Chapter 20: Southern France
As the Allied plans for the cross-Channel attack matured in January 1944, another staff headquarters in the Mediterranean began preparing for the last major seaborne thrust onto the European continent in World War II. Under the U.S. Seventh Army engineer, Brig. Gen. Garrison H. Davidson, the newly formed Force 163 moved into an unused French girls’ school outside Algiers. Having briefly commanded the Seventh Army, then a headquarters organization with few troops assigned, General Davidson retained an interest in the planning of the invasion, Operation ANVIL, after Maj. Gen. Alexander M. Patch took over the army command on 2 March 1944. The predominantly engineer staff developed several alternate plans for the undertaking in southern France but at General Davidson’s insistence and at the Navy Intelligence Board’s recommendation, the planners concentrated on the forty-five mile coastline between Toulon and Cannes. There, the beaches offered a good gradient for amphibious operations and rapid access to the major port of Marseille and the naval base at Toulon. Two good roads into the French interior ran north from the area. One led up the Rhone River valley to Lyon, and the other through the Durance River valley to Grenoble. Having served as Napoleon’s escape route from Elba in 1815, the latter was known as the Route Napoleon.1
ANVIL lived a precarious existence from the outset. It remained subordinate to the material demands of the projected Normandy invasion and the Italian campaign and subject to the voluble objections of Winston Churchill. Nevertheless, active planning continued at Seventh Army headquarters with the explicit endorsement of Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers, who had taken command of the North African theater at the turn of the year. Devers went so far as to freeze theater stocks necessary for ANVIL to preserve it as a viable operation. Not until 2 July did the Combined Chiefs of Staff finally direct the execution of ANVIL with a target date of 15 August. Churchill made a last-minute attempt to divert ANVIL forces to the west coast of France, but, because of General Devers’ commitment to the project, planning for ANVIL at Seventh Army was uninterrupted.2
Planning sessions had hardly begun when the impetus for closer cooperation between Army and Navy planners
made organizational innovation necessary. The experiences of the Sicilian and Italian landings showed the need for inter-service coordination of the operation, while the near-debacle at Anzio provoked a reassessment of amphibious warfare practice. In March 1944 General Davidson recommended that General Patch establish two joint agencies, a Beach Obstacle Board and a Beach Control Board, to revise procedures for the combined operations phase of the forthcoming invasion.
To form the Beach Obstacle Board Seventh Army engineers joined Navy engineers and planners working under Vice Adm. H. Kent Hewitt, commander of the Western Naval Task Force, which would transport Seventh Army to the invasion area. Working through the summer of 1944 at the Invasion Training Center in and around Salerno, the board tested several devices that had arrived too late for use at Normandy. The Apex drone boats, the Reddy Fox explosive pipe, and the Navy “Woofus”—a rocket-firing LCM engendered no great hopes among the board members, and they chose to rely primarily on demolition teams, each consisting of a naval officer and a balanced contingent of sailors and Army engineers.3
The Beach Control Board produced a similar new organizational element in the Beach Control Group, combining an Army engineer combat regiment, a naval beach battalion, and several smaller service units. Trained under the supervision of the Seventh Army G-4, Col. Oliver C. Harvey, one beach group was assigned to each of the three invading divisions with the job of moving supplies ashore in the assault, clearing any shore obstacles impeding deliveries to the troops moving off the beaches, and acting as an embryonic base section until the consolidation of the beachhead and the arrival of regular services of supply on shore.4
Tank-gapping teams were another successful innovation for ANVIL. An armored unit equipped with M4A4 tanks mounting bulldozer blades or scarifiers, the team was to breach the enemy beach minefields and sea walls serving as tank obstacles so that the armor in the first assault wave could move quickly off the open beaches in support of the advancing infantry. The engineers split the 6617th Mine Clearance Company to provide three teams, one attached to each of the engineer beach groups for the assault. Drivers from the regular armored forces were trained to manipulate the dozer blades to unearth buried mines as rapidly as possible.
By 19 June the major engineer combat unit assignments for the invasion were completed. Supporting the 3rd Infantry Division as the nucleus for the 36th Engineer Beach Control Group, the 36th Engineer Combat Regiment operated with the 1st Naval Beach Battalion and various chemical, ordnance, signal, and military police units. Assigned to the 45th Infantry Division, the 40th Engineer Beach Control Group employed its core engineer regiment, the 4th Naval Beach Battalion, two quartermaster battalions, two port battalions, a medical battalion, and several smaller
General Davidson
service units. With the 36th Infantry Division was the 540th Engineer Beach Control Group, comprised of the 48th Engineer Battalion, the 8th Naval Beach Battalion, two quartermaster battalions, two port battalions, a medical battalion, several detachments of service troops, and the three battalions of the 540th Engineer Combat Regiment.5 Though the same mix of support units was employed as in OVERLORD, there was no provisional brigade headquarters such as the one that controlled activities during the cross-Channel attack.
