Finally, on July 22, the morning dawned with clear weather. A convoy of small landing craft approached the port side of the John A. Campbell. Griff and his men descended into a landing craft via a stairway lowered from the top deck of the ship and from there took the short trip through mine-cleared channels to the steel piers that jutted out from the beach.
Past the beach, each man threw his duffle bag into one of a long line of cargo trucks and climbed aboard, twenty to a vehicle. They left the beach area on a narrow two-lane road beyond the dunes and traveled inland for about an hour to the west side of the Cotentin Peninsula, where the corps set up its first command post. The CP consisted of tents under camouflage netting interspersed among trees of an apple orchard in Saint-Jacques-de-Néhou. They were sixty miles northwest of Saint-Lô, in the hedgerow country of Normandy, where close-grown bushes or shrubs, tree roots, vines, and earth enchained into barriers chest high or higher. Along the hedgerows, an array of burned-out tanks interspersed with piles of discarded helmets, broken weapons, and crushed, empty ration boxes spoke to the now-repositioned American paratroopers who had landed in this drop zone during the invasion.
For twelve days, the corps had to wait while Allied forces attacked stiff German resistance at Saint-Lô. During that time, Griff and the other corps staff officers visited the various division camps around the peninsula and engaged in face-to-face planning and operations meetings with commanders of all armored, infantry, cavalry, and artillery units attached to the corps. They reviewed strategy and coordinated tactics for pursuing the Germans in a synchronized push.
On August 2, the corps broke out of its bridgehead and started its rapid sweep across France. Griff, as deputy chief of staff, oversaw the movement of the field headquarters command post to successive new sites to keep it close to the fighting front. One afternoon near the end of that period at Command Post 1—or CP 1—General Patton strode into the headquarters war tent to confer with General Walker and the assembled corps department heads, including Griff. Walker—only five-foot-two and portly—looked to strangers a bit diminutive, standing next to the taller Patton or the even taller Griffith, but, nevertheless, Walker was venerated by his subordinates from top to bottom.
That day, from the CP, Griff managed to bang out a letter to Nell, typed in all capital letters on a V-mail page:
SWEETHEART:
THESE ARE BUSY DAYS NOT AS EXCITING AS IDE [sic] LIKE BUT I HOPE LEADS TO MORE ACTION IN TIME. IM [sic] LEARNING QUITE A BIT AND GETTING EXPERIENCE WHICH WILL BE USEFUL.
THE PEOPLE I FEEL SORRY FOR IN THIS MESS ARE THE KIDS BUT THEY SEEM FAR FROM FEELING SORRY FOR THEM SELVES [sic]. EVEN THE SOBER ONES SEEM TO CARRY ON WITH OUT [sic] COMPLAINING. WOULD DO OUR SPOILED BRATS IN TEXAS GOOD TO SEE WHAT OTHERS HAVE TO GO THROUGH. I WONDER IF THESE EXPERIENCES WILL LEAVE A BAD IMPRESSION ON THE KIDS IN LATER LIFE. THEY ARE DARN FINE NOW.
IF NOTHING ELSE WAR TEACHES A GREAT RESPECT FOR THE OTHER FELLOW AND DRIVES HOME THE REALIZATION THAT THERE ARE SOME PRETTY GOOD PEOPLE IN THIS WORLD. NOT THE LEAST AMONG THEM BEING BRIG GEN CANHAM.
RECEIVED THE CHOCOLATE AND TWO MORE LETTERS. YOU WORK OVER TIME [sic]. HOPE THE BEACH IS FUN AND A RELAXATION BUT NOT A STOP FROM THE GOOD THINGS OF THE SCHOOL. STILL THINK THE FIRST COAT A GOOD THING.
SOME NEW PEOPLE I’VE KNOWN BEFORE ALMOST EVERY DAY SEE BORDERS FREQUENTLY. PEOPLES, HARVEY SOME TIMES. MANY OTHERS, JUST HAPPENED TO TALK OF THEM WOULDNT [sic] MISS THIS FOR THE WORLD BUT MISS YOU. PLEASE SEND [indecipherable, but may be “packages”].
LOTS LOVE YOU.
Grif [handwritten]
In this letter, his praise of legendary General Canham is revealing for what it says about his view of leadership.
