CARENTAN

This is a typical example of German troops that have already pulled back out of a city, in this case Carentan, and left some units behind. In this case two MG-units and snipers, in most cases only snipers. What here is depicted as a quick action was in reality a cumberome operation that could last up to days. Allied troops had a healthy dislike for German snipers who were difficult to take out and usually disappeared when the pressure got too great.

An American journalist in Italy:

'Always and everywhere procedures and patterns were the same. German guns betrayed their presence. We called our planes to bomb them, and then we concentrated our own artillery, too numerous to be opposed, and they shelled the German guns. Thereupon the infantry flowed slowly ahead. At each strongpoint or villages there were . . . a few snipers to be blasted out . . . [Then] the news would go out to the world that the place was ‘liberated’. This is the way it was, day after day, town after town'.