Next day I drove from the Omaha Beach through shattered Montebourg and Valognes into Cherbourg to estimate for myself how soon Cherbourg might take over as a seaport. As usual, I traveled in a jeep with an Army sergeant for my driver.
For miles, all the way going north from Valognes to the outskirts of Cherbourg, I passed an endless stream of heavy howitzers, field artillery, and tanks, all bound south now for the coming attack on St. Lô. But what struck me was not the plethora of heavy armor composing that southbound army; it was the G.I.’s, just come from battle, the veritable G.I. Joes of the cartoons—muddy, unkempt, unshaven.
About a mile or two before entering Cherbourg, I passed on the left a hastily wired enclosure behind which were the Nazi prisoners, some 30,000 of them who having fired away their last cartridge in desperate defense had then no option but to surrender. I stared at them in surprise. A group of soldiers more ready for parade in Potsdammer Platz you never saw—clean uniforms, shaved faces, shined boots—these the men who had just fought to their last cartridge? It seemed unbelievable. Some few, not in sight of my jeep, might have, but not the shined up crowd that I could see. Was it possible that Dr. Goebbels had exaggerated?
My driver and I proceeded a little further. Just outside Cherbourg itself, we had to slow considerably to avoid hitting a mud-plastered G.I. who, staggering under the load of a huge roll of khaki canvas he was trying to balance on his shoulder with one hand while he gripped his rifle with the other, was steering quite an erratic course down the road, also bound into Cherbourg.
I told the driver to stop alongside him, invited him and his curious bundle into the back seat of our jeep (which invitation he accepted with great alacrity) and we proceeded along the highway into Cherbourg itself. I looked back with interest at our passenger; why, I wondered, such solicitude for that oversized roll of canvas? But soon I quit wondering about the canvas to stare puzzled instead at that G.I.—he was the most nervous character I’d seen in weeks, eyes darting incessantly from side to side, rifle at the ready.
“What’s the matter with you?” I asked. “This town’s surrendered. It’s ours now.”
“Yeh, Captain,” he muttered, “but there’s a lot of snipers around that don’t seem to know it yet. Some of us G.I.’s ’ve been shot dead already. I’m taking no chances. Better keep your rifle ready—like me!”
Snipers? I hadn’t thought of that. Still, it might well be; he should know. But I didn’t have a rifle; I told him so.
“We’ll soon fix that for you, Captain,” he said. “Tell the sergeant to stop a minute; anywhere’ll do.”
How that would fix it, I couldn’t see, but this G.I. seemed to know what he was about. I ordered the driver to stop. He stopped.
“There!” said my G.I., pointing. “Help yourself, only be sure you take one that works!”
I looked. Alongside the road were German rifles by the dozens, all along the shoulder, tossed there evidently by columns of Nazis trooping out to surrender. Easily in sight were at least a thousand. I hopped out, observed my G.I., now that we were stopped, with his rifle at his shoulder, scanning the houses on both sides, ready instantly to fire should we be fired on. Thus protected, I seized the nearest German rifle, tried the bolt. It worked fine. I passed that one to my driver; selected another for myself; that one also worked satisfactorily.
What good, however, were rifles without cartridges? According to what I’d heard directly from Dr. Goebbels only the night before, there weren’t any left in Cherbourg—they’d all, down to the last cartridge, been fired at us before those prisoners I’d seen outside had surrendered their useless rifles.
But somehow it appeared from the evidence in front of me that someone had been pulling Dr. Goebbels’ leg; he had been grossly misinformed. Before me, alongside those rifles, were German ammunition belts loaded with cartridges by the thousands. I helped myself plentifully, passed more up to my driver, could have loaded our jeep with cartridges enough to have broken its springs, had I so desired. But I didn’t need any more. We proceeded all the rest of the way into the center of Cherbourg, with two rifles now at the ready and a third handy alongside the driver. But on that trip, we had no need of them. My G.I. thanked me and hopped out, to stagger off once more under his load of canvas; I thanked him heartily for his warning; the rifles might still come in handy on our journey out.
