The liberation of Cherbourg

On the afternoon of 26 June 1944 American soldiers of the 9th Infantry Division led out of an underground command post in Saint-Sauveur, a district on the southern edge of Cherbourg, Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, commander of the fortress’s defence, and Rear Admiral Walter Hennecke, naval commander of Normandy. Several hundred soldiers who had sheltered in the tunnels went into captivity with them. That day saw the end of the organised defence of the city – the largest port on the Cotentin peninsula and the first major port the Allies captured in France. The fighting nevertheless went on: the naval arsenal surrendered on 27 June, the forts on the breakwaters held out until 29 June, and the last German units on Cap de la Hague laid down their arms on 1 July. The prize, moreover, proved useless for many weeks: the Germans had destroyed the port so thoroughly that the first ships could not enter it until the end of July.

The port the invasion could not do without

The planners of Operation Overlord knew from the start that the Normandy landings could be sustained across open beaches and through the artificial Mulberry harbours only for a limited time. Armies that would soon number more than a million men needed a real port, with quays, cranes and deep water. The nearest was Cherbourg, at the northern tip of the Cotentin, some 50 kilometres in a straight line north of Utah Beach. Its capture was the main task of the American VII Corps under Major General Joseph Lawton Collins, part of General Omar Bradley’s First Army. The plan assumed this would happen within the first two weeks after the landing.

The port also had a history for both the French and the Germans. On 19 June 1940, in the last days of the Battle of France, the commander of the 7th Panzer Division, General Erwin Rommel, accepted the surrender of the French garrison there. Four years later the same Rommel, now commanding Army Group B, was responsible for the defence of the coast, including the fortifications of Cherbourg, which formed part of the Atlantic Wall. On the seaward side the city was protected by batteries of heavy artillery and by forts on the breakwaters; on the landward side by a ring of bunkers and strongpoints on the hills surrounding the city a few kilometres from its centre.

Cutting the peninsula

The first days after the landing brought no swift advance northwards. The paratroopers of the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, scattered over a wide area on the night of 6 June, and the 4th Infantry Division from Utah Beach first had to hold the beachhead, beat off counter-attacks and link up with Omaha Beach. That was achieved only after the Battle of Carentan on 10–14 June. North of Utah the Germans put up a stubborn defence on fortified lines around Montebourg and Quinéville, while the meadows they had flooded in the valleys of the Douve and the Merderet confined movement to a handful of causeways.

Collins, an energetic commander who was ruthless with subordinates he judged too slow, therefore changed the direction of the attack. Instead of driving straight for Cherbourg, he decided first to cut across the peninsula from east to west and isolate the fortress garrison from the rest of Normandy. The 9th Infantry Division and the 82nd Airborne Division pushed through Saint-Sauveur-le-Vicomte, and on the morning of 18 June patrols of the 60th Infantry Regiment reached the west coast near Barneville. The German forces in the north of the peninsula – parts of the 709th, 243rd and 91st Infantry Divisions and assorted battle groups, several tens of thousands of men in all, many of them from rear-echelon units, the navy and artillery crews – were cut off.

The quarrel over Hitler’s orders

Severing the peninsula exposed a deep rift in the German command. Gerd von Rundstedt and Rommel wanted to pull the troops back from Montebourg and the west coast into the fortress perimeter, so as to defend it for as long as possible at full strength. On 17 June the two field marshals met Adolf Hitler at his headquarters at Margival near Soissons and demanded freedom of action. Hitler refused. He did agree to a withdrawal, but ordered a new line to be manned right across the peninsula south of Cherbourg – one there were no troops to hold – and the fortress to be defended to the last man. Rommel considered the order a mistake but had to carry it out. The defence of the northern part of the peninsula was entrusted to Schlieben, commander of the 709th Infantry Division, who answered to the headquarters of LXXXIV Corps.

From 19 June the 4th, 9th and 79th Infantry Divisions advanced northwards on a broad front. Resistance was weakening almost everywhere: the exhausted defenders of Montebourg and Valognes withdrew during the night, and the Americans occupied the abandoned towns, already ruined by Allied bombing. In the woods of the northern peninsula they came upon launch sites under construction and storage depots for V-1 flying bombs – the weapon the Germans had been firing at London from the Pas-de-Calais coast since 13 June – and, near Brix, a bunker intended for V-2 rockets. On the evening of 21 June the three divisions stood before Cherbourg’s ring of fortifications.

The assault on the fortress

On the evening of 21 June Collins delivered an ultimatum by radio and through prisoners: the garrison was to surrender by 9 a.m. the next day. Schlieben did not reply. He had orders from Hitler to fight to the last round, and the port was to be destroyed before it fell into enemy hands. Around midday on 22 June hundreds of aircraft appeared over the fortifications: first RAF fighter-bombers, then aircraft of the American Ninth Air Force. The raid was violent but imprecise – some bombs fell on American troops, and many bunkers survived. The infantry of the three divisions then attacked the ring of fortifications from the east, south and west.

Over the next three days the Americans methodically reduced one strongpoint after another – with flamethrowers, with explosive charges pushed into embrasures and with tank guns firing into bunker apertures. On 25 June a naval force under Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, with the battleships Texas, Nevada and Arkansas and British cruisers, joined the battle from the sea. In the duel with the coastal batteries several ships were hit, among them Texas, on which the helmsman was killed. The same day the 79th Infantry Division attacked Fort du Roule – an old fort cut into the rock of the hill that dominated the city and the port. Its upper levels were taken in hand-to-hand fighting; the garrison of the lower levels, hewn into the rock, held out until the following day.

By 26 June the fighting had reached the city streets. In the morning units of the 9th Division reached the underground shelter at Saint-Sauveur where Schlieben and his staff were holed up. After the entrances had been shelled and a call to surrender had been issued, soldiers began to emerge from the tunnels, and in the afternoon the general himself surrendered. He refused, however, to order the whole garrison to capitulate, explaining that he no longer had communications with his units. The same day the British 30 Assault Unit seized a villa at Octeville that had housed a Kriegsmarine intelligence post, capturing its documents.

The last pockets of resistance

The fall of the command did not end the fighting. In the naval arsenal, surrounded by thick walls in the western part of the port, Schlieben’s deputy, Generalmajor Robert Sattler, held out. He surrendered on the morning of 27 June, once the Americans had brought tanks and guns up to the walls. Also active in the port was a small US Navy reconnaissance party under Commander Quentin Walsh, which during the fighting of 26–27 June took the surrender of several hundred Germans and freed several dozen American paratroopers who had been taken prisoner earlier. The forts on the breakwaters enclosing the roadstead held out longest, shelled from the land and bombed from the air; the last of them capitulated on 29 June. At the north-western tip of the peninsula, on Cap de la Hague, a battle group under Oberstleutnant Keil held out against the 9th Division until 1 July.

According to the US official history, some 39,000 Germans were taken prisoner in the fighting on the Cotentin in June 1944. VII Corps lost more than 22,000 men in the same period, counting from D-Day, including about 2,800 killed. The civilian population of the Cotentin also suffered badly – Valognes, Montebourg and other small towns were largely destroyed by bombing and shelling.

A wrecked port

Hitler, who had forbidden surrender, regarded the defence of Cherbourg as a defeat but the destruction of the port as a success. Rear Admiral Hennecke, who had directed the demolitions, was awarded the Knight’s Cross after he had already been captured, for what the citation called a feat without precedent in the annals of coastal defence. The Germans had blown up the quays, the cranes and the maritime station, sunk dozens of ships and barges in the basins and entrance channels, and sown the harbour waters with several kinds of mine, including magnetic, acoustic and pressure mines. According to American accounts, the US supply chief, Colonel Alvin Viney, judged it the most thorough demolition of a port in history.

Clearing the basins took engineers and minesweepers weeks. The first cargoes were unloaded from amphibious vehicles in mid-July, and ships began to berth at the rebuilt quays at the end of July; the port did not work on a larger scale until mid-August. The delay was all the more painful because the Channel storm of 19–22 June had destroyed the American Mulberry harbour off Omaha Beach and seriously damaged the British one at Arromanches. Throughout June and July the Allied armies were therefore supplied largely across open beaches.

Significance

The capture of Cherbourg was the Americans’ first great success in Normandy and proof that the Western Allies could take a strongly defended Atlantic Wall fortress from the landward side in under three weeks. For the Germans it was a serious defeat, and not only a military one. Hitler looked for culprits: an inquiry was announced into the commander of the Seventh Army, General Friedrich Dollmann, who died suddenly on 28 June – of a heart attack according to the official version, by suicide according to some historians. Rundstedt and Rommel, once again convinced that Hitler would not let them conduct operations, spoke ever more openly of the hopelessness of the situation in the West. In July Rundstedt was dismissed, and Rommel, badly wounded on 17 July when aircraft attacked his car, never returned to the front.

The port itself did not live up to expectations in the first weeks. Once rebuilt, however, it was for many months one of the most important supply ports of the US Army in France – until Antwerp was opened at the end of 1944 – and in August the first fuel pipeline of the PLUTO system was laid to it under the English Channel from the Isle of Wight. The fall of Cherbourg also allowed VII Corps to turn south, where in July the struggle for Saint-Lô began, followed by Operation Cobra, which opened the way to breaking the front and breaking out of Normandy.