Their relationship became particularly acrimonious when Churchill pitched up at Eisenhower’s Normandy headquarters, codenamed Shellburst, near the village of Tournières, 20 km south-west of Bayeux, on 7 August. The Prime Minister still wanted Ike to shift Dragoon to Brittany or even the Channel ports, arguing fiercely that this would pile the pressure on the Germans in northern France. In reality, there was a lack of available ports as the German garrisons resolutely clung on to those they still held.
American troops arrived outside the well-defended Breton ports of Brest and Lorient on 6 and 7 August respectively. The German forces in Brest would hold out until mid-September, while the garrisons in Lorient and St Nazaire did not capitulate until the end of the war. This mattered little, as by August Le Havre and Antwerp held much greater allure for the Allies.
As Captain Harry C. Butcher recalled scathingly, it was not long before Churchill turned to his favourite diversionary operation during the meeting on the 7th:
The Prime Minister had already opened the conference at lunch, telling us in phrases which only he can use so easily that history would show that Ike would miss a great opportunity if he didn’t have Dragoon, formerly Anvil, shifted from the scheduled amphibious attack in the Toulon area to the ports in Brittany, notably Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, or indeed through the Channel ports where he assumed they could walk in like tourists. He had not given much thought to the probable demolitions to these harbours on the southern coast or to the great demand already made on Cherbourg or any other Channel ports we may capture. Such landings would quickly give the now rapidly travelling right flank of the Allied Armies a stronger force with which to sweep to France, in the view of Mr Churchill.
The arguments went on for some six hours, and this exchange clearly took its toll on Ike, as Butcher remembered:
Ike said no, continued saying no all afternoon, and ended saying no in every form of the English language at his command…. Ike argued so long and patiently that he was practically limp when the PM departed and observed that although he had said no in every language, the Prime Minister, undoubtedly, would return to the subject in two or three days and simply regard[s] the issue [as] unsettled.
Meanwhile, the British Chiefs of Staff cabled General Wilson in the Mediterranean to alert him to the possibility of a quick change of plan for Dragoon, awaiting approval by the Combined Chiefs. By this stage, though, any change of plan was out of the question: if the LSTs and LCTs were to depart by 10 August for an attack on the 15th, there could be no meddling with the schedules.
Even Wilson pointed out that any build-up via Brittany would be slower than one via the Toulon area. ‘Thus the PM also was rebuffed by his British Allied Commander,’ concluded Butcher.
Eisenhower would have to endure more of the same when he called on the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street. Churchill remained unbending in his opposition to Dragoon when he met Ike on the 10th, as Harry Butcher again recalled:
The PM was still a bit pouty over Anvil, favouring diversion into Brittany, despite our absence of satisfactory ports. So Ike went to 10 Downing Street to have a further talk with him. The Combined Chiefs of Staff have supported Ike completely. But now the PM was bemoaning the future of Alexander’s campaign in Italy.
Churchill now played his ultimate card: with tears rolling down his cheeks, he threatened to resign if the Americans persisted with Dragoon; he said he might go to the King and lay down his mantle of high office. He also accused America of bullying Britain. Eisenhower was baffled by Churchill’s unrelenting opposition to Anvil, to the extent he would endanger the alliance. He was also beginning to tire of the constant bullying by the pugnacious British politician.
The ever-present Butcher witnessed at first hand the problems that Churchill’s attitude was causing:
Ike has been increasingly concerned about the PM’s attitude regarding Anvil and, above all, the feeling that the questioning and apparent dissension might cause a rift in the unity of the Allies at a time when success is almost in our grasp. The PM is upset over Ike’s insistence for the landings in southern France, still set for 15 August. Mr Churchill knows that the American Chiefs – Marshall, King and Arnold – defer all questions in the European Theatre to General Ike. Consequently, the Prime Minister unlooses on Ike all his art of persuasion.