Finally my jeep hauled up in the dock area, at the head of the huge pier where the transatlantic liners used to dock. Several times in peacetime, I’d come in there myself.
I found, already in Cherbourg, an old friend of my submarine salvage days of years before—Captain Norman Ives, slated to be Port Captain of Cherbourg. Ives would have nothing to do with the rehabilitation task—on the water, that was the job for the Navy salvage party; on the land, for the Army engineers. But once the port was ready to run, it would be Ives’ job then as Port Captain to run it. So I asked Ives, now that he’d seen Cherbourg Harbor, when he expected the port would be in operation.
Ives preferred not to discuss it then. He suggested I look about for myself and after I’d seen the situation, we could compare notes. That seemed reasonable. So still in my jeep with rifle at the ready between all stops, I set out to examine what had happened.
I can best epitomize what I saw by quoting the report on it by Colonel Viney of the Army Engineers:
“The demolition of the port of Cherbourg is a masterful job, beyond a doubt the most complete, intensive, and best-planned demolition in history.”
That was based on what Colonel Viney could see of the port installations—the piers, drydocks, harbor cranes, and breakwaters—all beautifully demolished. What Colonel Viney couldn’t see, and what was unique in this sabotage job was what was under water. Cherbourg had been more than just a seaport. It had also been a major naval arsenal. It was the base for the vast number of submarine mines that were to have been freshly laid in the Channel that spring as an anti-invasion barrier—only Admiral Hennecke had had no seagoing minelayers available to lay them there so they all remained in Cherbourg. When Hennecke on June 7 received orders from Hitler to demolish the port, he introduced a new wrinkle—all the mines that should have gone into 80 miles of minefields in the Channel, screening all Normandy from England, had been first armed and then dumped instead into Cherbourg Harbor to make it the most intensively mined water area the world had ever seen. That, not the destruction visible above ground, made the problem of using Cherbourg Harbor again something decidedly not contemplated when the clearance forces were talking glibly about getting it going in three days. Cherbourg, thanks to its ingenious naval commandant, turned out not to be a second Naples.
Admiral Hennecke, the Nazi who dreamed up that job, the day after his capture by the men of the VII Corps, was awarded by Adolf Hitler (in absentia, of course) the Knight’s Cross for “a feat unprecedented in the annals of coastal defense.”
Having seen the “feat,” for once in my life I found myself in complete agreement with Adolf Hitler. You could not move on the water anywhere in the port of Cherbourg except in a rubber boat with muffled oars, without being blown sky high by a mine of some type—acoustic, magnetic, or contact.
Some hours later, having noted all this, I went back to see Norman Ives before departing for the Omaha Beach. We both looked at each other pessimistically. Ives wouldn’t even hazard a guess as to when he’d have a port to operate, and I didn’t feel called on to act the part of a prophet either. So we parted with the question unresolved—except that it couldn’t possibly be soon. Omaha Beach, crippled as it was, was going to have to keep on carrying the load to the end. In the matter of our seizing a port, the Nazis had outwitted us. They had made sure that so far as the battle going on for Normandy was concerned, Cherbourg would never serve us as a port. If we won, we’d have to win without it. But as they’d seen it, without it we couldn’t win. That was why Hennecke got that Knight’s Cross.
CHAPTER 36
Erwin Rommel was in a quandary. His defense had
not gone as he had expected. On D-day, the Atlantic Wall, on which he had expended tremendous effort, where confidently he had counted on hanging up the invaders in the beach obstacles while he stung them to death from the bluffs above, had been smashed by heavy naval guns—something which had not figured in his calculations, for after all, Rommel was a soldier, not a sailor.
Then at each town behind the beachhead, where he had confidently expected to cordon off the invaders while he crushed them with his armor, again those naval guns had quickly pulverized both his positions and such of his armor as had not fled in time.
In fact, such a stunning impression had those naval guns already made on Rommel (and on his generals also) that they failed to take due account of the fact that their enemy, even with nothing but open beaches for entry (so they still seemed to think) had developed a very respectable armored weight on his own side. To them, even after the setbacks of the first ten days, it seemed that if they could only deny to the enemy the nearest port, Cherbourg, and get at him meanwhile far enough inland to be out of range of those naval guns, they would yet crush him.
