Had the Nazis been able to cause us one-tenth the damage which that storm dealt us, Dr. Goebbels would have had sound warrant for going all out on the radio to proclaim it to the world as a major German victory.
It looked to every person gazing then on the remains as if the Artificial Harbors were through—and so also was our invasion. All the Nazis had to do now to toss our armies back into the sea was to stage immediately their dreaded counterattack. We were helpless to resist. What I had so fondly looked on during my last day at Omaha as our certain assurance of victory—something wholly beyond Rommel’s power to destroy—lay now before Bradley’s eyes and everyone’s there, destroyed. Though by nature’s hand, not by Rommel’s. But what difference did that make? It was destroyed.
And surely now the Nazis knew it. For the first night of the full storm, the night of June 19 when no longer did we have any manned AA guns on the Phoenix line to keep them off, had seen more Nazi planes over Omaha dropping mines in our offshore shipping areas than on any night since first we had landed there. Undoubtedly then the Luftwaffe had scouted also the harbors to see what the storm was doing to them—now they must know. And soon would come the result of that knowledge—the crushing impact of Rommel’s Panzers driving toward the sea on our armies, fatally handicapped by lack of ammunition to hold them back.
To that part of our harbor forces which still survived, battered, seasick, totally exhausted by their struggles against the storm, anguished at the destruction that for four agonizing days and nights had gone on under their very eyes, there seemed no other possibility. The disaster was irretrievable. The invasion of Normandy must now collapse—unless swiftly we captured the port of Cherbourg in immediately usable condition—a wholly hopeless dream. For Rommel would not hesitate to sacrifice a French port when its destruction served Nazi interests.
CHAPTER 34
While still the storm was raging in the Channel, Commodore Flanigan sent for me. Once again I heard my assignment on a future project was suspended. There had come in an urgent radio from the Far Shore, asking my immediate return to the Omaha Beach. I was to proceed instantly to Portsmouth and there catch the first dispatch boat able to get to sea again. I was to do what I could to get Mulberry back in service. Never mind how long it might take me. I could forget Antwerp yet awhile; it could wait. Unless Mulberry soon started functioning again, we’d never get to Antwerp anyway.
Early on June 23, aboard one of the Coast Guard’s 83 foot picket boats I was on my way out of Portsmouth. From the young ensign who was its skipper, I got an impression of what the storm, now subsiding, had been as seen by those at sea. He himself was much shaken. He (an experienced amateur yachtsman before the Coast Guard grabbed him) had somehow managed to get his boat back into port the first day of the storm. That was more luck than some of his fellow Coast Guard skippers had had. Two of them at least, boats and crews together, had gone down in the gale—no survivors. And so had some of the Phoenix tows and much else that had been caught at sea on June 19.
Of course, after all that, nothing had gone to sea again until this morning. All shipping in the Channel had been halted, all planes had been grounded. The weathermen in the U. K. now were announcing it had been the worst June storm to hit the Channel in eighty years. And we had caught it on the chin, wholly unwarned of its coming, even as a matter of fact, promised good weather instead.
Why that had been allowed to occur seemed a puzzle. Our weather experts were first class—they had done an excellent job with their D-day forecasts. But perhaps the reason was that this storm had struck us, not from the westward as just before D-day, but from the northeast. In that direction lay Scandinavia and Holland, all in Nazi hands, from which we could get no weather data. Possibly we were as blind in forecasting weather originating across the North Sea from Norway as the Nazis had been, pre-D-day, in predicting what was coming across the Atlantic from Greenland or the Azores. At any rate, our lack of warning had cost us plenty.
What actually it had cost us, I never even vaguely appreciated till later that day I stood myself again on the Omaha Beach, gazing on wrecked landing craft in every direction and on such destruction as I could not have imagined possible from any cause—either from the fury of man at his worst or from nature at her most violent. Inshore lay a beach strewn with wrecks. Offshore lay the sunken ships of the Gooseberry breakwater, most of them now (including even the monster Centurion) with broken backs from the pounding they had received. And to their left, the concrete line of Phoenixs, with here and there huge chunks chewed out of that wall where the Bombardons had hammered them. And finally, the two long Whale roadways, now two twisted and pathetic strings of wreckage running out to the heavily battered and partly foundered pierheads. It seemed wholly unbelievable.