Attached to Maj. Gen. Lucian K. Truscott’s VI Corps, these units were accomplished veterans. The infantry divisions and engineers chosen for the first waves had all seen extensive action in the invasions of North Africa and Sicily and in the Italian campaign. The 36th Engineer Combat Regiment was preparing its fifth amphibious operation, and the 540th had had a distinguished career in two earlier landings. At the Invasion Training Center and around the Bay of Gaeta after the Seventh Army headquarters moved to Naples in early July, the engineer beach groups demonstrated demolitions, mine warfare, and small boat handling to infantry units. Since the engineers were well versed in tactics, their training centered on equipment—variations of the tank bulldozer and scarifiers, a new bridge-carrying tank, and other innovations.6
Enemy forces in the target area for Operation ANVIL looked formidable on paper but had major weaknesses in their organization and shortages in manpower and equipment. The local command, Nineteenth Army, three corps strong under Lt. Gen. Friedrich Wiese, had had to exchange several units with German commands in northern France following the Normandy invasion and emerged the loser in these transfers. Wiese’s relationship with his senior command, Army Group G, was uncertain. The divisional commanders available to him were competent, but at least two were exhausted from their experiences on the Russian front. German strength in southern France, counting reserve aggregations, amounted to over 285,000 men, including weak naval and air support. Wiese had somewhere between 85,000 and 100,000 men in the immediate assault area to thwart an invasion that he knew was coming. German aerial reconnaissance over the Mediterranean had detected the Allied buildup of shipping; some agent reports even mentioned
15 August as the date set for the assault. The 242nd Infantry Division, defending nearly the exact area described in the Seventh Army assault plan, was one of the two best Wiese had. But like the other divisions along the coast from the Italian to the Spanish borders, it was understrength and lacked some equipment. Though relatively better off than other units for trained soldiery, the 242nd had unreliable ethnic German troops from eastern Europe reinforcing it, and its least effective regiment included a battalion of Azerbaijanis. To add to Wiese’s difficulties, Hitler had personally decreed that the 242nd was to defend Toulon as a fortress and had given its sister division, the 244th, the same assignment in Marseille. Under these conditions, the army commander could not use his two most effective divisions as a maneuver force.7
Obstacles to landing craft in southern France were not nearly as numerous as those sown on the Normandy beaches, but the Germans had not totally neglected their defenses. Beach sands and all the beach exits were heavily mined and covered with barbed wire. Heavy artillery pieces, some from scuttled French warships in Toulon harbor, commanded all the likely approaches to shore. Concrete geometric shapes of all kinds barred movement on major roads and intersections along the coast. But, lacking manpower and necessary supplies, the German defenders could not construct positions in great depth, though their orders called for networks extending eight miles inland. At German Navy insistence they left intact the larger ports of Toulon and Marseille but completely wrecked some twenty smaller harbors in the invasion areas, including Ste. Maxime and St. Raphael. After 12 August, German forces along the coast were on constant alert.8
The main assault force assembled to strike this defensive shell loaded into attack craft with its contingents of engineers at Naples harbor between 8 and 12 August. Some of the slower vessels left the crowded anchorage early to coordinate their arrival off the beaches. By midnight 14 August, in calm weather and a light sea, over 950 vessels had gathered in assembly areas facing the Bays of Cavalaire, Pampelonne, and Bougnon and the shore east of St. Raphael. Before daybreak on 15 August commando raiders hit the suspected German gun emplacements on the Iles d’Hyères off Cape Benat, and the Allied 1st Airborne Task Force began its drop into zones around the towns of Le Muy and Le Luc, some ten miles inland from the amphibious landing zones. As the sun rose at 0638 a furious naval bombardment was directed at the larger German guns on the mainland, now obscured in the light haze hanging over much of the shoreline in the early dawn.
The Landings
Facing the 3rd Infantry Division on the left were the Alpha beaches. Alpha Red, the westernmost, was an arc of smooth yellow sand on the Bay of Cavalaire, bordered by a thin, intermittent stand of pines thirty yards from the water. Six miles due east across the southern tier of the St. Tropez peninsula, Alpha Yellow stretched along
Map 24: Southern France Beachheads, 15 August 1944
the Bay of Pampelonne, with restricted exits behind it leading to the resort town of St. Tropez to the north and over rolling farmland and rougher terrain to the west. (Map 24)
After 0710 minesweepers moved in under the cover of naval fire, clearing boat lanes to within 100 yards of the beaches. In the shallow water stood rows of concrete pyramids and tetrahedrons, most equipped with Teller mines. At 0730 eighteen Apex drones rumbled shoreward to blast clear the last 100 yards for the landing craft. Fifteen drones destroyed as many obstacles, but two circled aimlessly, and one roared back into the fleet area, damaging a sub-chaser when it blew up among the ships.9
By 0758, naval fire support shifted to the flanks of the beaches, and the first waves started shoreward. Three minutes later, the 7th Regimental Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, struck Alpha Red, and the 15th Infantry drove onto Alpha Yellow. The tank-gapping team at Alpha Red immediately fell into five-foot surf off the beach, nearly drowning out the tank engines. Undeterred, their crews gunned the two engineer tanks up the sand, bulldozing a passage through the railroad embankment behind the beach and clearing a road through a mined, wooded area, all in less than ten minutes.10 Elements of the 1st Battalion, 36th Engineer Combat Regiment, came in with the first wave on Red, and immediately squads began probing for mines with bayonets and detectors.
The gapping team at Yellow landed some 1,500 yards to the left of its assigned point and had to wade the single tank through water five feet deep. But once ashore, the vehicle took only a quarter-hour to clear a 1,500-yard path through antitank and antipersonnel mines to a highway, silencing a German antitank gun in the process. The tank’s dozer arm, partially severed by an exploding mine, finally buckled completely as the tank forded a stream to begin preparing a crossing site.
The 3rd Battalion, 36th Engineer Combat Regiment, hit Yellow and, clearing paths through the mines, pushed vehicle tracks of reinforced matting through the serviceable beach exits. By 0920 the 36th Engineer Beach Group’s command post was set up in the Hotel Pardigon in Cavalaire, off the left flank of Alpha Red. As the day progressed the 1st Battalion, leaving beach operations to the 3rd Battalion, advanced inland with the infantry to clear roadblocks and minefields. The unit laid out dumps behind the troops moving to the beachhead line, leveled an airstrip for reconnaissance aircraft, and erected barbed-wire barricades for a prisoner enclosure.11
Alpha Yellow Beach closed down on 16 August; poor exits and a sandbar just off shore limited its supply flow. The 3rd Battalion moved southwest across the St. Tropez peninsula on 18 August to relieve the crush of operations
on Alpha Red by opening Alpha Green opposite Red on the Bay of Cavalaire. Engineers quickly discovered that the exits off Green were heavily mined, and clearing them occupied much of the labor force until the end of the month. With these hindrances, service troops on the Alpha beaches had continual difficulty responding to the supply demands of the combat troops. Though the Alpha complex was the least efficient of the ANVIL beach operations, it continued to receive cargo until Marseille harbor came into full use.
Seven miles across the mouth of the Bay of St. Tropez from Alpha Yellow, beginning just east of rocky Cape Sardineau, the Delta beaches curved from south to northeast along the shores of the Bay of Bougnon. Delta Red and Delta Green lay contiguous, giving way to flat hinterlands. Delta Blue was separate, broken on its far right by a small river mouth and marked to its rear by rising slopes of the Maures. An eight-foot-high, three-foot-thick concrete wall stood along the back edge of Red and Green; behind it ran a paved road and a narrow-gauge coastal railroad atop a masonry embankment that also paralleled the shore behind Yellow and Blue.
