J. D. Salinger_ A Life - Kenneth Slawenski [51]
The Germans now withdrew to Cherbourg, their last line of defense. Their backs were to the sea. Well fortified and ringed with strong defensive positions, Cherbourg became a formidable fortress. The capture of Montebourg had opened the way to Cherbourg for the Allies, who now began to encircle the city. It took five days for them to inch their way into the garrisoned port. Although Cherbourg was shelled to near desolation, numerous demands for its surrender went ignored. With nowhere to retreat to, the Germans were compelled to fight on. What ensued was urban warfare—fighting street by street and house by house, where Salinger learned to fear the hidden eyes of enemy snipers. It was not until the night of June 25 that he and his regiment entered what was left of the city, unchallenged. The devastation there was tremendous, but the port was secured and with it the Allied invasion of occupied Europe.9
The battle for Cherbourg was emblematic of the initiative consistently taken by the 12th Regiment. Throughout the Normandy campaign, Salinger’s men were at the forefront of the action. At Émondeville, adjoining forces had to be called in to support them. After being pounded at Émondeville, they hunted down the fleeing Germans to the village of Joganville, where they exacted a ferocious revenge. At Montebourg, they had impatiently pulled ahead of the rest of the division, coming dangerously close to the fortified city itself. On being ordered to withdraw and set up defensive positions instead, they insisted upon retaking the position they had advanced to the day before. An appraisal of the 12th Regiment’s actions during June 1944 appears to be as much a study of collective emotion as of tactics. The same troops that had hesitantly dug in beside the hedgerows of Beuzeville-au-Plain on the night of June 6 could be found aggressively thrusting themselves against the enemy on the ninth, following the bloodbath at Émondeville. Battles such as Émondeville had a galvanizing effect upon the 12th Regiment, and Salinger was no exception. The slaughter there had been their baptism by fire. It served to give them purpose and solidified them as a brotherhood. Salinger did not fight to liberate France or to preserve democracy. Like all soldiers of his regiment, he fought with the purest sense of devotion, not for the army but for the boy next to him.
During campaigns such as the siege of Cherbourg, Salinger’s counterintelligence duties were pushed to their limits. It was his job to interrogate both locals and captured enemy in order to gather any information that could be helpful to division command. As the Cherbourg battle progressed and it became clear to the Germans that they were defeated, they began to surrender in large numbers. The 12th Regiment alone took 700 prisoners on June 24, followed by 800 the next day. Salinger had to decide whom to interrogate and how to interpret what information he gathered. It was an enormous undertaking and one that had to be accomplished while trying to keep himself alive.
On July 1, the regiment was ordered from Cherbourg south to Gourbesville, near Utah Beach and Beuzeville-au-Plain. There the exhausted men were finally granted three days’ rest. This was Salinger’s first break from combat in twenty-six days and his first opportunity to properly bathe and change his clothes. The division took this time to assess the situation: of the 3,080 members of Salinger’s regiment who had landed with him on June 6, only 1,130 remained. The sense of loss that these numbers represent is made even worse when one discovers that they were typical for the unit throughout the conflict. Of all the American regiments to serve in Europe