The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945

by Rick Atkinson

  Collins had not planned to launch his exploitation force—the 1st Infantry Division and two armored divisions, the 2nd and 3rd—until a clear hole had been drilled through enemy defenses by shock battalions from the 4th, 9th, and 30th Infantry Divisions. But the absence of the usual German counterattack on Tuesday afternoon suggested disarray and debility in the opposing ranks, even if the lead U.S. echelons had yet to break into the enemy’s rear. At 5:45 P.M. on Tuesday, Collins ordered the follow-on forces to attack the next morning, July 26. Riflemen crept forward through the night, feeling for booby traps, removing mines, and listening for the growl of panzer engines.

  With the new day, the American onslaught built momentum, as if both opposing armies had begun to slide across a landscape tilting south. GIs rode into battle “Russian style” on tank hulls, leaping off to spray every swale and thicket with blistering fire. On average, 1st Division troops required under three minutes to clear each hedgerow, a task that had taken hours just a few weeks earlier. On the eastern lip of the breach, forcing a narrow sunken road to St.-Gilles cost seven hundred 30th Division casualties, but by midafternoon tanks were churning through the village against little opposition. Marigny fell to the 1st Division, the 9th Division lunged nearly three miles beyond the Périers road, and at four P.M. the German Seventh Army reported Americans leaking through seven punctures in the narrow front. Enemy efforts to fling two divisions west across the Vire River to cork the bottle came to naught after the U.S. XIX Corps blocked the move. Fuel shortages forced abandonment of two Panther companies from the 2nd SS Panzer Division and an American patrol killed the Das Reich commander, a small but satisfying measure of vengeance for the massacres at Tulle and Oradour. Kluge told subordinates to expect no further reinforcements for at least a week.

  By nightfall on Thursday, 100,000 Americans were pouring through the five-mile breach, armored columns had closed on Coutances, and Bradley’s map board showed ever more enemy positions with unit icons marked “Rem”—remnants. “This thing has busted wide open,” the 30th Division commander told Collins.

  French farmers flitted across the battlefield, stripping shoes and tunics from German corpses. GIs found white tablecloths and wilting flowers on a mess table in a captured bivouac, along with well-thumbed pornography, copies of Life magazine, and checkers on a board abandoned in mid-game. A tank lieutenant saw a German drop his rifle and scamper away. “Then I caught sight of holes in his head, and he crashed full tilt into an apple tree,” he wrote. “He was running dead, like a chicken.”

  On Friday enemy forces scuffed to the rear across a twenty-mile front, pressed by both Collins’s VII Corps and Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, clattering down a corridor along the Cotentin coast. German ambuscades, local counterattacks, and confusion permitted substantial enemy forces to escape entrapment in the Cotentin. Even so, sheets of marching fire took a heavy toll. Pilots over Roncey reported a “fighter-bomber’s paradise,” with German traffic triple-banked and crawling bumper to bumper. For six hours Allied planes lashed the column, eventually joined by artillery, tanks, and tank destroyers until more than 100 panzers and 250 other vehicles stood wrecked if not burning; survivors pelted away on foot, silhouetted against the flames. The Hun had been hazed.

  Coutances fell on Saturday morning, July 29. German naval crews at Granville spiked their shore guns before fleeing. “Things on our front really look good,” an elated Bradley wrote Eisenhower. Ahead lay Avranches, among the oldest towns in Normandy, where the English monarch Henry II had arrived, barefoot and hatless, to make public penance on his knees for the murder of Thomas Becket in 1170. Built on a high bluff overlooking holy Mont-St.-Michel, eight miles to the west, Avranches gave onto Brittany and the Breton ports coveted by Allied logisticians. On Sunday evening, a spearhead from the 4th Armored Division lunged into the town only to find it undefended. Jubilant Frenchmen greeted them with waving tricolors.

  Belatedly alive to their peril, German troops hurried toward Avranches in trucks and horse-drawn wagons. Counterattacking at dawn, they were thrown back with white phosphorus, strafing P-47s, and gouts of Sherman fire. American tankers and riflemen soon seized the vital bridge over the Sélune River at Pontaubault, four miles south of town and unaccountably still intact. Within hours, three more crossing sites over the Sélune had been secured. Here the roads radiated to all points of the compass, including the Brittany ports. Seven thousand German prisoners shambled into VIII Corps cages on July 31 alone; many had been simply disarmed and waved to the rear unescorted. “We face a defeated enemy,” General Barton told subordinates in the 4th Infantry Division, “an enemy terribly low in morale, terribly confused.”

