Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (58 page)

Eddy sent both men to see Collins, who pointedly asked von Schlieben if he was surrendering on behalf of his entire command. Fearful even now of provoking Hitler’s wrath, he answered no, he surrendered only himself. Collins was furious and asked von Schlieben how he could justify “having his soldiers fight on when he saved himself by giving up.” Von Schlieben made some remark about how small groups operating independently might still delay the American victory. A disgusted Collins made sure that the news was broadcast to the defenders of the city that their commanding general had saved his own skin by capitulating while condemning his men to die in the last ditch.
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Other strongpoints capitulated one by one. The final obstacle was the naval arsenal, where the German commander, Major General Robert Sattler, wanted only to ensure that he could assert he was compelled to bow to overwhelming force. When Collins sent in a flag of truce, Sattler indicated that he would surrender if the Americans fired a few shells at the fortress for show. The shells were duly fired, and Sattler and four hundred men marched out with their bags packed. The forts on the outer breakwater held out for two more days. Kirk sent the destroyer
Shubrick
and six of Bulkeley’s PT boats to test their resolve, but the Germans there still had some fight in them, and once again shore batteries proved more resilient than expected. They finally surrendered on June 29 after being repeatedly strafed by American aircraft. By then, Collins had
already presided over a ceremony at city hall in which a homemade French flag made of parachute cloth was raised over the Hôtel de Ville.
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Even before that ceremony, a Coast Guard advance team under Lieutenant Commander Quentin Walsh had begun to investigate the condition of the harbor facilities. Walsh and his team had accompanied the 79th Division during its overland campaign, and as they worked their way through the ruined city to the dock area, they encountered occasional pockets of continuing resistance. Dodging snipers and taking prisoners, they made their way to the harbor, where they found that the Germans, with their usual efficiency, had wrecked virtually everything. What they had not smashed, they had booby-trapped with mines and explosives. They had used an entire freight train filled with explosives to demolish the railroad pier, and the inner harbor was choked with dozens of scuttled ships and sown with 133 mines. The Germans had even blown up the E-boat pens that had been the object of Kirk’s keen interest since April. The steel-reinforced concrete overheads of those pens turned out to be eight feet thick, and as Walsh and his men arrived, the E-boats inside them were still burning. Walsh reported to Kirk that the harbor was useless.
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Nevertheless, American, Canadian, and British salvage teams got to work almost immediately to clear the wreckage, sweep the mines, and repair the facilities. It was slow going. For more than two weeks, into mid-July, no Allied ships could use the harbor piers at all, and it was August before deep-draft supply ships could come into Cherbourg to unload at the rebuilt piers. Of course that meant that the Allies remained dependent on the beaches in Normandy. Thankfully, the steady delivery of supplies there continued to exceed expectations. On July 29, the day that the last pockets of resistance in Cherbourg were cleaned out, the Allies landed more than 23,000 tons of supplies on Omaha and Utah Beaches, and they sustained that level of efficiency through the next several weeks while Cherbourg Harbor was being repaired. On August 1, Allied ships landed 16,000 tons on Omaha Beach alone, an amount exactly double the pre-invasion daily goal.
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ON JUNE 30, RAMSAY DECLARED
that Operation Neptune was officially over. For more than two and a half years, ever since the ABC conversations
in Washington back in March 1941, nine months before Pearl Harbor, the Anglo-Americans had wrestled with the concept of invading Europe. Their strategic negotiating had been marked by often contentious and sometimes angry disputes about when and where to land. If the conversations at times grew sharp and many of the principals cursed one another privately in their diaries and letters, they never let their disagreements scuttle the alliance. George Marshall, Dwight Eisenhower, and the Americans had been proven correct in identifying northern Europe—and in particular France—as the strategic center of gravity, and Churchill, Alan Brooke, and the British had been correct in asserting that a premature invasion would have been catastrophic. From Bolero and Roundup to Neptune and Overlord, the plans underwent numerous revisions. Neptune was confirmed in May 1943 at Quebec, and it then took thirteen more months to plan, assemble, and execute the biggest maritime expedition in history. In those thirteen months, the Allies defeated the U-boat menace in the Atlantic and secured command of the air over France; they brought more than a million American GIs to Britain and conducted numberless training exercises on British beaches; they built the thousands of ships—the destroyers, Liberty ships, landing ships, and especially the LSTs—needed to conduct the invasion, and they brought them all together in British ports. It was an astonishing chronicle of perseverance and productivity, and on June 6, 1944, the greatest armada in the history of the planet assembled off the Normandy beaches.

