The capture of Saint-Lô

On the evening of 18 July 1944 a task force of the US 29th Infantry Division under Brigadier General Norman Cota broke into Saint-Lô – capital of the Manche department and the most important road junction in western Normandy. At the head of the column rode a jeep carrying on its bonnet the body of a battalion commander killed the day before, Major Thomas Howie. The next day, 19 July, the Americans cleared the last Germans from the town. According to the US official history, the twelve-day battle for Saint-Lô cost the American XIX Corps nearly 11,000 killed, wounded and missing, and the town itself, destroyed by bombing and shellfire, went down in history as the “capital of the ruins”.

The popular version, according to which Saint-Lô was taken on 18 July and the Allied breakout from the hedgerow country began, needs to be made more precise. The 29th Division entered the town on 18 July, but it was finally cleared only on 19 July. The breakthrough itself – Operation Cobra – began a week later, on 25 July, west of Saint-Lô. The capture of the town gave the Americans a start line along the Saint-Lô–Périers road, but it was not yet the breakout from the bocage.

A road junction in hedgerow country

Saint-Lô, a town of some 11,000 inhabitants before the war, stood on a rocky spur above the River Vire, where the roads from Bayeux, Isigny, Carentan, Périers, Coutances and Vire converged. Whoever held it controlled the communications of the whole western sector of the front. In the plans of General Omar Bradley’s US First Army it was to be taken within a few days of the Normandy landings. As early as the night of 6–7 June American bombers attacked the town to cut the roads by which German reserves would come up from Brittany; according to French figures, 352 civilians were killed and much of the town was reduced to rubble.

On the road to Saint-Lô, however, lay the bocage – a landscape of small fields enclosed by high earth banks overgrown with dense thickets of shrubs and trees. Every field was a small fortress, and the defenders behind the hedgerows cut down attackers at close range. In June the Americans took Cherbourg on the Cotentin Peninsula, but their progress southwards was very slow. On 3 July Bradley launched a general offensive along the whole front of the First Army – the Battle of the Hedgerows – hoping to bring his troops out onto drier, open ground on the Coutances–Saint-Lô line.

Facing the Americans was the German Seventh Army under SS-Obergruppenführer Paul Hausser. Directly in front of Saint-Lô, General Eugen Meindl’s II Parachute Corps held the line with the 3rd Parachute Division and the remnants of the 352nd Infantry Division, known for its defence of Omaha Beach, reinforced by battle groups from other divisions; west of the Vire the front was held by General Dietrich von Choltitz’s LXXXIV Corps. The paratroopers, though few in number, were well trained and made excellent use of the terrain. The key to the defence lay in the hills north-east of the town – Hill 192 and the Martinville ridge – from which German artillery observers could see every move the attackers made.

Twelve days of fighting

The task of taking Saint-Lô was given to General Charles Corlett’s XIX Corps. On 7 July its 30th Infantry Division crossed the Vire and the Vire–Taute canal west of the town and pushed south towards Pont-Hébert, where on 8–11 July it beat off counter-attacks by German reserves, including the Panzer Lehr Division. The main attack on the town itself began on 11 July. That day the neighbouring 2nd Infantry Division of V Corps took Hill 192 after heavy fighting, and Major General Charles Gerhardt’s 29th Division attacked from the east, along the Bayeux road, towards the Martinville ridge. From the north, along the road from Isigny, Major General Paul Baade’s newly arrived 35th Infantry Division attacked.

Progress was measured in hundreds of metres. The infantry took hedgerow after hedgerow, tanks struggled to break through the earth banks, and the German paratroopers, supported by mortars and artillery on the surrounding hills, counter-attacked at night. The 29th Division’s battalions melted away within days; replacements, sent straight into the line, were often killed before they had got to know their commanders. According to the US official history, in the July fighting in the hedgerows up to the capture of Saint-Lô the First Army lost some 40,000 men, the overwhelming majority of them infantrymen – for gains of ground measured in a dozen or so kilometres, and on some sectors in just a few.

On 15 July Major Sidney Bingham’s battalion of the 116th Infantry Regiment pushed through as far as the eastern suburb of La Madeleine, about a kilometre from the town, and was cut off there – without ammunition, with a handful of medics and several dozen wounded, for whom aircraft dropped blood plasma. On the night of 16–17 July the 3rd Battalion of the same regiment, under Major Thomas D. Howie, reached it. On the morning of 17 July Howie told his men: “See you in St. Lô” – and shortly afterwards was killed by a mortar fragment.

On 18 July the German defence on the hills north and east of the town began to crumble, and Meindl was pulling his paratroopers back to the south bank of the Vire. Gerhardt formed Task Force C from infantry, tanks, tank destroyers and reconnaissance troops under his deputy, Brigadier General Cota. In the afternoon the column set off along the road from Isigny, and in the evening, at about 6 p.m., broke into the quarter by the church of Sainte-Croix. By nightfall the Americans held the main crossroads, and on 19 July they cleared the last pockets of resistance from the ruins and handed the sector over to the 35th Division. German artillery continued to shell the town for several more days.

“The Major of St. Lô”

Howie’s body was laid on the bonnet of Task Force C’s lead jeep – according to accounts from the 29th Division, Gerhardt wanted the commander who had promised his men a meeting in Saint-Lô to enter the town with them. When the column reached the ruins, the soldiers laid it on the rubble in front of the shattered church of Sainte-Croix and covered it with the American flag. A photograph of the scene went round the American press, and Howie became “the Major of St. Lô”, one of the symbols of the whole campaign. Andy Rooney, who witnessed the scene as a correspondent for the army newspaper Stars and Stripes, called it years later one of the truly moving moments of a cruel war. Today a monument to Howie stands in Saint-Lô.

The toll of the battle was heavy on both sides. According to the American monograph St-Lo, published in 1946 in the American Forces in Action series, between 7 and 22 July the 30th Infantry Division lost 3,934 men, the 29th Division 3,706 and the 35th Division 2,437; together with the 2nd Infantry Division at Hill 192 and the 3rd Armored Division, losses came to nearly 11,000 killed, wounded and missing. The ground gained was between five and eleven kilometres. The Germans did not publish full figures, but the 3rd Parachute Division and the 352nd Infantry Division emerged from the battle badly bled, with no reserves left to plug further breaches.

The capital of the ruins

The town itself ceased to exist. The bombing of the night of 6–7 June was followed by further air raids and weeks of artillery fire from both sides; according to French estimates, 90 to 95 per cent of the buildings were destroyed. Only a handful of houses survived amid the rubble, and the inhabitants who had lived through it in the surrounding villages and farms returned to a desert of stone.

In 1945 the Irish writer Samuel Beckett came to Saint-Lô, working as a driver and storekeeper on the construction of an Irish Red Cross hospital. In 1946 he wrote a piece for Irish radio, “The Capital of the Ruins”, in which he described the town as “bombed out of existence in one night”. The phrase itself – coined, according to French studies, by the local historian Bernard Jacqueline – was given wide currency by Beckett and stuck to Saint-Lô for good. In 1948 the town was awarded the Legion of Honour and the Croix de Guerre 1939–1945, and the citation called its inhabitants “citizens of the capital of the ruins”. As early as October 1944 the US Navy gave the name St. Lo to an escort carrier, which was sunk by a kamikaze aircraft two weeks later in the Battle of Leyte Gulf.

The same day at Caen

On 18 July, as the 29th Division was entering Saint-Lô, General Bernard Law Montgomery launched Operation Goodwood on the eastern flank of the front. After a massive air bombardment, three British armoured divisions advanced from the bridgehead beyond the Orne towards the Bourguébus ridge, while the Canadians, in the parallel Operation Atlantic, took the southern districts of Caen, whose northern part had been captured on 9 July. The British attack stalled after a few days with heavy tank losses, but it tied down the German panzer divisions in the east – facing the British and Canadians rather than the Americans. The day before, 17 July, Allied aircraft had strafed the car of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel near Livarot; seriously wounded, he disappeared from the battlefield for good.

Place in the war

The capture of Saint-Lô closed the first and bloodiest phase of the American fighting in Normandy. Bradley got what he needed: the town and the straight Saint-Lô–Périers road as a start line, clearly visible from the air. On a narrow sector west of the town he planned Operation Cobra – a massive carpet bombing after which the infantry was to open a gap for the armoured divisions. Because of bad weather the attack was postponed several times; it finally went in on 25 July, and in the last days of the month turned into a breakthrough that carried the Americans out of the bocage towards Avranches and Brittany.

Saint-Lô, like Caen, became a symbol of the price Normandy paid for its liberation. After the war its inhabitants lived for several years in wooden huts, paid for partly by gifts from abroad; rebuilding in concrete began in 1948, and the Americans funded a modern hospital for the town. The gateway of the old prison, which survived the bombing, was preserved as a memorial to the victims of German repression and as the department’s memorial to the Resistance.