Schwerpunkt: From D-Day to the Fall of the Third Reich (17 page)

For all intents and purposes, though, as Monty slogged through to a loss of his objective at Caen, Brad on the west finally got Cherbourg which was just as crucial, if now not more so, than getting Caen. Since they were already on the water in the Bay of the Seine, we brought in the Navy to help pound the defenses around Cherbourg and that’s exactly what they did on Sunday the 25
^th
of June. I heard that General Collins himself was calling in some of the coordinates. We had some of our big old war horse ships out there behind a smoke screen and they were laying into the Kraut gun batteries pretty good until yet another storm blew their smoky cover. The
Texas
, one of the great battleships that gave the Krauts the what for at Pont du’ Hoc on DDay, got hit but thankfully, it was able to limp back to port. Then it was the Army Air Corp’s turn and they bombed the shit out of whatever Kraut guns were left standing. Between them, I can’t think the “Boche” (I love that word!) was any too willing to stick around although reports came in saying that plenty of them did.

And speaking of Cherbourg, I got a letter from Harold this afternoon.

June 23, 1944

Dear Frank,

Hiya, Frank. I got a couple of extra minutes to write. We’re heading north to Cherbourg though I could have sworn Germany was east. I guess we have to make sure none of the Krauts in this neck of the woods makes it out of here alive. That’s getting easier and easier for me to do because we’ve heard that some of those Nazi creeps have wiped out entire villages as a reprisal for isolated attacks on Kraut soldiers by members of the French Underground. Like some old woman or some kid bears responsibility for what the Resistance Fighters do! Don’t those son of a guns know that this kind of thing just fuels us up even as much as seeing our buddies mowed down? Our philosophy is now the same as theirs: for every one of us, we’ll kill 100 of you. It’s sickening, isn’t it Frank?

And speaking of killing, on the way to Cherbourg, we truly found the mother lode of great things to find. You’ll never guess so I’ll just tell you. I don’t know if you know that the Kraut prisoners have been telling us about “secret weapons” that are going to bring us and England (and whatever other country the POW can think of to impress us) to destruction, but that’s been some of what we’ve been hearing. Naturally because they’re Krauts and prisoner Krauts at that, we just figure if their lips are moving, they’re lying. But as we’re marching through this small little village, we came upon a German military installation that we found out was a launching site for this unmanned airplane whose business end literally had about a ton of explosives in it. It gets launched off a ramp by a catapult type thing and then flies to wherever it’s aimed at, which in this case was somewhere around your neck of the woods in Portsmouth, England. I may have just saved your life, Frankie! Unmanned! What those goshdarn Jerries don’t think of! I didn’t think it’d work but someone knows someone who heard from someone that they actually did send a bunch of these weapons over to hit England. Well they won’t be sending them from here, that’s for sure. We blasted the goshdarn place to smithereens.

Well, we’ve just been ordered to fall out to make our way to Cherbourg. Who knows, once I get there, wrestle it from the Krauts and hoist the American flag over it, maybe they’ll let me go swimming. I’m afraid to ask though. Maybe they’ll make me be a frogman. Take her easy, Frankie.

Love,

Harold

The Krauts had been firing these new weapons on England since June 15
^th
. The weapons are pretty incredible if you think about it. They fly by themselves and don’t need anybody inside to pilot them. How do they know where to go? Fortunately, many times they don’t and they crash land. But too many of them have hit London and caused too many civilian deaths and injuries.

As progress continued to capture Cherbourg, General Bradley ordered the 82
^nd
Airborne to take a town to the south to keep the Jerries from bringing reinforcements in to defend Cherbourg. It’s already reported to be lousy with Krauts so we don’t need any more. Brad did a great job of securing the southern flank of the Cotentin Peninsula by June 18
^th
. He cut off the commanding German general who could now receive no further supplies. Cherbourg finally fell on June 26
^th
when Cherbourg’s Commander, a general named von Schlieben, surrendered.