On August 3, the corps moved and set up its second command post, CP 2 in a pasture near the commune of Fleury, also on the west side of the peninsula. On August 5, it moved again and erected its CP 3 thirty-six miles south in a woodland-encircled meadow near Saint-Martinde-Landelles. There the Germans battered the corps over three nights of bombings, during which German planes flew more than 290 sorties against US positions. During those nights, flares dropped by German bombers transformed the night sky into flashes of daylight, as bright inflamed streaks from tracer bullets hurtled skyward from the ninety-millimeter antiaircraft batteries that were always positioned within a few miles of the corps’ headquarters CP.
Eugene Schulz, newly promoted to sergeant (technician fourth grade), tried to rest in preparation for the morning’s staff meeting. He would be expected in the early hours in the sixteen-by-twenty-four-foot war tent in front of huge maps displayed on a large board covered with transparent acetate sheets, on which the latest troop positions would be plotted. On opposite ends of the war tent were openings with a flap, to which two smaller office tents were attached—one for the G-2 Intelligence Department, the other for the G-3 Operations Department.
Following the meeting, back in the G-3 tent, Schulz, at his fold-up table, would type up Colonel Griffith’s orders on one of the staff’s Remington portable typewriters lodged in the base of its open hard-shell case, the tent jammed with other GI clerks busy at adjoining workstations. Schulz would bustle to disseminate those orders to waiting helmet-clad Twentieth Corps field commanders or their couriers poised in idling jeeps and motorcycles, ready to deliver the orders to forward positions.
On August 6, Twentieth Corps was ordered to head south across the Sélune River, but before nightfall its engineers had to quickly build a double Bailey bridge to replace the span that had been destroyed by German bombers. Once the corps broke across, its infantry and armored divisions progressed so fast that Chief of Staff Collier ordered half of the corps headquarters staff to come with him to set up a new CP 4, in a wheat field thirty-one miles south, near Vitré, twenty-five miles east of Rennes.
At about this time, Griff’s other sister, Dorothea, was expecting a baby. Griff somehow found time in France to purchase and have mailed to her a small silver chest as a gift for the baby. Dorothea adored her brother Griff. She was impressed that even during the fighting he had such close feeling and affection for her and her baby to make the effort to send that gift.
Three days after Collier’s order to set up CP 4, the other half of the corps headquarters staff followed from CP 3 to CP 4. While driving south, this half of the corps encountered little German resistance. Griff rode in his jeep, and French civilians congregated on the roadside, greeting American troops with shouts of joy and tears, handing the soldiers flowers, wine, and eggs. Streams of American armored vehicles, artillery trucks, tank transports, jeeps, and six-by-six troop trucks navigated around burned-out abandoned German tanks and trucks.
While the corps headquarters directed operations from CP 4, the corps engaged in a fierce fight for the city of Angers, which it captured on August 9, taking 1,800 prisoners. Angers was the first large, strategic center captured by the corps. It had been a communication, supply, and transport center for the German Seventh Army, with a naval radio command center that controlled the German Atlantic fleet, a submarine training regiment, a large Gestapo headquarters, and an air command.
On August 10, corps headquarters moved again, twenty-four miles east to its new CP 5 in a cow pasture a few miles east of Laval. Shortly thereafter, enemy lines broke down, and German divisions retreated to the vicinity of Chartres, and two days later, corps headquarters relocated seventy miles east to the area of the town of La Ferté-Bernard, where on August 13 its CP 6 emerged.
Since coming ashore in Normandy in July, Twentieth Corps—as part of a three-corps force—had swept eastward almost 220 miles with unexpected speed to the city of Le Mans. The corps’ goal had been to secure plateaus in the areas generally on a hundred-mile north-south line roughly fifty miles west of Paris, extending from Dreux on the north to Châteaudun on the south. This area provided airfield sites from which to maintain air support for operations east of the Seine River. Following the Normandy invasion, German forces had entered the so-called Argentan-Falaise Pocket surrou
nding the town of Falaise. In early August, in the Battle of the Falaise Pocket, the Allies had encircled and destroyed two German armies, killing an estimated ten thousand German troops and taking fifty thousand prisoners. Allied forces were now trying to cut off at the Seine those German forces that were seeking to escape from that pocket. Twentieth Corps had been initially ordered to secure Dreux as the initial step toward blocking the German escape by securing the bridgehead at Le Mans and liberation of Angers and had taken up the role of protecting the south flank of the US Third Army.
