“I’ll never forget that day as long as I live; the people were really joyful, tears were running down their faces, the girls were kissing everybody . . . even the johnny-come-latelies driving the tank destroyers . . . people were throwing flowers at us . . . just the way it’s supposed to be.”
—Colonel Harry R. Pritchard, A Company, 509th Parachute Battalion
With Truscott chasing the Germans up the Rhône Valley, and Toulon and Marseille invested by the French, General Patch had good cause for satisfaction with the pace and progress of Dragoon. Hitler had sacrificed the 242nd and 244th Divisions in the defense of the two major ports, but two German divisions remained at large on the board: Lieutenant General Karl Pflaum’s 157th Division, north of Grenoble; and Lieutenant General Otto Fretter-Pico’s 148th Division, near Nice. Both of these formations could be reinforced from Italy through the Alpine passes, but a series of Ultra intercepts had provided a strong indication that they were more likely to withdraw than mount a counterattack in southeastern France.
One Ultra intercept, deciphered and forwarded to Patch on August 20 was an order from OKW to Fretter-Pico to move toward the Italian frontier. When it came to Fretter-Pico’s eastern flank, the message was clear: “148 Division to defend area around Grasse [thirty miles northwest of Nice in the foothills of the Alpes-Maritimes] as long as possible without running risk of annihilation. Then to withdraw with main forces via Nice, Breil, Cuneo to take over new sector with left boundary coast at Menton, right boundary Embrun, Chianale-Varaita valley. If situation allows, groups to be pulled back fighting into Tinée and Var valleys as far as Larche-Condamine to bar a possible Allied outflanking thrust across Maddalena [Larche] pass . . . At 0900 August 19, leaving rearguards in contact with Allies, main body of 148th Division to withdraw from evening 19th onward first to east bank of the Var sector. In no circumstances to let Allies push them back by outflanking movement to the north.” Late in the evening of August 20, further intercepts indicated that the principal task of the 148th Division was to defend a possible withdrawal route from Grasse to Cannes, while the 157th Division, when pressed, was to pull back along a line Briançon-Chambéry-Aix-les-Bains in the Hautes Alpes.
While the Germans were preparing to withdraw to the east, the French had proven reluctant to provide the Americans with a right flank guard, which would push them awkwardly against the Alps. Devers, attentive to the codes of coalition warfare, had suggested to Patch that the First Airborne Task Force could be given this role and assume responsibility for the Allies’ eastern flank.
In a postwar interview, Devers recalled his role in the decision: “At this point [August 18] the French general, de Lattre, came in and said the job of guarding the right flank wasn’t becoming to his successes and what he wanted to do was to go up the other side of the Rhône. I happened to come into the headquarters right then and I suggested to Patch, or his chief of staff . . . ‘Let him go. Let him go up the other side. I’ll take care of that flank over there because we can keep the airborne [FABTF] to protect it.’ In other words . . . the airborne group under Frederick took over the job that had been originally assigned to the French. I didn’t wire back for authority to do this. That’s the way you lose battles. I got them to do what they did . . . Patch issued the order after I had told him I’d take the full responsibility.”1
Frederick was informed of his new role on August 19. As the British 2nd Brigade, which had participated in the Le Muy landings, was about to leave the theater, it was replaced by the First Special Service Force, the “Black Devils” commanded by Frederick in the Italian campaign, which had been held in reserve since the opening days of Dragoon after their operation against the offshore islands. The FABTF was to establish and hold a defensive flank running south from the hilltop town of Fayence to La Napoule on the Mediterranean. In this context, a “line” was not the equivalent of the trenches on the Western Front in World War I. The terrain running down to the sea from Fayence is hilly, dotted with villages perchés, and cross-hatched with numerous minor roads. Some garrisons in this sector, held by determined German troops, were prepared to hold out for days; others, manned by Ost troops, were more likely to surrender before a shot was fired.
At the northern end of Frederick’s line, the garrison at Fayence surrendered to a Jedburgh team, “Sceptre,” which had dropped into the Le Muy sector on August 14 and had made contact with Geoffrey Jones during the airborne landings. To the northwest of Fayence was the hilltop village of Callian, which had been reached on D+2 by patrols of the 2nd Battalion, 141st Regiment, 36th Division. It was now taken by a task force assembled by the battalion’s executive officer, Major Herbert Eitt, enabling the FABTF to move into the positions held by the 141st Regiment on the N-85, the Route Napoléon, all the way to Digne in the Basses-Alpes.
Frederick, now responsible for protecting the Seventh Army’s eastern flank, moved his headquarters to the Hôtel Courier in Saint-Raphaël. On the edge of town, at Valescure, were Geoffrey Jones and an OSS colleague Alan Stuyvesant, now working with a Gaullist intelligence network run by Pierre Escot that had excellent contacts in Cannes and Nice. Escot was rapidly taken into the intelligence set-up operated by Frederick’s G-2. Frederick now had in his sights the town of Grasse, the perfume entrepôt on the Cannes-Castellane road, the N-85, where the FFI anticipated that the Germans would make a stand. They were not given a chance. Grasse was surrounded by two regiments of FABTF on the morning of August 24 and its garrison surrendered.