  In a phone call from Le Mans to his chief of staff in Paris at 10:30 that Monday morning, Kluge scoffed when told of Berlin’s demand that another defensive line be thrown up in Normandy.

  It’s a madhouse here. You can’t imagine what it’s like.… All you can do is laugh out loud. Don’t they read our dispatches? Haven’t they been oriented? They must be living on the moon.… Someone has to tell the Führer that if the Americans get through at Avranches they will be out of the woods and they’ll be able to do what they want.

  The Führer would learn the truth of Kluge’s assessment soon enough. With agility and celerity, and bolstered by ten thousand tactical air sorties, First Army had driven thirty miles in less than a week to outflank the German left and pivot into Brittany. This thing had indeed busted wide open. The war of movement had begun, at last.

  Ministers of Thy Chastisement

  DOWN metalled roads and farm lanes they pounded, columns of jeeps and tanks and deuce-and-a-half trucks snaking through the shot-threshed fields and the orchards heavy with fruit. MP motorcyclists weaved among the ranks, scolding dawdlers. Grenades hung from uniform lapels “like Cartier clips.” Chalky dust powdered their faces and grayed their hair. “War was their business,” wrote the photojournalist Lee Miller, “and they went on in a sloping march.”

  On they marched, south, east, and west: past stone barns and mules hauling milk in copper urns, past shops that still peddled perfume and silk scarves, past collaborators with crude swastikas swabbed onto their shaved heads. When the trucks halted for a moment and GIs tumbled out to urinate in squirming echelons on the road shoulders, civilians rushed up to plead for cigarettes with two fingers pressed to the lips, a gesture described by Forrest Pogue as the French national salute. Others offered tricolor nosegays made from blue hydrangeas, red roses, and white asters. “Heep, heep, whoo-ray!” the Frenchmen yelled, repeating phrases learned from doughboys a generation earlier. “I speeg Engless. Jees-Christ, cot-dam!” Soldiers replied in schoolboy French or with handy phrases published in Stars and Stripes, among which was the French for “My wife doesn’t understand me.” A GI shout of “Vive la France!” often elicited jugs of calvados and toasts to the spirit of Lafayette or hissing denunciations of the Boche, also known to the Yanks as Krauts, Jerries, Graybacks, Lice, Huns, and Squareheads.

  German tourist posters still hung from schoolhouse walls, and German-language lessons—all umlauts and uppercase nouns—could be seen chalked on blackboards. But for mile after mile the only enemy encountered were prisoners, encouraged to surrender with the GI dialect known as Milwaukee German, or dead men, often buried beneath a makeshift marker with an epitaph reduced to a naked noun, also upper case: “A German.” The Wehrmacht retreat had “a Napoleonic aspect,” an officer in Army Group B conceded. Kluge in early August told his superiors, “No matter how many orders are issued, the troops cannot, are not able to, are not strong enough to defeat the enemy.”

  In hasty bivouacs the surging columns halted for the night, choking down cold K rations or heating soup in their helmets over a Sterno flame—the charred crown, with steel burned to a blue sheen, marked veteran troops as surely as a Purple Heart. Evening also was the time for brief memorial services. “One’s life is held in balance by a little piece of metal smaller than a man’s finger,” one s
oldier wrote. A chaplain who offered a prayer for the dead invoked the Irish poet Charles Wolfe: “We buried him darkly at dead of night.… we left him alone with his glory.”

  * * *

  SHAEF planners in late July estimated that Germany could be defeated quickly if nine more divisions were added to the seventy-five already allocated to OVERLORD. Unfortunately, with fewer than three dozen divisions now in France, almost no additional British units remaining, and U.S. reinforcements reaching France at a rate of less than one division per week, that war-winning tally of eighty-four would not be available on the Continent until August 1945. Instead, the Allies would have to settle for the arrival on stage of a man described by a reporter as “a warring, roaring comet” and by a West Point classmate as a “pure-bred gamecock with brains.”

