Neptune: The Allied Invasion of Europe and the D-Day Landings (57 page)

Deyo ordered counterbattery fire, but it seemed to have little immediate effect, for the
Nevada
was straddled six times in the five minutes between 12:40 and 12:45. An ensign on board insisted later that the
Nevada
was straddled by enemy salvos a total of twenty-seven times that afternoon. A sailor whose battle station was in an AA mount on the superstructure recalled seeing the shells arcing in toward the ship through the clear blue sky. He watched as one shell passed “between the Nevada’s masts” and landed only a few yards off the side, “sending up a huge geyser of water and scattering shell fragments against the ship’s hull.” The
Nevada
’s captain, Powell Rhea, maneuvered radically in an effort to throw off the German gunners, calling down to the engine room for emergency speed that allowed the old battlewagon to work herself up to twenty-one knots, a turn of speed she had not shown since before Pearl Harbor.
¹⁶

MEANWHILE, BRYANT WITH THE SHIPS
of Group Two, including the battleships
Texas
and
Arkansas
, approached Cherbourg from the east. Bryant’s assignment was to neutralize the big guns at Battery Hamburg behind Cap Lévi, then join Deyo off the city. Bryant knew that Battery Hamburg had been positioned to cover the seaward approach to Cherbourg Harbor, and as a result, its guns could track only to a point about thirty-five degrees east of due north. (See Map,
page 341
.) His plan, therefore, was to open fire while his ships were still east of that arc and slowly hammer the battery to pieces. That plan was undone at the last minute by the order not to open fire until fired upon or until contacted by a fire control party ashore. As it happened, however, the
Arkansas
established early radio contact with spotters ashore who had the Hamburg Battery under direct observation. That allowed the
Arkansas
to close to eighteen thousand yards (ten miles) and open a “slow deliberate fire” on the Hamburg Battery at 12:08. Explosions from her 12-inch guns erupted all around the target, but there was no response from the enemy. Some in the American battleships wondered whether the German gun positions had been abandoned.
¹⁷

The Germans were merely biding their time. Bryant’s ships crept westward until they were inside Hamburg’s arc of fire, and then at 12:29 the Germans opened up. The guns in Battery Hamburg significantly outranged
those on the
Arkansas
and
Texas
, and as at Querqueville, their marksmanship was “extremely accurate.” The destroyer
Barton
(DD-722) was hit on the second salvo at 12:30 when a 9.4-inch shell ricocheted off the water and crashed into her hull, smashing through several bulkheads and coming to rest inside the ship. But it did not explode. Then, only seconds later, another salvo landed just in front of USS
Laffey
(DD-724). Again, one of the shells ricocheted off the water and smashed into the hull of the American destroyer, and it, too, failed to explode. Ordinarily an 11-inch shell, or even a 9.4-inch shell, could break a destroyer in half, sinking her almost at once, and to some the fact that neither of these shells exploded was nothing less than providential. Bryant later speculated that the shells may have been manufactured at the famous Skoda Arms Works in Pilson, Czechoslovakia, where anti-Nazi patriots risked their lives to sabotage them. If so, the Americans off Cherbourg were much in their debt.
¹⁸

Despite their flawed shells, German marksmanship was unnervingly accurate. They fired in three-gun salvos, and they proved very adept at adjusting fire. A salvo aimed at the destroyer
O’Brien
at 12:51 landed six hundred yards long; only seconds later, a second salvo was three hundred yards long; a third straddled her; and at 12:53 she was hit—and this shell
did
explode. Thirteen men were killed outright, and nineteen more were wounded. That shell also knocked out the
O’Brien
’s radar, leaving her blind in heavy smoke amid several radically maneuvering vessels. To avoid a collision, the
O’Brien
’s skipper, Commander W. W. Outerbridge, temporarily retired northward. When he returned to the fight later, he shifted his ordnance to air-burst shells in the hope of forcing the German gunners to keep their heads down.
¹⁹

Just as the gunners at Querqueville focused on the
Nevada
, those in Battery Hamburg concentrated much of their attention on the
Texas
. The
Texas
was bracketed on the third salvo, and as Bryant put it, “They had us pretty well pinpointed.” The salvos came in at unrelenting intervals every twenty to thirty seconds while the
Texas
maneuvered radically. Bryant thought the incoming shells had a kind of “seductive sound—a soft swish, almost a caress” while they were en route. Then they hit the water with “the most ungodly smack you ever heard—sharper than that of your own guns
firing.” Alas, not all of them hit the water. One 9.4-inch shell struck the
Texas
, plowed through several deck levels, and came to rest in the warrant officers’ stateroom directly above the ship’s magazine for 14-inch ammunition. It, too, was a dud.
*
Another shell hit the top of the
Texas
’s armored conning tower, and this one did explode, smashing up the bridge area, killing the helmsman, and wounding eleven others. Captain Charles Baker, having just ordered a turn to starboard, had left the bridge to watch the maneuver when the shell struck, or he, too, would have been a casualty.
²⁰

At 1:10, under the impetus of this rapid and accurate fire, Bryant ordered the task group to turn away northward while the destroyers
Plunkett
and
Hobson
made smoke to cover their withdrawal. The small minesweeper
Chickadee
also ran the gauntlet of enemy fire to lay a protective smokescreen.
Texas
and
Arkansas
circled to starboard and continued to fire from twenty thousand yards (just over eleven miles), but the guns in the Hamburg Battery had a range of forty thousand yards, and Bryant’s maneuver did little to retard either the frequency or the accuracy of their shelling.
²¹