No underwater obstacles hindered the Delta force, and at 0802 the 40th Engineer Beach Control Group, under Lt. Col. Oscar B. Beasley, touched down. Finding no mines on the beach, the 1st Battalion of the engineer regiment reduced concertina-wire defenses of Red and Green and set to work unloading over ponton causeways and landing craft that grounded several yards out on the steep gradient.
The gapping team at Delta Green had approached the beach 500 yards to the right of its intended landfall and immediately lost all three of its engineer tanks when they plunged almost out of sight into the water on leaving the landing craft. The crews dove to retrieve the wall-breaching charges in the forward racks on the tank hulls and blew out a sea-wall section large enough for troops, tanks, and supplies to move through. By nightfall the 1st Battalion had supply dumps laid out 500 yards inland.
At Delta Yellow and Blue, the 3rd Battalion of the engineer regiment began limited operations. Landing craft nosed right into the beach here, but the exits at Blue were so constricted that it also closed on D plus 1. The 2nd Battalion, 40th Engineer Combat Regiment, a later arrival, went to the aid of the 36th Engineer Beach Group on short-lived Alpha Yellow late in the afternoon of D-day. It then moved through St. Tropez in the face of stiff German resistance to clear mines and open over twenty new boat ramps on beaches christened Delta Red 2, at the head of the Gulf of St. Tropez and west of the town.12
Farther east the road and the railroad tracks that skirted the Delta beaches ran through the ancient Roman port of Frejus, still a major populated point although centuries-long silting had placed it a mile from the sea. At the head of the gulf that once led to its harbor was Camel Red, the best beach in the VI Corps assault area for its gradient, size, and access to the valley of the sluggish Argens River to the left. Its advantages as a lodgment had occurred to the Germans too, and they erected here the strongest and best-
organized defenses encountered in Operation ANVIL. The Navy and the Air Forces pounded the emplacements all morning, softening the defenses for a thrust ashore planned at 1400 on D-day, but minesweepers sent in at 1100 drew such heavy fire that they retreated. An air attack at noon rained 187 tons of explosives on the German positions.
The main assault in the Camel area came at 0803 on Green, a narrow 500-yard-long stretch of rocky shingle backed by rising cliffs scarred with quarries 1½ miles east of the resort town of St. Raphael. Camel Yellow, to be taken indirectly rather than by immediate seaborne frontal attack, lay at the head of the Rade d’Agay across the base of the Drammont promontory from Green and was defended and blocked by obstacles and a net boom across the roadstead. At Antheor Cove, 2,000 yards east of Yellow, Camel Blue, a thin eighty-yard stretch, was the landing point of the troops of the 141st Infantry, 36th Division, who were to secure the easternmost flank of the beachhead line. The embankment of the coastal motor road ran thirty feet from the water’s edge at Blue, and the narrow-gauge railroad crossed the back of the diminutive inlet on an eight-span masonry bridge a hundred feet above the water.
The 1st Battalion of Col. George W. Marvin’s 540th Engineer Combat Regiment, leading the beach group, charged ashore on Green with two battalions of the 141st Infantry. Two engineer companies quickly organized the beaches, cleared mines, and set up dumps for the following assault waves. Company B crossed the Agay River with the 2nd Battalion, 141st Infantry, and met infantry units coming from Camel Blue to take Yellow from behind in order to start supply operations there.13
The first wave on Camel Green went in without a tank-gapping team. Equipped with a rocket rack atop its turret, the tank intended for the first wave was aboard an LCT that broke down on the way to the invasion area. The tank arrived on another craft in a later infantry assault wave and moved to the beach wall to blast a hole. The rockets accomplished their purpose, but the back-blast spewed a scorching sandstorm into the ranks of the unwary onlookers to the rear. After breaching the obstacle the engineer crew of the tank had no orders for other employment, though it occurred to them that they could have used their machine to help the regular engineer squads remove mines. Four D-7 bulldozers were damaged and several men wounded on Camel Green digging out mines by traditional methods.14
The Apex drones had their worst hour before the scheduled landing on Camel Red. Launched under a furious naval barrage about 1300, ten of the boats churned through the Gulf of Frejus. Three wrecked some mined tetrahedrons, one exploded on the far left flank of the beach, two ran up on the sand, and one made tight circles offshore. A destroyer blew another out of the water when it veered seaward, and sailors gingerly boarded the last two wayward robots to put them out of action. Navy intelligence later speculated that the Germans had stolen radio
control of the boats, a logical explanation of their dismal performance.
The volume of German fire during the foray of the drones forced a change in the plan to land the 142nd Infantry, 36th Division, on Camel Red; the Navy placed the assault wave ashore on already secured Camel Green at 1515. Diverting the assault force doubtless saved needless casualties, but now the 540th Engineer Combat Regiment’s overworked 1st Battalion, having moved the 141st and 143rd Infantry regiments ashore at Green, received the men and equipment of the 142nd as well. Work on the beach continued throughout the night, interrupted briefly at 2225, when several engineers joined rescuers swimming to the aid of the wounded on the stricken LST-282 after a German glider bomb hit the craft. The vessel grounded in the shoals near Cape Drammont and lay smoldering with forty casualties aboard and half her cargo reduced to junk.15
The 540th’s 2nd Battalion, landing with the 142nd Infantry, swept the right flank of Camel Green and then struck overland to organize Camel Yellow, at the same time relieving Company B. Yellow Beach became the principal supply beach in the Camel net, while troop and vehicular traffic moved over Green.
The 36th Division troops moving from these beaches carried the town of St. Raphael, lying between Red and Green, by evening of D-day and moved to reduce the formidable defenses of Red from the rear. After its relief on Yellow, Company B led the engineer elements following the 36th Division into St. Raphael shortly after daybreak on 16 August. Scattered German sniper fire greeted the company’s arrival on the outskirts of the town, but a short series of skirmishes eliminated the defenders, and the 540th Beach Group command post was set up in the town by noon. Joined later by Company A, Company B began the clearance of Camel Red, sweeping the western end of the beach, blasting out sections of seawall, and demolishing the seven-foot-high, three-foot-thick reinforced-concrete antitank blocks the Germans had strewn about the beach. The 1st Battalion less Company C, left behind to operate Camel Green, had Red open to traffic late in the afternoon of 17 August. Supply dumps behind the beaches had been operating for four hours, receiving laden trucks from the other Camel beaches.