But it was so, and something had to be done about it.
Fortunately that was immediately possible. With the wind died away and the. tides once again down to normal, the Gooseberry breakwaters and the remains of the Phoenix walls, badly battered though both were, once more were providing fairly smooth water in the inner harbor—plenty smooth enough for small craft to operate in.
Already the bulldozers were pushing or pulling aside enough wrecks here and there once more to allow workable though narrow passages for Dukws up the sands and on to the beach road leading to the draws. And the Dukws then saved the day, and no doubt the invasion also.
For while by the hundreds the little landing craft, the LCM’s and the LCT’s, were being pounded to junk on the beaches or against the Whale roadways, the Dukws (except for the three lost the first afternoon) all safely nestled well inshore on the plateau near their various dumps, rode out the storm on land, no more bothered by it than their half-brothers, the trucks, also parked on the bluffs above the beach.
The Dukws now waddled down from the plateau and swam nobly into action alongside coasters and freighters brought into the inner harbor, and even out to those in the rougher water outside. Aided by the LCT’s and the LCM’s which had survived (about half the total) a veritable miracle in cargo handling was achieved. 10,000 tons of cargo (most of it ammunition) were brought ashore on June 23, the first day after the gale, topping by a thousand tons the best record the port had ever made even before the storm. And next day, on the 24th, even that record went by the board—11,500 tons came in, to be topped again within two days on June 26, when working frenziedly to make good the deficit in ammunition before the enemy should strike at us, the men on the Omaha Beach landed through the Mulberry Harbor 14,500 tons of supplies—not too far from double the 8000 tons it had been hoped for from Mulberry in pre-invasion days!
Rommel had lost his golden opportunity. Heaps of artillery ammunition adequate to counter any attack now rested safely ashore in the dumps. With Cherbourg likely now soon to be in our hands and the guns which were so voraciously chewing up ammunition in its reduction, silent after that for a few weeks till they should open again for a breakthrough at St. Lô on the southern flank, those heaps could grow substantially. We were safe.
Meanwhile, a battle of a different nature was in the making on the Omaha Beach.
To back up the Dukws flotillas in unloading, the second order of business had been to clear away the wrecks from in front of the Colleville and St. Laurent Draws where the LST’s had before grounded out to unload. That also was swiftly done since the wrecks there were all small. And soon, directly over the beaches, once again LST’s (none of which had been lost in the storm) were discharging their loads of warlike materials, from tanks rumbling ashore on their tractor treads to G.I.’s stumbling ashore under inhuman packs on their own two feet.
The only drawback to all that grounding of the LST’s on a big scale was that once an LST had beached itself on a high tide for unloading, it had to wait idly by for the next twelve hours till high tide came again and it could haul free for a return to the U. K. and another load. Whereas the Lobnitz pierheads and the Whale roadways had taken care of unloading and starting an LST back to the U. K. i
n not over forty minutes. With the result that that same emptied LST was already back in England, reloaded and once again headed back for Normandy in less than the twelve hours she would have lost sitting idly on the beach at Omaha waiting for the next tide to float her free.
The haggard Captain Clark, who literally had put his body and his soul into the project for making all that possible, once clearance work enough had been done to get the Dukws going.again and the LST’s unloading on the sands (although with considerable lost motion due to beaching) pressed eagerly for the rehabilitation of the pierheads. Would I next check the condition of the Lobnitz pierheads and their now no-longer-floating roadways and advise whether it might not be possible to get at least part of them working again? It would practically double the usefulness of the LST’s, the most valuable vessels we had in supporting the invasion, if only their turnaround time on Omaha could once again be reduced to the forty minute period he had averaged in getting ashore the heavy artillery and the tanks in the three days before the storm.
