The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (23 page)

Now Cherbourg was nearly his—the high ground, the low ground, and the ground in between. Fort du Roule fell as he watched, although engineers would spend another day coaxing bitter-enders from the basements with white phosphorus down ventilation shafts and TNT lowered by wire to blast gun embrasures. GIs fought to the docks with grenades, bayonets, and 155mm rounds fired point-blank down the Boulevard Maritime.

General von Schlieben had by now retreated into a subterranean warren cut from a rock quarry just west of Fort du Roule. More than eight hundred comrades jammed the fetid chambers, leaving “hardly room enough to swing a cat.” At three
P.M.
on June 26 Schlieben radioed Rommel a final message: “Documents burned, codes destroyed.” Less than two hours later, an Army tank destroyer platoon fired twenty-two rounds at the tunnel entrance from three hundred yards. “It was good,” a gunner murmured after the last shot.

Within minutes a German soldier bearing a white flag the size of a bedsheet emerged, followed by a staggering column of troops with hands raised and a tall, gray-faced Schlieben, his greatcoat flecked with mud and powdered masonry. In his pocket was found a printed menu from a dinner honoring him in Cherbourg a few weeks earlier: lobster and hollandaise, pâté de foie gras, roast lamb, peaches, champagne. Now, at the 9th Division command post, he was offered K-ration cheese and brandy as Robert Capa and other photographers circled round. When Schlieben complained,
auf Deutsch,
“I am tired of this picture-taking,” Capa lowered his camera with a histrionic sigh and replied, also
auf Deutsch,
“I too am tired. I have to take pictures of so many captured German generals.”

*   *   *

Cherbourg, a SHAEF officer reported, proved a “looter’s heaven.” Vast stores of “everything from shaving cream to torpedoes” were found in Fort du Roule, along with silks, cigars, radios, and soap in unmailed packages to families in Germany. The Hôtel Atlantique held great stocks of carbon paper, envelopes, and shoes, both wooden and leather, while Schlieben’s cupboard in the Villa Meurice proffered beef tongue, bacon, artichokes, and canned octopus. Soldiers also found ten thousand barrels of cement—used for V-1 sites—a million board feet of lumber, and, most important, intact storage tanks for over 600,000 barrels of oil. MPs quickly secured warehouses stacked with thousands of cases of champagne, cognac, wine, and American whiskey. Bradley decreed that every soldier in Normandy would eventually receive two bottles of wine and three of liquor, but many chose not to wait for their allotment—VII Corps toasted the capture of Cherbourg with countless bottles of Hennessy and Benedictine. “The U.S. Army went on one big drunk,” a Navy captain recorded. “There were drunken voices singing, rifle shooting all night … with frequent detonation of hand grenades.”

Those who had inspected the port felt less celebratory. SHAEF planners initially hoped to capture Cherbourg on D
+
7 and to reopen the harbor three days later; in the event, the city fell on D
+
20, the first port operations took three weeks to begin, and Allied engineers would spend months repairing a facility proudly described by Berlin as “completely wrecked.” The German genius for destruction, honed with practice at Bizerte and Naples, produced what an American colonel called “a masterful job, beyond a doubt the most complete, intensive, and best-planned demolition in history.” Trainloads of explosives had wreaked damage far beyond even the darkest Allied expectations. Electrical and heating plants were demolished, along with the port rail station and every bridge, every building, every submarine pen. Each ship basin and dry dock was blocked with toppled cranes and more than a hundred scuttled vessels, ranging from fishing smacks to a 550-foot whaler. Twenty thousand cubic yards of masonry rubble choked the Darse Transatlantique, where once the
Queen Mary
and the
Normandie
had docked. One jetty was punctured with nine holes fifty feet in diameter, while craters measuring one hundred feet by seventy feet had been blown in the great quays.

Countless booby traps seeded the ruins, and more than four hundred mines of half a dozen varieties would be lifted or triggered in the roadstead. Some mines remained dormant for nearly three months before arming, so eight magnetic and eight acoustical sweeps of the port had to be completed each morning for the rest of the summer. A tedious, dangerous reconstruction began within hours of Schlieben’s surrender, despite delays in getting divers, tugs, and engineering gear from Britain. Eventually Cherbourg would shoulder over fifteen thousand tons of matériel a day, double an early SHAEF projection and more, but not until mid-July would the first barge enter the port, not until mid-August would the first Liberty ship dock, and not until mid-October would the deepwater basins be in good enough repair to berth big cargo carriers. “One cannot avoid noticing,” an Army study acknowledged, “that things did not go according to plan.” Cherbourg kept the Allied armies in France from wasting away, but the paramount task of enlarging and provisioning that host would bedevil Eisenhower for the rest of 1944.

