Patton, given his head and anxious to prove that his being shelved, after the face-slapping episode of the year before in Sicily, was a serious military blunder, literally ran wild on von Kluge’s southern flank. A master of movement and of fighting men, he moved fast and they fought ferociously. The opposition before them crumbled. Never had there been such a blitzkrieg. In swift succession Patron’s armor was through Rennes, Laval, and Le Mans with the road to Or-1éans and the Seine south of Paris wide open before him.
At this point it might have seemed sensible to any general in von Kluge’s position to order an immediate retreat of his forces along the only line still open to him—that is, eastward to the Seine, and to abandon northern France. But von Kluge was not free to decide. Hitler would relinquish nothing of France he had conquered; von Kluge was ordered instantly to shift his Panzers to the westward and attack toward Avranches and the sea to cut Patton off. As Hitler saw it, here at last was the golden opportunity to destroy the enemy piecemeal, and so far inland that the naval guns which had saved them initially would be powerless now before his armor to save them again.
Obediently von Kluge began to shift his armor from before Montgomery in the Caen sector toward Mortain, some twenty miles eastward of Avranches, and the nearest point to the sea still in Nazi hands. Five Panzer Divisions, mostly withdrawn from the Caen area, formed the spearhead of the attack, the major offensive by the Nazis since D-day, the heaviest they ever staged in the Battle of France.
Von Kluge faced an unbelievable situation. It had been a basic tenet in the logic of the German General Staff that a huge mechanized army, such as they had in France, could be defeated, if at all, only by a larger army, a million men at least, highly mechanized, heavily armored. But since the Nazis held all the ports and this requirement of getting ashore heavy armor was obviously an impossibility to the Allies, they had written off the occurrence of any such development as a manifest absurdity.
But absurd as such an impossibility had once seemed, there on three sides of von Kluge it was as a stark reality—there were the million men, beautifully equipped with motorized transport for mobility, heavily armored with tanks and guns.
Still, they were after all only an army, and no army is invincible. Defeat is never inevitable. The enemy had provided von Kluge with what seemed a serious blunder in their tactical dispositions. They had given him the chance to drive to the sea, cut them apart, and then to destroy each part separately. He prepared to assault at Mortain.
At this point, von Kluge learned what Rommel before him had learned—what it means to have a battle directed by remote control and particularly when that distant director comes to his decisions by intuition. Hitler, who first had frenziedly ordered von Kluge to stage his attack immediately, which von Kluge was moving to do, now from the distant eastern front reversed himself and decided there was no cause for haste. He ordered von Kluge to delay the attack on Mortain till more armor could be brought from the Pas de Calais. There, obviously, it was no longer needed, as Patton and the forces it was presumed to counter off Calais were very plainly already rampaging on von Kluge’s southern flank in France.
But von Kluge couldn’t wait. A delay till more armor could reach him from Calais would result only in allowing his Seventh Army to be encircled completely, even before that armor ever reached him—a ridiculous reward for waiting. When could those Panzer divisions from the Pas de Calais reach him? He didn’t know. The skies were full of Allied fighters; those Panzers could move only by night—slowly. And it was 150 miles to the Pas de Calais. Their arrival could not be soon.
What he did know was that Patton was fast closing on his own communications to the eastward. Should Patton get astride the highways still open to the east, Patton could strangle him. No longer then could his vital supplies of fuel for his tanks or ammunition for his guns get through. His only hope lay in throttling Patton first. He had only to get to Avranches, block the highway there, and then that stream of tank trucks, highballing it eastward with the fuel to keep Patton’s tanks and motorized columns going, would be dammed for good. Patton’s offensive would instantly shrink and soon die. And so also would Patton’s Third Army, left without gasoline or ammunition.
Von Kluge made up his mind. He must either attack at once or withdraw. And since he perfectly well knew Hitler would never authorize him to withdraw, to him it seemed the best way to meet the Fuehrer’s demands was to attack. So advising Hitler that waiting was wholly impossible if he were ever to attack as ordered, just after midnight, early on August 7, without waiting for any answer from Hitler, he launched his offensive in full strength.
It hit Hobbs’ 30th Division, which had just come into the line before Mortain, and overran his forward positions. One battalion was completely cut off and surrounded by that avalanche, but refused to surrender. The rest of the division, infantry against armor, fell back but hung together.
All day of August 7th, the battle raged. Hodges threw in two infantry divisions to bolster the 30th on its front, and an armored division to attack the enemy on his right flank and slow him up. Then the 35th Division, which was nearby, though belonging not to Hodges’ First Army but to Patton’s Third, was nevertheless seized also and thrown in on Hobbs’ right.
At that, satisfied that whatever von Kluge threw at him, his front before Mortain would hold, Bradley ordered Patton to disregard the battle at Mortain and everything occurring in his threatened rear and go all out east with one corps for Orléans and the Seine, while with another, at Le Mans, he was to turn north for Argentan and there get astride the enemy’s main road for retreat to the east. Meanwhile, so Patton was informed, Montgomery was coming down on Falaise from the north and then on to Argentan, which would completely shut off von Kluge from any escape.
