Normandy Crucible by John Prados

Author:John Prados
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2011-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

The headline in the next day’s New York Times read: “AMERICANS ROUT GERMANS IN WEST NORMANDY, SMASH PATH INTO BRITTANY.”60 France beckoned.

CHAPTER 5

ALL THE FÜHRER’S HORSES

General George Patton’s Third Army rushed into the Avranches breach. His strenuous efforts to speed troops across the bridges made the breach unassailable. Thus began what Patton staffer Robert S. Allen recalls as a “wild and tumultuous” phase. On the very first day General John S. Wood’s 4th Armored Division, busting out of Normandy, thrust into the adjacent Breton peninsula. Wood’s spearheads reached to within ten miles of Rennes, an important security and communications center at the base of the peninsula. Major General Robert W. Grow’s 6th Armored Division followed, driving into the center of Brittany and east for the port of Brest at the far tip. A scratch task force of Monarch troops headed toward Saint-Malo on Brittany’s northern coast. Troy Middleton commanded all Breton operations. Middleton annoyed Patton by not immediately sending infantry to back up his armor, but soon enough Monarch made that right. The advance proceeded rapidly.

Working with his advance headquarters, Lucky Forward, George Patton put into practice the precepts of mobile warfare that had made him such a fearsome adversary in North Africa and Sicily. On August 1, for the first time, Omar Bradley met with Patton as his official superior, chief of the 12th Army Group, under which Patton led the Third Army. General Bradley showed maps that delineated boundaries between the Third Army and the First, now coming under Courtney Hodges. General Patton did not like the narrow section of Normandy given him for his egress but his mission, after all, lay in Brittany.

Under the Overlord plan it had always been the primary goal of the Third Army to capture Brittany. George Patton had thought about that. Since those days, the code name Chastity had referred to the capture of most Breton ports, and Swordhilt to a specific attack on Brest. Patton had been in Normandy since July 6, and it was he who was supposed to capture Brittany. While Bradley’s GIs were still blocked in Normandy, Patton had dreamed up the idea of a real second invasion, a small one that might put a single army corps ashore on the north coast of Brittany, but that concept never left the sketch pad. On the day Cobra began, Patton was considering the objectives for his army once activated. It is clear from his diary and other source material that three-quarters of the Third Army would aim at Brittany, with a single corps sent into the French interior to guard the Allied right flank.

But as the moment of truth neared the urgency of the mission seemed to recede. What was the Third Army to do if not attack Brittany? General Bradley would make the decision. Yet Brad appeared reluctant to change the long-standing Overlord scheme. General Eisenhower seemed no more inclined to dictate orders to Bradley than to Montgomery, especially at this moment of intense fighting. When and how Brad changed his orders determined the campaign’s outcome.

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