Cherbourg

1. Lead

Cherbourg was the first great prize of the Normandy invasion. When the Allies landed in France on D-Day, 6 June 1944, they landed on beaches, and beaches cannot supply an army. Every ton of food, fuel and ammunition for the invasion had to come across the open beaches or over the artificial Mulberry harbours, and the planners knew that would not be enough. They needed a port, and the nearest great port was Cherbourg, at the tip of the Cotentin Peninsula, the great deep-water harbour that had served the transatlantic liners before the war. The capture of Cherbourg was therefore one of the first objectives of the invasion, and the American VII Corps, under Major General J. Lawton Collins, was given the task. In three weeks of hard fighting through the bocage — the hedgerow country of Normandy — and up the length of the Cotentin Peninsula, Collins’s men reached the port, and on 26 June, after a naval bombardment by American battleships and a street-by-street assault, the German garrison surrendered. The victory was real, but it was incomplete: the Germans, following Hitler’s orders, had wrecked the port so thoroughly that it took the Allies a month to bring the first ship in, and three months to restore it to full working order. Cherbourg was a victory, but it was a victory that had to be rebuilt, stone by stone, before it could serve the invasion it had been captured to supply.

2. Key Facts

Date	6–30 June 1944 (Cherbourg captured 26 June; last resistance 30 June)
Location	Cherbourg and the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, France
Result	Allied victory; Cherbourg captured, but the port was wrecked and took months to restore
Allied commanders	Lt. Gen. Omar Bradley (First Army); Maj. Gen. J. Lawton Collins (VII Corps)
German commanders	Lt. Gen. Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben (709th Infantry Division, Cherbourg garrison); Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Army Group B)
Allied strength	VII Corps: 4th, 9th and 79th Infantry Divisions; 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions; about 100,000 men in the Cotentin campaign
German strength	About 40,000 men in the Cotentin, including the 709th, 91st, 77th and 243rd Infantry Divisions
Allied losses	About 2,800 killed and 13,500 wounded in the Cotentin campaign (estimate)
German losses	About 40,000–41,000, including about 30,000 taken prisoner (estimate)

3. Background

Why Cherbourg Mattered

The invasion of Normandy was, above all, a problem of supply. The Allies planned to land more than 150,000 men on the first day, and more than a million within a month, and every one of those men needed food, fuel, ammunition and equipment — all of which had to come from England, across the Channel, and onto a hostile shore. The planners had two answers. The first was the Mulberry harbours, the great artificial ports that were towed across the Channel and assembled off the beaches, and the second was the capture of a real port. The Mulberries were a marvel of engineering, but they were vulnerable to weather — the great storm of 19 June 1944 destroyed the American Mulberry at Omaha Beach — and they could never handle the volume of supplies that a great army needed. A real port was essential, and the nearest real port to the landing beaches was Cherbourg. The port, with its deep-water harbour, its docks and its railways, could handle the ships that the invasion needed, and the planners made its capture one of the first objectives of the operation. The American VII Corps, which landed at Utah Beach on the eastern side of the Cotentin Peninsula, was given the task: to cut across the base of the peninsula, to isolate Cherbourg, and then to take it.

The Cotentin Peninsula

The Cotentin Peninsula is a great fist of land, about 60 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide, that juts out into the English Channel from the Normandy coast, with Cherbourg at its northern tip. In June 1944 it was a difficult country to fight in. The low-lying land at the base of the peninsula, around the Merderet and Douve rivers, had been flooded by the Germans, and the only ways across were narrow causeways that were covered by German guns. The interior of the peninsula was bocage — the hedgerow country of small fields bounded by thick earth banks topped with trees — and the bocage, which would dominate the fighting in Normandy for two months, was ideal for defence: every field was a fortress, every hedgerow a firing position, and the Americans, who had never fought in such country, had to learn to fight in it field by field. The peninsula was defended by four German divisions, the 709th, the 91st, the 77th and the 243rd, under the command of Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, and the Germans, who had spent four years fortifying the coast, had built concrete gun positions, minefields and obstacles along the beaches and around the port.

The German Fortress

Cherbourg itself was a fortress. Hitler, who understood the importance of the port, had declared it a Festung — a fortress to be held to the last man — and the garrison, under von Schlieben, had been ordered to fight to the death and to destroy the port before it fell. The defences of the port were formidable: concrete gun casemates on the heights around the town, minefields, barbed wire, and anti-tank obstacles, and, inside the town, strongpoints in the houses and in the forts that guarded the harbour. The most important of these was Fort du Roule, on the heights above the town, which commanded the harbour and the town, and which the Germans had fortified with concrete and with guns. The garrison, about 30,000 men in the town itself, was a mixture of infantry, artillerymen, naval personnel and Luftwaffe ground troops, and it was well supplied with ammunition and with food. The Germans, who had watched the Allies land at Utah Beach, knew that Cherbourg was the objective, and they were ready.

4. Opposing Forces

The battle for Cherbourg was fought by two forces that were uneven in numbers but not in the way the Germans had hoped. The Americans had more men, more tanks and more artillery, and they had the support of the greatest naval and air forces ever assembled; the Germans had the advantage of ground, of fortifications, and of a fortress they had been ordered to hold to the last.

	Allies	Germany
Infantry	4th, 9th and 79th Infantry Divisions; 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions	709th, 91st, 77th and 243rd Infantry Divisions; fortress troops
Armour	M4 Sherman tanks; M10 tank destroyers; armoured infantry	A small number of tanks and assault guns; mostly static defences
Artillery	105 mm and 155 mm howitzers; corps artillery	Coastal guns (up to 240 mm); 88 mm guns; fortress artillery
Naval support	Task Force 129: battleships Texas, Arkansas, Nevada; cruisers and destroyers	—
Air support	9th US Air Force; RAF 2nd Tactical Air Force	Luftwaffe: almost no aircraft over Normandy by late June
Command	Unified: Bradley (First Army), Collins (VII Corps)	Divided: von Schlieben (Cherbourg), Dollmann (7th Army), Rommel (Army Group B)

VII Corps

The American VII Corps, under Major General J. Lawton Collins, was one of the finest corps in the American Army. Collins, known as “Lightning Joe” for the speed of his operations, was an aggressive and able commander, and his corps — the 4th, 9th and 79th Infantry Divisions, with the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions in support — was well trained, well equipped and well led. The corps’ infantry, though they had never fought in the bocage before, learned quickly, and its artillery, which was massed in support of every attack, was the best in the world. The corps also had the support of the American battleships offshore, which could fire their great guns into the German positions around Cherbourg, and of the 9th Air Force, which bombed the German defences day and night. The corps’ greatest asset, however, was its commander: Collins, who visited the front every day, who understood the ground, and who drove his divisions forward with a speed that the Germans could not match.

The Cherbourg Garrison

The German garrison of Cherbourg, under Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben, was a formidable force on paper, but it was, in practice, a mixture of units that had never fought together. The 709th Infantry Division, which formed the core of the garrison, was a static coastal division, made up of older men and of conscripts from occupied countries, and it was not a match for the American infantry in open fighting. The other divisions in the Cotentin — the 91st, the 77th and the 243rd — were better, but they had been mauled in the fighting since D-Day, and by the time the Americans reached Cherbourg they were shadows of themselves. The garrison’s strength lay in its fortifications: the concrete gun positions, the minefields, and the forts, above all Fort du Roule, which commanded the town and the harbour. The garrison’s weakness lay in its command: von Schlieben, who was a brave and able officer, was cut off from his superiors, his communications were broken, and his orders — to hold to the last man and to destroy the port — were impossible to carry out in full.

Naval Guns and Air Power

The American attack on Cherbourg was supported by the greatest concentration of naval and air power that had ever been assembled for a single port. Task Force 129, under Rear Admiral Morton Deyo, included the battleships Texas, Arkansas and Nevada, four cruisers and eleven destroyers, and on 25 June it closed to within a few kilometres of the coast and bombarded the German gun positions around the port. The German coastal guns, some of them of 240 mm calibre, fired back, and the Texas was hit twice, but the naval bombardment, though it did not destroy the concrete fortifications, silenced many of the German guns and demoralised the garrison. Above them, the 9th Air Force bombed the port and the town, and the RAF’s heavy bombers attacked the German positions at night. The Luftwaffe, which had been a threat in the first days of the invasion, was almost absent by late June, and the Allies had complete mastery of the air over Normandy.

5. The Battle

Utah Beach and the Airborne Landings

The battle for Cherbourg began on D-Day itself, 6 June 1944, with the landings at Utah Beach and the airborne drops behind it. The 4th Infantry Division landed at Utah, on the eastern side of the Cotentin Peninsula, and met lighter resistance than the Americans at Omaha Beach: the German defences at Utah were thinner, the naval bombardment had been more effective, and the landing, though it drifted to the wrong beach, was a success. The division’s casualties on D-Day were about 200 men, a fraction of those at Omaha. Behind the beach, the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions had been dropped in the night, to seize the causeways across the flooded lowlands and the town of Sainte-Mère-Église, and though the drops were scattered — some paratroopers landed miles from their objectives, and some drowned in the flooded fields — the airborne troops seized the causeways and held them, at heavy cost, until the infantry from Utah Beach linked up with them. By the end of 6 June, the Americans had a foothold on the Cotentin Peninsula, and the road to Cherbourg was open.

The Drive North

The first task of the VII Corps was to cut across the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, from Utah Beach to the west coast, to isolate Cherbourg from the rest of Normandy. The corps’ advance was slow and hard: the flooded lowlands, the bocage, and the German resistance in the towns of Carentan and Montebourg made every kilometre a battle. Carentan, at the base of the peninsula, was taken by the 101st Airborne Division on 12 June, after four days of fighting, and the corps, having cut the peninsula, turned north, towards Cherbourg. The advance up the peninsula was a battle of hedgerows: the Americans, who had never fought in the bocage, had to learn to fight in it, field by field, hedgerow by hedgerow, and they learned quickly, with the help of the “Rhino” tanks — Shermans fitted with steel teeth that could cut through the hedgerows — and with the massed fire of their artillery. By 18 June, the corps had reached the west coast at Barneville, cutting Cherbourg off from the rest of France, and by 20 June it was at the outskirts of the port itself.

The Assault on Cherbourg

The assault on Cherbourg itself, which began on 22 June 1944, was a battle of streets and strongpoints, and it was fought by three American infantry divisions against a German garrison that had been ordered to fight to the last man. The town, which had been fortified for four years, was defended by concrete gun positions, by minefields, and by strongpoints in the houses and in the forts, above all Fort du Roule, on the heights above the harbour, which commanded the town and the port. The Americans, who attacked from the south, fought their way into the town house by house, while the German garrison, fighting from the concrete positions and from the houses, held on. The assault was supported by the greatest concentration of naval and air power ever assembled for a single port, and by the massed artillery of the VII Corps, and it was, in the end, a victory — but a victory that cost the Americans dearly, and that left the port in ruins.

The Naval Bombardment

On 25 June, the day before the assault on the town itself, Task Force 129 closed in on Cherbourg and bombarded the German gun positions. The battleships Texas, Arkansas and Nevada, with their great 14-inch and 12-inch guns, fired at the concrete casemates on the heights around the port, while the cruisers and destroyers fired at the smaller positions. The German coastal guns fired back, and the duel lasted for three hours: the Texas was hit twice by 240 mm shells, and the destroyer O’Brien was damaged, but the American ships, firing from beyond the range of most of the German guns, silenced many of the batteries. The bombardment did not destroy the concrete fortifications — the great guns could not penetrate the thick concrete of the casemates — but it destroyed the lighter guns, it demoralised the garrison, and it showed the Germans that the Allies could bring the full weight of their naval power to bear on the port.

Street by Street

The assault on Cherbourg itself began on 22 June, and it was a battle of streets and strongpoints. The 4th, 9th and 79th Infantry Divisions, attacking from the south, fought their way into the town, house by house, while the German garrison, fighting from the concrete positions and from the houses, held on. The fighting was close and bitter: the Americans, who had expected a quick victory, found that every street, every building, had to be taken by assault, and the Germans, who had been ordered to fight to the last man, fought as if they meant it. The key to the town was Fort du Roule, on the heights above the harbour, and on 25 June, after a day of fighting, the 79th Division took the fort by assault, blowing open its concrete doors with explosives and fighting through its tunnels. With the fort in American hands, the town was untenable, and on 26 June von Schlieben, who had been captured in his headquarters bunker, surrendered the garrison. The town was in American hands, but the port was in ruins.

The Last Resistance

The surrender of Cherbourg on 26 June did not end the fighting on the Cotentin Peninsula. In the north-west of the peninsula, at Cap de la Hague, a German force of about 5,000 men, under the command of a naval officer, held out in the coastal fortifications, and it took the Americans four more days, until 30 June, to reduce it. The last German resistance in the Cotentin was not overcome until the end of June, and by then the Americans had suffered about 2,800 killed and 13,500 wounded in the campaign, and the Germans had lost about 40,000–41,000 men, including about 30,000 taken prisoner. The battle for Cherbourg was over, and the port, which had been the objective of the whole campaign, was in American hands — but it was a port in ruins, and it would be months before it could serve the invasion. The men who had fought at Cap de la Hague were among the last German soldiers to surrender in Normandy, and their resistance, though hopeless, had cost the Americans four more days.

6. Turning Point

Cutting the Peninsula

The turning point of the Cherbourg campaign came not at the port itself but at the base of the peninsula, on 18 June, when the VII Corps reached the west coast at Barneville and cut Cherbourg off from the rest of France. Until then, the Germans in Cherbourg had been supplied and reinforced from the south, and they had been able to withdraw if they chose. After 18 June, they were isolated: no more reinforcements, no more supplies, and no way out except by sea — and the sea was controlled by the Allies. The isolation of the garrison made the capture of the port a matter of time, and it freed the VII Corps to concentrate its whole strength on the assault. The Germans, who had fought well in the bocage, were now fighting a battle they could not win, in a fortress that had been cut off from the world.

Fort du Roule

The second turning point was the capture of Fort du Roule on 25 June. The fort, on the heights above the town, commanded the harbour and the town, and as long as it held out, the Americans could not take Cherbourg. The 79th Division’s assault on the fort — a direct attack on a concrete fortress, with explosives and flamethrowers, through tunnels and gun positions — was one of the most daring actions of the Normandy campaign, and its success broke the German defence. With the fort in American hands, the German positions in the town were untenable, and von Schlieben, who had lost contact with his troops and who knew that further resistance was hopeless, surrendered the next day. The fort, which the Germans had believed to be impregnable, had fallen in a day, and with it fell Cherbourg. The fort’s capture also opened the harbour to the engineers, who could at last begin the long work of clearing the port and rebuilding it for the invasion’s supply.

7. Casualties and Losses

American Losses

The American losses in the Cotentin campaign were heavy, though they were lighter than those at Omaha Beach and in the bocage fighting that followed. The VII Corps lost about 2,800 men killed and about 13,500 wounded in the fighting from D-Day to the fall of Cherbourg, with the heaviest losses in the 4th Infantry Division, which had landed at Utah Beach, and in the 82nd and 101st Airborne Divisions, which had fought in the flooded lowlands and at Carentan. The losses, though painful, were replaceable: the United States was producing men and material in numbers the Germans could not match, and the VII Corps, after a short rest, went on to fight in the breakout from Normandy and in the advance across France. The VII Corps’ losses, though heavy, were light compared with those the corps would suffer later in the war, and the men who had fought at Cherbourg — at Utah Beach, at Carentan and in the bocage — had learned the lessons that would carry them to Germany.

	Allies	Germany
Killed	About 2,800 Americans (estimate)	About 5,000–6,000 (estimate)
Wounded	About 13,500 Americans (estimate)	About 5,000 (estimate)
Captured or missing	Small numbers	About 30,000 taken prisoner
Total	About 16,300	About 40,000–41,000

German Losses and the Wrecked Port

The German losses in the Cotentin were far heavier: about 40,000–41,000 men, of whom about 30,000 were taken prisoner, including the garrison of Cherbourg itself. The four German divisions in the Cotentin — the 709th, the 91st, the 77th and the 243rd — were destroyed as fighting formations, and they were never rebuilt. But the Germans, even in defeat, achieved one of their objectives: the destruction of the port. Following Hitler’s orders, the garrison had wrecked the harbour before it fell: the docks were blown up, the cranes were toppled into the water, the harbour was blocked with sunken ships and mines, and the port’s facilities were destroyed so thoroughly that the Allies, who had captured Cherbourg to supply their armies, could not use it for a month. The first Allied ship did not unload at Cherbourg until 16 July 1944, and the port did not reach its full capacity until the autumn. The destruction of the port was the Germans’ last revenge for the loss of Cherbourg, and it cost the Allies dearly in the weeks that followed.

