World Battlefronts: Stubborn Nations

When Caesar’s legions first saw the granite-bound harbors of Armorica (ancient Celtic for Brittany, meaning near the sea) they built their forts on the high ground nearby. The Bretons who came five centuries later fortified its coasts. Through the centuries Norsemen, Norman dukes, British and French kings battled in long sieges of Breton bastions.

This week the Germans repeated history. At four deep harbors direly needed by the Allies they fought from redoubts deepened, strengthened to withstand modern bombing. In the fortresses the Germans showed the highest and lowest in Nazi battle morale.

The three great U-boat bases at Brest, Lorient and Saint-Nazaire took terrific poundings from land and air, but the Germans held on doggedly. For U.S. troops there was no choice but to fight their way in; the ports were needed by the A.E.F. and every day they held out was a day more for the last-ditch defenders.

But in Saint-Malo, a lesser port on the northern coast, the situation was different. The Germans had 10,000 men in the defenses when a U.S. spearhead drove across the causeway and into the ancient, walled, seagirt city. By this week the U.S. forces had killed, captured or wounded 7,000 of them, held nine-tenths of the town.

Some Germans there had shot their officers, had marched out in units behind white flags. Some displayed a paper they said German officers had been forced to sign. It read: “It is my duty to hold this position to the last, even if we are encircled and lack food and ammunition. Should I not fulfill my duty, and surrender … I shall be court-martialed upon return to Germany and get punished.”

Ragtag Army. The 3,000 who remained were a ragtag little army of cooks, truck drivers, sailors, punishment platoons. But their commander was a man obsessed: tall, grey Colonel Andreas von Auloch. He had been at Stalingrad, had seen the Russians turn that siege to victory. Captured Germans said he was a madman, added that his wife and children had been killed in a Berlin bombing.

He was in a madman’s hopeless situation: there was no escape. But he was in a seagirt fort, approached only over a narrow bottleneck of land. The Americans had battled past Saint-Malo’s ancient walls and towers, past modern pillboxes to this last fort, set 50 feet deep in the granite, crisscrossed with underground tunnels.

The U.S. commander pleaded for Auloch’s surrender, to avoid more senseless killing. Medical supplies for his wounded went in under flag of truce; a captured German woman, reputedly the Colonel’s mistress, carried one offer of honorable surrender to him. A captured chaplain relayed an ultimatum. Auloch’s reply: “Capitulation to an American is not compatible with the honor of a German soldier.”

As they did at the U-boat bases, the Americans kept on pounding, aware of the pleasant fact that conquest was only a matter of time and the unpleasant fact that it would be a matter of casualties.