While I’m sure this will never get into the official German Battle Report, one of the American officers in Cherbourg told us later that this was one of the goofiest surrenders he’d ever heard of. The Kraut Commander von Schlieben told the officer that he, the Kraut, would be dishonored if he surrendered. Then he said he could continue resisting the American infantry but he couldn’t withstand an armored attack because he had no more anti tank guns. Damned if the American didn’t order one lone tank up to where this Kraut general was and with that, he surrendered. And when I say he surrendered, I mean just those who wanted to. There were still a bunch of Krauts who didn’t surrender right away but kept on fighting for another couple of days and it wasn’t until July 1
^st
that we actually had the whole city of Cherbourg secured. It took another thousand planes to bomb the shit out of them, but these isolated pockets of German fanaticism surrendered in due time when they saw they had only one other suicidal option. Before every last one of them gave up, though, the goddamn Krauts blew up all the ports.

Between the bombing and the demolition that had taken place, the city was in rubble and the ports we so desperately needed would be of no use to us at all until we could make repairs. We sent in teams of engineers to repair those ports as quickly as possible but they reported that the Krauts had used new types of demolition charges. We had to order in both mine sweepers and frogmen to neutralize those explosive devices. While they are working heroically and you wouldn’t catch me trying to defuse an unexploded device in a million years, their work is compounded by the fact that they are working underwater and so the repairs are taking much longer than we anticipated. We are keeping a watchful eye on their progress, but the ports are probably not going to be operational any time soon which is a goddamn shame because our supply line is going to be in big trouble until we can find a way to easily get what’s over here in England over there in France. I’m hoping that by the time we get the ports fixed, we’ll be so far east, we may not even need them. We got to keep up the pressure on our southern drive to clear out this area so Patton can get going. I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I got high hopes for old Blood and Guts and yeah I heard his men say his guts but our blood. Still, even with the mouth that roared, he’s a hell of a general.

Further south, Brad was trying hard to get the high ground around several towns in the Cotentin Peninsula. The original DDay plans as set forth to everyone by Montgomery himself in his initial briefings was to have the Americans from Omaha Beach capture Coutances within the first days of landing. The original plan had Brad getting these guys to St. Lo and then moving down to Countances where he would pivot and continue his attack. We needed Coutances but would have to fight like hell to get there so Brad re-worked Monty’s Plan A and went to Bradley’s Plan B which delayed the need to take Countances. He’s now decided that because of the huge toll the slow progress is taking on his troops, that instead of moving all the way south to Coutances, he’ll be satisfied if he can take the town of St. Lo.

St. Lo is a small town, I’ve heard, with more strategic value than citizens, I think. It had once belonged to Charlemagne which shows it’s been of strategic value for a thousand years. Now it has to be taken by us. St. Lo was the real key to Brad’s progress because of its location half way through and towards the neck of the Cotentin Peninsula. With that town in our hands, we’ll have the roads leading south and east which we need in order to clean out and seal the peninsula. Once the peninsula is sealed, our front line would be shortened which would mean our supplies could move more easily and, we can get to Countances from St. Lo if we still need to. After losing those 2000 men on Omaha (and it was going to be the Omaha survivors who were going to take Countances), I’m glad he revised his original plan and I pray to God Almighty that he makes it to St. Lo with no more casualties.

Well, that prayer wasn’t answered exactly like I had hoped. Battling for St. Lo has been costly to say the least. To facilitate the town’s capture, preliminary bombing runs dropped about 10,000 pounds of bombs on it, leaving this small village in absolute ruins. We found out though, that the goddamn Jerries weren’t as deterred as we had hoped and our guys, having fought their way off of Omaha, were as tired and shocked as any men could be. They had those goddamn hedgerows and the goddamn Jerries who were hiding behind them as well as the flooded marshes to contend with. Reports showd progress of about a half a mile a day because, before any of our tanks could move, the hedges on the embankments had to be removed one by one. Then when they could clear that obstacle, they couldn’t run over the land because it had been flooded. How did we not know of all this before these poor bastards got there?