It was clear that Eisenhower was sick of it, but he was too diplomatic to say so; besides, everyone had better things to think of as the hard-fought Normandy battles were now coming to fruition around Falaise. Ike, although pushed to the brink of despair by his recalcitrant ally, would not budge; he was committed to making the Germans fight on as many fronts as possible. He pointed out that America had acceded to Britain’s desire to invade North Africa first, thereby pushing the invasion of northern France back from the spring of 1943 to June 1944. The fall of Rome in June and the success of Operation Cobra in Normandy in July 1944 had finally convinced Eisenhower to give the green light to the secondary invasion.
Privately Eisenhower must have been very rattled that his decision to implement Dragoon could have brought down the British government. Indeed, he was clearly shaken by his encounters with Churchill and wrote to him:
To say that I was disturbed by our conference on Wednesday does not nearly express the depth of my distress over your interpretation of the recent decision affecting the Mediterranean theatre. I do not, for one moment, believe that there is any desire on the part of any responsible person in the American war machine to disregard British views, or cold-bloodedly to leave Britain holding an empty bag in any of our joint undertakings … I am sorry that you seem to feel we use our great actual or potential strength as a bludgeon in conference.
Despite Churchill’s antics, Eisenhower still held the British leader in high regard, affectionately describing him as ‘a cantankerous yet adorable father’. Churchill, wily old politician that he was, also knew that despite his brinkmanship this was the high water mark of Britain’s dominance of the alliance. Previously British and American Chiefs of Staff rarely disagreed on major issues, but from now on they would rarely see eye to eye and with Britain increasingly the junior partner it would rarely prevail.
While Overlord ultimately succeeded in defeating Army Group B, it failed to provide usable ports as quickly as the Allies had hoped. Eisenhower therefore convinced himself that he must have Marseilles, which is bigger than most of the Breton ports and all of the channel ports except Antwerp. Marseilles also had the advantage of being about 150km nearer to the German frontier than, say, Cherbourg. It could offer an entry point to those forces still in America and unable to enter Europe via the channel ports; the only potential alternative was Bordeaux and that would have meant diverting forces from Normandy.
Eisenhower also liked the idea of stretching the German Army from the North Sea to Switzerland. It seemed to him that Dragoon would also make better use of those American forces currently stuck in a slogging match in Italy and bring the French Army, re-equipped by America, back into the field. Ike and Marshall had won the day and Anvil now became Dragoon, employing the troops of General Alexander Patch’s US 7th Army from Italy and General Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s French II Corps, his units having been built up in North Africa following the invasion there. The landings were scheduled for 15 August, ten weeks after D-Day. There would be no turning back.
Chapter Five
The Second Front – Blaskowitz’s Lost Divisions
The forces of the German commander in the west, Field Marshal Gerd von Rundstedt, Oberbefelshaber West (OB West), were divided into two army groups. In the south was General Johannes Blaskowitz’s Army Group G with its headquarters in Toulouse; this group, totalling just seventeen divisions, consisted of General Kurt von der Chevallerie’s 1st and General Friedrich Wiese’s 19th Armies, stationed on the Biscay and Riviera coasts respectively. Wiese himself was based at Avignon, north-west of Marseilles.
Blaskowitz’s Army Group G
General Blaskowitz was an e
xperienced soldier with an unenviable task ahead of him. Born in 1883, he had commanded the German 8th Army during the invasion of Poland; however, his lacklustre performance meant he was the only army commander not elevated to the rank of field marshal at the end of the campaign. His appointment as Commander-in-Chief East lasted all of six months after his opposition to SS activities saw him replaced in mid-May 1940. However, he bounced back to command the 9th Army during the invasion of France, becoming Military Governor of northern France. In October he took over the 1st Army, which he controlled until May 1944, when he was appointed to command Army Group G. Blaskowitz first met his new staff on 16 May.
Blaskowitz found that his key armoured formations were Chevallerie’s 11th Panzer and 17th SS Panzergrenadier Divisions, and Wiese’s 2nd SS Das Reich and 9th Panzer Divisions. The latter, under Generalleutnant Erwin Jolasse, was desperately in need of a refit and rest; in March that year it had been sent to southern France, where it absorbed the 155th Reserve Panzer Division. Blaskowitz also discovered that there were in fact only four infantry divisions of any note in the whole of southern France (the 708th, 242nd, 244th and 338th), as the rest were refitting or reforming and evidently substandard.
Although the 11th Panzer Division was nominally part of Wiese’s 19th Army, it actually came under Hitler’s direct command. A similar arrangement for the panzer divisions in Normandy had greatly hampered their timely intervention on D-Day. To make matters worse, not only was the 11th Panzer Division beyond Wiese’s direct control, it was also based in the Carcassone-Albi area, some 240 km from Avignon and even further from the Marseilles-Toulon-Provence area.
The 11th Panzer Division was created in August 1940 under the command of General Ludwig Crüwell, and saw action during the Balkans campaign. It was then committed to the southern sector of the Eastern Front from June to October 1941, after which it was sent to the central sector, where it remained until June 1942 and then returned south. Generalleutnant Wend von Wietersheim assumed command in mid-August 1943. The division fought at Belgorod, Kursk and Krivoj Rog, and suffered significant casualties when it was encircled at Kresun, south of Kiev. The exhausted division was then transferred to France for refitting in June 1944, where it absorbed the 273rd Reserve Panzer Division. The latter was commanded by General Hellmuth von der Chevallerie from mid-November 1943 to 9 May 1944.
In the north, Field Marshal Erwin Rommel’s vastly stronger Army Group B comprised General Friedrich Dollmann’s 7th Army, consisting of sixteen divisions stationed in north-western France, and General Hans von Salmuth’s 15th Army, consisting of twenty-five divisions stationed in Belgium and north-eastern France.
Rundstedt expected the Allies to invade the Pas de Calais, as this would offer the attacking force the shortest crossing-point of the English Channel, and it was just four days’ march from the vital German industrial region of the Ruhr. The massing of the US 3rd Army and the Canadian 1st Army opposite the Pas de Calais convinced von Rundstedt, Rommel and Hitler that this reasoning was correct. The net result was that Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (the German High Command) gave priority to von Salmuth’s 15th Army north of the Seine. Due to the Allies’ successful deception efforts, Rundstedt’s better units remained in the Pas de Calais area, which had a negative effect on Dollmann’s 7th Army covering Normandy and Brittany. A phantom Allied 4th Army in Scotland also convinced Hitler of a threat to Norway, pinning down even more troops in Scandinavia.
General Georg von Sodenstern, commander of the 19th Army at Avignon until he was replaced by Wiese on 1 July 1944, tried to sound optimistic about the demands made by Rommel’s Army Group B: ‘One recognises the perplexity of a command which to close up one gap has to tear open another, and has trusted to the vague hopes of lucky developments in the south of France.’ However, there would be no lucky developments.
Siding with von Rundstedt, Sodenstern had disagreed with Rommel’s preference for keeping the panzer forces of Army Group B close to the Normandy beaches. This, he reasoned, was simply putting one’s head on the anvil just as the blow was about to fall. Sodenstern also argued that any defensive success in the south of France would be pointless if they were defeated in Normandy. In his view it would be far better to withdraw from southern France and fight in front of the West-wall. Blaskowitz agreed with Rundstedt and Sodenstern; he favoured a withdrawal into the interior where Army Group G could fight a mobile battle. Hitler, though, could not make up his mind what to do about the defence of southern France.
In the Mediterranean the Allies ran a series of deception operations designed to mislead the Axis Powers as to the true strength of the Allied forces in the region, and then to convince the Germans that the Allies would attack Crete or western Greece from the Mediterranean, or Romania via the Black Sea. Clearly Churchill was in favour of thrusting into the Balkans, partly to forestall Stalin’s plans for the region, and years later Eisenhower was to concede that this should have been their course of action.
‘Fortress’ Riviera
While the bulk of German defensive efforts were directed to northern France during the first part of 1944, the Mediterranean coast was not altogether neglected. The French Riviera, once a byword for luxury, was now host to German pillboxes, gun emplacements, mines and booby-traps, though Army Group G (or more precisely the 19th Army) was hardly in a fit state to defend it effectively. Altogether Blaskowitz had about 30,000 troops in the assault area, but within a few days’ march there were over 200,000. By early June some 62,500 mines had been laid along the coast and almost a thousand permanent fortifications constructed; weapons pits, trenches, tank obstacles and road-blocks supplemented these.
