Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (30 page)

There was a legendary exchange between Bradley and Collins at this time, when the First Army commander received a characteristic signal from Montgomery declaring loftily that ‘Caen is really the key to Cherbourg.’ Collins exploded: ‘Brad, let’s wire him to send us the key!’
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Yet while the Americans interpreted Montgomery’s words both as an excuse for British difficulties around Caen, and an attempt to diminish that which they themselves were seeking to accomplish in the Cotentin, Montgomery was correct. Almost every single German formation of quality was fighting against the British. There could be no comparison between the difficulty of facing 12th SS Panzer or Panzer Lehr, and that of rolling up the weak enemy divisions falling back on Cherbourg.

Not that this diminishes the qualities of speed and energy which VII Corps displayed in reaching the great port. Collins was already revealing himself as one of the outstanding personalities of the campaign. The tenth child of a Louisiana Irish family, he was 48 years old. Like so many other American career soldiers, he had spent years between the wars gaining age and enduring stagnation, seemingly without hope of glory or professional fulfilment. In 1920, when he found himself demoted to captain in the general post-war rundown of the services, he considered resignation. He was 44 before he attained a lieutenant-colonelcy, and it was January 1943 before he saw action for the first time, as a divisional commander in the Pacific. As a young man, he had considered becoming a lawyer, and possessed uncommonly catholic tastes for a soldier. He had travelled widely in Europe and the Far East, was a fine shot and an opera lover. A ruthless driver of men, he unhesitatingly sacked officers of any rank who failed to match his standards. Beyond the various divisional and regimental commanders whom he dismissed in the weeks after D-Day, he
disposed of an operations officer who persisted with the fatal American army pre-war doctrine of placing unit boundaries on high ground, and an artillery commander who seemed unable to understand the vital importance of forward observation. Intolerant of excuses, he had a superb eye for an opportunity on the battlefield: American – and British – forces in Normandy sorely needed more commanders out of his mould.

Just 22 hours after gaining Barneville, having achieved an astonishingly rapid change of axis through 90 degrees, Collins’s men began to push north for the port. Middleton’s VIII Corps, newly operational, accepted responsibility for securing the American east–west line while VII Corps drove for the port. Collins was already agitating for a leading role in the push south when Cherbourg fell. Bradley told him: ‘Troy [Middleton of VIII Corps] likes to fight, too.’

The intensity of rivalry between senior officers in battle is often difficult for civilians to grasp. But it is a simple fact of life that for professional soldiers, war offers the same opportunities and fulfilments as great sales drives offer corporation presidents. This is not a moral judgement, but a reality as old as war itself. All that was new in the Second World War was that unique opportunities were available to commanders on the battlefield to ingratiate themselves with newspaper correspondents, and thus to make themselves national figures. In the British Army, only an officer of Montgomery’s rank could exploit this. But within the American forces in Normandy, many divisional commanders competed ferociously for publicity for themselves and their formations, and there was bitter jealousy, for instance, of the fame of ‘The Big Red One’.

The battle for Cherbourg

At 2.00 p.m. on 22 June, preceded by a massive air bombardment, the Americans opened their attack against the three ridge lines on which the German outer defence of Cherbourg was centred. ‘The combat efficiency of all the [defending] troops was extremely low,’ admitted a German writer later.
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Cherbourg’s defences had been designed principally to meet an attack from the sea, and in an exercise early in May, General Marcks had demonstrated their vulnerability to landward assault by breaking through at exactly the points at which the Americans now attacked. Collins later expressed his astonishment that the Germans failed to make a stand on the outer range of high ground around the city, instead retiring immediately to the inner forts. They appeared to lack not only the numbers, but the will to conduct such a defence. Four German battle-groups had been formed from the remains of the units which had retreated up the Cotentin, and static defence in fortified positions is the least demanding role for poor-quality troops. If the Americans were able to mount their attack without enduring forceful counter-attacks, of the kind which were creating such difficulties for the British around Caen, it remained a harrowing task for infantry to advance into the intense machine-gun fire from the huge concrete bunkers.

Major Randall Bryant’s battalion had fought a procession of minor skirmishes against pockets of German resistance up the peninsula, in one of which Bryant surprised himself as much as his men by successfully bouncing a bazooka round off a road into the belly of a German tank – the Americans had learned by bitter experience that direct fire would not penetrate its armour. Now, in the streets of Cherbourg, they began two days of nerve-racking house-to-house fighting on the road to Fort du Roule. They learned
by experience the techniques of covering the building opposite while squads leapfrogged forward, paving their path with grenades, for it was a skill in which they had never trained. The enemy’s massive network of strongpoints had to be reduced one by one in dogged fighting, the assaulting infantry scaling the open approaches under withering machine-gun fire.