For the moment the conquerors savored what Churchill called “this most pregnant victory”: the capture of
OVERLORD
’s first big objective, at the price of 22,000 VII Corps casualties. Before the Hôtel de Ville, near the statue of Bonaparte on his prancing charger, Collins on June 27 made a brief speech in ill-pronounced French and presented the mayor with a tricolor sewn from American parachutes. Civilians were instructed to surrender both firearms and pigeons—to prevent messages to the enemy—and to stay indoors after sunset. A band played various national anthems in dirge time before the Army brass strolled through the Place Napoléon to congratulate their filthy, hollow-eyed soldiers, one of whom muttered, “Make way for the fucking generals.”

Prisoners by the acre dumped their effects—knives, lighters, dispatch cases—and shuffled past jeering, spitting Frenchmen “thinking up new lines of invective” to bellow, as Alan Moorehead reported. From nearby cages they would be herded onto LSTs and any other floatable conveyance for transport to British camps, still singing ballads from the Seven Years’ War. Hitler was so enraged at the fall of Cherbourg that he threatened to court-martial the Seventh Army commander, who abruptly died on June 29, ostensibly from a heart attack, although many suspected poison, self-administered.

GIs also sorted through effects, including a low mountain of bedrolls stenciled with the names of soldiers killed in action and stacked along a stone wall near the Louis Pasteur Hospital. Quartermasters separated government gear from personal items, filling cardboard boxes with photos of smiling girls, harmonicas, and half-read paperbacks. A pocket Bible carried a flyleaf inscription: “To Alton C. Bright from Mother. Read it and be good.” Staff Sergeant Bright, from Tennessee, could no longer be good because he was dead.

In a nearby nineteenth-century French naval hospital, bereft of both water and electricity for the past week, doctors found a morgue jammed with decomposing German, French, and American corpses. Amputated limbs filled buckets and trash cans in the corridors and underground surgeries. “There were dirty instruments everywhere, dirty linens,” wrote a nurse from the 12th Field Hospital. Patients lay “stinking in their blood-soaked dressings and excreta.” A
Life
magazine reporter wrote, “Perhaps more men should know the expense of war, for it is neither a fit way to live nor to die.” He added, “The war in the West had barely begun.”

Two bordellos promptly opened in Cherbourg, both operating from two
P.M.
to nine
P.M.
and one designated “whites-only.” MPs kept order among long queues of soldiers.
Les tondues,
women shorn for
collaboration sentimentale
during the German occupation, were paraded on a truck labeled “The Collaborators’ Wagon.” They were the first of some twenty thousand who would be barbered in France this summer; their tresses burned in piles that could be smelled for miles.

Such stenches lingered in the nostril, to be carried beyond Cherbourg and beyond the war: the stink of diesel exhaust, of cordite, of broken plaster exposed to rain, of manure piles and the carcasses of the animals that shat them before being slaughtered by shellfire. An infantryman named John B. Babcock later catalogued the scents wafting around him: “cosmoline gun-metal preservative, oil used to clean weapons, chlorine in the drinking water, flea powder, pine pitch from freshly severed branches, fresh-dug earth.” Also: “GI yellow soap and the flour-grease fumes” from field kitchens, as well as those pungent German smells, of cabbage and sour rye, of “stale-sweat wool [and] harsh tobacco.” Even if the war in the west had barely begun, here was the precise odor of liberation.