But Rommel now was beginning to doubt even that. His freedom of action in running his campaign was being hamstrung from his rear by Hitler on the far Russian front. Rommel, to meet the exigencies of a fast-changing battle front, could not move a Panzer Division to where he thought he most needed it, without the Fuehrer’s express permission. And by the time he got it (even if he did, which was not always) the move was too late to do him any good. How could he do anything but lose a war under such conditions?
That had not been all. His good right arm, General der Artillerie Erich Marcks, Commander of his 84th Corps defending the coast line, a most capable and much respected officer, on D + 6 had been killed by a strafing attack and his headquarters promptly overrun by G.I.’s on the ground. Bradley was now in possession of all the 84th Corps files, and could not possibly be unaware of the severe command handicaps imposed on Rommel by Hitler’s remote control methods of directing the war in Normandy. Not to mention also that it was certain Bradley had in his hands the file copy of that famous order from Hitler on D-day morning to the 84th Corps—that by nightfall of June 6, it was the Fuehrer’s express command that all invaders be hurled back into the sea. Ironically, by D + 6, Marcks was dead, and the order itself was in the hands of those same invaders, who far from being in the sea, were in possession of the 84th Corps Headquarters. From a psychological point of view, aside from its military aspects, that was bad.
Faced with that situation, Rommel and von Rundstedt between them had persuaded Hitler on D + 10 (June 16) to come to Normandy to see for himself. As for them, they now favored a withdrawal, say at least to the line of the Seine, which was better defensible. But Hitler would have none of it. His secret weapons, the V-l (already just launched against London) and the V-2 (yet to come) would soon win the war for him. Meanwhile, he would not give up an inch of his conquests. Every soldier in Normandy must fight to his last drop of blood and to his last cartridge. There would be no withdrawal, regardless of how imperative one might seem to generals viewing the situation from purely military considerations.
Hitler flew back to Berchtesgaden to be closer to the Russian front. Field Marshal von Rundstedt, an old man but still a clear-sighted one, went back to his headquarters, much depressed. Under similar circumstances in World War I, the German General Staff had forced the Kaiser to abdicate and obtained an armistice. But with Hitler in the saddle, that was impossible. No one could force him to abdicate. So the destruction of Germany was unavoidable.
But Rommel was a much younger man and one with a greater stake in Germany’s continued existence. He also went back to his headquarters, fully resolved now. To him, catastrophe was not unavoidable and he would help avoid it. He would cooperate with the plot long brewing among other generals in Germany to assassinate Hitler—that was the only possible way, he saw now, to remove Hitler and to avoid the total destruction of Germany. He gave his assent via his Chief of Staff—now he would cooperate. After Hitler’s death, with Rommel himself, the military idol of the Reich, installed as Chief of State, Rommel to save Germany from utter destruction would make the best peace he could with the West.
But meanwhile, till the plotters in Berlin could somehow implement their design, Rommel had still the war in Normandy to occupy him. He must, if possible, produce a stalemate there. On that rested his only hope for success in later negotiations. To produce that stalemate, Rommel did his best.
Matters in Normandy went still from bad to worse. With Allied fliers in complete control of the skies, Rommel’s best turned out to be far from good enough. By day, no German military traffic could move along any road leading through northern France to Normandy without surely being destroyed from the air. And by night, it moved only blacked-out along jammed roads, very slowly.
Rommel’s Seventh Army, defending Normandy, could not even get up to the front the minimum 3000 tons a day of ammunition, gasoline, and supplies it needed for bare defense. Colonel General Dollmann, commanding that Seventh Army, reported most pessimistically that the 4500 tons a day he required to sustain offensive action in an armored attack were fantastically beyond the capacity of such trucks as he had to move to his front. Even more so was it impossible to him to build up the 14,000 tons reserve necessary before opening an offensive. To mount an armored counterattack was wholly beyond the realm of reality.
