Denny: Blasting of forts viewed from ‘box seat’ on cliff
By Harold Denny
With U.S. forces before Cherbourg, France – (June 25)
Few battles have been as visible and as spectacular as today’s. I watched much of it from the edge of a cliff looking directly down on most of Cherbourg, like a box seat at a theater. It was the forward observation post of one of the leading elements in this assault and for a while an officer watched and gave directions for the supporting artillery fire.
In today’s battle were our infantry, artillery, tanks and even our warships, while the Germans were fighting back with heavy coastal guns, field artillery, machine guns, rifles and nasty-sounding rockets. And the operations of all these were spread out in full view on the stage below.
The day was warm and brilliant.
A big quarry had been dug into a cliff on the edge of the village of Hau Gringore, a suburb of Cherbourg, where 300 prisoners were taken when it fell yesterday. The quarry was still making trouble, however. With tunnels it was connected with the coastal plain and with Fort de Roule on our left, still unconquered then. Sometimes the Germans crept through the tunnel, fired a few bursts in our direction and retreated back. So, guards were posted there and eventually the mouth of the tunnel was blown up, after a dozen or two French men, women and children, with their baggage, dogs and cats, had been ushered from their shelters to a point beyond the town.
Three women captured
Among yesterday’s prisoners, an officer told me, were three women. One was a Ukrainian girl, together with her very young Ukrainian husband, who said they had been brought here as captives and forced to work as servants of the Germans. The girl was in an advanced state of pregnancy.
On our left, between us and Fort du Roule, was a fire-blackened ridge up which the Germans would sometime creep and open fire with machine guns. We could hear our infantry toiling up its slope.
To our right, across a green valley dotted with gray, little red-roofed houses and garden patches crisscrossed with hedges, was a ridge topped by German fortifications. Troops from another American unit were advancing on it from the other side of the ridge and American tanks could be seen nosing about on our side of the ridge. Those Germans were trapped.
City proper little damaged
Tourists who visited France in better days will remember the six-mile-long breakwater studded with the medieval-looking French fortifications that made this artificial harbor. On your left, as you used to enter Cherbourg on the liner Normandie from New York, you probably noticed an old fort and lighthouse on Île Pelée, which forms one doorpost of the main entrance through the breakwater. As your ship steamed farther in through the inner breakwater, you may have seen a similar old fort, Des Flamands, on your left as you turned into the French Line pier.
From my box seat, I could see the western half of the town of the ship canal, just to the west of the French Line pier. The city itself looked little damaged, but empty and dead. Few civilians are left there now.
Pelée and Flamands made nuisances of themselves to our troops yesterday, so at 8 o’clock this morning, our dive bombers smacked them and also Fort du Roule and the German positions on the ridge to our right. When I arrived in the frontline an hour later, Flamands and Pelée were silent, and smoke poured from the fortifications on the ridge to our right. The forts on the ridge still fired, however, and 88mm shells occasionally came in from Fort du Roule. And on a sandspit to my left of Flamands, as I saw it, were three determined 88s – pestiferous guns, with a hard, flat report and a shell that comes so fast you can hardly duck. They had fired all night and were at it again today.
Navy guns back artillery
Sitting beside me with field glasses was Army Lt. James S. Timothy of Washington, DC. He was observing for some 81mm howitzers behind, and this was an artilleryman’s dream. He called for blank range and down came his shells smack on the target. Billows of gray and yellow smoke, sand and black-burning explosive poured up, and we could see the Germans running for their dugouts. Lt. Timothy sent in shell after shell, but the Germans had their guns mounted in dugouts. They ran the guns out on tracks to shoot and then withdrew them. The German fire grew less frequent but persisted.
This was what we wanted to pacify; those forts that had been holding us up, geysers began appearing in the water just off Fort des Flamands. The Navy was firing a “ladder,” each shell moving in closer to the guns on that sandspit. Finally, they fell directly on the enemy positions. Then our ships opened up with shells that turned that little strip into a hell of red flame, black smoke and yellow dust.
I sat beside a Navy observer and could hear over his telephone the gibberish in which one officer on a distant ship conversed with him. The Navy gave the Germans a few more salvos and that was the end of that opposition.
Then the German nebelwerfers in the city began their big incendiary rockets toward our men off the right. They make an indescribable noise – something like titanic horse whinnying, or a gigantic aching creak – and you can see their missiles sail through the air. They make great bursts of flame where they hit and send up clouds of oily black smoke. They set grass fires and it seemed that the Germans were trying to burn our fellows out that way.
15 scout way into town
Meanwhile, an audacious patrol of 15 men, led by Lt. Shirley Landon of Spokane, Washington, went out around the right edge of the ridge and into the town, to scout the best way for the infantry to enter the city. We watched them anxiously through glasses as they skirted hedges and dodged behind the buildings below. Lt. Timothy and his mortars were ready to give fire support to them if they got into trouble.
We watched Lt. Landon, walking ahead, signal his men and they deployed across an open field and disappeared behind some buildings. They were daringly far into the town. We heard rifle fire down where they were but could see nothing. A general came up and watched, too. There was perhaps half an hour of suspense, which we relieved by watching our tanks maneuver across a valley, and then someone shouted.
Up the lane towards us came two doughboys and after them a long line of Germans with their hands clasped over their heads. Other doughboys walked at their flanks and a few more brought up the rear. I counted 78 prisoners before a startling explosion in my ear jarred my count and mystified me until I learned it had been one of our own blasts. Afterward, I learned there were 81 prisoners.
A Frenchman in the town met the patrol and pointed out the Germans in a ditch at the edge of a highway behind it. Pfc. William K. Petty of Indianapolis went in and flushed them out. Three started to pick up their rifles but they were instantly disarmed and all marched back.
Things were getting warm again on that right-hand ridge. At times this afternoon, it was like watching a circus, where so much was going on in different rings that it was impossible to see everything.
Those German fortifications were wreathed in smoke, and vehicles parked near them had disappeared. Yet some of them kept shooting. One 175mm coastal gun took potshots at one of our warships. It was just as if our warships had lost their tempers. They cut loose on the fortress then. Vast explosions shook the ground and pillars of smoke and dust rose. Then we saw a white flag go up above the skyline. The warships ceased firing. A few minutes later, we saw a long column of Germans come out of the fort and march toward our tanks in formation to give themselves up. Everybody on the cliff cheered, and that’s how the way was cleared for our infantry attack into the town, which began soon after. The way was not entirely cleared. Some surviving nebelwerfers still fired at us, and the enemy artillerymen and machine-gunners persisted. But the way had been cleared enough for our fellows to go ahead.
