The General's Compliments

U.S. troops had been fighting inside Cherbourg for 26 hours. But on the city's perimeter were Maginot-type forts, begun by Vauban in the 17th Century, improved by Napoleon in 1808, perfected by Todt in the 1940s, which still blazed with bitter resistance. Spectacled Major General Manton S. Eddy, commander of the 9th Division, stood with one of his regimental commanders on a hillside near Octeville, on the southwest approaches to the port.

The General and the Colonel were peering over the barrel of a machine gun which was firing across a large quarry. Following its line of fire they could see the mouth of a tunnel.

Soon a white flag appeared at the tunnel's mouth. The German lieutenant who held it stepped stiffly into the open. He turned right and dipped the flag, turned left and dipped the flag, faced General Eddy and dipped the flag. It was all very precise and formal. Eddy beckoned him to come over.

The lieutenant presented the compliments of Lieut. General Karl Wilhelm Dietrich von Schlieben, military commander of Cherbourg, and of Rear Admiral Walter Hennecke, naval commander, and asked that an officer be sent to the tunnel to conduct them out to surrender.

Nazi Underground. The Germans in the tunnel did not wait for the conducting officer. A stream of them poured out. Their commander was with them.

Six feet three, black-helmeted, wearing the Iron Cross at his throat, Schlieben was a beaten man. His flabby, worried face was a tired grey; his grey-green greatcoat was mud-splotched and a mass of wrinkles. The starch had gone out of both the man and his clothes.

Brusque Admiral Hennecke looked superciliously down his hawk's nose. His morale had just been boosted by award of the Knight's Cross to the Iron Cross. "Hennecke performed a feat unique in the history of coastal defense," read his radioed citation. "He carried out an exemplary destruction of the port of Cherbourg."

Eddy drove his captives in his command car to headquarters and served them his best brandy. By radio he notified Major General Joseph Lawton Collins, VII Corps commander. "Lightning Joe" Collins said he'd be right over. While they waited, good host Eddy tried to make small talk. Schlieben was taciturn; Hennecke was glad of the chance.

Piecemeal Surrender. Amid formality as stiff as an inspection on West Point's plains, Collins asked Schlieben to surrender the entire Cherbourg garrison. The answer was a quick, emphatic "Nein!"

Collins argued that it was unfair of Schlieben to surrender himself, leaving his men to fight, many of them to die. Schlieben persisted: his experience in Russia had taught him the value of delaying tactics by small, holdout groups. Joe Collins set his long jaw, dismissed them. They were driven away, past grinning M.P.s. The mop-up went on.

The Lower Level. Schlieben's small, holdout groups achieved a few hours more delay. Time & again U.S. troops cleared one level of a Vauban-Todt fort, only to have Germans emerge in their rear from a lower level. Schlieben's tunnel system at first yielded 300 Nazi moles; from the sub-basement finally came 500 more.

The 2nd Battalion of one of the 9th's regiments stormed Fort Equeurdreville, a citadel like a buried warship at the extreme left (west) of the line. In the center Major General Ira Wyche's 79th Division smashed successive layers of Fort du Roule; on the right Major General Raymond O. Barton's 4th Division drove to the waterfront.

The Germans exacted as heavy a toll of U.S. lives as they could. They fought like fiends up to the moment of annihilation; then they quit to save their skins. At Fort du Roule they fought among themselves over whether to surrender. Few insisted on dying for the Fi--hrer, although they had been ordered to fight to the death, and many fought their last battle literally with a revolver at their backs. Reported TIME Correspondent Charles Christian Wertenbaker: "The prisoners do not look gallant now; in fact they never were very gallant."

Covering the Waterfront. Hennecke's naval gunners manned waterside batteries bearing such names as Bromm, Yorck, Hamburg and Landemer. They served their guns so well that lean, bushy-browed Rear Admiral Morton L. Deyo took his whole division of ancient U.S. battleships (Nevada, Texas, Arkansas), four cruisers and seven destroyers to blast them out.

"This port is going to be ours, so we don't want to mess it up more than we have to," Deyo told his gunnery officers. But Deyo's guns and Hennecke's demolitionists messed it up considerably before Commodore William A. Sullivan, the U.S. Navy's port-restoration expert from Casablanca and Naples, could move in and start putting it to rights. Alongside his Seabees worked Army Engineers of the new Port Repair Ship Company, nicknamed "sailjers," using plans for Cherbourg's rehabilitation which had been made a year before its liberation.

First observers in the port were aghast at the destruction. Major General Cecil Ray Moore, chief engineer of ETOUSA, said Hennecke had "knocked hell out of the port," but insisted it was "in better shape than I expected." But he emphasized that Cherbourg had been mainly a passenger port, received only a negligible amount of freight (155,000 tons in 1938, contrasted with 1,300,000 for the little canal port, Caen), could not be compared with Naples. Now it was up to the rebuilders to step up its capacity.

Supplies for two divisions were to begin flowing in at once. At week's end it was estimated that "a few weeks" would suffice to make the port a funnel for the great flood of supplies needed to. sustain General Montgomery's offensive.

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