Gorrell: Norman countryside set afire by big guns
Massed batteries fire into onrushing Yanks; peasants hand out cognac to doughboys
By Henry T. Gorrell
Outside Cherbourg, France (UP) – (June 24, 7:10 p.m. CET)
U.S. troops battering the Germans back along the flaming road to Cherbourg were within 1,000 yards of the port tonight, and the order has gone out to our infantry: “Push the b******* over and walk into the town.”
From a vantage point on the road overlooking Cherbourg, I see massed batteries of German 88s firing over open sights into the onrushing Americans.
The whole countryside seems to be on fire from a frightful storm of bombs and shells. Flames are licking up the slopes of the hills dominating the city.
Sound resembles surf’s roar
The roar of small-arms fire rolling back from hand-to-hand fighting just down the road resembles the roar of surf on a rocky shore during a tropical storm.
The Germans have dug into the outlying houses around Cherbourg and are covering the roads with machine-gun fire while their heavy artillery is trying to halt the main American forces closing in from the south and southwest.
As I joined the forward companies moving up for the assault, I saw dozens of subterranean concrete and steel pillboxes that had been bypassed in the initial sweep and mopped up later.
Dead as yet unburied
Black smoke mushroomed up from the ruined pillboxes and the Germans, Poles and Russians who manned them are piled up in grotesque heaps of dead or crammed into nearby prison-cages, trembling in terror at the crash of their own shells.
In the heat of the battle, there has been no time to pick up even American dead, let alone enemy dead, and the bodies of fallen Germans lie in roadside ditches covered with blood-soaked coats and blankets.
The advance is progressing under the personal direction of an American general who many times today escaped death by the narrowest of margins.
French peasants who remained in their partially ruined farmhouses as the battle of Cherbourg swirled around them are dashing back and forth, handing out cognac to tired frontline doughboys.
Fighting is going on all around this post, but the peasants line the road to watch hundreds of captured Germans streaming back to the rear.
French hoot Nazi prisoners
Many of the peasants hoot derisively at the Nazis and draw their hands across their throats, yelling “Dirty Boches!”
All indications tonight are that the siege of Cherbourg is entering its final hours. The Germans must now surrender or die fighting in the streets. Militarily, Cherbourg is untenable.
Word has just come back that the doughboys have fought their way across the pillbox-studded heights overlooking the port, where the Germans had their last major defense line.
Poked dynamite down periscope
The captain of an infantry company told me how Cpl. John D. Kelly knocked out a pillbox with concrete and steel walls six feet thick.
The captain said:
We were pinned down by machine guns with dead and wounded all around us when I saw this guy carrying a long pole. It was Kelly with his pole charges – long sticks with a charge of dynamite on the end.
He dropped three or four of them down the hole where the periscope sticks out of the pillbox and smoked the Heinies out. He did all this under heavy fire.