A World at Arms (134 page)

The Germans had counted on holding onto the port city for a long time, but the Americans drove north to its defense perimeter in three days, immediately beginning an assault on the fortress. Supported by air attacks and naval as well as ground artillery, the American troops drove into the city during the third week of June. The German commander, General Schlieben, surrendered on June 26; some German soldiers held out in bitter fighting until June 30.

The Allies now had their port, later than they and earlier than the Germans had hoped,
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but the destruction of its facilities by German demolition experts had been massive. It took almost three weeks to open the port at all and months before it could handle substantial volumes of cargo. Eventually Cherbourg would take more than half of all the cargo landed in France for the American forces,
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but the delay imposed by the demolitions contributed substantially to the eventual halt in the Allied offensive. Whatever the problems, however, the seizure of Cherbourg meant that the Allies could not be driven into the sea again even if the weather should destroy the remaining Mulberry and make it impossible to land troops and supplies over the beaches. The destruction of one Mulberry right after the capture of Cherbourg in the great Channel storm enormously complicated the supply problem of the Allies, but they were bringing in considerable amounts over the beaches and could look forward to the restoration of Cherbourg’s facilities.

While the Americans were cutting off the Cotentin peninsula and taking Cherbourg, the British 2nd Army was battering its way toward Caen, a town which had been included in the anticipated D-Day lodgement. Held up by German armored units, repeated German counter-attacks, and the reluctance of Montgomery and his subordinate army commanders to accept heavy casualties, the advance came to an early halt. Montgomery hoped to drive beyond Caen to Falaise in mid-June, but German resistance stalled his drive.
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On June 18 he ordered new drives for Caen by Lt. General Sir Miles Dempsey’s British 2nd Army and for Cherbourg by Bradley’s United States 1st Army;
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the latter succeeded, but the Caen offensive again made minimal progress. Montgomery thereupon decided to build up his forces on the British sector for a big push; as he wrote Brooke on July 14, he had decided on a real “show down on the eastern flanks, and to loose a Corps of three armored divisions in the open country about the Caen-Falaise road.” As he put it to his most important backer in the Allied high command: “The possibilities are immense; with seven hundred tanks loosed to the South East of Caen, and armored cars operating far ahead, anything can happen.”
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What did happen was that this big attack on July 18–19, called “Goodwood,” was halted with very heavy losses in
spite of an immense prior air bombardment and a massive armored assault.
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This check suffered by the British almost cost Montgomery his position since most of the higher officers at Eisenhower’s headquarters, especially the latter’s British deputy Tedder, wanted Montgomery relieved, and Eisenhower had had enough of Montgomery’s difficult behavior. Montgomery was saved by the backing of Churchill and the American breakthrough on the other flank, which opened up new prospects for the Allies.

In the middle of the Allied front, which included the right flank of the British 2nd Army and all of the American 1st Army, progress had been very slow indeed. The Americans were pushing toward St.Lo in order to secure a good basis for a drive into the open country at the western end of the Normandy front, but they were held up by two factors. The first of these was the bocage, the hedgerow terrain which confined the tanks to narrow roads and the infantry to laborious field–by–field advances under fire from well–concealed German defenders. It might be argued that it would have been better if the British had fought a slowly advancing battle in this terrain while the Americans drove into the open in the perfect tank country at the eastern end of the bridgehead, but the position of the two Allied forces had been determined by transportation factors. The shortage of shipping and the need to bring troops and supplies directly from the United States after the initial landing had led to the decision for the British to take the left and the Americans the right flank in the landing and the subsequent campaign.
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The result therefore was that the Americans had to slug their way forward in the bocage, a process that only became easier as they welded steel “tusks” onto the front of the tanks so that these “rhinoceroses” could drive right through the hedgerows.

