Military History | Fort du Roule, Cherbourg — Three Weeks to the First Cargo

The 314th Infantry attacked up this rock on the morning of 25 June 1944 and held the upper works of the fort by midnight. Guns in the lower levels, under the lip of the cliff, went on firing; the 313th Infantry reached the outskirts of Cherbourg — Cherbourg-en-Cotentin since 2016 — but could not push in past them, and the fort held out until the following day. Neither it nor the town was the objective. The port below was.

Its destruction had begun on 7 June, its daily progress logged in the war diary of Marinegruppenkommando West. Every basin in the naval and commercial port was blocked with sunken ships. The Gare Maritime was demolished and twenty thousand cubic yards of its masonry tipped into the deep basin used before the war by Atlantic liners; two large ships closed that basin's entrance. Cranes were brought down across the port. Colonel Alvin G. Viney, who wrote the American plan for repairing it, called the job "the most complete, intensive, and best-planned demolition in history". Konteradmiral Walter Hennecke was awarded the Knight's Cross for it the day after his capture. The American official history reporting the award quotes Hitler calling it a feat unprecedented in the annals of coastal defence; its footnote gives no source for the phrase.

Planners had expected the port to open three days after its capture. The first cargo came ashore on 16 July, from amphibious trucks, over a beach that had been a bathing resort. Obstructions were not all cleared until the end of September. In November 1944 Cherbourg discharged 433,201 tons, more than half of everything landed in France for the American armies that month, against 325,150 tons for the whole of 1937.

Both the American account and the Manche's own encyclopaedia record how little of the town was hit; the wreckage was concentrated on the port and the arsenal. Cherbourg counted 39,105 people in 1936 and 40,042 in 1946. The fort has held the city's Musée de la Libération since 6 June 1954. The road up to it is the montée des Résistants.

📸 Cover: Fort du Roule from below, the 19th-century masonry on the crest and, in the scrub on the slope beneath it, one concrete casemate of the 1943 battery. Photograph by Xfigpower, 4 January 2019, CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.