First Phase of the Operation

The front on 1 August.--On 1 August American armor and infantry were smashing forward on the impetus of the break-through at St. Lo. The surge of five armored columns cut the Germans to ribbons. Dozens of powerless, unequipped, and disorganized enemy units were scrambling southward and eastward to escape annihilation. Fighters of the XIX and IX TAC hunted the foe on the roads, where they moved two and three trucks abreast without discipline in plan less escape; in the undergrowth in valleys and stream beds, where Panther and Tiger tanks and isolated artillery sought refuge; in bivouac areas, where Germans pitched their oblong tents for a few hours' respite in their headlong flight.

This sudden rout followed the massive air operation of 25 July, which helped to break the month-old deadlock along the base of the Cotentin peninsula. From the capture of Cherbourg until that date, Americans and Germans had fought obdurately around St. Lo, Periers, and Lessay. When the shattering aerial attack finally came, the massed weight of American heavy, medium, light, and fighter-bombers, about 3,000 strong, saturated German antiarmor defenses with thousands of small bombs, each with a lethal radius of 100 yards. After that the enemy lines were numbed, dislocated, shredded. The First Army sprang forward before the Germans could recover their balance. In a week the Army reached Avranches. Its cooperating air power stopped hundreds of tanks and vehicles along the roads, throwing into confusion seven nervously withdrawing divisions. At Avrances, on 1 August, the Third Army entered the fight.

Five days--for Brittany.--General Patton's first request to XIX TAC was a strange one: Do not blow up any bridges.

Since long before D-day tactical aircraft had concentrated on bridge-busting, a very effective way of slowing German movement. General Patton looked at it another way. He wanted the bridges intact so that his own troops could cross the rivers without delay without having to ford them, or to throw up pontoon bridges. He counted on swift advance--and made it. within 5 days all Brittany except Brest, St. Malo, Ile de Cezembre, and Lorient were in American hands.

The very speed of Third Army movement changed the whole character of fighter-bomber cooperation. Before the break-through, the highest priority assignment for Thunderbolts, Mustangs, and Lightning's had been the isolation of the battlefield from the south, east, and north. That assignment presupposed that advance would be slow and tortuous, that it was advantageous to demolish permanent road and river structures like bridges, embankments, and overpasses to stop the enemy from flooding the battle zone with troops and supplies. When General Patton started moving, he turned the interdiction job inside out. The Third Army wanted lines of communication ahead of our troops as smooth and fluid as possible.

Before the big air blow of 25 July, the second highest priority assignment for air, as the First Army fought stubbornly from hill to hill and patiently stormed strong points, had been to attack enemy defensive positions which had held out for days and might continue for weeks. Thunderbolts would plan. 24 to 48 hours in advance, to dive-bomb a stubborn machine gun position or a fort impregnable from the ground.

In XIX TAC-Third Army tactics, the second job also was reversed. There were no such things as German "strong points" in Brittany short of the great island and port fortresses. Over the open country of the peninsula the Germans rarely paused long enough to make a stand on Hill X or Ridge Y. It became impossible to plan tactical air cooperation missions a day and when aircraft had to make sure, before an attack, that the objective had not already been taken by our ground forces. It soon became clear that in cooperating with General Patton, XIX TAC would find its targets in the field, would plan as it flew.

To cut off enemy lines of retreat, to destroy German tanks and infantry in flight, to eliminate pockets of resistance and delaying action, General Weyland planned and dispatched two extremely flexible types of missions which depended heavily upon the acuteness and resourcefulness of his individual airmen.

One was armed reconnaissance. In these operations, fighter-bombers armed with bombs and bullets ransack deep and shallow zones ahead of the ground forces for targets of opportunity. The field for armed reconnaissance is bounded on the inside by the bomb line, a series of marked terrain features, beyond which all territory is definitely held by the enemy. With General Patton's amazingly swift ground advance, the bomb line moved hour by hour and pilots carried area maps strapped to their legs so that they could be alerted about changes as they were made. In the campaign for Brittany and after, XIX TAC armed reconnaissance missions paid juicy dividends in locating and breaking up masses of enemy strength behind the battle line, in knocking out enemy tanks and vehicles approaching or fleeing the front, and in giving the Germans no leisure to rest, regroup, or maintain secrecy of movement.

