Drive to The Port

The battle for Cherbourg opened on a clear, cool, summery day. U.S. troops had chased the beaten Nazi divisions up the peninsula, driven wedges to the sea on both sides of the seaport. There was no escape except by sea--and the Allies controlled the sea.

Leaflets had warned the battered Cherbourg garrison to surrender or die. They were ignored: Nazi officers had orders to shoot, any man who attempted to retreat or give up. The attack was run off in the classic form that an army can achieve when it has overwhelming air power, plenty of good artillery, plenty of well-trained, hard-fighting infantrymen.

Before the last push began, the German positions were methodically bombed for 80 minutes. A group of bombers attacked every five minutes by the clock. Between assaults, fighter-bombers swooped in to knock out pinpoint targets. Nazi fighters jumped the first group of bombers. They were lumped themselves by escort fighters, and for 15 minutes the air was full of swirling dogfights. Then the Nazi ships fled, and stayed away.

Ditches for Precision. The bombers' targets were close enough to the U.S. lines to make sweating doughboys hug their ditches and curse in exasperated admiration. An American battalion commander who had to take his outfit forward in a few minutes fought with a bulky phone, trying to find out whether the air operation was running on schedule. He got a connection to regimental HQ, bellowed into the mouthpiece:

"Hello, hold it! Is this damn air show over or not? I don't like this pinpoint bombing."

The line went dead. Then it rang on again; the bombing was over in that section. But there was to be more, just ahead. The battalion moved its command post 50 yards up the road. Then it halted abruptly as the ripping-silk burst of a German machine pistol sounded up ahead. The enemy was still on the job.

By midafternoon one company had worked its way ahead through a field and come in sight of its immediate objective. It was a long concrete fort, ringed with mines and dominating a ridge barring the way to Cherbourg. There the battalion used time and metal to save men. Instead of assaulting the fort, the commander called for drenching artillery and mortar fire, then sifted his infantry in cautiously to clear up what resistance was left.

Slow Approach. On all three sides of the city the advance on Cherbourg was like that. In the last five kilometers there was a series of such forts; an outfit might spend an afternoon moving up a few hundred yards and taking one fort and its supporting strong points. When the frontline troops had pushed on, demolition squads blew the concrete blockhouses to rubble, lest German patrols infiltrate at night and man the forts again.

For three days the Americans closed their ring, always moving closer, taking cover skillfully, using their superiority in air and artillery without mercy. At last the main row of five major forts had been pierced, the city lay ahead, dark, burning and deceptively empty-looking.

From the outskirts American troops could hear the Germans setting off demolition charges. One night the Nazis tried to sneak valuable technicians and equipment out in seven merchant ships. British torpedo boats caught them, sank two, damaged three more, chased the convoy to shelter in the Channel Islands.

At least 1,000 guns were battering the elaborate French-built defenses of Cherbourg. Infantrymen with grenades, bazookas and dynamite charges cleaned out the inland strongholds, Fort du Roule and Octeville. From the sea a naval task force, including battleships and cruisers, stood in to batter and silence the big harbor installations, Fort des Flamands and Pelee Island.

The Germans fought back savagely with heavy coast-defense guns, field artillery and multiple-barreled Nebelwerfers, whose incendiary rocket projectiles sail through the air with an unearthly noise, described by N.Y. Timesman Harold Denny as "something like a titanic horse whinnying, or a gigantic aching creak."

Last Stand. As troops pushed ahead into the city, German detachments fell back in desperate street fighting. Some of the small harbor fortifications leveled their antiaircraft guns to fire at the incoming Americans. In a few hours the German resistance had been cut into pockets, no longer under centralized control. Just before his wireless blacked out,-the Nazi commander in Cherbourg thanked his Leader: "Final struggle for Cherbourg raging. General fighting with troops. Long live the Fuhrer and Germany."

Some of the German troops who had been ordered to fight to the death did die. Many others surrendered meekly and marched out under guard, their hands clasped over their heads. In 24 hours near the end, 3,400 Nazis gave themselves up; Allied staff officers guessed that the total German loss in and around Cherbourg might be 30,000.

The last centers of strong resistance were around the city post office, a naval arsenal, the seaplane base. Attacking troops, weary, grimy but intent on the kill, surrounded them and drove in for the final mop-up. As they closed the battle for Cherbourg engineers were moving in behind to help reopen the great Atlantic port to sea traffic.

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