Von Kluge pressed his attack. Nazi Panther tanks, outgunning our General Shermans, drove forward. And what was more, at Mortain they not only outgunned our tanks but for once far outnumbered them also. Von Kluge had there five Panzer Divisions, a massive striking force. Hodges had but one armored division to oppose them; the other two armored divisions we had were with Patton, stabbing into the enemy rear far to the east. Bradley had decided to leave them there.
For Bradley was relying on means other than his own tanks to stop those German Panthers. He had artillery, plenty of it, and he was not stinted on ammunition for his guns. And he had air support. Our fighters could now operate from nearby airfields set up on the bluffs overlooking Omaha, and behind the British beachhead. American Mustangs with their guns and British Typhoons carrying rockets under their wings flew low over the battlefield to help the artillery by engaging the Panthers in direct combat.
Mortain was as strange a battle as ever was fought. For six days von Kluge hammered viciously with five Panzer Divisions against a front held only by four divisions of American infantry and one of armor. By all the rules, his Panzers should have gone crashing through those infantry divisions before Mortain and then on to Avranches by the sea with even greater ease than once they had ripped through British infantry to the sea at Dunkirk. But they didn’t.
With massive artillery support to back up the troops and with the fighter planes overhead coming down with screaming rockets and bursting shells to meet the Panthers each time they advanced in force, the infantry held its ground against all attacks.
From August 7 through August 11 Bradley and von Kluge slugged it out before Mortain. But as night fell at last on August 11, it was von Kluge who gave up. The battlefield was littered now with the smoking wrecks of hundreds of his Panthers, and he could get no replacements for them. The sea was still twenty miles away, no closer to him appreciably than at the hour he had jumped off for his attack. And worst of all, he noted with dismay that while he was fighting at Mortain, Patton, instead of retreating to cover his own supply line, had boldly dashed eastward to Argentan where now he sat astride one line of von Kluge’s retreat while Montgomery was rapidly closing on Falaise to shut off the only other line. Von Kluge h
ad to admit failure. Never would he get to the sea. And unless now he moved fast in the opposite direction, never would he be able to extricate the Seventh Army either. He begged of Hitler that the attack be abandoned and he be permitted to withdraw to the Seine.
He got Hitler’s very reluctant permission on August 12, and started a withdrawal. But it was Eisenhower’s permission he should have asked instead. For now it was much too late for the Seventh Army to withdraw without it. Hit by Patton at Argentan on the southern neck of his line of retreat, harassed by Montgomery closing on Falaise on the northern side of that exit, and squeezed hard by Hodges’ First Army pushing forward from Mortain, von Kluge’s Seventh Army was now in a sack with the mouth closing.
Nineteen German divisions, the whole of the Nazi forces in Normandy, had but one way out, and that one exposed to heavy shelling from both sides. And further exposed, as they jammed up trying desperately to squeeze out through a narrowing bottleneck, to incessant attack from our unopposed fighters, flying night and day strafing the milling mass of Nazis trying to flee from the Falaise pocket.
The net effect was the capture, practically complete, of eight Infantry and two Panzer Divisons. And so decimated and broken were the remnants of the remaining divisions that managed partly to escape but practically without any heavy equipment, that the fragments were hardly any longer an army. It was a debacle far worse than von Paulus had suffered before Stalingrad.
The German Seventh Army was destroyed. What few elements escaped never stopped their flight till they reached the German border. Most of France was lost to Germany in that disaster; the remainder was soon also to be liberated.
Hitler raved at the news. He accused von Kluge of having violated his orders and of having deliberately staged his attack before the arrival of additional armor, for the specific purpose of holding him, der Fuehrer, up to ridicule as a general who had ordered an impossible attack. And he promptly superseded von Kluge as Commander in the West by Field Marshal Walther von Model.
Since there was no longer any army in the West worth considering, that sudden relief from command of it could not have meant much to von Kluge. But what came with it in his orders meant a great deal. On August 18, hardly six days after he had broken off his offensive at Mortain and had begun his attempted flight from the Falaise pocket, von Kluge was peremptorily told to proceed to Berlin to explain himself.
As it did not appear to von Kluge that any explanation he might put forward setting out the imperative reasons which had forced his decision to attack without further delay would even be listened to by his enraged Fuehrer, it seemed to the disheartened Field Marshal an act only of simple prudence to forestall Hitler by killing himself. This he promptly did.
The mortality among Nazi top commanders in Normandy was getting startlingly high.
CHAPTER 38
By the end of August, it was apparent that the battle of France was practically over—it had been won. On August 15, General Devers had invaded southern France, shortly seized Marseilles, and then, almost unopposed, moved north. On August 25, our First Army liberated Paris. Antwerp was occupied by Montgomery’s British troops on September 4, a tremendous gain for us.