Company F left Yellow on the eighteenth to begin clearing the dockside area and the quays of the town. Bulldozers had started to open the streets when one of the company machines engaged a row of blocks, concrete obstacles with hidden Teller mines. The engineer components of the 540th Beach Group, having sustained only one fatality since D-day, lost nearly a platoon when the detonation of one booby-trapped block killed four and wounded twenty-seven men. On the following day the remainder of the 2nd Battalion abandoned Yellow Beach and came to St. Raphael to continue the harbor reconstruction that Company F had begun, and the little port began receiving incoming cargo on the twentieth.
While VI Corps consolidated the invasion beaches, the Seventh Army
Mine removal at Camel Red. Mines were used to blast a hole in the seawall at rear
Engineer Section, operating out of the Hotel Latitude Quarante-trois in St. Tropez, kept a close eye on the developing beach supply operations. The unexpectedly rapid advance off the ANVIL beaches soon forced the engineers to accelerate work schedules in two areas intimately connected with the forward movement of Seventh Army supply: rehabilitation of ports and repair of railroad lines and bridges. By 27 August General Davidson had completed personal reconnaissance of Marseille and Toulon as well as petroleum facilities at Port-de-Bouc. He was already revising engineer plans to speed up the influx of engineer units and supplies of all kinds.
The choice of ports for major cargo discharge became a bone of Army-Navy contention even before German resistance in Marseille and Toulon collapsed. From 25 August, General Davidson opposed the original Navy plan to refurbish both ports simultaneously. Spurred by the desperate need to get ahead of a mounting shipping crisis in the European theater, where two major amphibious invasions had taken place within two months, the Navy sought all means possible to turn ships around and keep a constant supply of empty vessels available. The Army’s immediate concern was the movement of supplies; Toulon, a naval base with narrow wharves, constricted access, and only
single-track rails to serve it, was unsuitable for bulk cargo movement except as a supplementary port. The railroad net in and out of Marseille was highly developed—capable of moving more than 350 boxcars a day—and followed the natural commercial route along the axis of advance of the Seventh Army. General Davidson recommended directing all salvage and clearance efforts at preparing Marseille for the twenty-five ships of the D plus 25 convoy. A conference on 1 September, chaired by Maj. Gen. Arthur A. White, Seventh Army chief of staff, resolved the impasse in favor of the Army’s view but gave the Navy permission to assign Seabees to develop Toulon as a secondary port. After 1 September the French Navy also devoted most of its engineering efforts to the reconstruction of its former base.16
A successful French assault on the two cities, concluded on 28 August after a week-long fight, brought the headquarters and 2nd Battalion, 36th Engineer Combat Regiment, and the 335th Engineer General Service Regiment into Marseille to prepare it for large-scale cargo operations. Assigned for the moment to Coastal Base Section established at Marseille, the troops undertook preliminary damage estimates, started mine and booby-trap clearance, and removed rubble in the dockside areas, with the 335th at first doing the mine clearance around the deep-water harbor and the 36th handling the Vieux Port area.
Many of the German mines were improvised, though the standard Schu antipersonnel and heavier Teller mines were plentiful. Larger charges meant to demolish entire docks and storage facilities were made locally of explosive-packed wooden barrels and 300-pound drums, casks of picric acid, and detonators. Equipped with timing mechanisms and set into the docks or warehouse walls, they blasted twelve-foot craters, making whole wharves temporarily impassable. The charges had flattened all warehousing in the dock area. The 335th dug out over thirty tons of explosives and removed 2,000 Teller mines, but had to detonate many of the big charges in place when the engineers discovered that the fuses had so decomposed that their safe deactivation was impossible.
Engineer regiments supervised by the headquarters organization known after 1 September as the 1051st Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group set about restoring enough of the port to serve the needs of the Seventh Army and the projected requirements of the 6th Army Group headquarters of Lt. Gen. Jacob L. Devers. The army group was scheduled to become operational on 15 September. On the landward side the engineers removed debris and repaired quay walls. Where German charges had blown holes in the tops and sides of masonry wharves, the engineers first reconstructed the dock walls. German prisoners, augmented by Italian labor gangs, did all of the heavy, disagreeable manual labor to clear the breaks and then to fill the craters, and they repaired wall sections with the rubble they carried from other parts of the city and the harbor.17
In the harbor channels the Germans had sunk over sixty-five ships in patterns that vitiated the methods the engineers had used at Naples harbor. At Marseille the enemy piled ships atop one another on the harbor floor at such odd angles to and distances from the quays that bridging over them was not feasible. Nearly all the 121 individual berthing spaces in the old and new sections of the 550-acre port were blocked; cranes serving the cargo wharves were toppled into the water to form additional blocks or were otherwise sabotaged. The Germans also had scuttled seven ocean-going vessels in a heap to close the mouth of the deep-water section of the port.
While Navy salvage teams attacked this key obstruction, French engineers and the 1051st tried to bypass it by blowing a passage in the breakwater protecting the harbor. The engineers moved in a well-drilling crew to bore holes in the jetty for charges. But then Navy divers managed to topple one of the seven hulks off the pile, allowing the passage of laden Liberty ships above the remainder of the wreckage. Once this blockage was eliminated, the Marseille port slowly came to life again. By 8 September, when the Coastal Base Section took control of the port, eight Liberty berths were operating around the clock; by month’s end the port had received 188 ships carrying 147,460 men, 113,500 long tons of cargo, 32,768 vehicles, and 10,000 barrels of petroleum products of all kinds.18
In the area of Port-de-Bouc, a satellite port some twenty-five miles by sea northwest of Marseille, the engineers encountered similar, though much less extensive, destruction and harbor blockage. The center of the southern French petroleum traffic in peacetime, this port also had a daily capacity of 7,000 short tons of dry cargo; it was the hub of a canal system that funneled barge traffic between Arles, twenty-five miles up the Rhone River, and Marseille’s Barge-line Harbor. Port-de-Bouc’s dock system on the Mediterranean was constructed as an extension of a continuous commercial net winding along a narrow, 3½-mile tidal strait passing through the town of Martigues, which sat astride the opening into a wide saltwater lake, the Etang de Berre. Its shore was lined with smaller wharves, canal entrances, and petroleum refineries.