On August 13—prompted by the discovery of a considerable number of Germans between the Argentan-Falaise Pocket and the lower Seine—General Patton changed the corps’ mission to instead seize Chartres and secure a bridgehead there across the Eure River. Patton believed that by attacking the Germans quickly the Allies would have the opportunity to complete the destruction of the forces that had escaped the Falaise Pocket and estimated that seventy-five thousand enemy troops and 250 tanks could still be encircled west of the Seine.
About six miles ahead of the corps lay twenty miles of the deep Perche forest, and around the middle of it stood the town of Nogentle-Rotrou, then a German Panzer division headquarters, which was only about five miles from Plainville, site of underground caves being used by local Resistance fighters as a hideout. After the forest, the corps’ road would continue in open fields for about ten miles to Courville-sur-Eure, the site of the next command post, where French Resistance fighters had been busy attacking the Germans and planning more attacks.
One such attack had just occurred in Nonville, about 120 miles south, where a Resistance sniper had shot a German soldier who had been passing in a truck. The Germans had pounded on, and nearly knocked down, the front door of a farmer’s house, demanding that he give first aid to the soldier. And around Courville-Sur-Eure, German tanks and armored vehicles had been reported concealed under trees. A little over two miles beyond Courville-sur-Eure, near Loulappe, a Resistance fighter had ignited a German ammunition convoy, which had burst into flames and destroyed a barn full of wheat.
The corps headquarters staff established its CP 6 two miles outside the town of La Ferté-Bernard, in the rose garden of an old closed château. The five-story white-stone château, with steeply pitched two-story slate roofs, featured a tall, narrow picture window in a gable in the grandest of its three roofs that commanded a view from its high-ceilinged great room from which sixteenth-century nobles likely had looked out over their feudal lands. The château and garden, in which the men of the corps had pitched their tents, exposed them to the history of the countryside through which they were fighting.
Late on the night of the fourteenth, a small group of FFI fighters came into the HQ tent while Gene Schulz worked the night shift in the attached “three-shop” (or G-3) tent. A young, attractive blonde French woman led the fighters. She was slender, in her twenties, dressed in a well-worn, tightly buttoned uniform jacket, while a tuft of her hair showed from beneath the peasant’s head scarf that she had tied in a knot under her chin, its ends waving over her shoulders. She wore an armband—with its blue, white, and red Tricolor, that displayed the initials FFI and the Cross of Lorraine, with its distinctive twin horizontal bars—and in her right hand she held an automatic pistol ready to fire.
The woman introduced herself as Madame Clavel, deputy commander of the FFI battalion. She and her companions said they were eager to provide the corps with information about the enemy. The corpsmen had heard about this knockout woman, and they would come to refer to her as the Veronica Lake of the Corps, after the American pinup movie star. Madame Clavel was strong-minded and dominant, and in time the Americans—weak in the knees at the sight of her—would come to regard her as the actual boss of the FFI battalion. Her true name was Silvia Monfort, and after the war she married FFI battalion commander Maurice Clavel. She also operated under the pseudonym Sinclair, and she would later earn decorations as a Resistance figure and go on to a postwar career as a stage and screen actress, director, and grande dame of French theater.
The FFI fighters moved behind the German lines to harass German forces and carry out acts of sabotage. One FFI observer worked alongside Captain de la Vasselais, a French liaison officer to the corps while it occupied its CP at La Ferté-Bernard. The FFI observer and the captain were patrolling in the vicinity of Le Chartres-sur-le-Loir, one hundred miles south, in a jeep driven by the corps’ Sergeant Sidney Bornstein, when a German machine-gunner ambushed them, killing the observer and wounding both Vasselais and the driver, who still managed to return in the jeep to the American lines through enemy fire, taking eighty-six bullet holes along the way.
Madame Clavel asked to see the commanding general or chief of staff. She sought a load of bazooka ammunition and several thousand rounds for their tommy guns to carry out a night attack against a German-held town. The Maquis of Plainville, with 150 men, led by Maurice Clavel and a local leader codenamed Duroc, had just launched an attack at Nogent-le-Rotrou, three days before the corps’ arrival. Whether the corps supplied the ammunition she requested that night is not clear. The British SOE and American OSS were supporting the FFI at the time with airdropped weapons and supplies, but the FFI used mostly its own weapons. Along the corps’ route toward Chartres, around the time it had positioned its CP 6 at La Ferté-Bernard, Resistance groups conducted at least three additional operations. The raid for which Madame Clavel sought the ammunition may have been one of them.