9th Division gained Octeville, and the 314th Infantry stormed Fort du Roule by other examples of the sacrificial courage which alone enables infantry to seize strongly fortified positions. When Corporal John Kelly found his platoon pinned down by machine-gun fire, he crawled forward to fix a pole charge beneath the German firing-slit, but returned to find that it had failed to detonate, and went back with another one. This time, the explosion blew off the protruding gun barrels, enabling the corporal to climb the slope a third time, reach the rear door of the pillbox and grenade it into silence. Lieutenant Carlos Ogden cleared the way for his company by knocking out an 88 mm gun with a rifle grenade although already wounded in the head, ignoring a second wound to run forward with grenades and silence the supporting German machine-guns. Both Kelly and Ogden were awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor.

Underground in their tunnels and bunkers, thousands of German personnel lay crowded beneath the bombardment: naval ratings, Luftwaffe ground staff, supply units, clerks – all the ragtag of a huge base wretchedly conscious of their isolation and disheartened by days amid the stink of their big generator motors, and the dust and cordite fumes filtering through the caverns. On a wall map in General von Schlieben’s command post at St Sauveur, on the southern outskirts of the city, his operations officer, Major Forster, marked the remorseless progress of the American advance – Collins’s men had unknowingly bypassed the German’s switchboard bunker, leaving their communications intact. On
26 June, the unhappy von Schlieben surrendered with 800 of his men when tank destroyers began firing direct into the tunnel entrances above him. Major Randall Bryant was beside Manton Eddy, the divisional commander, when a tall, dignified German officer detached himself from the long file of surrendering defenders emerging from the arsenal and announced formally: ‘I am von Schlieben.’ The astonished Eddy showed the general to a jeep and took him away to his command post for lunch. Bradley, however, declined to entertain the German because of his anger that he had protracted Cherbourg’s defence at such cost in American lives, and had finally refused to order a total surrender of the port after his capture.

Organized resistance in Cherbourg ended only on 27 June, and the 9th Division was obliged to fight hard for several days more to reduce the defences of Cap de la Hague, at the north-west tip of the peninsula. In the city, Eddy led a desperate attempt to control the men of his division as they ran riot among captured stocks of brandy, wine, champagne. At last he retired in despair, declaring, ‘Okay, everybody take twenty-four hours and get drunk.’
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Hundreds of cases of looted alcohol were loaded aboard captured German vehicles and followed units of VII Corps across Europe. Half a case of champagne was sent to Bradley, who touchingly sent it home to the US to toast his grandson on his return in 1945. Randall Bryant’s officers’ club was still drinking its share of the proceeds of Cherbourg in Germany in 1946.

Bryant’s battalion regretted its excesses on the morning of 28 June, when they began a long foot march towards Cap de La Hague, following the German formation signposts. They reached the entrance to a huge underground bunker without opposition, seized the single enemy sentry guarding it, and advanced warily inside, pistols in hands, towards the sound of voices. They found themselves in a room full of German officers clustered around a table laden with a large ham. Dean Vanderhouf, the battalion commander, rose to the occasion. ‘Stop!’ he called to his astonished audience. He leaned forward to seize the ham: ‘I’ll take that.’ The
Americans were uncommonly lucky. Other units endured hard fights at Cap de la Hague.

In the month of June, VII Corps had captured 39,042 prisoners and achieved the first American objectives of the campaign. General Collins had proved himself an outstandingly energetic and skilful corps commander, just as General Maton Eddy had shown his capabilities at the head of the 9th Division. The reduction of a ‘fortress’ that Hitler had ordered to resist for months gave sufficient exhilaration to the Allies to mask the disappointment of their commanders when they received the first reports from Cherbourg harbour. The port facilities of Naples had become operational just three days after the city fell, and some such new miracle had been looked for at Cherbourg. Instead, Bradley’s engineers found the shambles created by one of the most comprehensive demolition programmes in the history of war. The OVERLORD logistics plan called for Cherbourg to discharge 150,000 tons of stores by 25 July. In reality, the port received less than 18,000 tons by that date. In was late September before it approached full operational capacity, by which time almost every harbour in France and Belgium was in the hands of the Allies. The drive for Cherbourg thus failed to achieve its immediate strategic purpose of accelerating and securing the Allied build-up. But of this, little needed to be said in the days of exultation following the most spectacular Allied ground gains since the landings. It was only Eisenhower, Bradley and Montgomery and their staffs who were conscious that the battle for the northern Cotentin had lasted many days longer than they had hoped or planned for and that, while it persisted, little progress was made with the drive to gain fighting room further south. On 27 June, when Everett Hughes brought Eisenhower news of a renewed delay to movement by First Army, the Supreme Commander reflected moodily: ‘Sometimes I wish I had George Patton over there.’
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