While they dueled with the German batteries, the Navy ships also responded as best they could to call-fire requests from Collins’s forces. The smaller batteries near Querqueville received a lot of attention, since those guns could be turned to face landward as well as out to sea. The destroyer
Ellyson
closed to within a mile of one battery and fired twenty-seven rounds of 5-inch ordnance “full salvos and rapid fire” in a single minute. The
Ellyson
ceased fire only because the ensuing smoke so obscured the target that the spotters could no longer see it. Either the object of the
Ellyson
’s fury was wrecked or the German gunners decided to lie low for a while, because the battery ceased firing.
²²

By 1:20, the ships had been on station for eighty minutes, and according to their orders they were supposed to retire at 1:30. It was obvious, however, that the German defenses had not been suppressed, and Deyo radioed Collins to ask, “Do you wish more gunfire?” Collins may have been away from his headquarters when the query came in, for he did not reply until
2:05, when he answered, in effect, “Yes, please.” He asked if the Navy ships could continue firing until 3:00, as Deyo had initially suggested.
²³

Because most of the Querqueville batteries had been silenced by now, at least temporarily, Deyo ordered the
Quincy
to steam eastward and join Bryant in the ongoing battle against Battery Hamburg. Some of the smaller batteries near Cap Lévi had been suppressed, but the Hamburg Battery remained defiantly active even though it was now the target of nearly every ship in Bryant’s group, plus the
Quincy
. With eight ships firing at once, their shells created great clouds of smoke and dust around the target, and the spotters could not tell which ship had fired which shell, making corrections impossible. The Navy gunners simply fired into a curtain of smoke. Only when they spotted the bright orange stab of a muzzle flash could they determine the location of an enemy battery, and even that provided merely a bearing to the target. In spite of these difficulties, at 1:35 the
Texas
finally landed a 14-inch shell directly on one of the big German guns, putting it out of action. The other three, however, continued to fire, and soon the
Texas
was bracketed again. At 2:51, Bryant ordered the task group to turn away for the second time while the destroyers again made smoke.
²⁴

Before it was over, the
Texas
fired more than two hundred 14-inch shells and the
Arkansas
fired fifty-eight 12-inch shells at the Hamburg Battery.
Quincy
and the five destroyers added more than six hundred 8-inch and 5-inch rounds. Yet at three o’clock, when Deyo ordered a general withdrawal, three of the big guns there were still in action. The
Tuscaloosa
continued to fire until she was beyond range, but so did the Germans, and because their range was longer, they got the last word. At 3:10 a shell that was almost a taunt landed just twenty-five feet from the
Texas
, flinging sea-water and shrapnel across her deck. Again Bryant ordered the destroyers to make smoke. As the Kriegsmarine gunners in Battery Hamburg watched the Allied task force disappear over the northern horizon, they may well have congratulated one another on having driven off the enemy.
²⁵

Bryant put the best face he could on the operation in his official report, writing that although his ships were “hopelessly outranged and continually harassed by enemy fire over a period of two hours and twenty minutes,” they were “smartly handled and continued the engagement until ordered to
withdraw.” Ramsay, too, was complimentary, praising the “skill and determination” of Deyo’s command. Yet in the aftermath of the naval assault on Cherbourg, it was evident to nearly everyone that despite recent experiences in the Mediterranean, heavy-caliber coastal artillery, strongly fortified and well served by trained crews, remained a very tough opponent for guns afloat. After the war, Bryant himself wondered if the naval attack had “advanced the surrender [of Cherbourg] one hour.”
²⁶

It may well have. Though the naval assault on June 25 did not cause the Germans to throw up their hands, it almost certainly had an impact, however indeterminate, on the defenders. Like the aerial assault three days before, the naval bombardment further eroded the already flagging morale of the German garrison. Even von Schlieben was losing his nerve, and he wired Rommel to ask, “Is the destruction of the remaining troops necessary?” Seeking permission to negotiate, he declared, “I must state in the line of duty that further sacrifices cannot alter anything.” It didn’t matter. Rommel wired him back: “You will continue to fight until the last cartridge in accordance with the order from the Fuehrer.” Von Schlieben would obey, however reluctantly, though both he and the men he commanded fully appreciated the hopelessness of their situation. Surrounded on three sides by Collins’s ground troops, bombarded from the air, and now assailed from the sea, many—perhaps most—looked only for a swift end to the battle. And a swift end to the battle was exactly what Collins had in mind.
²⁷

IN THE END, CHERBOURG FELL
to the soldiers on the ground. The men of Tubby Barton’s Fourth Division sealed off the city to the west, and on June 25 the men of the 9th and 79th Divisions fought their way into the outskirts of the city, even as Deyo’s and Bryant’s ships continued their bombardment. The final assault was a collage of small-unit actions, many of them marked by astonishing individual heroism. Forte du Roule surrendered when GIs who had clambered up onto the ramparts lowered explosives down the ventilation shafts and the Germans inside rapidly appreciated their vulnerability.
²⁸

When the Allies learned that von Schlieben himself was in a nearby underground bunker, they blocked the tunnel entrance and sent in a German prisoner with a demand for his surrender. Obedient to Hitler’s
order to fight to the last, von Schlieben refused. The Americans then brought up a few tank destroyers—tracked artillery vehicles with 3-inch guns—and fired a half dozen rounds into the mouth of the tunnel. That was enough. A German voice called out for a cease-fire, and a German-speaking American officer went into the tunnel to tell von Schlieben he had two minutes to surrender. He didn’t need two minutes. Within seconds, hundreds of German soldiers were streaming out of the tunnel under a huge white flag—very likely a bedsheet. Von Schlieben had hoped to stage a formal surrender, but he was swept along with the others in the general stampede, his dignity in shambles. The American officer on the scene, the bespectacled and cherubic Major General Manton Eddy, was stunned to find himself addressing not only von Schlieben but also the German naval commander at Cherbourg, Admiral Walther Hennecke.
²⁹