  The first glimpse of Lieutenant General George S. Patton, Jr., for many soldiers came in Avranches, where he leaped from his jeep into an umbrella-covered police box and directed convoy traffic through a congested roundabout for ninety minutes. Assigned by Bradley to oversee VIII Corps’s drive south, Patton had helped shove seven divisions past Avranches in seventy-two hours, cigar smoldering as he snarled at occasional Luftwaffe marauders, “Those goddamned bastards, those rotten sons-of-bitches! We’ll get them.” When a subordinate called to report his position, Patton bellowed, “Hang up and keep going.” In a Norman landscape of smashed vehicles, grass fires, and charred German bodies, he added, “Could anything be more magnificent? Compared to war, all other forms of human endeavor shrink to insignificance. God, how I love it.”

  At noon on Tuesday, August 1, his U.S. Third Army officially came into being, with nine divisions under three corps. At the same instant, Bradley ascended to command the new 12th Army Group, complementing 21st Army Group while still subordinate to Montgomery. Bradley’s former deputy, Lieutenant General Courtney H. Hodges, succeeded him as First Army commander. “We are advancing constantly,” Patton told his staff. “From here on out, until we win or die in the attempt, we will always be audacious.” To his diary he confided, “I am very happy.”

  “There are apparently two types of successful soldiers,” Patton had recently written his son. “Those who get on by being unobtrusive and those who get on by being obtrusive. I am of the latter type.” True enough, but for nearly a year he had been consigned to near anonymity. Slapping two hospitalized soldiers in Sicily, ostensibly for malingering, nearly cost Patton his stars; he was denied an early role in OVERLORD and a chance to command the army group now led by Bradley, his junior and former subordinate. A minor but foolish indiscretion in April, when he told a British social club that “undoubtedly it is our destiny to rule the world—the Americans, the British, and of course the Russians,” almost lost him Third Army. “Patton has broken out again,” Eisenhower wrote Marshall after that incident. “Apparently he is unable to use reasonably good sense.”

  Narrowly pardoned, Patton spent the spring and early summer as a conspicuous decoy to confuse German intelligence about a second Allied landing. He shopped in Britain for hunting guns and saddles, wrote atrocious poetry, played badminton and golf, bought a white bull terrier named Willie, and offered Eisenhower $1,000 for every week in advance he was permitted to leave England for France. A reporter found him “neurotic and bloodthirsty.” To his wife, Bea, who was not only his confidante but a kindred spirit—she once bribed an Egyptian boatman to smuggle her into a tattoo parlor in a failed effort to have a full-rigged clipper ship needled across her chest—Patton had written in early July, “Can’t stand the times between wars.”

  He also reflected deeply on generalship and the exploitation juggernaut he would now command. His kit included Edward Augustus Freeman’s six-volume History of the Norman Conquest of England, which Patton studied to understand William the Conqueror’s use of road networks in France. He arrived in France determined not only to redeem his reputation but to find glory. “I’m in the doghouse,” he told Joe Collins. “I’ve got to do something spectacular.” Bradley had bluntly warned him: “You know, George, I didn’t ask for you.” But Bradley soon found himself impressed by a man who seemed more “judicious, reasonable, and likeable than in the Mediterranean.” To his soldiers, Patton promised that the enemy would “raise up on their hind legs and howl, ‘Jesus Christ, it’s the goddamn Third Army and that son-of-a-bitch Patton again.’”

  Now here they were, sluicing into Brittany with open flanks and a vulnerable rear. “I had to keep repeating to myself, ‘Do not take counsel of your fears,’” Patton told his diary on August 1. To Bea he wrote that combat “always scares and lures me, like steeple-chasing.” He ordered laminated battle maps of the sort he had carried in Tunisia and Sicily—ten by twenty inches each, with a scale of eight miles to the inch. When the set was delivered, he scowled. “It only goes as far east as Paris,” he complained. “I’m going to Berlin.”

  * * *

  First he was going to Brest, and no special map was needed to see that Brest lay west while Paris and Berlin lay east. Only the seizure of a Normandy beachhead ranked higher in importance for OVERLORD planners than the capture of Brittany and its ports: St.-Malo, St.-Nazaire, Lorient, Brest, and Quiberon Bay, for which another grandiose artificial harbor was envisioned. Delays in shaking free of Normandy, as well as the cautionary tales of Mulberry A and scorched-earth demolitions at Cherbourg, failed to dampen the ardor of Eisenhower and his logisticians. Patton’s army was to take Brittany.