The other factor holding the Americans up was the skillful and determined resistance. Taking advantage of the terrain, German forces, mostly infantry but some armor, fought for every field. By this time they were trying to hold the Americans to the slowest possible advance while launching their heaviest armored attacks against the British. The Americans did not, however, have to assist their ally directly because air attacks kept the Germans from moving their armored divisions quickly enough to the British front to mount a serious threat there at anyone time.
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It was therefore possible for the Americans to concentrate on their own front, and if the Germans made them pay a heavy price in casualties for
every yard gained, the defenders were also suffering heavy losses which they could not replace as readily as the Americans.
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The plans for the big American push were also not disrupted by the introduction of a new weapon by the Germans. Originally scheduled to be launched far earlier, the first salvo of pilotless jet planes, the V-1s, was fired at London on June 12 with the major bombardment beginning three days later. Hitler was most enthusiastic about this project and seriously expected the attacks to lead to an evacuation of London and thus a disruption of the whole Allied effort.
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The V-1 was supposed to be followed quickly by the V-2, a ballistic missile, but the first of these was not fired until September 8, 1944. Certainly the V-1 caused destruction and casualties, and the renewal of heavy bombing in the fifth year of war had a serious effect on British morale; but many of the pilotless planes were shot down and others crashed or failed on their own. Although the new weapons gave the Allies an added incentive to try to break out of Normandy as quickly as possible in order to overrun the launching sites, they could not interfere seriously with the Allied forces fighting to liberate France. On the other hand, the introduction of the new weapon obviously aimed simply at a big city led Churchill to argue seriously and repeatedly in favor of using poison gas in retaliation. He was restrained by the objections of his military advisors and a veto by the Americans, but the British leader held to his preference even if he could not implement it.
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Whatever the effects of the V-weapons, the German reaction to the establishment of a coherent and sustainable Allied bridgehead was a combination of fierce defensive fighting with no effective strategic concept. The fighting slowed down the Allies but could not drive them back. Both in repeated speeches to his generals and to industrial leaders, Hitler tried hard to enthuse those apprehensive about the situation. He looked to new weapons and to fanatical resistance to show the enemy that victory over Germany was impossible; in other words, he was coming to believe that a defensive victory was now Germany’s great hope. As for the situation on what now had to be called the Western Front, he had rejected both the suggestion that the first major counter–attack be made against the Americans in favor of one against the British, while rejecting all advice for mobile defense in favor of simply holding all ground.
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For a short time longer, this approach succeeded in containing British and American advances; but since it wore out the defending troops, including the armored divisions which had to remain in the front line continuously, it also speeded up the rate of German collapse at the front once a major gap had been torn in their lines.

The Allies had originally planned to launch the great offensive in the
American sector code-named “Cobra” at the same time as “Goodwood,” but it had had to be postponed repeatedly because bad weather prevented the air forces from providing the needed support. Because the air forces, when they could fly, had not yet fully mastered the techniques of effective cooperation with ground forces, large numbers of bombs were dropped on the American units, causing numerous casualties, but the weight of the heavy bombing fell on the Germans when the operation finally started on July 25.
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The American troops pushed through the staunch defenders and, in the immediately following days, the German divisions facing the western end of the front began to disintegrate as more American divisions joined those already advancing south. Even as the German front was being ripped open in the west, Montgomery, under pressure from Eisenhower, drove his forces forward in the east; and although these, now reorganized into the 1st Canadian as well as the 2nd British Army, did not make major advances, their determined pressure prevented the Germans from shifting strength to their own threatened left flank. That flank collapsed in the last days of July as the Americans seized Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula and were clearly poised to drive into the open terrain to the south.

Their ability to do so had been assisted by the drawing of most German armor to the British front and its then being held there by a combination of repeated attacks on the part of British and Canadian divisions, as well as Hitler’s fixation on concentrating the newly arriving reserves in that sector. The success of the American effort was also greatly aided by the continued effectiveness of the Allied deception operation which, by pretending that another major landing would come in the Pas de Calais area, led the Germans to keep most of their 15th Army away from the fighting front–Normandy. By the time the Germans realized at the end of July that the Normandy landing was the only one and that there would be no other Channel crossing, it was too late for reinforcement from 15th Army to be transferred to the danger points or to relieve the divisions facing the Canadians and British, so that these divisions in turn could move west. Field Marshal Gunther von Kluge, who had replaced von Rundstedt early in July,
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did not get permission to transfer substantial forces until the end of the month–just as the Americans broke through.

