D-Day_ The Battle for Normandy - Antony Beevor [203]
Middleton, back at VIII Corps headquarters, faced a difficult choice. He sympathized with Wood’s desire to strike east, but his instructions remained to capture the ports on the coast of Brittany and he was not in contact with Patton. Middleton drove to see Wood and sent the 4th Armored Division back south-westwards to take Vannes and then Lorient. Vannes fell rapidly, but Lorient appeared impregnable.
On 4 August, Patton himself, escorted by an armoured car, drove down into Brittany. He was following the advance of the 6th Armored Division commanded by Major General Grow, whom he had ordered to rush for Brest, the main port of Brittany, bypassing all resistance. Patton whooped with joy every time they ran off a map and had to open a new one. This was warfare as he loved it. But Patton had not told Middleton the objective he had given the 6th Armored. Grow then received a signal from Middleton, ordering him not to bypass Saint-Malo, on the north coast of the peninsula, and to attack it the next day. Grow requested that the order should be cancelled, but Middleton was firm.
Grow was about to sit down with a cup of coffee outside his tent in a wheatfield, when Patton suddenly appeared. ‘What in hell are you doing sitting here?’ he demanded. ‘I thought I told you to get to Brest.’ Grow explained his order from Middleton and his chief of staff produced the written order. Patton read it, then folded it up. ‘And he was a good doughboy, too,’ Patton murmured to himself. ‘I’ll see Middleton,’ he said to Grow. ‘You go ahead where I told you to go.’
The confusion continued, but Patton settled the problem of communicating with divisions spread out over hundreds of miles. He allocated the 6th Cavalry Group to report on the exact position of all his divisions and armoured columns as well as on the enemy. Its thirteen reconnaissance platoons, each with six armoured cars and six quarter-ton trucks, had high-powered radios which could also act as a back-up if the Signal Corps network failed. The 6th Cavalry was soon known as ‘General Patton’s Household Cavalry’.
The advance of the 6th Armored Division towards Brest was hardly unopposed. Groups of German stragglers and improvised combat groups fought delaying actions. During daylight hours, the columns had support from Mustangs of the 363rd Fighter Group, but ‘every night from 3 August to 6 August we had to fight for our bivouac areas,’ reported Captain Donley from the 6th Armored. On 5 August, the town of Huelgoat was reported to be clear, so General Grow rode in with a tank and an armoured car. He was greeted with ‘intense small arms fire from all directions’. Donley’s company of armoured infantry was sent to get him out, supported by tanks. The German paratroopers in the town were now trapped. The armoured infantry accounted for many of them, but the FFI begged to be allowed to finish the rest off. They claimed that ‘the paratroopers had cut off the hands of a woman’ and the FFI ‘was mighty anxious to mop them up’.
The 6th Armored put the FFI into reconnaissance Jeeps, known as ‘Peeps’, to lead the way. And the leading tank battalion placed sandbags on the front of their Shermans to absorb the blast of 50 mm anti-tank rounds. If a village was deserted, it usually meant that the Germans were there: ‘The first thing we did was to blow off the church steeple in order to get rid of possible [observation posts] and sniper fire.’
With German stragglers roaming the countryside behind their advance, Jeeps had to dash through like the ‘pony express’. Snipers and bands of Germans