The second type of mission was armored-column cooperation. Before St. Lo break-through, between 10 and 14 tanks in every division were equipped with the same VHF radio sets carried by the fighters. Four- and eight-ship flights hovered over the lead elements of armored columns, ready to attack on request, to warn the tanks of hidden opposition, to eliminate delaying actions. These flights never returned to base until new flights came to relieve them. With this airplane cover always present, and as close by as fighters escorting heavy bombers, obstacles which might have taken hours to surmount were eliminated in a few minutes. Before St. Lo, a most important precaution was taken. All American vehicles had fresh white stars painted on them, and were given cerise and yellow panels to identify them to friendly aircraft. In a war which saw American and hostile tanks deep within each other's lines, these measures saved many lives.

On 1 August XIX TAC had operational control of three groups of Thunderbolts. As General Patton's tanks plunged forward south of Avranches, the first air operations order assigned two groups to cover the progress of two armored divisions. The third group was ordered to fly armed reconnaissance deep into Brittany, over the broad fields where Third Army tanks would soon strike.

The P-47's could not take off until late afternoon, but they flew 10 separate missions in the few hours remaining before darkness. The first day's bag was miscellaneous. Spotting the muzzles of AAA guns in some harmless-looking hay wagons, the Thunderbolt pilots blasted them to bits. Another flight knocked out three 88-millimeter fieldpieces in the path of the 6th Armored Division, and a third plastered a field bristling with enemy gun positions. The armed reconnaissance aircraft cut 3 railway lines, destroyed 22 motor vehicles and 2 armored cars, and raked a busy marshalling yard and a fuel dump. Statistically, it was an inauspicious beginning for the new air cooperation arm, but that was because the planes were grounded throughout most of the day.

In the next 4 days General Patton's armored columns penetrated and secured all Brittany except the heavily fortified ports. Intermittent bad weather kept many aircraft on the ground, but XIX TAC was growing to full strength and daily flew missions which materially helped the Army's progress. Two more P-47 groups and one P-51 group joined General Weyland's forces before 5 August, and after only 3 days at its camp site XIX TAC headquarters again moved nearer the battle line, this time to Beauchamp's, east of Granville.

General Patton's tactics developed explosively and intricately. General Weyland had to spread his flying strength thinly, cover new and vast areas every day, make maximum use of every fighter-bomber. Broadly, the air-ground warfare in the first days of August broke into three phases.

First, three Third Army columns were cutting into Brittany along parallel lines. All required constant armored-column cover during good flying hours. The spearheads in southern and central Brittany occasionally ran into dangerous tank concentrations or the cross fire of heavy guns, often met masses of enemy troops in bivouac areas or defensive deployments. The northernmost Third Army column, Brig. Gen. Herbert L. Ernest's armored task force, soon reached the concrete pillboxes ringing St. Malo and had to face fire both from powerful ground batteries and from warships in St. Malo Harbor.

Simultaneously, XV and later XX Corps fought southeastward from Fougeres, in a move which started as protection for the rear of the Brittany-bound columns and which quickly matured into an independent drive. There were reports that these swiftly moving corps might be menaced by panzer units south of the Loire; therefore General Weyland's fighters and tactical reconnaissance planes had to maintain far-flung, vigilant patrols around the flanks.

Finally, on 3 August, the enemy inaugurated serious and potentially dangerous countermeasures. He struggled to concentrate his divided forces around Rennes and St. Malo, and, more ominously, he was massing strength at Mortain for an eleventh-hour drive to cut the narrow American supply corridor at Avrances. This threat gave General Weyland the difficult job of protecting Third Army's rearward lines of communication against breaches by enemy ground forces and desperate attacks by small units of the Luftwaffe.

The three subphases of these operations are considered singly:

Armored-column cover and armed reconnaissance in Brittany. -- General Patton's armored columns in Brittany were traveling so fast that frequently they outran their communications. For the Thunderbolts overhead, the bomb line was hourly shifting westward, where the end of the peninsula juts into the Atlantic. The front was so unstable that attacks were never planned in advance; the P-47's eliminated any opposition as they found it.

