Operation Cobra and the Great Offensive by Bill Yenne

Author:Bill Yenne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pocket Books
Published: 2004-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Monday through Friday, August 21 through August 25

While Paris grabbed the world’s headlines that week, Patton was focused on his great Blitzkrieg to the south and east. The idea was to have two corps—XII Corps east of Orleans and XX Corps south of Paris—moving abreast of one another in a rapid sweep to the Seine.

On Monday, August 21, Walton Walker’s XX Corps had moved southeast from Chartres with the objective of taking a bridgehead or two across the Seine between Melun—which is about thirty miles southeast of Paris—and Fontainbleau, which is ten miles south of Melun.

Patton understood that the key to the war east of Paris was getting across the Seine. As he had once observed, “Throughout history, campaigns and wars have been lost due to an army stopping on the wrong side of a river.”

He was determined that such a mistake wouldn’t be made on his watch.

The attack toward Melun would be led by two combat commands of General Lindsay Silvester’s 7th “Lucky Seventh” Armored Division. With Combat Command B left behind to hold the approaches to Paris by way of Dreux, Combat Command A and Combat Command R were tasked to move out on Monday. While Combat Command A circled to the north of Melun, Combat Command R would drive straight in from the west to seize the bridgehead as quickly as possible. The latter command had reached the city on Tuesday, and had found the bridge partially intact. However, it would take the better part of the week to get across the Seine at Melun.

Spearheading the drive against Fontainebleau would be General LeRoy Irwin’s 5th Infantry Division, which had been essential to the capture of Chartres over the weekend. Irwin moved quickly on Monday, not encountering any significant German opposition until his division got within about a dozen miles of Fontainebleau on Tuesday afternoon.

On Wednesday morning, the 11th Infantry Regiment of the 5th Infantry Division broke through the German resistance, and the division was rolling through Fontainebleau by midday. The 11th Infantry Regiment reached the Seine, near Fontainebleau at about the same time that the 10th Infantry Regiment reached the Seine at Montereau, a few miles upriver. Both regiments found that their respective nearest bridges had been destroyed by the Germans. With the help of a Forces Françaises de l’Intérieur unit that had taken Mon-tereau, the 10th Infantry Regiment located a ford, and managed to get across the Seine. They secured the eastern shore and waited for engineers to arrive to install a prefabricated treadway bridge.

Meanwhile, an 11th Infantry Regiment battalion commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kelley Lemon, spotted five small boats on the eastern shore, swam the river, tied the boats together, and rowed them back. Using the boats, the 5th Armored Division managed to secure a place on the east side of the Seine for the engineers to anchor a treadway bridge. By Thursday, United States vehicle traffic was flowing across the Seine both at Montereau and near Fontainebleau.

Having taken Orleans on the Monday before Liberation Day,

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