The Steel Wave (57 page)

BRADLEY’S MOBILE HQ, NEAR ISIGNY
JUNE 24, 1944

“We have a larger problem than air support, Ike.”

“I’m listening.”

Bradley rose from the narrow leather bench and paced across the small space. Eisenhower sat on a small sofa placed against one wall of the truck trailer. He had always marveled at Bradley’s efficient use of the limited area inside the trailer, every wall papered with overlapping maps. There was one small writing table and a coffeepot in one corner. Eisenhower glanced into his cup—empty—but thought, Enough for now. To the front of the trailer, Bradley’s sleeping area was cordoned off by a short wall, perched up on an elevated platform. Eisenhower couldn’t help thinking of the tents in his own forward command post. Brad’s got the right idea, he thought. He can move anywhere he wants to go and keep his feet dry doing it. There’s a lesson here.

Bradley continued to pace. He kept his hands on his hips and seemed reluctant to speak, so Eisenhower knew that what was coming wouldn’t make either of them happy. After a long moment, Bradley stopped and looked at him.

“I wish I could lather you up with good news. Nothing good about this storm. I know damn well the enemy has taken full advantage of our inability to hit them from the air. Well, hell, you know that.” He paused. “Dammit, Ike, this is tough. Lee’s your man, and I know he has your respect. But the supply situation has gone from awful to—well, more than awful. I’ve been bitching like hell at the SOS for weeks and haven’t gotten anywhere. I haven’t been needling you about this because I assumed you had more important things to worry about. But it’s so bad now it’s causing a reassessment of the entire operation.”

Eisenhower had heard complaints before and knew the Service of Supply was never as efficient as it should be. The logistics commander, General John Lee, was generally disliked by everyone but Eisenhower, which Eisenhower considered something of a mystery. Lee was a powerfully driven man and fought tirelessly to bolster the resources of his supply service. But as the realities of Overlord had grown more complex, the grumbling from the field commanders had grown louder. Eisenhower had begun to accept that Lee’s biggest problem might be an ego that needed constant massage. Even though Lee was tackling the enormous logistical problems that Overlord presented, he was spending just as much energy building his own kingdom, noisily inflating his own importance. The result had been constant wrestling matches between Lee’s supply offices and the frustrated commanders in the field, notably Bradley. It was one reason why the port of Cherbourg was considered so vital to American needs; presumably, it would offer a far more open conduit for the flow of supplies so desperately needed by Bradley’s army. But now, with the thrust toward Cherbourg delayed by the storm, Bradley’s supply problems were increasing.

“Reassessing the entire operation? What kind of reassessment are you talking about? I’ve heard nothing about that from Monty.”

“Have you seen Omaha Beach?”

Eisenhower shook his head. “The destroyer brought me across Utah. I haven’t been there since the storm hit.”

“It’s the biggest mess you ever saw. I’d say it looks worse now than the day we landed.” Bradley moved to the small desk, searched through papers, picked up one, handed it to Eisenhower. “Do you realize that if we had delayed the June 6 landings, our alternate timetable would have put us on those beaches the same day the storm hit? Do you have any idea what kind of disaster
that
would have been? You’re a charmed man, Ike.”

“Knock it off. We landed when we did because it was the right thing to do. I’m just the guy who had to dot the
i
’s. Believe me, I’ve been giving considerable thanks to the war gods.”

“If you say so. But we’re still looking at a disaster. I had to push like hell to get the navy to tell me how bad the storm hurt us. Admiral King finally got me these figures, before he wanted to release them to anybody else, even you. Ike, we lost eight hundred ships! Everything from beach landers to LCTs to full-sized cargo ships.
Eight hundred ships,
busted to hell or sunk. It’ll take the engineers a month to clear that damned beach of the wreckage. And the mulberries at Omaha are shot, useless.”

“I know about the Mulberries. That’s why we need Cherbourg.”