All that was logical enough and worth tremendous effort. Considering the millions and millions of dollars and the year of labor poured into Mulberry, it was reasonable to put in whatever more of effort might make it produce to the limit. I started a detailed survey of what wasn’t smashed beyond swift repair in that tangled mass of pontoons, bridge trusses, and pierheads. Considering that it comprised originally materials for three roadways and six pierheads, surely we should be able swiftly to salvage from what was there on Omaha enough to put back into service one roadway and two pierheads. And perhaps within a month or so, to repair enough additional parts so that with what was still in England, we could place a second roadway and two more pierheads back in action. It would be of tremendous value in unloading LST’s swiftly.
Having put together in Massawa from cannibalized pieces of smashed machinery a whole naval base sabotaged by the Italians, complete from shops through piers to drydocks, I had no doubt a similar result could quickly be obtained from cannibalizing the wreckage of the floating piers in Omaha. I would guarantee it.
I told Clark so.
Eagerly Clark rushed to the higher naval command afloat for authority to start. But all he got for his enthusiasm for rehabilitation was ice-cold water thrown in his face. The naval command afloat had never taken much interest in Operation Mulberry—it didn’t then, when part of it was smashed by what some claimed wasn’t even a storm really—just a “strong breeze.” Why bother further?
And besides, Cherbourg was about to fall within a day or two—that was certain, and then we should have a real port. The largest salvage group the Navy had in Europe was at hand on the Near Shore, ready and itching to move immediately into Cherbourg behind our invading troops, and decidedly lukewarm to the idea of anyone’s dallying with anything less dazzling. Within three days, so they calculated, based on some experience with what had happened in Nazi-damaged Naples harbor before its evacuation the year before, they would have the port of Cherbourg open and ready to begin operations. Why waste any more effort on the damaged installation, after all a makeshift harbor anyway, of Omaha?
The Omaha Beach had had its day. Cherbourg would swiftly make it wholly superfluous. That the thoroughgoing Rommel and his unhurried naval subordinate, Admiral Hennecke, might present us with a situation very different from that left by a Nazi general hastily evacuating Naples, seems not to have entered their thinking.
So Captain Clark was flatly refused permission to attempt any restoration of his damaged pierheads. What might appear salvable to them, the British could have for repairs and extensions to their Mulberry B installation on their beaches to the eastward. That British artificial harbor, remarkably enough due to a location naturally less exposed to the fury of a storm from the northeast, and due partly also to its still uncompleted state, had emerged with far less damage. The most that would be done at Omaha would be to bring additional Phoenixs from England to patch the holes in the breakwater punched by the Bombardons, which last, of course, would never be replaced. With only those minor repairs, our Mulberry Harbor might make out as best it could for the remainder of its existence, which would now not be long under any conditions. From the rosy estimates passed along to the higher command by the waiting salvage parties, Cherbourg should be operating within the week.
Captain Dayton Clark, utterly worn down anyway by his hectic drive to get his harbor swiftly into operation after D-day, then broken in body by his four day battle with the elements to save it from destruction, now broken in spirit by this last rebuff, could take no more. The day after the capture of Cherbourg, June 26, he was on his way back across the Channel, bound for the Near Shore and hospitalization—as much and as badly wounded an invasion casualty as if on D + 1, one of those Nazi shells bracketing the first vessels he was sinking on the Gooseberry breakwater had burst in his face.
He had had it.
CHAPTER 35
The attack on Cherbourg opened on June 21 with a general assault on the perimeter of bunkers and strongpoints ringing the city. On June 22, the Air Corps was called on for a daylight strafing attack by fighters on all these defenses, to be followed by 1100 tons of bombs. After twenty minutes of fierce fire from the fighter planes, 375 heavy bombers came over to finish with an hour’s attack concentrated on the six major forts in the defense ring.
The material damage to the enemy was apparently not great. But the effect on the morale of the Nazi defenders was terrific—the sight of unopposed Allied fighters and bombers having a field day in the skies over them with never a single plane of the Luftwaffe coming to their aid was too much. While they were frenziedly being urged by Hitler to die for Cherbourg, why, the defenders asked, weren’t Goering and his Luftwaffe there to die with them if Cherbourg were that important?