Here the Germans had had little time for methodical destruction of facilities. They blasted loose large stones from the masonry docks to ruin them and to foul the berthing areas alongside. Company A, 335th Engineer General Service Regiment, arriving in the area on 27 August, replaced these stones easily and filled craters along the quays with the debris of the scattered German demolition charges. When the Navy finished sweeping mines from the approaches later in August and removed the single blockship in the harbor, three berths along the T-shaped jetty and on the quays became available for Liberties. The end of September saw the discharge of 36,837 long tons of regular cargo at Port-de-Bouc, little when compared to the tonnages of Marseille, but consistent with the port’s real importance as the chief Allied POL entry point in southern France.19
Engineer officer probes for explosive charge at Marseille
The main rail service through the area was a double-track system that paralleled the coast west of Marseille, crossed the narrow ship channel between Port-de-Bouc and Martigues at its center, swung east through Port-de-Bouc, and then veered north after bridging the Arles Canal. The Germans blocked both ship movement on the waterways and rail traffic by dumping the turn span that crossed the tidal strait into the ship channel and dropping the second rail bridge into the canal. The
1051st finally cleared the channel obstruction in October, blasting away the wreckage to allow heavy tanker traffic access to the Etang de Berre. Reconstruction of the rail overpass over the Arles Canal restored traffic on the line out of Port-de-Bouc in early December.20
Base Sections and SOLOC
In the two weeks following the invasion, General Davidson made every effort to free engineer combat regiments on the beaches for work behind
the advancing armies. The Coastal Base Section, with an advance party ashore on 16 August, began assuming control of operations in Marseille and was in full control in the city by 8 September, a week ahead of schedule. The Coastal Base Section engineer, Lt. Col. Chauncey K. Smullen, agreed to release all engineers but one battalion of the 40th Engineer Combat Regiment from the beaches. Renamed Continental Base Section on 10 September, Coastal Base left Marseille to become the mobile section moving behind the 6th Army Group. On 26 September, when it was rechristened Continental Advance Section, the logistical command was at Dijon. (Map 25)
The Advance Section left behind at the port city a new support command, Delta Base Section (DBS), which ran the southern French ports until after V-J Day. The DBS Engineer Section, established 3 October under Lt. Col. William B. Harmon and among the largest components of the new base section, took over the 1051st Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group and the activities of over thirty other units providing fire protection, construction, water supply, and services in the port areas. By war’s end in Europe the engineers had restored nearly 35 percent of Marseille’s prewar harbor facilities, leaving the remainder for postwar reconstruction by the French government.21
With the relief of the engineers on the beaches, the over-shore operations began closing down. Supply-choked Alpha Beach closed 9 September, followed by the Deltas on the sixteenth and the busy Camel Red on 25 September. By the end of the month the flow of supply had shifted to Marseille where Delta Base Section formed the southern end of 6th Army Group’s line of communications in France.
Once 6th Army Group had met 12th Army Group in east-central France to form a continuous battle line facing the Reich, an adjustment in the administration of supply functions became necessary. SHAEF assumed tactical control of the 6th Army Group on 15 September, the day it began operations as a headquarters in France, but resolution of the question of command over the supply establishment in southern France was more gradual and complicated.
The complexities arose from the fact that two separate communications zone commands were now active in the ETOUSA area, an advance element of SOS, NATOUSA, that opened at Lyon on 11 September, and General Lee’s COMZ, ETOUSA. Though the 6th Army Group’s operational area was within Lee’s preserve, it still drew its supply from massive reserves in the North African theater, which lay outside Lee’s purview. COMZ was momentarily unprepared to handle requisitions and establish procedures for the Rhone valley supply net, but any accommodation would have to recognize the legal supremacy of COMZ on the European mainland. Conferences between the two parties proceeded throughout September. SHAEF was willing to allow General Devers as commander of 6th Army Group a fair degree of autonomy in his supply. In the compromise eventually worked out, ETOUSA would assume ultimate control of the Rhone supply route on 20 November while an intermediate
Map 25: Southern France Supply Operations
command, the Southern Line of Communications (SOLOC), opened on the same day to handle supply in the south. Although a subsidiary of COMZ, ETOUSA, SOLOC was still authorized direct communication with NATOUSA on the matters of supply ) cc and personnel coming from Italy or North Africa. On 3 November, a COMZ general order named Maj. Gen. Thomas B. Larkin, former NATOUSA SOS commander, commander of SOLOC and deputy commander of COMZ, ETOUSA. This uneasy union of the two supply commands functioned acceptably, but SOLOC lasted only through the winter; on 6 February 1945, the command passed out of existence, six weeks before 6th Army Group crossed the Rhine.22
Engineer operations on the supply routes in southern France were under the SOLOC engineer, Col. Clark Kittrell, a career soldier with years of experience in civil works in the United States. Kittrell’s Engineer Section was always understaffed and constantly working under two separate sets of procedures and policies, depending upon which theater’s jurisdiction applied to matters touching on engineer operations. He continued to wrestle with shortages of spare parts and inadequate inventory methods that became worse as the demands of the sudden advance accumulated. Chief among the engineer concerns for SOLOC, however, were the functions affecting the supply of the pursuing army, railroad supply routes, and petroleum pipeline supply systems.23
Railroads
Allied rail supply operations in southern France began on 23 August with short-haul bulk service lines out of Frejus to points less than thirty miles inland. The 40th Engineer Beach Group had begun collecting empty rail cars at St. Tropez on D plus 2 and added this equipment to the twelve locomotives and eighty cars found intact at Carnoules, within the beachhead area. As Coastal Base Section took over Marseille, the Army engineers retained responsibility for roads and rail maintenance out of the city. Damage to roads was slight, and the rails were usually only blocked by fallen debris. Where Germans had torn up trackage, French railroad employees replaced rails and ties with no difficulty.
From a point above Aix-en-Provence, twenty-five miles north of Marseille, the French rail net divided into two routes traveling north: a multiple track link running up the Rhone valley on both sides of the river and a single track branching east and then north to Grenoble. More steeply graded, negotiating mountain terrain, and subject to deep snows and frequent flooding, in the upland passes, the Grenoble route nevertheless had priority because there seemed to be far less damage along it than along the heavier duty Rhone alternate. The major breaks encountered in the southern end of the net were just southwest of Aix; at Meyrargues, ten miles north of Aix; and north of Sisteron at the confluence of the Buech and Durance Rivers.
