Yanks seize last Cherbourg heights
Hundreds of foe are captured as city’s fall nears
By Edward W. Beattie
SHAEF, London, England (UP) –
U.S. infantrymen captured the last heights overlooking Cherbourg and stormed down the slopes to within 1,000 yards of the flaming port today, sweeping up hundreds of exhausted prisoners and huge quantities of arms and ammunition abandoned by the retreating Germans.
Battered and stunned by the hellfire of bombs and shells rained on them from land, sea and air, the Nazi defenders still fought back with fanatical fury, but front dispatches said Lt. Gen. Omar N. Bradley’s Yankee veterans were beating them back foot by foot into a narrowing deathtrap inside the city.
Two of the three forts on the southern approaches to the port fell to the attacking Americans yesterday and United Press war correspondent Henry T. Gorrell reported from the battlefield that the last hours of Cherbourg’s siege were at hand.
Massed batteries of German 88mm cannon were firing over open sights into the ranks of the attacking Americans, while hundreds of hidden enemy machine guns fired incessantly from the farmhouses and fields bordering the main highway into Cherbourg.
Bradley’s doughboys were slugging their way through the maze of enemy defenses, however, and there were indications that the four-day assault had knocked much of the fight out of the 30,000-odd Germans holding the port.
Two Nazi generals dead
Two of their divisional generals were dead and front dispatches said hundreds of exhausted captives were being marched back into U.S. lines through a gantlet of jeering French peasants.
Late Saturday, the doughboys launched a final attack from their newly-won heights under a ringing order to “Push the b******* over and walk into town.” With a bayonet charge, they captured a huge stronghold of 16 subterranean rooms which had somehow absorbed the shock of the tremendous three-dimensional bombardment.
Henry T. Gorrell of the United Press watched the charge from an observation point itself only two kilometers (just over a mile) from Cherbourg. Earlier he flew over the besieged city in a Piper Cub observation plane and reported seeing the Americans “advancing en masse toward their final objectives.” “The infantry’s advance is rapid,” Gorrell said.
Nazis may try sea dash
He also noted a number of German ships in the harbor, possibly meaning that the enemy would make other evacuation attempts like Saturday’s pre-dawn getaway aboard seven small merchant ships escorted by E-boats and armed landing craft.
The British blockade patrol promptly sank two of the vessels, seriously damaged three others and left them wallowing helplessly off Cherbourg, while the remaining two succeeded in running through to Alderney in the Channel Islands. The British forces suffered superficial damage and a small number of casualties.
Supreme Headquarters said that if the enemy garrison did not surrender within a few hours, the fighting might develop into slow and costly street battles.
Americans reach heights
Gorrell reported from the front, however, that the Americans reached heights overlooking the city at 3:20 a.m. with only slight resistance.
About 1,250 Germans had surrendered in the Cherbourg area in 24 hours, and this fact, plus the enemy’s failure to react to the breaching of the port’s perimeter defenses, “indicates a rapid deterioration of the enemy morale and ability to defend Cherbourg much longer,” a front dispatch said.
More than 300 Marauder medium bombers saturated Cherbourg’s defenses in a series of raids before noon, but a thick weather front precluded almost all aerial support in the afternoon.
Citadel spouts flame
Richard McMillan of the United Press said long-range cannon, field artillery, naval guns, tanks and infantry as well as planes were “all massing fire upon the citadel, which is belching smoke and flames as the Germans attempt to destroy it.”
Fires were burning in the center of the city and at several points east and south of it, according to a London Evening News dispatch, by a correspondent who flew over the front. The reporter said:
There was an air of fateful brooding over Cherbourg, but there were no signs of the battle which was raging in the suburbs. The enemy, one felt, was like a rat in a hole nervously awaiting the fate soon to overtake him.
German broadcasts admitted Saturday that the Americans had managed to capture several strongholds, breaking into Cherbourg’s outer defenses at three points through the use of heavy shellfire. The Allied command is using 10 divisions in the assault on the fortress, Berlin asserted.
The German DNB Agency said particularly heavy fighting was raging for Cherbourg’s airdrome west of the city, which had been under Allied shellfire for several days and hence no longer useable by the Luftwaffe.
The U.S. column, which slugged its way north of La Mare à Canards, had advanced more than a mile in 36 hours of grueling fighting from one German strongpoint to another.
At Allied headquarters, where reports are apt to be up to 24 hours old, it was stated that the Germans, including 40-year-old coastal defense crews who had been thrown into the line, were battling savagely with no sign of a surrender. The Germans in and around the town number 30,000 at a minimum, it was said, including marine units, Todt Organization workers and dockhands.
They include the remnants of four divisions – the 91st, the 77th, 70th and 243rd Divisions, the last named composed mostly of Bavarians and Austrians.
The commanders of the 91st, a Gen. Falley, and of the 243rd, Gen. Hellmich, have been killed in the battle for Cherbourg, headquarters announced.
The 77th Division suffered heavily when it tried to break through as the Americans cut across the base of the Cherbourg Peninsula. A few units got through but the bulk fell back to Cherbourg with bloody losses.
There were few changes elsewhere on the French invasion front except that northeast of Caen, the British captured the wrecked village of Sainte-Honorine-la-Chardronette after heavy fighting in which 12 German tanks were knocked out.
The bulk of four German tank divisions is concentrated around Caen, the primary counterattack area for the Germans if Field Marshal Erwin Rommel should try to compensate for the loss of Cherbourg by wiping out the east part of our bridgehead.