8. Map and Geography

The Cotentin Peninsula

The Cotentin Peninsula, about 60 kilometres long and 30 kilometres wide, juts out into the English Channel from the Normandy coast, with Cherbourg at its northern tip. The peninsula is divided by the Merderet and Douve rivers, which flow across its base, and by the bocage — the hedgerow country of small fields and thick earth banks — which covers its interior. The low-lying land at the base of the peninsula, around the Merderet and the Douve, was flooded by the Germans before D-Day, and the only ways across were the narrow causeways that the American paratroopers seized on the night of 5–6 June. The peninsula’s roads run north and south, along its length, and the American advance up the peninsula followed those roads, from Carentan in the south to Cherbourg in the north. The port itself, at the tip of the peninsula, is a deep-water harbour, sheltered by breakwaters, and it is the only great port on the Normandy coast.

Cherbourg and Its Harbour

Cherbourg’s harbour is one of the finest in France, and it was the reason the port was worth capturing. The harbour, which is sheltered by a great breakwater, is deep enough for the largest ships, and it has docks, quays and railways that could handle the volume of supplies the invasion needed. The town itself, which in 1944 had about 40,000 inhabitants, sits at the head of the harbour, with the heights of Fort du Roule rising above it to the south. The Germans, who understood the harbour’s importance, had fortified it with concrete gun positions on the heights and around the harbour mouth, and they had mined the approaches to the port. The harbour, which the Allies captured on 26 June, was so thoroughly wrecked by the Germans that it took a month to clear and three months to restore, but when it was restored it became the greatest Allied supply port in France, until the port of Antwerp was opened in November 1944.

9. Outcome and Legacy of Cherbourg

The Port Rebuilt

The most important consequence of the capture of Cherbourg was the rebuilding of the port, and the rebuilding was a feat of engineering as remarkable as the capture itself. The American engineers, working under fire and in the wreckage of the harbour, cleared the sunken ships, removed the mines, rebuilt the docks and the cranes, and, on 16 July 1944, brought the first Allied ship into the harbour. By September, the port was handling thousands of tons of supplies a day, and by the autumn it was the greatest Allied supply port in France, handling more cargo than any other port except Antwerp. The port of Cherbourg supplied the Allied armies in their advance across France, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the invasion of Germany, and it did so until the end of the war. The capture of Cherbourg, which had seemed, in June, to be a victory without a prize, became, by the autumn, the prize that had made the victory worthwhile.

The Bocage and the Breakout

The capture of Cherbourg also freed the VII Corps for the next phase of the Normandy campaign: the breakout from the beachhead. After Cherbourg, Collins’s corps turned south, into the bocage, and fought its way through the hedgerows towards Saint-Lô, the road junction whose capture would open the way for the breakout of late July. The fighting in the bocage, which lasted through June and July, was among the hardest of the Normandy campaign, and it was in the bocage that the Americans learned the lessons — about tanks, about artillery, about infantry tactics — that they would use for the rest of the war. The breakout, when it came, on 25 July, in Operation Cobra, was led by the VII Corps, and it was the corps that had taken Cherbourg that broke out of Normandy and drove across France to the German border. The road from Utah Beach to Cherbourg, and from Cherbourg to Saint-Lô, was the road that led to the liberation of France.

Legacy

Cherbourg is remembered, in France and in the United States, as the port that supplied the liberation. The town, which was devastated by the fighting in June 1944, was rebuilt after the war, and its harbour, which was wrecked by the Germans, is now one of the great ports of France, serving the ferries to England and Ireland and the ships of the French navy. The town’s memorials — the Fort du Roule, which is now a museum of the liberation, and the American cemetery at Colleville-sur-Mer, which looks out over the beaches where the invasion began — keep the memory of the battle alive. The capture of Cherbourg is studied in military schools as an example of the importance of ports in warfare, and of the fact that a port, however well fortified, is only as strong as the army that defends it, and that an army that is cut off, as the garrison of Cherbourg was, cannot hold a fortress for long.

10. Commanders

Allied Commanders

Major General J. Lawton Collins (United States). Commander of the VII Corps, and the man who took Cherbourg. Collins, known as “Lightning Joe”, was one of the ablest American corps commanders of the war, and his drive up the Cotentin Peninsula, in three weeks of hard fighting, was a model of aggressive, well-led operations. He later commanded the VII Corps in the breakout from Normandy, in the Battle of the Bulge, and in the invasion of Germany, and he ended the war as one of the most respected American generals.