The original plan for railroad repair left the entire job of major rehabilitation behind the armies to the engineers of the 1st Military Railway Service, scheduled for phasing into southern
France on D plus 30. When the advance up the Rhone valley got much ahead of schedule, bridge repair fell to the Seventh Army engineers, now forced to rely on their ingenuity and extensive stocks of locally procured materials. With heavy bridging steel sections still on convoys sailing from the United States or heading for Marseille from stockpiles within the Mediterranean, the engineers were working with a supply allotment adequate for D plus 14 operations when the combat elements had already taken D plus 60 objectives. General Davidson’s construction regiments picked up what they could to improvise structures to span German demolitions in the rail supply line.
L-5 Cub planes gave the engineers a head start on surveying the damage. Engineer officers with Speed Graphic cameras flew low-level passes over blown bridges, some behind enemy lines, shooting oblique-angle photographs to give construction troops a means of computing their material requirements.24
The 343rd Engineer General Service Regiment restored service to Aix in ten days by a stratagem that saved days in repairing a 104-foot gap in the rail bridge. In the area the unit found a German 270-mm. railway gun. Hauling it to the site, the engineers stripped the gun and the rail trucks from the traverse base of the piece and, attaching a ten-foot steel extension, launched the platform as the stringers for the new span across the void, Bailey fashion. The Aix bridge work was complete on 29 August. At the same time engineers were restoring the bridge at
Meyrargues, a task made doubly troublesome by a rise in flood waters. After closing a 107-foot gap with the first Bailey railroad bridge in southern France, a quadruple-single span with a deck thirty-eight feet above the water’s surface, they opened the bridge to traffic on 18 September.
The 40th Engineer Combat Regiment forged the last link in the rail chain on the eastern route. A Class 60 span covering two breaks over the Buech River north of Sisteron, the bridge used stocks of local lumber and steel sections. The engineers replaced a destroyed 91-foot-high central masonry pier with a vertically emplaced triple-single Bailey panel. Supply traffic, moving 1,500 tons per day over this point after 22 September, could travel to railheads in the Poligny–Mouchard area, 130 miles north of Grenoble, relieving some transport problems as the 6th Army Group crossed the Moselle River.25
When the director general of the Military Railway Service, Brig. Gen. Carl R. Gray, Jr., brought his headquarters from Rome to Lyon on 14 September, he immediately began a more complete reconnaissance of rail damage. He then revised original priorities, concentrating on the double-track system up the Rhone valley to Lyon. General Gray told General Devers four days later that the main breaks in this stretch were at Livron, Avignon, and Valence; two smaller rail bridges outside Lyon, one over the Rhone and one over the Saone River, would have to be reconverted from use as vehicular bridges. Save for material shortages, the breaks at Valence and Avignon posed no problems.26
The 343rd Engineer General Service Regiment, assigned the job of opening the Marseille-to-Lyon route, began work on the Livron bridge on 7 September. Where before the war a masonry-arch bridge had carried a single track across the shallow, muddy Drome, there was now a 310-foot break with all the masonry piles blown. The low height of the original structure and the river’s slow current lessened engineering problems; the troops emplaced scarce steel I-beam stringers atop nine timber bents to open the line to rail-borne supply on 20 September, five days ahead of General Gray’s estimates. This performance, together with the 343d’s operation in the southern Rhone valley, earned the regiment Lt. Gen. Alexander M. Patch’s commendation.
On 2 October, the 344th Engineer General Service Regiment repaired a 410-foot single-track structure over the Doubs River at Dole, using thirty-foot-high timber bents, with standard Bailey forming the span. Opening the Dole route brought the railheads north to Vesoul and Besançon.27
At that point in the restoration, with railheads moving into the rear of the 6th Army Group area, German demolitions at the bridges had become the smaller supply problem. By mid-September General Devers found that where railroads were concerned, the “bottleneck now is cars rather than bridges.”28
The Aix bridge, which used the carriage of a German railway gun
When the Allied drive slowed against stiffening German resistance at the Vosges Mountains and the defenses before the Rhine River, supply lines stopped growing. But the demand for ammunition rose alarmingly, and shortages persisted until the winter months. Trucks remained the principal means of transport until well into October, when new railroad rolling stock arrived at Marseille; in September trucks carried forward 222,000 tons of supply compared to 63,000 tons moving by rail. Engineer units had built eighty-eight highway bridges on the supply routes, mostly from local timber and steel stock.
After 30 October Seventh Army engineers divided responsibility for rail rehabilitation with the increasingly capable 1st Military Railway Service, whose units and equipment were now arriving more regularly. Army engineers reopened a northern loop in the rail service running from Epinal to Strasbourg through Blainville, Lunéville, and Sarrebourg, while the 1st Military Railway Service worked on a southern leg running from Epinal through St. Die to Strasbourg. The Military Railway Service refurbished the military rail line behind the First French Army on an axis running from Vesoul through Lure and Belfort to Mulhouse. In supporting the drive up the Rhone, the 1st Military Railway Service supervised the construction of forty-two rail bridges and the repair of nine between Marseille
and Dijon by early 1945. At various times, the work continued to involve the 40th, 94th, 343rd, 344th, and 540th Engineer Regiments and the 1051st Engineer Port Construction and Repair Group.
With the winter lull in the advance, the engineers began to take up scarce Bailey panels laid down in the press of the rapid assault, replacing them with semi-permanent timber bent, steel, and wood deck bridging along vital roads and rail lines. During the last half of October the engineers consolidated the hoarded reserves for the thrust through the Siegfried Line, over the Rhine River and into Germany itself.29
Map Supply
The rapidity of the advance carried the assaulting American and French divisions into areas for which military maps were still in Italy. The two engineer units sent in with the invasion, the 1st Mobile Map Depot with VI Corps and the 2nd Mobile Map Depot with the French, were merely clearinghouses for distribution. Their early stocks of 1:100,000, 1:50,000, and 1:25,000 maps reflected an invasion plan that did not project an Allied advance out of Provence until much later in the year. Small-scale maps for areas far up the Rhone valley were especially scarce; French units were even relying on the standard Michelin road maps and on information from local natives. By 1 September the demand for maps had inundated the two units, and the 1709th Engineer Map Depot Detachment flew in from Naples to help. In little more than a month these three units shipped over eight million maps to combat troops.