Allied control of the air slowed down all German movements, and the earlier attack on the transportation system had reduced its efficiency and its recuperative power. The Germans could not sustain the positional warfare which had characterized the first eight weeks of fighting in the West; and the disaster which the army had suffered in the meantime at the hands of the Red Army meant that massive reinforcement of the
Western at the expense of the Eastern Front was impossible, even if Hitler had been so inclined.

Under these circumstances, the Americans, now reorganized as planned into the 3rd Army under Patton on the right and the 1st Army under General Courtney Hodges on the left with Bradley advanced to 12th Army Group commander, pushed division after division through the gaping hole at the western end of the German front. The 3rd Army’s divisions had originally been scheduled to head southwest into Brittany, in order to open up the port of Brest and other harbors for additional American units and supplies to land directly from the United States (as in World War I). Since German resistance in the interior of Brittany was obviously minimal–many of the units originally stationed there having been drawn into the Normandy battle and chewed up in the prior fighting–it was clearly not necessary to commit the whole 3rd Army there. New decisions had to be made and these intersected fatefully with the new decisions now made by the Germans.

With Bradley’s and Montgomery’s approval, Patton sent only one of his four corps into Brittany. That was more than enough to clear most of the province but not enough for quick seizure of the ports which the German garrisons held stubbornly, Brest falling only on September 19. Two corps were sent racing southeast and south with a fourth held in reserve. With the right flank of American 1st Army also on the move, it looked as if the whole German army in Normandy might be surrounded.

Since about two-thirds of the German front was still holding coherently, Hitler decided on a major counter–attack at Mortain, an operation already being planned by von Kluge who had also replaced Rommel when the latter was wounded. This operation was to strike west and to the sea and cut off the American forces which had pushed through the Avranches gap. When the Germans massed for and launched this counter-attack, they suffered a major defeat to which the tactical air support of the Allied ground forces–now finally functioning effectively–contributedgreatly.
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The Americans were, as we now know, also greatly assisted by the fact that key German messages connected with this attack had been intercepted and decoded. Having shifted the weight of their forces from the British-Canadian front westwards for this operation, the Germans were more vulnerable to encirclement than ever once the Mortain attack had been beaten off by the Americans.
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With the Canadian and British forces attacking southward toward Falaise now that some of the German armored divisions previously facing them had been shifted westwards for the Mortain attack, it looked for a moment as if the whole 7th German Army and the Panzer Group West (renamed 5th Panzer Army) might be trapped. The advance units
of the American 3rd Army reached north to Argentan as the Canadians pushed toward them, while portions of the American 1st Army had also reached positions south of the German front. Ten days after the Mortain attack had been halted, it looked as if the two German armies were about to be trapped in what came to be known as the Falaise pocket.

The Allies had the possibility of completely destroying most of Army Group B, with the American troops in the south pushing northward to Argentan even as they headed east toward Paris, while the Canadian 1st Army was to close the pincer from the north. In the period August 8–18, the German front was battered, pushed in from the south, pulled back from the west, but not penetrated in the north. Montgomery sent untried Canadian divisions and the Polish armored division instead of more experienced units to close the gap. As a result, the Germans, though losing heavily in equipment and men, were able to extricate a substantial proportion of their soldiers and most of the higher staffs–all of which could be reformed into effective military units with which the Allies would have to cope later. It is also possible that if Bradley had ordered the 3rd Army to drive beyond its designated advance line to Falaise, the pocket could have been sealed off earlier and more effectively; but in the absence of regular meetings between Montgomery and the American commanders (because of Montgomery’s unwillingness to have such meetings), such a step would have been difficult to take.