On June 23 and 24, against weakening but still substantial resistance, the VII Corps pressed forward into the inner defenses. A major assault was scheduled for June 25 against the line of inner forts, of which Fort du Roule, crowning an eminence completely dominating all of Cherbourg and its harbor, was the main objective.
To make the attack decisive in shattering what will to resist the Nazis had left, Bradley asked Admiral Kirk for a naval bombardment of the harbor forts while he smashed against the landward ring. Bradley well knew that the Cherbourg naval batteries outranged the guns Kirk had and that Kirk could do them no real damage; still he felt certain that the moral effect of heavy American shells falling on Cherbourg from the sea outweighed the risks to Kirk and his ships and would hasten the collapse of the defense.
Kirk obliged.
The battleships Texas, Nevada, and Arkansas under Rear Admiral Carleton Bryant were to make the main attack. Supported by the cruisers Augusta, Quincy, and Tuscaloosa under Rear Admiral Deyo and assisted by the British cruisers H.M.S. Glasgow and Enterprise, the fleet stood in for a long range engagement with the numerous coastal defense guns facing the sea from Cherbourg. Admiral Bryant, knowing very well that the shore batteries had him outclassed, cannily offered the enemy eight different targets to keep his fire dispersed, and then kept all his own warships steaming erratically at high speed to make them as poor targets as possible while they poured in their shells to burst on what they trusted were the Cherbourg gun positions; whether they hit them or not was not too important.
While neither Bradley or Kirk knew it then, they got precisely the reaction they were hoping for. Not a bursting naval shell ever hit anything that made a difference so far as anyone knew. But the resulting thunderous explosions, heard most distinctly by every Nazi in a Cherbourg bunker as well as by von Schlieben, had the exact effect desired. First that strafing from the skies, then the battering from landward on their casemates by 155 mm. shells from our G.I.’s with their multitudinous “Long Toms,” now this hail of heavy shells from the seas—it was all too much for the harassed and hopeless defenders. Von Schlieben, begging permission by radio of Rommel to surrender, noted:
“In addition to superiority in materiel a
nd artillery, air force and tanks, heavy fire from the sea has started, directed by spotter planes. I must state in the line of duty that further sacrifices cannot alter anything.”
But to this Rommell, his hands tied by Hitler’s orders, could make no answer save:
“You will continue to fight until the last cartridge in accordance with the order from the Fuehrer.”
Offshore, having fired shells enough to make the proper impression on those on the receiving end in Cherbourg, when the shore batteries there finally began to straddle even his fast moving ships and bursting shells started to explode on his flagship, the Texas, Admiral Bryant discreetly withdrew, along with all the rest of the fleet.
Meanwhile, as this bombardment from the sea was adding the last straw needed to terrify the already demoralized defenders, the 314th Infantry, aided by the 311th Field Artillery, was attacking Fort du Roule, a towering precipice looking about as impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar. But nevertheless, in a fierce all day battle, fought out finally practically hand to hand under the stone walls of the fort with hand grenades and satchel charges, they overwhelmed it.
On June 26, with G.I.’s now breaking into the city itself from all sides, General von Schlieben and Admiral Hennecke, military and naval commanders respectively, together with 800 troops were all caught in an underground bunker cut out of the solid rock, forming the defense command post for Cherbourg. They refused a demand to surrender, but changed their minds when a tank destroyer fired several rounds into the bunker entrance.
So on D + 20, with its defenses everywhere collapsing and our troops pouring into the city, Cherbourg fell into our hands.
That night over the radio on the Omaha Beach I listened to Goebbels announcing what one might think had been a major disaster to German arms, but it wasn’t exactly put that way. As Goebbels told it, it seemed that the valiant defenders of Cherbourg, after exacting an unheard of toll of dead from the attackers for each inch of ground, finally with their last cartridge expended, had been forced to lay down their useless rifles. Their unparalleled defense was a glorious page in the annals of Hitler’s Reich. Heil Hitler!
The Far Shore Page 32