D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [116]
Recovering from the effects afterwards took longer than the storm itself. To refloat an LST thrown up on to the beach required bulldozers to dig huge trenches around it in the hope that another high tide might float it off. The Americans, who ‘never really believed in the Mulberry’, cleared what they could, then proved that they could land ‘an amazing tonnage with flat-bottomed barges and by beaching ships at low tide’.28
The storm badly delayed the build-up, hampered the return of casualties to England and forced the cancellation of air operations. This absence of Allied fighter-bombers from the sky allowed the Germans to accelerate their reinforcement of the Normandy front. At the same time, many Allied divisions, either already embarked for France or ready to cross, were delayed by a week or more. The most immediate effect was on supplies, especially artillery ammunition. General Bradley had a difficult choice, but decided to maintain full support for Collins’s attack on Cherbourg. His other two corps - Gerow’s V Corps to the south-east and Middleton’s VIII Corps on the south side of the peninsula - would receive only a minimum of artillery shells, even though Bradley knew that this would allow the Germans time to prepare defences south of the Douve marshes.
Despite the fury of the storm, Collins had urged on his three divisions to encircle the tip of the peninsula. General von Schlieben, knowing that his fragmented forces could not hold the Americans in the open, had begun to withdraw to the forts around Cherbourg. His own division had taken under command a wide variety of units, including a Georgian battalion and a mounted regiment of Cossacks with five squadrons. Their Russian colonel when drunk confessed to wanting ‘a bit of plunder’. ‘It was a war of fun and games,’ observed one of Schlieben’s colonels sarcastically.
Although resistance on the advance to Cherbourg was mainly one of isolated actions, it was a testing time for the newly arrived 79th Division in the centre. ‘The men were tired,’ wrote one platoon commander, ‘and the more tired they became the more they wanted to bunch, particularly during marching.’ This failure to keep a safe distance led to many unnecessary casualties in the early days. Sometimes they encountered stragglers who claimed that their company had been virtually wiped out, but it was never true. They were just disorientated by this first experience of hedgerow fighting. Platoon commanders felt vulnerable chasing around trying to find lost men or squads. Five miles east of Cherbourg, the 79th ran into an outpost line of scattered pillboxes and machine-gun nests: ‘K Company [of the 314th Infantry] lost almost a full platoon, because of inexperience and a certain amount of panic, when the troops bunched and formed very profitable targets for enemy gunners.’ But they found that if they encircled a pillbox and then fired a bazooka at the rear, the defenders surrendered rapidly.
On 22 June, the Americans launched a massive air raid on Cherbourg late in the morning. The alarms rang in the flak positions manned by German teenagers from the Reichsarbeitsdienst, recruits engaged on construction projects who were not yet proper soldiers. They ran to their guns as the first waves of fighter-bombers came in. ‘We fired back like madmen,’ wrote one of them. Then came a rumbling drone over the Channel as formations of American heavy bombers appeared, glinting in the sun. ‘An inferno descended - roaring,