Yet despite all that has been rightly said about the importance of Allied manpower and superior material assets, it was not merely the overwhelming numbers that made Neptune possible. Nor was it the creative but often dubious gimmick weapons: the DD tanks, the rocket-firing LCTs, or even the Mulberry harbors, all of which proved disappointing at some level. It was, instead, the commitment and the dedication of the men themselves. From the stalwart and unflagging determination of Winston Churchill to the pragmatic flexibility and cheerful congeniality of Franklin Roosevelt, from the dispassionate clear-eyed professionalism of George Marshall to the flamboyant self-assurance of Bernard Montgomery, from the political sensitivity and quiet competence of Dwight Eisenhower to the patrician and highly professional Bertram Ramsay, it was the people involved who made
Neptune possible. The planners sought to account for every eventuality, though in the end the factor that produced the Allied victory was human judgment applied at a crisis moment, often instinctively and selflessly. That certainly included Ike’s courageous decision to go ahead with the operation despite the storm that was raging around Southwick House on June 5. It included the grim determination of the young Navy and Coast Guard officers and coxswains who pushed their landing craft onto the target beaches through the hedgehogs and the teller mines. It included the close-in gunfire support provided by the destroyers off Omaha Beach, which all but put their bows on the bottom to suppress the German guns ashore. It included the soldiers themselves, trapped on that deadly beach, who scaled the bluffs hand over hand and seized the high ground. It included the British commandos who held Pegasus Bridge, as well as the Rangers who seized Pointe du Hoc. And it included thousands of others, officers and men, who had to make life-and-death decisions in the midst of furious combat on all the beaches. Back in their hometowns, the newspapers and radio reports announced the names of the Allied commanders in large boldface type. Most of those engaged in Neptune, however, did their jobs anonymously: the ensigns and lieutenants, coxswains, enginemen, boatswain’s mates, line handlers, demolition specialists, gunners, Seabees, and medics—indeed, all the varied ratings of a vast and complex maritime organization, American, British, and Canadian, both Navy and Coast Guard. They made Neptune a success.

O
N JUNE
22, the day the storm off the Normandy beaches began to abate, and while Collins’s three divisions prepared to launch their final assault on Cherbourg, Russian forces on the Eastern Front initiated Operation Bagration, a massive ground offensive along a three-hundred-mile front that involved 2.3 million men and 2,700 tanks in 146 divisions. Initially, that offensive was to have taken place simultaneously with the Normandy landings, but Stalin waited until two weeks after D-Day because June 22 was the third anniversary of the German invasion of Russia. Here at last was a double envelopment of the enemy on a continental scale. Nazi Germany now confronted a two-front war with a million American, British, Canadian, and French soldiers attacking in the west and more than two million Russians attacking in the east.

Hitler refused to accept reality. Just as he had ordered von Schlieben to die in the last ditch at Cherbourg, so now he ordered all his armies to stand and fight where they were, insisting that there should be no retreat. That, of course, simply condemned most of them to die. And die they did, by the
tens of thousands. Officers who suggested any other tactical solution were sacked. Field Marshal Karl von Rundstedt, commanding German armies in the west, felt obligated to tell Hitler that the strategic situation in France was hopeless. Hitler responded by replacing him with Gunther Hans von Kluge.

Throughout the rest of June and into July, the principal fighting in Normandy continued to swirl around Caen, which allowed Montgomery to assert, with justification, that his forces were bearing the brunt of the enemy’s counterattacks. It also allowed the Royal Navy battleships and cruisers to hammer away at German positions in and around the city, doing so with such effectiveness that Major General Leo Geyr von Schweppenberg, commander of Panzer Group West, appealed to Berlin for permission to withdraw beyond the range of the Allied naval guns. Hitler denied the request and fired von Schweppenberg.
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All that time, the Allies continued to pour men, vehicles, and equipment into France. With Cherbourg harbor still not fully operational, the LSTs and smaller landing craft brought men and supplies over the Normandy beaches as well as the British Mulberry pier off Arromanche. On July 4, the millionth Allied soldier came ashore, and two days later George Patton, who up to then had been cooling his heels in England as a decoy, landed at a small airstrip behind Omaha Beach. Once off the plane, he told the soldiers who crowded around him that they were going to Berlin, where, he insisted, “I am going to personally shoot that paper-hanging goddammed son of a bitch.”
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Three weeks later, on July 25, the Americans initiated Operation Cobra, a plan to break out of their enclave in Brittany and Normandy. Early gains were incremental and costly. Then on August 1, two armored divisions of Collins’s VII Corps opened a hole in the German lines, and Patton’s newly activated Third Army burst through into the French countryside. Hitler ordered an immediate counterattack, and though his lieutenants attempted to obey, their assaults were blunted and then hurled back. With unchallenged command of the air and dominant superiority on the ground, Allied columns raced across France the way the Germans had done back in 1940. The Allies very nearly trapped two full German armies in a double envelopment in
what was known as the Falaise pocket south of Caen, and while the Germans managed to escape by the narrowest of margins, they nevertheless fled eastward all the way to the Seine River.
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AS THE FIGHTING MOVED INLAND
, away from the beaches, the Neptune forces were dispersed. Ramsay himself continued to cooperate with Montgomery’s Second Army in the campaign for the lowlands and especially the capture of Antwerp in September, but both Vian and Kirk returned to England for reassignment. Kirk’s Western Naval Task Force was officially dissolved on July 10, and he became Commander, U.S. Naval Forces in France. Vian, elevated to a Knight Commander of the Bath and the rank of vice admiral, went to the Pacific, where he assumed command of a fleet of aircraft carriers. In that capacity, he supervised the attack Churchill had long advocated against Japanese-held Sumatra. Both Jimmy Hall and Morton Deyo also got orders to the Pacific, where in the spring of 1945 they participated in the American invasion of Okinawa, for which each of them received the Navy’s Distinguished Service Medal. Leigh-Mallory, too, was assigned to the Pacific as the Air Commander-in-Chief for South East Asia, though while en route there his plane crashed over the French Alps in poor weather and everyone on board was killed.
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