Map production in southern France began on 14 September with the arrival of the 661st Engineer Topographic Company and the 649th Engineer Topographic Battalion and reached a peak capacity within about two weeks. The demand for 1:25,000-scale maps also rose rapidly as the Allied offensive encountered the prepared German defenses at the Vosges Mountains and slowed down in late October and early November.30
Engineer Supply for the First French Army
The establishment of 6th Army Group headquarters at Lyon on 15 September marked also the redesignation of the French Armée B as First French Army. Although now a formally organized field army operating on home soil, Lt. Gen. Jean de Lattre de Tassigny’s command continued to labor under a notable lack of service forces, including engineers. French supply of all types funneled in part through Base 901, hastily transferred from Naples two weeks before the invasion to support Armée B. The organization had never functioned in its intended capacity in Italy, and it fared only slightly better in France. Attached to Coastal Base Section for the assault period, the command, under Brig. Gen. Jean Gross, was so lacking in basic equipment, trucks,
and trained staff personnel that it could not meet the demands made upon it. Divided in half in mid-October, Base 901 acquired a new commanding officer in Brig. Gen. Georges Granier as its headquarters moved to Dijon to work side by side with the Continental Advance Section in the city.
The establishment of the First French Army also occasioned the division of Seventh Army engineer stocks, nearly half of which were to go to the French. Brig. Gen. Henry C. Wolfe, 6th Army Group engineer, met with General Davidson on 20 September to apportion the materials, and Brig. Gen. Robert Dromard, First French Army engineer, received his allotment the following day. American sources supplied the French with sparing amounts of critical bridging parts and stream-crossing equipment and rationed what was found on the battlefields thereafter. The French also received maps from American topographic units until 1 November, when they organized their own printing operations.31
POL Operations
The Seventh Army engineer POL plan for DRAGOON, formulated in early summer 1944 at Naples under Lt. Col. Charles L. Lockett, drew on the successful experience with pipelines gained in the North African and Italian campaigns. The engineers envisioned a pipeline system up the Rhone River valley, making use of the already existing refinery installations in Toulon, Marseille, and smaller ports at the river mouth.32 Depending on the damage done by the retreating Germans, the engineers could easily support the troops battling in the beachhead area with a gallon of gasoline per man per day, the consumption rate established in earlier campaigns. But the rapid success of the invasion altered the sequence and timing of fuel depot construction and accelerated the schedule for laying of the pipeline north. Demands for gasoline skyrocketed; every truck moving forward off the beaches took with it as many jerry cans as it could hold, but advance units were still sending convoys on 300-mile round trips back to the beach dumps for resupply as the Seventh Army pursued the fleeing German Nineteenth Army to the north. (Map 26)
The 697th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company was the first of its kind ashore, landing at Camel Green on D-day. Capt. Carl W. Bills, commanding the unit, was among the foremost POL experts in the theater, a man of wide prewar experience in the Oklahoma oil fields; despite his relatively low rank, he became the technical supervisor of the whole fuel pipeline system up the Rhone valley. The company entered St. Raphael as soon as the town was cleared, surveying for a pipeline in that area. Various detachments collected enough petroleum pumping equipment to begin construction and operations, but spent several days retrieving materiel coming to the invasion beaches in scattered lots on small
Map 26: POL Pipeline
landing craft. The company took four days to construct three 10,000-barrel tanks in the town. By the end of the month, St. Raphael was receiving bulk tanker discharge through one four-inch and one six-inch line connecting the facilities to the docks. Another four-inch aviation gas line covered the six miles from the larger tanks to a 1,000-barrel storage container at the airfield at Frejus. After the field was abandoned, the airfield tank served as a motor fuel storage point.33
Bypassing the embattled petroleum facilities at Marseille and Toulon for the moment, Captain Bills left a 79-man detachment in St. Raphael to run affairs and took the 697th to the next logical point for pipeline operations, the port area around Port-de-Bouc, 120 miles by road from St. Raphael. Arriving 25 August in Martigues, held only by FFI troops, the company rested for a day while the French overcame the last German sniper resistance. Rapid surveys with General Davidson at the scene revealed that, apart from a few bullet holes punched into the tanks by the U.S. XII Tactical Air Force, the prewar storage capacity of 250,000 barrels in the area was undiminished.
On 26 August the 697th began the construction of a nineteen-mile, four-inch-diameter victaulic pipe for 80-octane fuel to connect the refineries of L’Avera at Port-de-Bouc; La Provence at La Mede, three miles east of Martigues on the southern edge of the lake; and the large Bruni oil refining complex on the north shore of the Etang de Berre. A second four-inch line for 100-octane gasoline paralleled the first between
Port-de-Bouc and La Mede, where the company built a 1,000-barrel storage tank.
In their four-year occupation the Germans had depleted the supply of coupling joints to match the French fittings within the refineries; the engineers were able to maintain an adequate supply only after the establishment of the engineer dump at Le Pas-des-Lanciers. The occupiers did leave behind a valuable source of expertise in the French former employees of the oil plants and the Vichy government fuel-rationing authorities. After the elimination of collaborators among them, these Frenchmen provided a ready and experienced supplement for Allied manpower and facilitated military and essential civilian fuel distribution.34
With the discharge areas intact and the first inter-terminal line wholly operational by 12 September, the company had already begun the pipeline covering the thirty-five miles between Berre and the Durance River. The line reached Salon, eight miles north of Berre and the site of a large convoy refueling and jerry can refill point, in the first week of construction and by 25 September was at the south bank of the Durance, five miles southeast of Avignon. Here, pushing the pipe across on a 1,480-foot timber trestle, the 697th passed the line to the 784th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, which linked it to their completed section. It covered the next thirty-two miles north to the French railroad tank car installation at Le Pontet, the second large decanting station for refueling of truck convoys. Accompanying the engineer pipeline along its whole length was a Signal Corps telephone net that permitted prompt reporting of pipeline leaks.