  But the collapse of the German left wing gave Montgomery pause, and as early as July 27 he had suggested that the campaign in Brittany might require only a single corps. Neither Bradley nor Patton took the hint. Patton, whose doghouse status made him leery of challenging Eisenhower’s master plan, wagered Montgomery £5 that GIs would be in Brest by Saturday night, August 5. Claiming “a sixth sense by which I can always know to a moral certainty what the enemy is going to do,” Patton insisted that “there aren’t more than ten thousand Krauts in the entire [Brittany] peninsula.” That was wrong by a factor of at least six. But to his 6th Armored Division, then 150 miles from the objective, he issued a two-word order on August 1: “Take Brest.”

  On the same day, Third Army’s other spearhead, the 4th Armored Division, raced forty miles south from Avranches to the outskirts of Rennes, the Breton capital and a nexus for ten trunk roads. Here an epiphany struck Major General John S. Wood, the beetle-browed division commander. Known as P.—for “Professor,” because he had tutored his classmates at West Point—Wood had attended the academy to play football after graduating from the University of Arkansas, where he studied chemistry. A devoted rose gardener and a linguist who had read both De Gaulle and the German panzer mastermind Heinz Guderian in the original, Wood often buzzed above the battlefield in a Piper Cub with red streamers flapping from the wingtips so that his men below could recognize him.

  “We’re winning this war the wrong way,” Wood declared. “We ought to be going toward Paris.” The French capital was only sixty miles farther from Rennes than Brest; Brittany was a cul-de-sac, while Paris led to the Reich. Wood ordered two 4th Armored columns to outflank Rennes and cut seven of those ten roads; the city fell on August 4. Proposing to reach Chartres—150 miles east—in two days, Wood radioed Patton, “Dear George … Trust we can turn around and get headed in right direction soon.” Instead he was dispatched west into Brittany for a bloody siege at Lorient.

  Bradley belatedly had come around to Montgomery’s view that “the main business lies to the east.” On August 3, he told Patton to clear Brittany with “a minimum of forces.” Patton chose to pivot east with his XV and XX Corps while leaving VIII Corps behind, a splintering of the army that took time and consigned two cutthroat armored divisions, the 4th and 6th, to static siege warfare rather than freeing them to lead the charge across France.

  The Brittany campaign soon proved bootless. None of the ports would be especially useful, in part because of their distance from the main battlefield—five hundred miles separated Brest fr
om the German frontier—and in part because Hitler ordered various coastal fortresses held “to the last man, to the last cartridge.” That recalcitrance soon neutered 280,000 German defenders along the European littoral, but it also denied several important ports to Allied logisticians for weeks, if not for the duration. The siege of St.-Malo ensnared twenty thousand GIs for a fortnight and wrecked the harbor; Brest, with seventy-five strongpoints, and walls up to twenty-five-feet thick, proved a particularly hard nut, costing ten thousand casualties among the seventy thousand Americans who would invest the citadel for more than a month in a medieval affair of scaling ladders and grappling hooks. Though Bradley later insisted that the Brest garrison was too dangerous to leave unchallenged in his rear, the diversion of five divisions to Brittany reflected an inflexible adherence to the OVERLORD plan. “We must take Brest in order to maintain the illusion of the fact that the U.S. Army cannot be beaten,” Bradley told Patton, who agreed.

  The war ended with not a single cargo ship or troopship having berthed at Brest, which bombs and a half million American shells knocked to rubble. The synthetic harbor at Quiberon Bay was never built. P. Wood, whose 4th Armored Division finally was released from siege duty at Lorient in mid-August to hie toward Nantes and far beyond, considered the Brittany sidestep “one of the colossally stupid decisions of the war.” But with most of Patton’s legions finally baying eastward by mid-August, both the initial swivel to the west and the failure to fulfill the strategic ambitions of the Brittany campaign seemed like small beer. “We have unloosed the shackles that were holding us down,” Montgomery told his lieutenants: