The capture of Brest

On 18 September 1944 the last German units defending the city itself surrendered in the ruins of Brest. On both sides of the river Penfeld, which divides Brest and its naval harbour, the German commanders surrendered to two American divisions, and nearly 10,000 soldiers went into captivity that day. The fortress commander, General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, had earlier withdrawn to the Crozon peninsula on the other side of the roadstead and laid down his arms only on the afternoon of 19 September. Thus ended the Battle of Brest – one of the costliest American operations in France, fought for a port that by the time it was captured was no longer of any use.

Brest lies at the very western tip of Brittany, on a roadstead open to the Atlantic, and for centuries it had been the main base of the French Atlantic fleet rather than a Channel port. The city was taken on 18 September, but Ramcke’s surrender and the end of the fighting on the Crozon peninsula came on 19 September, and the last small group of Germans, near Douarnenez, was forced to surrender on 20 September.

The port they were counting on

The plan for the invasion of France assumed that after the Normandy landings the American forces would be supplied through the ports of Brittany. The Mulberry artificial harbours were to be a temporary solution, and the only large port in the landing area, Cherbourg, had been thoroughly wrecked by the Germans before they surrendered at the end of June. The planners were therefore counting on Saint-Malo, Brest, Quiberon Bay, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and Nantes. Brest, with its deep, sheltered anchorage, was the most important of them; there was even talk of receiving troopships sailing direct from the United States there.

Brest also mattered at sea. From 1940 it had been one of the main German U-boat bases on the Atlantic, with huge submarine pens that withstood many air raids. It was from here that Scharnhorst, Gneisenau and Prinz Eugen had set out in February 1942 on the Channel Dash. As long as the Germans held Brest, the Allies could not safely use the waters around Brittany that led to the peninsula’s other ports.

An armoured dash and a fortress

The opportunity to take Brittany came suddenly. After the breakthrough in Operation Cobra and the capture of Avranches at the end of July 1944, General George Patton’s Third Army sent Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps into the peninsula. Its 4th Armored Division entered Rennes, while Major General Robert Grow’s 6th Armored Division raced across the middle of Brittany straight for Brest, more than 300 kilometres away. Patton hoped that the tanks would burst into the city before the Germans could organise its defence. Around 7 August the division arrived before the fortifications of Brest, but it lacked the strength to storm the fortress. The Germans, who had fallen back from the interior of the peninsula to the ports, had managed to shut themselves in.

The defence of Brest was directed by General Ramcke, commander of the 2nd Parachute Division, a veteran of the Battle of Crete and of the fighting in North Africa, who had received orders from Adolf Hitler to defend the city to the last man. His paratroopers, young and well trained, formed the core of the garrison. The rest was made up of units of the static 343rd Infantry Division, naval anti-aircraft and coastal artillery, U-boat base personnel, sailors from the ships and various rear-echelon units. Middleton put the German strength at about 16,000 men, and Third Army headquarters thought even that figure too high. According to Martin Blumenson’s US official history, there were in fact some 30,000 in Brest, and even more counting the defenders of the Crozon and Daoulas peninsulas. The city was encircled by a ring of old French forts and newer German bunkers, with dug-in guns of every calibre. Ramcke also ordered most of the civilian population to be evacuated from the city.

For the assault Middleton assembled three infantry divisions – the 2nd, 8th and 29th – a task force including the 2nd and 5th Ranger Battalions, and strong corps artillery: according to various accounts several tens of thousands of soldiers in all (about 75,000 is a frequently quoted figure). They were helped by fighters of the French Resistance who knew the terrain and the German fortifications.

The siege

Ammunition was a problem from the outset. Third Army headquarters, preoccupied with the pursuit to the east, believed that Middleton was overestimating the enemy’s strength and will to resist. It set 1 September as the date for the capture of Brest and allotted some 5,000 tons of supplies for the entire operation – according to Blumenson, less than a quarter of what the corps needed for the first three days alone. The main attack began on the afternoon of 25 August, the day the Allies liberated Paris further east and were starting the pursuit beyond the Seine. The three divisions attacked side by side: the 29th in the west, the 8th in the centre and the 2nd in the east. During the night and the following morning RAF and American heavy bombers bombed the city, but the defenders did not crack and the attack made slow progress. When the ammunition ran out, Middleton had to halt it.

The fighting turned into the laborious capture of one fortification after another – some 75 strongpoints in all. On 1 September, the day by which the city was supposed to have fallen according to the plan, Middleton renewed a coordinated attack, and on 8 September – when ammunition deliveries had finally improved – another. On 10 September General Omar Bradley gave the operation priority in supplies, and VIII Corps passed from Patton’s command to the new Ninth Army of General William Simpson, whose headquarters was taking over command in Brittany. Fort Montbarey, west of the city, took three days to capture, with the help of British Churchill Crocodile flame-throwing tanks. The fighting went from house to house, and both sides kept up heavy artillery fire. The American artillery fired nearly half a million shells at Brest.

On 12 September Middleton called on Ramcke to surrender “to avoid further bloodshed”. The German general replied briefly that he must decline the proposal.

The disaster in the Sadi-Carnot shelter

The evacuation did not include all the inhabitants. Officials, doctors, nurses, firemen, nuns and people with nowhere to go remained in the city. Many of them took refuge in the shelter beneath the Place Sadi-Carnot, cut in 1942–1943: a tunnel some 250 metres long, about 25 metres underground. Part of it was occupied by the Germans, who stored ammunition there and fuel for a generator.

On the night of 8–9 September, at around 2.30 a.m., a fire broke out in the German part of the shelter, followed by explosions. People fleeing towards the exits came up against a closed grille which opened inwards and which the pressure of the crowd jammed shut. According to the Departmental Archives of Finistère, several hundred people, civilians and soldiers, were killed. The cause of the fire has never been fully explained. It was the most tragic single disaster in the history of Brest during the war, and the shelter is today a memorial site.

The surrender

In the second week of September the defenders, driven out of one fort after another, fell back towards the old town and the harbour. The Americans reached the medieval walls surrounding the city centre, scaled them and covered the last few hundred metres to the quays. On 18 September the Germans surrendered on both banks of the Penfeld: in the western district of Recouvrance Colonel Hans von der Mosel, the fortress chief of staff, surrendered to the 29th Division, and in the eastern part of the city Colonel Erich Pietzonka of the 7th Parachute Regiment surrendered to the 2nd Division in the Place du Président Wilson. Blumenson describes the strange impression made on the Americans by nearly 10,000 prisoners who were ready for captivity – shaved, washed, in clean uniforms and carrying suitcases.

Ramcke, meanwhile, had crossed to the Crozon peninsula, where the 8th Division had for several days been eliminating the last German positions. The commander of the 343rd Division, Generalmajor Josef Rauch, had already surrendered on 17 September. When on 19 September the Americans broke through the last line of defence at the base of the Quélern headland, Ramcke, with a handful of men, sent a message asking the assistant commander of the 8th Division, Brigadier General Charles Canham, for his credentials. According to the accounts, Canham pointed to his soldiers and replied: “These are my credentials.” The words later became the motto of the 8th Division. On the afternoon of 19 September Ramcke surrendered.

The toll given by Blumenson was high. The Americans lost 9,831 men at Brest – killed, wounded and missing. Some 38,000 Germans were taken prisoner, of whom more than 20,000 were combat troops. Other accounts give slightly different figures, usually in the range of 36,000–38,000 prisoners and about 10,000 American casualties. On the evening of 19 September VIII Corps handed over the captured fortress and the prisoners to the rear services.

A wrecked port and a wrecked city

The victory did not deliver what the operation had been launched for. Before surrendering, the Germans had methodically destroyed the port: they blew up the quays, cranes and dry docks and blocked the harbour basins with wrecks. The port was not restored quickly enough to help supply the Allied armies, and it played no part in that until the end of the war. The city itself, bombed by Allied aircraft since 1940 and shelled during the siege, lay in ruins. The old centre was almost completely destroyed, and of the old buildings it was mainly the stone fortifications that survived. After the war Brest was rebuilt to an entirely new plan.

Even during the siege the Allies’ priorities had changed. When at the end of August and the beginning of September British and Canadian troops took the Channel ports, including Dieppe, as well as Antwerp almost intact, the Breton ports ceased to be needed. On 3 September planners at Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force recommended abandoning the use of Lorient, Quiberon, Saint-Nazaire and Nantes, and the command accepted this on 7 September. According to Blumenson, on 14 September, before the city had fallen, Brest too was struck out of the plans. The day before, General Dwight Eisenhower had still been saying that Brest was needed as insurance in case the opening of the Channel ports was delayed, but by then the operation was continuing largely under its own momentum. Bradley recalled after the war that he had insisted on finishing it for reasons of prestige as well: a siege once begun could not be abandoned without undermining the belief that the US Army could not be stopped.

Significance

The capture of Brest ended the struggle for the Breton ports, but not in the way that had been planned. The costly operation, in which three infantry divisions and huge quantities of ammunition had been tied down for almost a month at the western tip of France, persuaded the Allied command not to storm the remaining German fortresses on the Atlantic coast. The garrison of Lorient, about 15,000 strong, and that of Saint-Nazaire, about 12,000, together with smaller groups south of the Loire estuary, were merely surrounded – mainly by French units and small American forces – and held out until the end of the war, surrendering only in May 1945. Blumenson observes that Ramcke could regard his task as accomplished: the defence of Brest had tied down forces and ammunition that the Allies could not use on the German border.

For the American forces Brest was the last battle of the French campaign to be fought far from the main front. As early as 24 September the 29th Division left for the First Army, and on 26 September VIII Corps, with the 2nd and 8th Divisions, set off by rail and road for Belgium and Luxembourg, to what was then a quiet sector in the Ardennes. The supply problems that Brest had not solved increasingly held back the Allied advance on the frontier of the Reich in the weeks that followed, and opening the port of Antwerp became their top priority. The day before Brest fell, at the other end of the front, Operation Market Garden had begun, intended to carry the war across the Rhine.

General Ramcke was taken as a prisoner to the United States, and after the war the French put him on trial, charging him and his subordinates with crimes committed during the fighting for Brest, including the killing of civilians, looting and the destruction of houses. In 1951 the court sentenced him to five years’ imprisonment, almost all of which was offset by the time he had already spent in custody. Brest, devastated by four years of air raids and a month of siege, was rebuilt over the following two decades.