The liberation of Rennes

At about nine in the morning on 4 August 1944 soldiers of the US 13th Infantry Regiment of the 8th Infantry Division marched into Rennes, the capital of Brittany. They met no resistance: a few hours earlier, at three in the morning, the German garrison – some 2,000 men – had slipped out of the city by back roads to the south-west, having blown up most of the bridges over the Vilaine. The inhabitants, who had lived under occupation for four years and had been through several Allied air raids in June and July, greeted the Americans with flowers and wine. Rennes was the first large French city to fall into Allied hands after the breakthrough in Normandy, and the first in which power was immediately taken over by people appointed by de Gaulle’s Provisional Government.

War chronologies record under 4 August that Rennes was liberated by American troops. This is true, though it needs adding that while it was the infantry that entered the city, the fight for it had been waged since 1 August by the 4th Armored Division, and that in the city itself members of the French Resistance had taken over the town hall the day before, on 3 August.

The breach at Avranches

The road to Rennes opened in the last days of July. After seven weeks of fighting in the hedgerows and the capture of Saint-Lô, the US First Army broke through the German front on 25 July in Operation Cobra. On 30 July the spearhead of the 4th Armored Division drove into Avranches at the base of the Cotentin peninsula, and on 31 July it captured an intact bridge over the Sélune at Pontaubault. Beyond it there was no longer a continuous German front – only roads leading west, deep into Brittany, and south, towards the Loire.

At noon on 1 August General George Patton’s Third Army, which had been waiting in Normandy for several weeks in secrecy from the Germans, entered the fighting. At the same time General Omar Bradley took command of the new 12th Army Group, made up of the First and Third Armies. Patton took over Major General Troy Middleton’s VIII Corps, which he had been unofficially supervising since 28 July, and immediately sent it into Brittany. From the outset the Overlord plan had envisaged the capture of the Breton ports – Brest, Lorient, Saint-Nazaire and Saint-Malo – as well as the construction of a new port in Quiberon Bay. Supplies and further divisions straight from the United States were to arrive through them.

The armoured dash and the halt before the city

VIII Corps was led by two armoured divisions. Major General Robert Grow’s 6th Armored Division was ordered to race through the middle of the peninsula straight for Brest, more than 300 kilometres away. Major General John Shirley Wood’s 4th Armored Division was to take Rennes and then – as Patton wanted – push on south-west towards Quiberon Bay and cut the whole peninsula off from the rest of France. Middleton’s orders mentioned only Rennes. Wood, a commander with Patton’s temperament, considered that he had wide latitude.

Rennes, a city of more than 80,000 inhabitants, was the junction where ten of Brittany’s main roads met. The Germans had not turned it into a fortress, but they were aware of its importance. On the afternoon of 1 August Combat Command A (CCA) of the 4th Armored Division covered about 65 kilometres from Pontaubault in a few hours and by evening was on the northern outskirts. There the spearhead ran into batteries of Luftwaffe 88-millimetre anti-aircraft guns defending the airfield, supported by a handful of infantry. Firing over open sights, the guns stopped the Americans. According to the American official history, the defenders destroyed eleven Sherman tanks and took twenty prisoners; French sources speak of several dozen killed. Meanwhile a detachment of the German 91st Air Landing Division and two replacement battalions – about 1,900 men – sent from Le Mans had managed to reach the city. During the night command of the defence was taken over by Colonel Eugen König, commander of the 91st Division.

On 2 August Wood realised that Rennes could not be taken on the move as Avranches had been. His division was strung out over 80 kilometres of road, it was short of fuel, ammunition and food, and communications with corps headquarters kept breaking down. He demanded an infantry regiment from Middleton – “now, repeat, now”. Middleton placed under his command the 13th Infantry Regiment of Major General Donald Stroh’s 8th Division and provided lorries to carry it.

Wood, however, had no intention of waiting outside Rennes. He believed that the decisive battles would be fought not in Brittany but in central France, and that his division should turn east, towards Chartres and Paris. On 3 August, without waiting for approval, he sent both combat commands in a wide arc west of the city. By evening the spearheads were at Bain-de-Bretagne and Derval, 50–65 kilometres south of Rennes, cutting seven of the ten roads leading out of it. Wood proposed a march on Châteaubriant and Angers on the Loire, but Middleton ordered him to secure Rennes first. When Middleton arrived at divisional headquarters the next day, Wood threw his arms around him and declared that the high command was “winning the war the wrong way”. In the end Patton and his chief of staff, General Hugh Gaffey, decided that the 4th Armored Division was to go west – towards Vannes and Lorient.

The night of 3–4 August

The halt outside Rennes had tragic consequences for the city. On the morning of 3 August the Germans dispatched the last transport of prisoners to the Reich – according to French sources, some 800 members of the Resistance and several hundred Allied prisoners of war. Many of them did not survive the concentration camps.

On the afternoon of 3 August the first battalion of the 13th Infantry Regiment, rushed up from Avranches, attacked straight from the march column and, under fire from machine guns and anti-aircraft guns, broke into the north-eastern outskirts. According to the American official history, the defenders lost 60 killed and 130 wounded, and the city was almost surrounded by American tanks. At 11 p.m. the commander of the German Seventh Army, General Paul Hausser, agreed to a withdrawal. The garrison burned its depots and installations, disabled its anti-aircraft guns and at three in the morning set out in two groups along back roads and across country. The Americans, racing along the main highways, barely noticed them; after five days’ march the Germans reached Saint-Nazaire. On the way they clashed several times with Resistance units.

On the morning of 4 August the 13th Regiment entered the city, followed by the rest of the 8th Division, which had originally been meant to follow the 6th Armored Division towards Brest. General Stroh took responsibility for the security of Rennes, and his division manned all the roads into the city and became the corps reserve.

The French did not wait for the Americans before taking power. On the afternoon of 3 August members of the Resistance occupied the town hall and removed the Vichy-appointed mayor, René Patay. Yves Milon became chairman of a provisional municipal council. On 4 August Victor Le Gorgeu, a senator and mayor of Brest, took up office as Commissioner of the Republic for Brittany, appointed by General Charles de Gaulle’s Provisional Government. Resistance activists took over the radio station and the printing works of the collaborationist daily Ouest-Éclair, in whose place the newspaper Ouest-France – today France’s largest regional daily – began to appear. The swift installation of a French administration in the first large liberated city had political significance: for months de Gaulle had feared that the Americans would want to govern liberated France through the AMGOT military occupation administration, as in Italy. In Rennes, as earlier in Bayeux, he showed that it would be his government that took power.

The Breton Resistance

Brittany had one of the strongest resistance movements in France. According to the American official history, the French Forces of the Interior (FFI) there numbered some 20,000 armed members in the summer of 1944. From June weapons were dropped to them, and paratroopers of a French SAS battalion landed in the Morbihan; on 18 June they fought a fierce battle with the Germans at the partisan camp near Saint-Marcel. In July General Marie-Pierre Koenig, the FFI commander in London, appointed Colonel Albert Eon to command all Resistance forces in Brittany. On 29 July the 12th Army Group placed the Breton FFI under Patton’s Third Army, and on 3 August the BBC broadcast the agreed signal for a general uprising.

The partisans guarded bridges, showed the Americans the roads and the German positions, rounded up stragglers and protected the supply routes behind the racing columns. West of Rennes their help was even more important than in the city itself: when the spearhead of the 4th Armored Division drove into Vannes on 5 August after a seven-hour run, an FFI battalion that had earlier seized the local airfield guided it along the best roads. American commanders, who had only a few divisions in Brittany, repeatedly stressed the value of this help.

Fortress ports

The speed with which Patton’s tanks crossed Brittany did not translate into the capture of the ports. Hitler ordered them to be defended as fortresses to the last man, and their garrisons – made up of army troops, sailors and U-boat base personnel – had enough time to shut themselves in. On 7 August the 4th Armored Division stood before Lorient, and at roughly the same time the 6th Armored Division reached Brest, which – as it later turned out – was defended by nearly 30,000 troops. Neither division had the strength to take a heavily fortified city. The citadel of Saint-Malo did not capitulate until 17 August. The Battle for Brest, whose defence was directed by General Hermann-Bernhard Ramcke, lasted until 19 September and cost the Americans thousands killed and wounded, and before surrendering the Germans completely destroyed the port that was meant to supply the Allied armies. Lorient and Saint-Nazaire, besieged by the French and small American forces, surrendered only after Germany’s capitulation, in May 1945. The Breton ports, for whose sake VIII Corps had entered Brittany, never played the part in Allied supply that the plans had foreseen.

Place in the war

The occupation of Rennes concluded the first phase of the American breakout from Normandy. As early as 3 August Bradley decided that only Middleton’s VIII Corps would go into Brittany, while the main forces of the Third Army would turn east – towards the Loire, Le Mans and the Seine; the next day this was confirmed in a directive by General Bernard Montgomery, who commanded all ground forces in Normandy. The pre-invasion plans, which assumed that capturing the Breton ports would be the most important task after the breakout from Normandy, ceased to count. General Wade Haislip’s XV Corps took Le Mans on 8 August and began to outflank the German armies from the south. Instead of withdrawing, Hitler on 7 August threw panzer divisions into a counter-attack at Mortain towards Avranches, aiming to cut the narrow corridor through which Patton’s supplies flowed. The attack collapsed, and the forces that had taken part in it were soon encircled near Falaise.

To the end of his life Wood believed that his division should have moved east straight away rather than towards Lorient, and some historians later agreed with him: in the first days of August there were hardly any German troops between the Loire and Paris. Others point out that the Allies could not then have known how quickly the German front would collapse, and that supplying the armies advancing across France would soon prove the biggest problem of the campaign. What is certain is that Brittany, over which the planners had argued at length before the invasion, became a secondary theatre of the war in August 1944.

For the French, the liberation of Rennes meant more than it did for the Allied staffs. It was the first large city in which power passed smoothly from Vichy into the hands of de Gaulle’s people, and the liberation of Brittany – in many places with the decisive participation of local partisans – became part of the legend of the French Resistance. Three weeks later, on 25 August, Paris was liberated.