3.
L
IBERATION

A Monstrous Blood-Mill

O
NE
million Allied soldiers had come ashore at Normandy by early July, yet the invasion increasingly resembled the deadlock at Anzio or, worse, the static trench warfare of World War I. Tentage vanished, replaced by labyrinthine burrows roofed with double layers of pine logs and sandbags. “They keep lobbing mortars at us,” Lieutenant Orval E. Faubus informed his diary. “It is a world no civilian can ever know.” Though Cherbourg had been taken, the beachhead on July 1 was only six miles deep in places. Caen and St.-Lô remained in German custody, and daily casualties in Normandy exceeded those of the 1917 British force in Flanders during the third battle of Ypres, which included the hellish struggle at Passchendaele. A German general who had fought in both world wars now described the Normandy struggle as “a monstrous blood-mill, the likes of which I have not seen in eleven years of war.” Omar Bradley lamented, “I can’t afford to stay here. I lose all my best boys. They’re the ones who stick their heads through hedges and then have them blown off.”

Eisenhower’s planners had given little thought to the Allied recourse if
OVERLORD
led to stalemate. A few options were considered, including another airborne and amphibious assault outside the Normandy lodgement. But the only credible solution, a SHAEF study concluded, was to bash on: to “concentrate all available air and land forces for a breakout from within the captured area.”

The supreme commander’s jitters grew with each new casualty list. He switched cigarette brands to Chesterfields, but still smoked several score a day, contributing to an ominous blood pressure reading of 176/110. An Army doctor prescribed “slow-up medicine”; his ears rang anyway. He ate poorly and slept badly, not least because V-1 attacks often forced him into a renovated shelter at Bushy Park where paint fumes gave him headaches. A flying bomb on July 1 detonated two hundred yards from Eisenhower’s office, sucking panes out of the windows and peeling off a swatch of
WIDEWING
’s roof. In a red leather journal, the supreme commander jotted brief, unhappy notes: “Bradley’s attack to south now postponed to July 3. How I suffer!… Tried to play bridge. Awful.” During a visit to the beachhead in early July, he stayed at Bradley’s command post, padding about at night in red pajamas and slippers; one afternoon he squeezed into the back of a P-51 Mustang from which the radio had been removed and for forty-five minutes flew west, then south, then east toward Paris for an aerial view of the battlefield. “Marshall would raise hell if he knew about this,” he admitted. Upon being told that a German officer captured at Cherbourg refused to disclose where mines had been laid, Eisenhower said, “Shoot the bastard”—an order neither intended nor enforced.

Montgomery had long envisioned an attritional battle, which he called “the Dogfight,” between the invasion assault and a breakout from the beachhead. Eisenhower chafed anyway. In a “dear Monty” note on July 7, he wrote:

I am familiar with your plan for generally holding firmly with your left, attracting thereto all of the enemy armor, while your right pushes down the peninsula and threatens the rear and flank of the forces facing the Second British Army.… We must use all possible energy in a determined effort to prevent a stalemate.… I will back you up to the limit in any effort you may decide upon to prevent a deadlock.

Montgomery’s reply a day later affected a bluff insouciance, despite 1,200 casualties that day in the Canadian 3rd Division alone, including 330 killed. “I am, myself, quite happy about the situation.… I now begin to see daylight,” he wrote, adding:

I think the battle is going very well. The enemy is being heavily attacked all along the line, and we are killing a lot of Germans. Of one thing you can be quite sure—there will be no stalemate.

So it had begun. This direct, professional exchange concealed an enmity that already infected the Allied high command and would grow more toxic. In his diary, Montgomery complained that Eisenhower “cannot stop ‘butting in’ and talking—always at the top of his voice!!… I like him very much but I could never live in the same house with him; he cannot talk calmly and quietly.” Montgomery professed to spend one-third of his day “making sure I’m not sacked” and another third inspiriting the troops, which “leaves one-third of my time to defeat the enemy.”

At SHAEF, the insistence by “Chief Big Wind”—as Montgomery was privately nicknamed—that the battle was unfolding as planned fed a seething disgruntlement, particularly among British air commanders. Montgomery had become “something of a dictator, something of a mystic,” wrote one. “It was difficult to track him down and to get an audience with him.” Eisenhower’s deputy, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur W. Tedder, told Churchill in late June that fewer than half of the planned eighty-one squadrons were flying from Normandy because only thirteen airstrips had been built. “The problem is Monty, who can be neither removed nor moved to action,” Tedder advised his diary. Persistent rain added to the gloom. A scowling Leigh-Mallory compulsively tapped his portable barometer, which always seemed to be falling. “Things are now egg-bound,” he complained, “and they may become glacial.”