Steven J. Zaloga - Brittany 1944: Hitlers final defenses in France

The plans for Operation Overlord, the Allied invasion of France in 1944, placed great emphasis on the need to capture deep-water ports in order to provide the logistical requirements of the advancing Allied armies. Cherbourg was liberated at the end of June 1944, but it had relatively modest docking facilities. The Overlord plans focused on the requirement for the deep-water ports in Brittany, and in particular, Brest and the ports around the Quiberon Bay area, including Lorient and Saint-Nazaire. Brest was very familiar to US war planners, having been the major port of debarkation for the American Expeditionary Force in World War I. Following the Operation Cobra breakout in late July 1944, Pattons Third US Army was added to the Allied order of battle in Normandy. The primary mission of Pattons force was to race into Brittany and seize the vital Breton ports.

The subsequent race into Brittany in August 1944 was one of the fastest mechanized advances of the 1944 campaign. Within days, US units were on the doorstep of the ports of Brest, Saint-Nazaire and Lorient. Yet no sooner did Pattons Third US Army arrive in Brittany than doubts began to arise about the validity of its mission. The Germans had demolished the port facilities in Cherbourg in June 1944 and were likely to do the same in the Breton ports. This would cause months of delays in opening the ports. The collapse of the Wehrmacht in Normandy in August 1944 raised the issue of whether Pattons forces would be better employed heading eastward towards the Seine River and Paris. The capture of ports further east, notably Le Havre, Boulogne, and Antwerp, would be closer to the Allied front-lines and therefore more efficient from a logistical standpoint. In the event, only a single corps was left behind to lay siege to Brest while the rest of the Third US Army switched directions eastward in one of the most consequential developments of the summer campaign.

From Berlins perspective, August 1944 was a month of defeat and despair. The Wehrmacht in Normandy was in retreat. Following the second D-Day Operation Dragoon in southern France Hitler authorized the withdrawal of the remaining German field armies in western, central and southern France. There was one exception. The garrisons of the Breton ports were declared to be Festung (Fortress), which in Hitlers vocabulary meant that they would be defended to the death.

Brest was subjected to a costly four-week siege operation in AugustSeptember 1944 before being liberated. Eisenhower decided against the waste of any troops to capture the other Festung ports, and they were to be left to rot on the vine. In the event, the French government began to petition Eisenhower to accelerate their liberation. Plans were initiated in early 1945 to liberate the Festung ports. This began in April 1945 at Royan on the Gironde estuary, but the heavy loss of civilian life led to a reconsideration of these schemes. The remaining Festung ports remained in German hands until after the capitulation of Nazi Germany in May 1945, remaining Hitlers last bastions in France.

The Breton ports were heavily fortified in 194344 as part of the Atlantic Wall program. This is an R699 gun casemate of 6./MAA 262 armed with a war-booty 152mm K15/16(t) gun near the Phare du Portzic lighthouse on the coast southwest of Brest.

Steven Zaloga, Campaign 278: Cherbourg 1944: The First Allied Victory in Normandy, Osprey Publishing Ltd: Oxford, 2015.