German truck to the Livarot hospital, where he was treated.

From mid-August, the village witnessed the rout of several hundred German soldiers and vehicles from the 7th Army, who were trying to escape the trap that the Allies were gradually closing in on them. On August 20, all available armored vehicles in the Vimoutiers sector were engaged in a desperate counterattack towards Trun: the crews, harassed by the Allied air force and regularly engaged against their adversaries, did not spare their engines: several of them encountered mechanical failures due to overheating, others simply had no more fuel, the successive slopes having taken their toll on the vehicles’ excessive consumption. Five tanks from the SS Schwere Panzer-Abteilung 102 were thus abandoned by their crews at the exit from Vimoutiers towards Gacé, after having been summarily neutralized. One of them, the Tiger I tank numbered “224” and commanded by SS-Unterscharführer Herbert Reisske, is still visible today, a few meters from where it stopped.

On August 21, Lieutenant General Guy Simonds’s 2nd Canadian Corps sought to close this exit by heading towards Gacé. He first ordered the 2nd Infantry Division to capture Vimoutiers and secure a crossing over the Vie River. After a long infiltration through the dense bocage, the Black Watch (Royal Highland Regiment) of Canada reached the town in the mid-afternoon. Around 7:15 p.m., the 3rd Battalion began reconnaissance of Vimoutiers and confirmed that the bridge was intact. However, it had to repel several German infantrymen tasked with slowing the Allied advance there. At the end of the day, at 10:26 p.m., reconnaissance units of the 18th Armored Car Regiment took up positions in the village for the night.

For the next forty-eight hours, fighting continued on the outskirts of Vimoutiers, still within range of German artillery. The Canadian Chaudière Regiment also crossed the village on August 22nd around 8:00 p.m. Unable to hold the ground, the Germans launched harassing fire to maintain pressure on the Allies. The latter continued to suffer heavy losses: the 1st Battalion, Black Watch, reported the loss of 34 of its troops on August 23rd alone due to this fire.

Vimoutiers map: