D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [115]
As soon as the peninsula was cutoff, Collins wanted to give the Germans no time to reorganize. General Manton Eddy, the commander of the 9th Division, had to turn his whole formation round in less than twenty-four hours to be ready to advance north up the west coast. Collins placed the 79th Infantry Division in the centre, while the 4th Division, still fighting hard round Montebourg and Valognes, would clear the eastern part and attack Cherbourg from the right. The 4th Division’s commander, Major General Raymond O. Barton, may have lacked the flamboyance of some colleagues, but Liddell Hart had been impressed. He described him as ‘refreshingly open-minded’.
Barton’s 4th Division advanced against the concentration of forces to their north. Bombardments of naval and ground artillery had been battering the German defences around Montebourg and Valognes, along with the towns themselves. Montgomery’s own reliance on artillery was revealed in a ghastly joke when he wrote to de Guingand, ‘Montebourg and Valognes have been “liberated” in the best 21st Army Group style, i.e. they are both completely destroyed!!!’
The three divisions advancing on Cherbourg also benefited from having their own air support party, ready to call in fighter-bomber attacks. At that stage, while this new liaison technique was being tried, most emergency requests took at least three hours to accomplish. But there were exceptions. On 16 June, ‘a Cub plane reported to division artillery that a column of troops was crossing a bridge. Artillery phoned it in. Corps contacted a squadron of fighter-bombers in the area and directed it onto the column. In 15 minutes they had a report they had strafed the column. Reports have come in that American prisoners being marched down the road by Germans escaped in the course of strafing by our planes.’ This early attempt at ground-air cooperation was an important start in what would become a devastatingly effective combination later in the campaign.
But just as Collins’s advance on Cherbourg was proceeding well, the Allies were hit by an unforeseeable disaster. On 19 June, the most violent storm for forty years began to blow up in the Channel, combined with a spring tide. Locals had never seen anything like it. The gale force winds along the coast were, in the Norman saying, enough ‘to take the horns off a cow’. Temperatures dropped to the equivalent of a cold November. The Mulberry artificial port at Omaha was destroyed beyond repair. One or two experts said that gaps in its construction had made it vulnerable, but it stood on the most exposed piece of coast. Its British counterpart at Arromanches was partly protected by a reef and rocks, and as a result could be rebuilt afterwards.
Landing craft were hurled by the waves high on to the beaches, smashing against each other. Flat Rhino ferries sliced into their sides. Even landing ship tanks were thrown ashore. ‘The only chance we had of keeping our landing craft from being beaten to bits,’ wrote a US Navy officer, ‘was to anchor a long way off the beach out in the Channel and hope we could ride the storm out.’ For ships en route to England, the crossing was unforgettable. ‘It took us about four days to do the 80 nautical miles in very rough seas to Southampton,’ wrote an officer on an LST. ‘The seas were so rough that the skipper was afraid that the ship would crack in two; therefore he ordered the mooring cables to be strung fore and aft and tightened up on the winches to give extra support to two of the deck plates. That ship was strung like a mountaineer’s fiddle.’
The storm