‘I was ordered to the supply train to help restock as we had lost everything in just a few days,’ wrote an Obergefreiter in the 91st Luftlande. ‘We had nothing but the clothes we stood up in. The worst thing continues to be the planes so everything has to be done at night. Those bastards strafe individuals with the onboard machine guns; we should have anti-aircraft artillery and planes here but they’re nowhere in sight. You can imagine that this completely exhausts morale. Now we’ve been told that in the next few days there’ll be a major air offensive with a great number of planes standing by.’
The American southern flank of the corridor became the responsibility of the 82nd Airborne and the hapless 90th Division. To oversee this sector, Bradley appointed Major General Troy H. Middleton, one of the most impressive commanders at his disposal, to command VIII Corps. Middleton, who had made his name in Italy, was said to look like ‘a burly professor with his steel-rimmed glasses’.
Opposing Middleton, the LXXXIV Corps finally received its new commanding general on 18 June. Generalleutnant Dietrich von Choltitz may have been ‘a pudgy man who looked like a night club comedian’, but he had learned his skills in the ruthless school of the eastern front, especially in the fighting for Sebastopol. Choltitz had come from Seventh Army headquarters at Le Mans, where Generaloberst Dollmann had briefed him. Choltitz was not impressed. ‘The commander-in-chief made a very tired, almost absent-minded impression,’ he wrote at the end of the war. Generalleutnant Fritz Bayerlein of the Panzer Lehr Division was even more contemptuous of Dollmann. He regarded him as a ‘Null’ and said that ‘he had lived a life of luxury and had grown soft’.
Choltitz also found the staff of LXXXIV Corps demoralized. After the failure of the first panzer counter-attack west of Caen, his predecessor, General Marcks, had said openly that ‘the war was lost’, a treasonable offence. The casualty rate among divisional commanders also had an effect. As well as Falley of the 91st Luftlande and Marcks himself, General Helmlich had been killed on 10 June, and Ostendorff of the 17th SS was seriously wounded on 16 June. To complicate matters even more, Choltitz found that with the American advance across the peninsula, his only contact with General von Schlieben was via the Channel Islands and Cherbourg.
As soon as the peninsula was cutoff, Collins wanted to give the Germans no time to reorganize. General Manton Eddy, the commander of the 9th Division, had to turn his whole formation round in less than twenty-four hours to be ready to advance north up the west coast. Collins placed the 79th Infantry Division in the centre, while the 4th Division, still fighting hard round Montebourg and Valognes, would clear the eastern part and attack Cherbourg from the right. The 4th Division’s commander, Major General Raymond O. Barton, may have lacked the flamboyance of some colleagues, but Liddell Hart had been impressed. He described him as ‘refreshingly open-minded’.
Barton’s 4th Division advanced against the concentration of forces to their north. Bombardments of naval and ground artillery had been battering the German defences around Montebourg and Valognes, along with the towns themselves. Montgomery’s own reliance on artillery was revealed in a ghastly joke when he wrote to de Guingand, ‘Montebourg and Valognes have been “liberated” in the best 21st Army Group style, i.e. they are both completely destroyed!!!’
The three divisions advancing on Cherbourg also benefited from having their own air support party, ready to call in fighter-bomber attacks. At that stage, while this new liaison technique was being tried, most emergency requests took at least three hours to accomplish. But there were exceptions. On 16 June, ‘a Cub plane reported to division artillery that a column of troops was crossing a bridge. Artillery phoned it in. Corps contacted a squadron of fighter-bombers in the area and directed it onto the column. In 15 minutes they had a report they had strafed the column. Reports have come in that American prisoners being marched down the road by Germans escaped in the course of strafing by our planes.’ This early attempt at ground-air cooperation was an important start in what would become a devastatingly effective combination later in the campaign.
But just as Collins’s advance on Cherbourg was proceeding well, the Allies were hit by an unforeseeable disaster. On 19 June, the most violent storm for forty years began to blow up in the Channel, combined with a spring tide. Locals had never seen anything like it. The gale force winds along the coast were, in the Norman saying, enough ‘to take the horns off a cow’. Temperatures dropped to the equivalent of a cold November. The Mulberry artificial port at Omaha was destroyed beyond repair. One or two experts said that gaps in its construction had made it vulnerable, but it stood on the most exposed piece of coast. Its British counterpart at Arromanches was partly protected by a reef and rocks, and as a result could be rebuilt afterwards.
Landing craft were hurled by the waves high on to the beaches, smashing against each other. Flat Rhino ferries sliced into their sides. Even landing ship tanks were thrown ashore. ‘The only chance we had of keeping our landing craft from being beaten to bits,’ wrote a US Navy officer, ‘was to anchor a long way off the beach out in the Channel and hope we could ride the storm out.’ For ships en route to England, the crossing was unforgettable. ‘It took us about four days to do the 80 nautical miles in very rough seas to Southampton,’ wrote an officer on an LST. ‘The seas were so rough that the skipper was afraid that the ship would crack in two; therefore he ordered the mooring cables to be strung fore and aft and tightened up on the winches to give extra support to two of the deck plates. That ship was strung like a mountaineer’s fiddle.’
The storm continued until the evening of Thursday, 22 June. The destruction on the beaches defied belief. More ships and materiel had been lost than during the invasion itself. Yet those involved in the planning of D-Day could not help remembering with grateful relief the decision to go ahead taken on 5 June. If the invasion had been postponed for two weeks, as had been feared, the fleet would have sailed into one of the worst storms in Channel history. Eisenhower, after he had seen the damage on the beaches, took the time to write a note to Group Captain Stagg: ‘I thank the gods of war we went when we did.’
Recovering from the effects afterwards took longer than the storm itself. To refloat an LST thrown up on to the beach required bulldozers to dig huge trenches around it in the hope that another high tide might float it off. The Americans, who ‘never really believed in the Mulberry’, cleared what they could, then proved that they could land ‘an amazing tonnage with flat-bottomed barges and by beaching ships at low tide’.[28]
The storm badly delayed the build-up, hampered the return of casualties to England and forced the cancellation of air operations. This absence of Allied fighter-bombers from the sky allowed the Germans to accelerate their reinforcement of the Normandy front. At the same time, many Allied divisions, either already embarked for France or ready to cross, were delayed by a week or more. The most immediate effect was on supplies, especially artillery ammunition. General Bradley had a difficult choice, but decided to maintain full support for Collins’s attack on Cherbourg. His other two corps — Gerow’s V Corps to the south-east and Middleton’s VIII Corps on the south side of the peninsula — would receive only a minimum of artillery shells, even though Bradley knew that this would allow the Germans time to prepare defences south of the Douve marshes.
Despite the fury of the storm, Collins had urged on his three divisions to encircle the tip of the peninsula. General von Schlieben, knowing that his fragmented forces could not hold the Americans in the open, had begun to withdraw to the forts around Cherbourg. His own division had taken under command a wide variety of units, including a Georgian battalion and a mounted regiment of Cossacks with five squadrons. Their Russian colonel when drunk confessed to wanting ‘a bit of plunder’. ‘It was a war of fun and games,’ observed one of Schlieben’s colonels sarcastically.
28
Even after Cherbourg had been captured and made operational, the Americans managed to land much more over the beach than through the port. In the month of August they landed 266,804 tons and 817 vehicles at Cherbourg, 187,973 tons and 3,986 vehicles at Utah and 351,437 tons and 9,155 vehicles at Omaha. The British averaged 9,000 tons a day at Arromanches. They were also able to use small fishing ports which the Germans had not destroyed.