“Fine, we need Cherbourg. But my orders are to send Collins up there and, at the same time, send Middleton’s Eighth Corps south, to capture Saint-Lô and open the door out of the Cotentin. We sure as hell can’t stay penned up the way we are for very long. The enemy is building up his defenses every day. Monty assumes that our next step is to hammer the Saint-Lô area, maybe bust through, but right now that’s where Rommel is the strongest. I’ve been talking to Middleton about bypassing that to the west, keeping the Eighth Corps closer to the coastline. It’s pretty clear to me that we’ll make better progress if we strike toward Avranches. We could cut off a hell of a lot of Rommel’s people by moving around that way, maybe surround them altogether. But not anymore. Middleton can’t move until Collins finishes the job at Cherbourg.”

“Why not? Dammit, Brad, this isn’t like you. I’m already hearing too much about what we can’t do from Monty. Is this about supplies?”

“More specific than that; it’s about ammunition. We can’t supply the artillery fire for both operations. We don’t have enough damned shells! Admiral Kirk’s a good man, Ike, a good friend. He’s agreed to send the navy’s big guns to bombard the port. Until the heavy bombers can help us out, it’s the only real power we can bring to bear. The Germans have poured enough concrete at Cherbourg to cover Kansas a foot deep, and we can’t just prance up to those walls with a big show of uniforms and expect them to surrender. It’s a damned citadel. You know they’ll fight for it.” He stopped. “Part of this is my fault.”

“Which part?”

“I haven’t climbed on the backs of the artillery people the way I should have. Every time we launch a ground attack, we’ve started with the biggest damned artillery barrage you’ve ever seen.”

“I would hope so.”

“No, Ike.
The biggest damned barrage you’ve ever seen.
Some of the infantry commanders won’t send their people forward until every living thing in front of them is wiped off the map. Every damned mortar company is crying about ammo, every tank commander, every artillery officer. So far, no one has shown me that it actually works. We’ve stepped off several times, thinking it’ll be a walk in the park, and—son of a bitch—the enemy’s still there, still putting up a hell of a fight. So when our boys get resupplied for the next attack, they do it again, more this time, fire every shell they have. Stupid mistake, but it stops here. It has to. With the problems we have getting ammo into France, I can’t supply Middleton with enough firepower to drive south until Collins takes Cherbourg. Neither you nor I have any idea how long that will take.”

“Give me an idea anyway. I know you, Brad. You’ve thought about this until you’re blue in the face. Don’t tell me you don’t have an estimate.”

Bradley sat on the narrow bench again and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees.

“Okay, Ike. This damned weather will decide a great deal. Collins is already moving north, and if we can send the bombers up to help him, Cherbourg might fall in a week, maybe sooner. If he can secure the city and turn south to link up with Middleton, we’ll be strong enough to hit Rommel.”

“You’re talking July.”

“Yep. July.”

“What does Monty say?”

Bradley seemed surprised. “You haven’t talked to him?”

Eisenhower felt the weight of the question. “Not today. De Guingand is supposed to meet me here this afternoon.”

Bradley sat back, frowning, and Eisenhower knew what he was thinking. Freddie de Guingand, Montgomery’s chief of staff, was an affable, efficient man, who had always worked well with his American counterparts. Eisenhower liked him immensely and had grown accustomed to meeting far more often with de Guingand than with Montgomery himself. De Guingand seemed to accept his role as Eisenhower’s preferred go-between, but Eisenhower had to wonder if Montgomery’s own chief of staff was aware how difficult it was for Eisenhower every time he had to face Montgomery. Eisenhower’s patience for excuses and bluster was wearing thin. He looked at Bradley, saw the stern-faced frown, couldn’t tell if Bradley was reading him.

“This isn’t something we need to discuss, Brad. I should go to see Monty anyway. He’s made it plain that when I show up I’m taking him away from the business at hand, interfering where I don’t belong. Not sure how much longer that game can be played. He hasn’t delivered what he said he would deliver, and I know damned well that Churchill is grousing at him, and a few British newspapers are raising hell.”

“That’s not justified, Ike, not at all. I know he’s got his problems at Caen, and some of that’s his own doing. And you know damn well I’m not smitten by the Legend of Monty or anything like that. Right now, Rommel’s got seven panzer divisions in front of Monty, and we’re facing no more than two. Monty has never stuck his nose any further into my command than it needed to be. His biggest problem is that he shoots his mouth off. When you tell the whole world what you’re going to do, and then you do it, that makes you a hero. If you don’t do it, you look like a jackass. I’m mad as hell about our delays and our problems, but I’m not blaming anything on Monty. I’ve got my hands full right here.”