Everywhere now throughout France the enemy was either contained or in full flight for the shelter of Germany and the Siegfried Line, its vaunted West Wall. Nothing more was ever heard, even from Dr. Goebbels, about the Atlantic Wall. Somehow, that, barrier to our armies seemed now so far in the distance as to have been lost from view. But the West Wall was surely going to be different. Past that, we should never get.
Eisenhower still had major problems, but no longer were they the ones that faced him prior to D-day. Tides, the phases of the moon and its relation to the hour of dawn, the weather good or bad, on a specific day in the future, no longer concerned him. His problem no further lay in getting materials in vast quantity across an open beachhead so that he might win the Battle of France. That had been solved for him by Mulberry. It lay now in getting those materials, and especially gasoline, once they all were landed somewhere in France, over the vast number of miles that lay between the Normandy beaches and the borders of Germany he was rapidly approaching.
Transportation facilities in France—railroads, bridges, rolling stock, all of which our bombers had zealously smashed to seal the enemy in Normandy off from supply—now became Eisenhower’s greatest headache. Eagerly he looked forward to opening up Antwerp in the north and Marseilles in the south, both far closer to the Rhine than any port in Normandy, to ease that transportation problem.
But as August, 1944, ended and the Battle of France faded imperceptibly into the Battle of Germany, far in Eisenhower’s rear the Artificial Harbor at the Omaha Beach still continued to function. For the armies now approaching the Rhine it was furnishing supplies at a rate approaching 15,000 tons a day, nearly twice its designed capacity. Had there been trucks enough to take it away, it could have handled even more. It had far outlasted the thirty days life expectancy earnestly prayed for in its infancy lest the invasion fail. Now that the invasion had turned out an undreamed of success, nobody already beyond the Seine and rapidly approaching the Rhine paid much attention any more to the crippled old work horse that had made all that possible.
As a matter of fact, most of them never had, anyway. But until November, Omaha as a harbor continued to overshadow by far in tonnage even the port of Cherbourg on which we had expended our major effort in rehabilitation. Ultimately, Cherbourg contributed to the winning of the Battle of Germany, but the Battle of France which had to be won first or all was lost, was won with no help from ruined Cherbourg; only Mulberry carried that load.
Finally, as winter approached and the nearer ports of Antwerp and Marseilles took over, Omaha Beach as an unneeded port of entry was at last shut down.
So without fanfare, and with all those whose agonies and heartaches and broken bodies had made it a reality, long vanished from that blood-stained beach, Operation Mulberry, that fantastic conceit which had made the Normandy Invasion stick, faded into oblivion.
Only a vast cemetery atop the bluff at the St. Laurent Draw, where lie buried the bodies of those who never left the Omaha Beach, remains now to mark the wide sands where once lay Mulberry.
GLOSSARY
AA
Anti-aircraft artillery
AT
Anti-tank gun
BAR
Browning automatic rifle
Bazooka
Portable rocket launcher, hand carried
Belgian Gate
Steel underwater beach obstacle, German
Bombardon
Floating steel breakwater section, 200 ft. long
Concertina wire
Coiled horizontal barbed wire entanglement
DD
Duplex drive amphibious tank
Dukw
2½ ton amphibious truck, six-wheel drive
E-boat
German fast motor torpedo boat, similar to our PT
Far Shore
The coast of Normandy
G.I.
(Government issue). Colloquial name for U. S. soldiers
Gooseberry
Code name for breakwater of sunken ships
Hedgehog
Steel underwater obstacle, made of three crossed angle irons
LCA
Landing Craft, Assault (British), for 35 men
LCI(L)
Landing Craft, Infantry (Large), for 200 men
LCM
Landing Craft, Mechanized, for 1 tank or 70 men
LCT
Landing Craft, Tanks, for 4 tanks (some larger)
LCT(R)
LCT fitted for rocket firing, 1000 rockets
LCVP
Landing Craft, Vehicle, Personnel (wood), for 35 men
Lobnitz
Semi-floating pierhead, 200 ft. long, anchored on four vertical steel legs
“Long Tom”
155 mm. howitzer, long barrelled, American
LST
> Landing Ship, Tank. Ramp type seagoing ship, loads 1900 tons tanks and trucks 300
About the Author
Edward Ellsberg (1891–1983) graduated first in his class from the United States Naval Academy in 1914. After he did a stint aboard the USS Texas, the navy sent Ellsberg to Massachusetts Institute of Technology for postgraduate training in naval architecture. In 1925, he played a key role in the salvage of the sunken submarine USS S-51 and became the first naval officer to qualify as a deep-sea diver. Ellsberg later received the Distinguished Service Medal for his innovations and hard work.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
Copyright © 1960 by Edward Ellsberg and Lucy Buck Ellsberg
Cover design by Barbara Brown
Cover photo courtesy of the Naval Historical Foundation
ISBN: 978-1-4804-9364-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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