Lieutenant General Omar Bradley (United States). Commander of the First Army, and Collins’s superior. Bradley, a quiet and methodical commander, planned the American part of the Normandy invasion, and he directed the VII Corps’ advance on Cherbourg from his headquarters in France. He later commanded the 12th Army Group, the largest American field command in Europe, and he ended the war as a five-star general.

Rear Admiral Morton Deyo (United States). Commander of Task Force 129, the naval force that bombarded Cherbourg on 25 June. Deyo, who had commanded the naval gunfire support at Utah Beach on D-Day, brought his battleships in close to the coast and silenced the German coastal guns, in a duel that was one of the last battleship actions of the war.

German Commanders

Lieutenant General Karl-Wilhelm von Schlieben (Germany). Commander of the 709th Infantry Division and of the Cherbourg garrison. Von Schlieben, a brave and able officer, defended Cherbourg to the last, following Hitler’s orders to hold the fortress and to destroy the port, and he was captured in his headquarters bunker on 26 June. He spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in the United States, and he died in 1964.

Field Marshal Erwin Rommel (Germany). Commander of Army Group B, and the overall German commander in Normandy. Rommel, who had inspected the Atlantic Wall defences in the spring of 1944, knew that Cherbourg was the key to the invasion, and he did everything he could to hold it. He was wounded by an Allied air attack on 17 July 1944, and he was implicated in the July plot against Hitler and forced to take his own life in October 1944.

General Friedrich Dollmann (Germany). Commander of the 7th Army, which defended Normandy. Dollmann, whose army bore the brunt of the invasion, was unable to reinforce Cherbourg in time, and his divisions in the Cotentin were destroyed piecemeal. He died of a heart attack on 28 June 1944, two days after the fall of Cherbourg, and his death, in the middle of the battle for Normandy, was a heavy blow to the German command.

Frequently Asked Questions

When was Cherbourg captured?
26 June 1944, when the German garrison under von Schlieben surrendered. The last German resistance on the Cotentin Peninsula, at Cap de la Hague, held out until 30 June.

Why was Cherbourg so important?
Cherbourg was the nearest great deep-water port to the Normandy landing beaches. The Allies needed a port to supply the invasion, and the beaches and the artificial Mulberry harbours could not handle the volume of supplies a great army needed.

Why couldn’t the Allies use Cherbourg at once?
The Germans, following Hitler’s orders, had wrecked the port before it fell: the docks were blown up, the cranes toppled, and the harbour blocked with sunken ships and mines. The first Allied ship did not unload until 16 July 1944.

How many Americans died taking Cherbourg?
About 2,800 Americans were killed and about 13,500 wounded in the Cotentin campaign, from D-Day to the fall of Cherbourg. German losses were about 40,000–41,000, including about 30,000 taken prisoner.

Who commanded the American attack on Cherbourg?
Major General J. Lawton Collins, commander of the VII Corps, under Lieutenant General Omar Bradley of the First Army. Collins was known as “Lightning Joe” for the speed of his operations.

What was Fort du Roule?
The fortress on the heights above Cherbourg harbour, which commanded the town and the port. It was taken by the 79th Division on 25 June 1944, and its fall made the German defence of the town untenable. It is now a museum of the liberation.

Sources

1. Wikipedia, “Battle of Cherbourg” — dates, strength, casualty figures and the course of the battle.
2. US Army Center of Military History, Utah Beach to Cherbourg (6 June–1 July 1944), American Forces in Action series — the official history, the VII Corps’ advance and the capture of the port.
3. Joseph Balkoski, Utah Beach: The Amphibious Landing and Airborne Operations on D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Stackpole, 2005) — the landings and the drive up the Cotentin.
4. Adrian R. Lewis, Omaha Beach: A Flawed Victory (University of North Carolina Press, 2001) — the Normandy campaign, the bocage and the supply problem.
5. Samuel Eliot Morison, History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, Vol. XI — the naval bombardment of Cherbourg by Task Force 129.
6. Encyclopædia Britannica, “Cherbourg” — the port, its history and its role in the invasion.

Further reading

• Stephen E. Ambrose, D-Day, June 6, 1944 (Simon & Schuster, 1994).
• Max Hastings, Overlord: D-Day and the Battle for Normandy (Simon & Schuster, 1984).