One piece of good news that we finally got was a report that some good old American know how solved the hedgerow problem when some Grunt sergeant turned some tanks into bulldozers by attaching a plow to the front ends. Genius! But because of the time lost in advancing to the town, St. Lo was still not in our hands, even almost a month after DDay. We’re going to get it, it just won’t be this month I don’t think, because recently received Enigma transmits showed that the 2
^nd
SS Panzer Division is on its way to meet up with us in St. Lo and the crack Panzer Lehr Division is moving west from Caen and towards the Peninsula as well. I only hope that the Krauts don’t bring in
more
reinforcements to make it even harder for our men to take this God forsaken town. And by the way, am I the only one thinking that if Monty’s plan was to keep the German units pinned down to defend Caen, what in the hell was the 2
^nd
SS Panzer Division doing in St. Lo and what was Panzer Lehr doing moving towards it?

News from Uncle Joe in Russia just reached us. He’s helped us out again by launching a huge offensive on the three year anniversary of Hitler’s genius tactical decision to invade Russia. He initiated
Operation Bagration
and while we aren’t getting all of the reports, what we are seeing is that Stalin is kicking the shit out of Hitler. So far, thousands of Krauts will be stuck on the Eastern Front which is good because that means they won’t be deployed to any other battlefields in the west and hundreds of their tanks will be used as snow fences in Russia from now on.

So while we’ve established a beachhead and progressed inland at a more than a respectable pace during our first days in France, we now find we’re not moving as rapidly as we had expected. From June 12th until after the 26
^th
our progress started stalling. We were still making progress but not as spectacularly as before. So what happens? Questions started coming in from the politicos and newspaper wackos about expectations for future advances. I guess they thought that conquering France and defeating Hitler’s Third Reich was going to be a cakewalk or something. With a fountain pen in your hand instead of a gun or a bayonet, I guess you can ask questions with a straight face about progress through shitty terrain with do or die Nazis. Ike, born politician that he is, deftly placated these meddlesome old goats and still met with his troops for morale purposes and with his officers for incentive purposes to make sure advances would be made. Now, by the end of June, we were able to report the good news that the front was linked up and the roads that we could use to bring supplies all the way from Cherbourg to the Orne River were in our control.

To end on a high note, here’s some interesting news from our buddies, the Canucks. The towns liberated by the Canadians of Juno Beach and the artificial harbors built between them and the Brits on Sword have become a celebrity debarkation port. Not only did Prime Minister Churchill enter France through this port, but so did the megalomaniac General DeGaulle who returned after a four year absence while his country was being occupied by Germans. When de Gaulle landed, he broadcast the good news to his people that he was heading up the French Provisional Government. I guess the French had been under Germany for so long, that even de Gaulle looked good. But who am I to say? Maybe he is good. I just can’t help seeing a pompous windbag every time he opens his trap. And I keep reminding myself that when the war is over, they can vote in whoever they want. And talking about the beaches, I just heard that the King of England himself also came over here to have a look see and he too came in through Juno’s harbors. That’s the ticket, eh?

On June 22, 1944, three years to the day after Hitler invaded Russia, the Russians unleashed Operation “Bagration” and the Germans lost another 350,000 troops and innumerable vehicles and equipment on the Eastern Front. There was now no possibility that reinforcement troops or replacement equipment could be moved from the Eastern Front to Normandy. Moreover, since launching his plan to conquer Russia on June 22, 1941, Hitler had been focusing the majority of his attention to the east. He obviously felt the greater threat came from Russia, not Normandy, and this belief governed his actions accordingly. Rommel was hamstrung as he simultaneously faced the British in the battle for Caen and the Americans in their fight for Cherbourg, Carentan, St. Lo and the rest of the Cotentin Peninsula. Facing at times a 6:1 ratio of Allied soldiers to German defenders, the Germans were unable to mount any significant offensive actions to protect their hold of these French towns but General Rommel defended them masterfully. Nevertheless, it was simply a matter of time before the superior numbers and strength of the Allieds resulted in a steady increase of territory gained. While strong and dedicated, the German army could not halt the conquest of the Allied invaders who gained a stronger and bigger foothold in Normandy throughout June, 1944.