Had Dollmann known (which he didn’t) that at that very time, over 8000 tons a day, twice as much as he was getting, was coming in to supply his enemies over the beachhead at Omaha (wholly aside from what was coming over the British beachhead and at Utah) he would have been even more pessimistic. But German Intelligence in Normandy was now all shot to pieces and Luftwaffe reconnaissance was nonexistent; having no knowledge of what was going on at our beachheads, he was spared that added weight on his mind.
Rommel tried to block off Bradley’s path to Cherbourg. Battleship guns defeated the effort. Conceding then the ultimate loss of Cherbourg as inevitable, Rommel started to withdraw southward from the Peninsula, before it was cut through, his best divisions for further field use at St. Lô in cordoning off our beachheads. Hitler defeated that effort. Not a man, even of the mobile field troops, was to be withdrawn from the Cherbourg Peninsula; they were all to stay there along with the garrison forces, and fight to the last drop of blood, the last cartridge. So Rommel, having to countermand his orders actually already given for that withdrawal, was left to contemplate now the loss of both Cherbourg and his mobile troops.
No doubt also by then he was beginning to contemplate which was causing him the most damage—our battleship guns or Hitler?
Now came worse. Cherbourg fell. While adequate steps had been taken already by Admiral Hennecke and his naval command to see that Cherbourg was valueless to its captors, still the moral effect, both in Germany and elsewhere in the world, was tremendous. On both sides, to Herr Schmidt in Berlin and to Joe Doakes in New York, neither one of whom realized how useless Cherbourg would be for months yet, it seemed the same. Now the Allies had a seaport, a big one. Defeat or victory (depending on who was doing the looking) was now just around the corner.
Colonel General Dollmann, commanding Rommel’s Seventh Army, sadly depressed already by what he was unable to do, could stand the strain no longer. The capture of Cherbourg with almost 40,000 of the men of his Seventh Army, was one blow too much for him. The day following its fall, Dollmann dropped dead of a heart attack.
On the eastern front, Field Marshal Keitel, Chief of the German General Staff, was almost as badly upset over Cherbourg’s capture. Immediately he got von Rundstedt in Normandy on the far end of a telephone line reaching from the Russian front all the way across Germany to France. In great agitation, he inquired of von Rundstedt:
“What shall we do?”
Von Rundstedt, with Dollmann’s death fresh in his thoughts to remind him that he was much older even than Dollmann, answered nevertheless only in col
d logic:
“Do? Make peace, you idiots! What else can you do?” And he hung up.
To Keitel, even from von Rundstedt that was rank insubordination; he rushed to Hitler. Three days after the fall of Cherbourg, von Rundstedt along with Rommel stood before Hitler in Berchtesgaden to recant, but instead of recanting they both insisted on an immediate withdrawal beyond the range of naval artillery, with the obvious inference that it would be even better to withdraw wholly from France to the Siegfried Line, while still they had an army with which to make a stand there till a peace could be negotiated.
They got nowhere. Hitler announced it was his order to them to confine the enemy to his bridgehead. The two Field Marshals, convinced that an impossibility was demanded of them, went back to Normandy.
Now matters moved fast. Two days later, von Rundstedt was relieved of his command. Daring to question the Fuehrer’s ideas of strategy was too much. Field Marshal von Kluge took over, fresh from the Russian front, with orders to stage an offensive. Rommel, seeing the only soldier in whom he had any confidence thrown out of France, exclaimed:
“I will be next!”
For Rommel that came soon, but not exactly as he had expected.
Bradley, with Cherbourg as an objective off his mind, turned everything he had—armor, infantry, and air support, to the south for the breakthrough southward into the open that was contemplated in the Overlord Plan. After that breakthrough, Patton and the newly constituted Third Army were to go westward into the Brittany Peninsula and secure for us there the additional (and so it was initially thought, essential) ports of Brest, L’Orient, and St. Nazaire, and to allow us to set up an added temporary harbor on Quiberon Bay. By D + 42, all that should be done, and at that point, our original First Army and Patton’s new Third Army would turn east again, with Montgomery at Caen as the hinge, then really to begin the Battle of France.
The Far Shore Page 33