Blaskowitz and the 19th Army’s Chief of Staff Generalleutnant Walter Botsch knew that they had no Atlantic Wall on their hands: only one-third of the intended concrete defences were ever completed, and those built were in the first echelon on the beach zones. Blaskowitz was only too well aware that the defences around Marseilles, Toulon and the Gulf of Fréjus constituted little more than a thin crust that at best would hold the Allies up. Once inland, there was nothing to stop them other than natural geography and those units to hand.
The key naval port facilities at Toulon were outclassed only by its larger western civilian neighbour at Marseilles. Its defences against attack from the sea included batteries at Mauvannes and on the peninsula of St-Mandrier. Inland, Toulon is partly shielded by the hilly terrain and narrow river valleys running west of the port from Bandol to the Grand Cap Massif and the region west of Solliés-Ville. The eastern approaches running from La Valette to La Crau and Le Pradet are more vulnerable because of the coastal plain which provides the best route of attack. The 19th Army protected this area with two defensive belts. The outer ran from the coast south of Hyèrres blocking the main east–west road. To the north the town was protected by the Redon hills, and the German defences continued along the Gapeau river past La Crau and up to Solliés-Ville and Solliés-Pont. These defences were reinforced by the 700-metre-high Coudon rock overlooking the plains east of Toulon, which provided ideal artillery and observation positions.
The inner defensive belt was anchored on the Coudon foothills and the Touar and Pradet ridges running down to the coast near Le Pradet. These ridges, although low-lying, look out over the coastal plain and were guarded by German anti-tank guns and pillboxes. Making use of old French fortifications, the Germans also held the Faron feature overlooking northern Toulon. Just to the west of Faron, the Las River valley provides an entry point to Toulon, but this was screened by a fortification known as La Poudrière, which was based in old quarry workings.
Before the German take-over of southern France in November 1942, the French authorities, as a token of goodwill towards the Germans, had strengthened the coastal defences to safeguard Toulon from an attack from the sea by the Allies. Other preparations included plans for scuttling the fleet, in the event of a successful landing by the Allies. Now, on the peninsula in front of the harbour at Toulon, there was a complex of 340mm g
un batteries mounted in turrets. In addition, some seventy-five medium-sized guns were strung out along the coast, including 200mm and 105mm Flak guns. Two massive 340mm guns from the scuttled battleship Provence had been moved by the Germans to the Cape Cépet battery on the St-Mandrier peninsula which forms Toulon’s large bay. Originally there had been two twin gun turrets in the battery, but when the French fleet was scuttled they had also been damaged. The Germans managed to repair two of the guns, though one was sabotaged just before the landings.
Blaskowitz’s principal commands in the south were the 58th Reserve Panzer Corps stationed in Toulouse (controlling the 2nd SS Panzer Division, 9th Panzer Division and 189th Reserve Infantry Division), and General Ferdinand Neuling’s 62nd Reserve Corps at Draguignan north-east of Toulon (controlling the 157th Reserve Infantry Division and the 242nd Infantry Division). Created in France in 1943, the 58th Corps was transferred from Rambouillet to Mödling in Austria before taking part in the occupation of Hungary in March 1944. The following month it returned to France, this time to Toulouse, coming under Blaskowitz’s Army Group G.
The 189th Reserve Division was raised in September 1942 and redesignated the 189th Infantry Division in December. It was then reformed in May 1943 in France and came under the command of Generalleutnant Richard von Schwerin from October 1943 until the end of September 1944. Formed in October 1942 from Division Nr 157, the 157th Reserve Division was stationed in France under Generalleutnant Karl Pflaum until the Italian surrender in September 1943. It then moved into Italy, taking 5,772 prisoners during two days. The 242nd Infantry Division came into being in July 1943 under Generalleutnant Johannes Bäßler, comprising the 917th, 918th and 919th Garrison Regiments and the 242nd Artillery Regiment.
Operation Dragoon Page 10