Naturally the targets were scattered and miscellaneous. In the first 5 days of August, XIX TAC fighters bombed and strafed 21 German troop concentrations or bivouac areas and 1 command headquarters, destroyed 250 motor vehicles, 12 tanks, 9 horse drawn vehicles, 4 locomotives, and 9 railway cars. The rail network in Brittany was not nearly so dense as that in Normandy, but Mustangs and Thunderbolts cut tracks in 5 places and disorganized 7 enemy fuel and supply dumps and 1 gasoline storage tank.

Although German defenses in Brittany were thin and widely separated, the aircraft of XIX TAC put 17 gun posts out of action, several at the direct request of ground forces temporarily thwarted by the enemy positions. One group of P-47's silenced eight guns one afternoon, and then flew on to destroy another which was marked off with white smoke by Third Army columns. Another afternoon, eight Thunderbolts precision bombed and knocked out three self-propelled heavy guns directly on the line of advance into central Brittany.

German tanks in Brittany tried every ruse they could invent to escape the fighter-bombers, and occasionally they put in sudden appearances in the zone of operations. On the morning of 2 August P-47's on armed reconnaissance along the northern coast of Brittany found a German armor assembly area and knocked out seven Tiger tanks which had been trying to conceal themselves under a smoke screen. sometimes air cooperation requests from Third Army's G-3 for Air required immediate action and necessitated vectoring XIX TAC Thunderbolts to the target. One such request was for an immediate attack on a group of tanks in a wood. A P-47 squadron was promptly dispatched to the wood, and its sixteen 500-pund bombs fell in thick concentration on 15 enemy tanks.

Since Luftwaffe opposition was so slight--only one daylight attack was reported in the 5-day campaign for Brittany--armored-column cover flights were often released and given permission to sweep over stretches of road up to 30 miles ahead of our lead tanks. These sweeps, free yet tied definitely to a particular armored column, brought in the heaviest bag of German motor and horse transport on the roads.

The toughest resistance encountered by armed reconnaissance patrols in Brittany was from the walled-in fortress at St. Malo; they were violently shelled by Germans deep inside concrete gun emplacements and on warships in the harbor. Third Army at once called for bomber assistance from Ninth Air Force; meanwhile Thunderbolts braved solid flak on 4 and 5 August to destroy or damage one combat ship each day. In other operations near St. Malo, fighter-bombers blew up buildings loaded with explosives.

Guarding the southern and eastern flanks.--On 3 August the XIX TAC operations order called for cooperation with XV Corps armor and infantry, thrusting southeast from Fougeres. Originally this was a reconnaissance rather than an offensive task, although the first patrols landed with reports of transport destroyed and rails cut. The XV was making such rapid headway that armed and tactical reconnaissance units had to fly as far south as Angers and as far east Laval on the lookout for possible opposition. Tactical reconnaissance aircraft, flying in pairs for self-protection, returned with photographs of German defenses in a wide arc around the Third Army flanks, while armed reconnaissance struck closer to the Army's forward units and attacked whatever offered itself.

Later in August this aerial guard mount on the Third Army's right would turn into one of the most spectacular air cooperation achievements in history. For the time being it was in the watch and wait stage. Reconnaissance planes were instructed to seek out the 11th Panzer Division, which was repeatedly reported to be northward bound to hit General Patton's right flank near Rennes. The vigilant aircraft reported every movement to intelligence but, as it worked out, the 11th Panzer Division never turned up on the Third Army front, although a few elements may have been present for a time in the vicinity of Angers.

Protecting the corridor.--From the start the Third Army was menaced in the rear. Above Avranches, the First Army held the Cotentin peninsula; below Avranches, the Third Army was expanding in all directions. These two broad areas of American penetration were tied together only by a narrow, vulnerable corridor, crisscrossed by roads and bridges along which reinforcements were speeding southward. The enemy grouped at Mortain and attempted a powerful drive westward to Avrances and the sea, with the object of cutting the American armies in half.

From the first, General Weyland told his groups cooperating with armored columns to make periodic sweeps backward to cover the Avranches corridor against air attack. As soon as XIX TAC got its first P-51's, they were assigned to keep a constant fighter umbrella over the Third Army rear. Enemy aircraft seldom came over the corridor during the day, but sometimes lone bombers or small formations attacked roads and bridges near Avranches by night. XIX TAC was not equipped with night fighters; hence a request for protection was forwarded to IX Air Defense Command, which put up Black Widows to drive off the harassing enemy aircraft.