The German troops slipped away during the night towards Saint-Nazaire, at the mouth of the Loire. The only ones who stayed behind were ‘a handful of drunks’. They were easily rounded up by the American infantry on 4 August, ‘but they had to be protected from the French’. The remaining population — some 60,000 out of 120,000 — surged on to the streets to welcome the Americans, who rushed medical units to the hospital. ‘One paratrooper patient with a bad face wound came up and shook my hands and cried,’ a captain reported. Soldiers immediately gave whatever they could, including their own combat kit, to those whose uniforms had fallen to pieces.
Middleton, back at VIII Corps headquarters, faced a difficult choice. He sympathized with Wood’s desire to strike east, but his instructions remained to capture the ports on the coast of Brittany and he was not in contact with Patton. Middleton drove to see Wood and sent the 4th Armored Division back south-westwards to take Vannes and then Lorient. Vannes fell rapidly, but Lorient appeared impregnable.
On 4 August, Patton himself, escorted by an armoured car, drove down into Brittany. He was following the advance of the 6th Armored Division commanded by Major General Grow, whom he had ordered to rush for Brest, the main port of Brittany, bypassing all resistance. Patton whooped with joy every time they ran off a map and had to open a new one. This was warfare as he loved it. But Patton had not told Middleton the objective he had given the 6th Armored. Grow then received a signal from Middleton, ordering him not to bypass Saint-Malo, on the north coast of the peninsula, and to attack it the next day. Grow requested that the order should be cancelled, but Middleton was firm.
Grow was about to sit down with a cup of coffee outside his tent in a wheatfield, when Patton suddenly appeared. ‘What in hell are you doing sitting here?’ he demanded. ‘I thought I told you to get to Brest.’ Grow explained his order from Middleton and his chief of staff produced the written order. Patton read it, then folded it up. ‘And he was a good doughboy, too,’ Patton murmured to himself. ‘I’ll see Middleton,’ he said to Grow. ‘You go ahead where I told you to go.’
The confusion continued, but Patton settled the problem of communicating with divisions spread out over hundreds of miles. He allocated the 6th Cavalry Group to report on the exact position of all his divisions and armoured columns as well as on the enemy. Its thirteen reconnaissance platoons, each with six armoured cars and six quarter-ton trucks, had high-powered radios which could also act as a back-up if the Signal Corps network failed. The 6th Cavalry was soon known as ‘General Patton’s Household Cavalry’.
The advance of the 6th Armored Division towards Brest was hardly unopposed. Groups of German stragglers and improvised combat groups fought delaying actions. During daylight hours, the columns had support from Mustangs of the 363rd Fighter Group, but ‘every night from 3 August to 6 August we had to fight for our bivouac areas,’ reported Captain Donley from the 6th Armored. On 5 August, the town of Huelgoat was reported to be clear, so General Grow rode in with a tank and an armoured car. He was greeted with ‘intense small arms fire from all directions’. Donley’s company of armoured infantry was sent to get him out, supported by tanks. The German paratroopers in the town were now trapped. The armoured infantry accounted for many of them, but the FFI begged to be allowed to finish the rest off. They claimed that ‘the paratroopers had cut off the hands of a woman’ and the FFI ‘was mighty anxious to mop them up’.
The 6th Armored put the FFI into reconnaissance Jeeps, known as ‘Peeps’, to lead the way. And the leading tank battalion placed sandbags on the front of their Shermans to absorb the blast of 50 mm anti-tank rounds. If a village was deserted, it usually meant that the Germans were there: ‘The first thing we did was to blow off the church steeple in order to get rid of possible [observation posts] and sniper fire.’
With German stragglers roaming the countryside behind their advance, Jeeps had to dash through like the ‘pony express’. Snipers and bands of Germans desperate for food tried to ambush supply vehicles. ‘The trucks were like a band of stage-coaches making a run through Indian country.’ Replacements coming forward to join their units found that they had to be ready to fight just to get there. The Americans asked the FFI to do what they could to guard their lines of communication.
Patton was faintly dismissive of the French Resistance. He later said that their help was ‘better than expected and less than advertised’. Yet their contribution in Brittany was indeed considerable. ‘They aided in loading heavy ammunition,’ an officer with the 6th Armored reported, ‘and they cleared snipers, while our columns kept going.’ They also secured bridges, provided intelligence and harassed Germans at every turn. On 6 August, a German report to Kluge’s headquarters complained that the American advance on Brest was carried out ‘with the help of terrorists’. General Koenig back in London was labelled the ‘Terroristenführer’, and the following day the Germans reported ‘battles with terrorists everywhere’. German reprisals became predictably violent, with two massacres on the Finisterre peninsula near Brest. Twenty-five civilians were shot in St Pol-de-Léon on 4 August, and forty-two men, women and children in Gouesnou were killed by sailors of the 3rd Marineflakbrigade on 7 August.
On 6 August, Colonel Eon’s force secured the surrender of a battalion of Osttruppen at Saint-Brieuc. But when Eon and Passy returned to their headquarters exhausted that evening, their camp was attacked by 250 Germans from the 2nd Paratroop Division. After six hours of fighting they managed to force them back. Passy and a small group were surrounded, but they eventually fought their way out. When they met up with the rest of the headquarters group they heard that their loss had been reported to London. But soon the FFI and FTP attacks forced the Germans to withdraw into coastal towns, which could be more easily defended. Further south, other FFI detachments helped Wood’s 4th Armored Division, even clearing a minefield by hand.
Grow’s leading troops approached Brest on 6 August. After some wildly excessive optimism that the city would surrender to a show of force, Grow soon had to accept that an armoured division was incapable of seizing a major fortified city. He did not know that the commander of ‘Fortress Brest’ was General der Fallschirmtruppen Hermann Ramcke, a ruthless paratroop veteran who had sworn to Hitler that he would defend the city to the last.[60] Grow then found he was being attacked from behind by the German 266th Infanterie-Division, which had been trying to join the large garrison in Brest. His forces soon dealt with them, but Brest proved far too great an obstacle, as Patton rapidly appreciated.
The 8th Infantry Division came up to help the 6th Armored. Their tasks included night patrols to prevent large German foraging parties, sometimes up to 150 strong, from seizing food from French farmers. The FFI came begging for arms and gasoline, but they were also bringing in prisoners. The 8th had to set up a stockade to hold 600 of them. One of their officers was very pleased ‘to get a Hermann Goering ceremonial dagger off one of the paratroopers’. The 8th Infantry hardly knew what to expect in this very unconventional quarter of the war. At one moment a British special forces officer who had been dropped behind enemy lines turned up wanting fuel, the next they found themselves embroiled in French political rivalries. Two quite senior French officers turned up in uniform, offering their services, but the members of the Resistance who had been helping the Americans insisted angrily that they would never work with them. They were what they called ‘moth-balls’: those who had served under the Vichy regime and now brought their uniforms out of the closet as soon as the Allies appeared. The Americans ‘courteously got rid of the old officers’.
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Ramcke systematically destroyed the city later by fire and with explosives. ‘It was entirely wiped out!’ he boasted to General von Choltitz later in British captivity. He claimed that he was following the example of Admiral Nelson burning Toulon in 1793.