In the Loire Valley and in Paris, the FFI and other Resistance forces aided the Allies in their pursuit to the Seine and helped protect the Third Army’s southern flank. They did so by disrupting enemy railroad and highway movements and enemy telecommunications and by developing open resistance on a wide scale by providing tactical intelligence, preserving installations the Allies valued, and mopping up enemy positions the Allies had bypassed.
By 7:30 on the evening of August 14, Twentieth Corps Artillery had arrived and had set up its own command post in thick woods near the château whose garden hosted the corps’ CP 6.
The next morning, when Griffith conducted rounds, three German Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighter aircraft came overhead, strafing at treetop height. Men scrambled for cover beneath the trucks. The ground had been hard when the men had arrived, so their foxholes were of negligible size. The enemy planes circled and returned with guns ablaze. Bullets zinged all around as men hugged the trucks. The artillery units escaped any injury, suffering nothing but some upset breakfast in the melee, but the troops of the Sixty-Ninth Signal Battalion on the road nearby suffered a handful of casualties.
Also on the evening of the fourteenth, on orders from the Third Army, the Seventh Armored Division was redirected east to Chartres. The German defenders were startled by the speed of the corps’ armor. Usually the long barrels of the tank guns and the clanking treads were the enemy’s first warning of the approaching Americans. An armored division of this type would have had in its ranks almost eleven thousand men and 160 M4 assault tanks, sixty-six M5 light tanks, thirty-six M8 armored cars, eight self-propelled seventy-five-millimeter howitzers, and fifty-four self-propelled 175-millimeter howitzers. These troops would have divided into three tank battalions, three artillery battalions, a reconnaissance squadron, and three infantry battalions, together with all services necessary for their operation.
The Seventh Armored Division reached the objective on the night of August 15, as the corps headquarters closed in the wood west of Courville-sur-Eure.
By August 15, the corps would be on its way to Chartres. The larger mission of Patton’s Third Army—of which Twentieth Corps then represented a third—had been to reach the Seine to establish what the Allies called the D-Day lodgment area, the part of France northwest of the Seine that would serve as their base for new operations in their fall and winter push toward Germany. Alongside Twentieth Corps’ movement toward Chartres, Fifteenth Corps headed toward Dreux, and Twelfth Corps pressed toward Orléans. The Allies’ D-Day plans had be
en to reach the D-Day lodgment area within ninety days, but they had done so in only seventy-four days, and for the Third Army, that speed was now creating logistics challenges that would slow its further advances.
Although the other two corps of the Third Army had not encountered significant German resistance, the Twentieth Corps was about to—at Chartres.
At daybreak on the morning of August 15, at Chartres Cathedral, priests and staff were preparing for Masses in spite of the war. August 15 is the Solemnity of the Assumption, a major feast day in the Catholic Church, celebrated as a public holiday in France.
Mass that day began at 9:00 a.m., with Bishop Harscouët serving as priest celebrant, before scores of congregants. The day of the Assumption had special meaning for the Catholics of Chartres, because their cathedral had always been dedicated to the Virgin Mary. They prayed for her to look over them, over their families, and over their beloved ancient church. The present parishioners felt somber fear, as they had in the dark days of early June 1940 when the German invasion had swept over Chartres. Now, in days just past in 1944, they had heard explosions and seen German demolition crews planting charges under bridges and at monuments, and witnesses who had come into town from outlying farms had seen debris littering the edges of roads from scuffles between Resistance fighters and German soldiers in the gaps between towns.
Back at CP 6 in La Ferté-Bernard, Griff and the other section heads conducted their predawn briefing with General Walker to discuss changes to orders. Heavy plywood easels held topographic maps propped against the long war tent wall. The maps detailed roads, fences, creeks, villages, and farm buildings. In grease pencil, clerks diagramed with specified symbols the location of each division and battalion under the corps’ command and all other Allied and enemy troop positions. Field telephones rang in the G-2 department, its staff collecting reports of interrogations of captured enemy and coded messages via phone, radio, and courier from forward positions, observation planes, and informants, including German-speaking Americans who had infiltrated German-occupied territory. With constant movement of the units, the G-3 staff assistant on duty, principally Sergeant Joe Messner, was always busy wetting his rag from a can of alcohol to relocate the various units’ unique x, oval, or circle symbols to an updated position.
Saving the Light at Chartres Page 25