By early September, the press of operations forced the establishment of a provisional battalion-level supervisory headquarters to coordinate and control the pipelaying and operating activities of eight distribution companies, several attached companies from engineer combat regiments, and one dump truck company. First commanded by Maj. Charles B. Gholson, the unit finally was designated 408th Engineer Service Battalion (Pipeline) on 6 January 1945. It allowed the rapid transfer of supervisory talent among the operating battalion headquarters, the distribution companies, the Delta Base Section, and Continental Advance Section (CONAD) or SOLOC commands as the construction effort demanded. The headquarters also relieved the individual companies of the need to obtain their own supply of pipes, couplings, and pump gear from the harbors in southern France. The battalion tied its wholesale supply to the French rail net, placing stocks of pipe in rail sidings close to the line of construction at roughly twenty-mile intervals.35
After connecting the pipe on the north bank of the Durance, the 784th took responsibility for testing and operating the whole line from Berre to Le Pontet. Meanwhile, the 697th leapfrogged ahead to install the next sec-don of pipe into the rehabilitated French storage tanks at Lyon, with dispensing points at St. Marcel, Vienne, and Lyon itself. By 9 November the pipe was moving nearly 13,000 barrels of fuel daily,
a rate maintained until the end of the war on the Rhone River valley pipeline.36
Meanwhile, other petroleum engineer units arrived at Marseille and Port-de-Bouc to continue refurbishing and operating the bulk ports there. The 1379th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company entered Marseille on 29 August after landing six days earlier at St. Raphael. The fierce battle for Marseille had done little damage to the petroleum facilities, and the company had pipelines running from the quays to the largest refinery at the Rue de Lyon within a week. One group left behind on Corsica to train French petroleum units rejoined the company on 17 September, With detachments in Port-de-Bouc, Marseille, La Mede, and Berre, the 1379th took over the whole tanker discharge operation in southern France and began the construction of a six-inch line around the Etang de Berre as the beginning of a new system to parallel the earlier four-inch pipe. The 696th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company arrived at Berre on the twenty-first to carry the six-inch pipe to just above Avignon.37 The 701st Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company, another highly experienced unit from the Italian campaign, arrived at Marseille on 9 October and moved the work ahead from Avignon to Piolenc; there, the 696th took over again to a point above Valence.
In late October the Rhone overflowed its banks after heavy rains. The two companies constructing the line up the riverbank south of Lyon had to float pipe into position by plugging one end of it and moving it into the heavy flood waters. A detachment of the 701st downstream repaired the severed four-inch line at Livron. In November, progress on both lines came to a temporary halt when an early freeze blocked the pipes and burst couplings on a stretch between Lyon and Macon—water used to test the pipe before pumping fuel through it had been left in the pipe during a sudden temperature drop. The 697th and the 701st backtracked, hastily thawed the line, and replaced broken sections, allowing operation to resume by 23 November.
The combined work of the 696th and the 697th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Companies and Companies E and F of the 335th Engineer General Service Regiment brought the operational four-inch pipe to the rear of the Seventh Army area at La Forge, near Sarrebourg, on 12 February 1945, although construction was slowed by heavy snow. The six-inch pipe lagged behind north of Vesoul, plagued by an inadequate supply of parts and faulty construction that had to be rechecked. The six-inch pipe became operational to the La Forge terminal on 3 April, while the 697th was overseeing the last leg of four-inch pipe construction in three parallel lines from La Forge through Sarreguemines and Frankenthal, Germany, and across the Rhine near Mannheim into the terminal at Sandhofen, a Mannheim suburb. Another seven miles of six-inch pipe, erected by the 1385th Engineer Petroleum Distribution Company under the supervision of the 697th experts and the 408th Engineer Service Battalion, connected the Frankenthal and Mannheim terminals.38
On 26 February 1945, in the general consolidation of supply operations under ETOUSA, Lt. Gen. John C. H. Lee, commanding the Communications Zone (COMZ), ETOUSA, took under his ultimate authority the petroleum distribution net in southern France along with the pipelines constructed across the northern tier of the Continent. Operations records were turned over to the ETOUSA Military Pipeline Service after 26 February, and the 408th Engineer Service Battalion and its attached units came under the operational control of the ETOUSA staff, though still attached to CONAD for supply and administration. The construction companies remained relatively autonomous through all of the centralizing and remained in place to continue the operation of the 875 miles of four-inch and 532 miles of six-inch pipeline they had emplaced behind the 6th Army Group in the advance from southern France.39
Preparing To Cross the Rhine
As the Germans fell back speedily upon their defenses before the Rhine in September and October 1944, 6th Army Group planners began to entertain the idea of crossing the river before the year was out. This possibility led the engineers to establish Rhine River crossing schools in late September. Seventh Army engineers, who would carry the brunt of the assault burden, treated the crossing as an amphibious operation complicated by the rapid current of the river—eight to ten miles per hour in the winter months. Once again General Davidson turned to his experienced engineer regiments, the 40th, the 540th, and the 36th, to form the central elements of combat groups capable of transporting assault troops and of organizing beachheads on the far bank as they had on the Riviera beaches.
On 26 September one battalion from each of the engineer regiments and two French engineer battalions began training in two crossing schools. The basic course was held near Dole on the Doubs River, usually slow and narrow in the autumn. Under the supervision of the 1553rd Engineer Heavy Ponton Battalion, the combat engineers practiced with swift fourteen-foot storm boats and larger assault craft, both types powered with outboard motors. After four days of practice, the engineer trainees moved to the advanced-course site at Camp de Valbonne near Lyon on the Rhone River to gain experience with the same equipment in faster river currents.40
At Camp de Valbonne, under the direction of the 85th Engineer Heavy Ponton Battalion, the engineers also practiced bridge building over the rapid stream and experimented with heavier cable anchors for ponton treadway bridging and antimine nets to ward off explosives set adrift by the enemy to eliminate crossing structures. New means of launching and affixing cross-river cables were tested in efforts to provide guy wires for laden DUKWs negotiating the current with barely enough
power to make headway against the river’s flow.
As winter drew on and chances for crossing the last major water obstacle before the German heartland dwindled, the engineers concentrated on maintaining their equipment for the postponed operation. The equipment amassed for each crossing group counted 96 storm boats, 188 assault craft, 6 rafts, over 400 outboard motors, 1 heavy ponton bridge, and 150 DUKWs assigned to transport artillery pieces. All of this material was now mounted on wheels to take immediate advantage of any sudden breakthrough to the Rhine’s edge. By early December, General Davidson decided to store the entire collection for the winter, and Army engineers moved their equipment to covered areas, factories, and the forests around Luneville.41
As the year ended, the engineers turned to face a different ordeal. In a final desperate attempt to stem the Allied advance to the Rhine, German forces along the western front launched a massive counteroffensive out of the Ardennes Forest. In the middle of December, the surprise blow put the entire Allied command in the west on the defensive for over a month and stretched engineer elements to their utmost.