T
hough the foul weather continued, on June 26, the commander of the German garrison at Cherbourg, General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, was captured, along with eight hundred defenders of the primary defensive position at the heart of the fortress city. Over the next few days, the remainder of the city, including the critical waterfront, fell completely into American hands. But Cherbourg was not the supply panacea that Eisenhower had assumed it to be. With the Allied attack coming from air and sea as well as by land, von Schlieben had known that Hitler’s orders to hold the city “to the last cartridge” was a hopeless task. Bowing to the inevitable, the Germans had instead wrecked as much of the harbor facilities as they could, clogging the shipping channels with sunken ships and debris and in general making the port virtually useless. It was yet another difficult challenge for the Allied engineers, the men who were charged with repairing what the Germans destroyed. For Bradley’s army, that destruction meant more delay and more shortages of the matériel they had to have before they could consider their next major attack.

While Bradley wrestled with the challenges of confronting Rommel’s forces at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, Montgomery struggled again to take the increasingly fortified city of Caen. On June 26, he launched what he referred to as the showdown stage of the campaign, but the Panzer Lehr Division rose to the challenge and blunted the British attack. With the weather preventing British air support, the Germans launched a counterattack of their own, resulting in a hard fight that cost both sides enormous casualties. But neither side could hold the momentum, and by July 1, the front along the Caen sector continued to show disturbing signs of becoming a muddy stalemate, too reminiscent of what these two armies had endured thirty years before. Despite Montgomery’s insistence that the attack on June 26 had achieved a notable victory, Eisenhower saw the reality on the maps. Though the Germans had suffered a higher toll of casualties, losses Rommel could not afford, the British had gained very little ground and were no closer to occupying Caen than when the attack began. Despite all the planning, despite Montgomery’s confident certainty in his own predictions, Eisenhower was becoming increasingly concerned that if there was to be a turning of the tide, if a great hole was ever to be punched through the German lines, that punch would have to come from the right, on Bradley’s front. Whether Montgomery would ever admit that his failure to capture Caen was in fact a failure at all, he continued to insist that his efforts there had accomplished his goal of drawing German strength away from the Americans.

Montgomery’s raw-nerved defensiveness was producing strains in England that Eisenhower could not avoid. The heavy hand of politics was being felt, a grumbling toward Montgomery that was growing louder. But Eisenhower had no reason to step into that fray, not as long as the battlegrounds were still so dangerous and the outcome still very much in doubt. Montgomery was right that Bradley was facing far fewer German tanks than were bloodying the British at Caen, and American troop strength was continuing to increase. Despite supply issues and weather, if there was to be a major success in the Overlord campaign, the Americans were in the best position to make it happen.

With Collins’s Seventh Corps now able to turn south, Bradley was finally able to assemble the enormous strength required for a large-scale push against the Germans, whose best efforts were aimed at keeping the Americans bottled up in the Cotentin Peninsula. The Seventh Corps would push southward alongside the newly arrived Eighth. To their left, the Nineteenth Corps, also newly arrived, would fill the space closer to the British positions. Bradley’s force totaled fourteen American divisions, who outnumbered their German opposition by nearly three to one. Their overall objective would be to drive south, from the western coast of the Cotentin, on a front that would extend east, past the valuable crossroads of Saint-Lô. It was the Americans’ most ambitious attack of the entire Overlord campaign. With the British continuing to hold the majority of the German armor at Caen, Montgomery enthusiastically championed the plan, insisting it would throw open the door to a collapse that could consume Rommel’s entire front. But the failure of the Ninetieth Division was still fresh in Bradley’s mind and, like Eisenhower, he recognized that placing so much dependence on freshly arriving troops was a serious risk. Bradley decided to rely upon the most experienced troops in his command. No matter how worn out the paratroopers were, Bradley insisted the Eighty-second Airborne lead the next attack.

35. ADAMS

NEAR PONT-L’ABBÉ
JULY 2, 1944