It was in Grasse that a remarkable American expatriate, Isabel Pell, introduced herself to the FABTF. According to the Force’s Colonel Bryant Evans, who got to know her well: “The French referred to her as ‘The Girl with the Blond Lock’ because I seem to remember she had a blond streak in her hair. She had been wild in New York and it was said that her family was paying her 25,000 dollars a year to stay out of the country. I also have a recollection that she held the record for the fastest automobile trip between Grasse and Paris.” A handsome, fearless lesbian, Pell had played a key role with the FFI, storing weapons and ammunition dropped by the British and Americans at her farm at Puget-Théniers.* Pell also had a distant family connection to Geoffrey Jones, who recalled: “She protected quite a few people who were hiding out from the Gestapo. On one occasion the Nazis raided her farm, and although she had four people down in the cellar at the time, she swore that there was no one there. In my opinion, things like take more guts than shooting a gun off in battle.”2
Jones saw Pell as a striking relic of the Roaring Twenties, with a flapper-style haircut and mannish clothes. In spite of her years in Provence, she spoke atrocious French but was adored by the local community. She helped Jones recruit a team of female operatives and gained the confidence of General Frederick who, unconcerned with her heavy drinking and occasionally wilful manner, employed her as a liaison officer, advising the Americans on locals they could trust and those they should avoid. Captain Joseph W. Welsh, the FABTF’s Civil Affairs Officer,† remembered: “Everyone loved Isabel. The men at headquarters thought she was crazy, but they all liked her immensely. She was outspoken, didn’t really care about authority. Even though she respected and liked Frederick, she disagreed with him quite strongly.”
After the taking of Grasse, Frederick drove his men on, although the transport and fuel shortages that had bedeviled the 36th, 45th, and 3rd Divisions threatened to slow the FABTF’s eastward progress. However, the airborne troops had their own logistical solution, reminiscent of medieval armies on the march. In a letter home, Lieutenant Dick Spencer summed up their freewheeling approach to campaigning: “Almost overnight the parachutists ‘mechanized’ themselves. The column was cluttered with carts and bicycles, with and without tires. The Jerry convoys had taken a shellacking; it seemed that all their vehicles in southern France had a white [Allied] star painted on the sides and on the top; and adorned with makeshift American flags and bright pieces of silk, nylon, and rayon . . . and surmounted with ten or fifteen parachutists.” The buccaneering 517th Parachute Infantry Regiment earned the soubriquet “Colonel Graves and his 5,000 Thieves.” Anything that wasn’t nailed down was fair game. One of their raiding parties returned from a quartermaster’s stores in Marseille with cases of Good Conduct medals, stolen in error. Never a man to look a gift horse in the mouth, Colonel Graves came up with a solution, telling the culprits, “Well, what the hell, give one to everybody who hasn’t got a venereal disease.”
The FABTF was moving eastward on a sixty-mile front with one foot in the mountains and the other on the coast. It had limited artillery assets, and fire support was supplied by the U.S. Navy. Rear Admiral Morton Deyo’s Right Flank Force was tasked with suppressing German coastal batteries and was advised by the army not to hesitate to fire into populated areas if the enemy was there and shelling American troops. In the early afternoon of August 22, the cruiser Brooklyn shifted its fire from enemy artillery to troop concentrations and later armored vehicles and, as the day wore on, a railway gun lurking in a tunnel. On the morning of the 23rd the Brooklyn, working in concert with a spotter plane, bombarded enemy gun emplacements and trench systems. Liaising with a P-51 Mustang, the cruiser Tuscaloosa destroyed a four-gun battery with just sixteen rounds and scored a direct hit on another battery.
On the afternoon of the 24th, the FABTF’s 509th Parachute Infantry Battalion entered Cannes. The Germans had already pulled out, leaving behind them a thorough seeding of mines on the resort’s outskirts. A local resident, Jean-Paul Carbonel, drove out to greet the 509th on his motorcycle: “We reached the bridge at the Siagne, which had been blown . . . The Americans were on the other side and since there was less than fifty centimeters of water in the Siagne, an American tank [a tank destroyer from a battalion attached to 509th] crossed the river and wanted to climb up the other side. A man who must have been the owner of the field shouted to them [the crew] that there were mines, but they refused to listen. The tank advanced, so we quickly moved back and a mine exploded and cut the treads on the front left-hand side. Later we found the pieces of an anti-tank mine [a Teller mine] in the sand. The tank behind it sent out a cable and they pulled the tank out of the way. At that moment, some Americans came with metal detectors and they removed all the mines. Afterward the whole column crossed and climbed into the N-7 and they followed us into Bocca [a western suburb of Cannes].”3
The German garrison in Cannes, commanded by a Colonel Schneider, had orders to destroy the city before evacuating it. Schneider ignored his instructions and completed the withdrawal by the early morning of the 24th, leaving the city intact, its inhabitants rejoicing, and the FFI parading as liberators. The 509th arrived in time to participate in the celebrations before moving on to the next target, Nice. Once again, Geoffrey Jones, now fully integrated into Frederick’s G-2,‡ played an important part in the initial stages of the operation. On August 27, with the German evacuation of Nice well underway, an enemy staff car was ambushed in the city and a blood-soaked knapsack crammed with papers was retrieved. When the package was presented to Frederick, it was immediately clear that he had in his hands a copy of General Fretter-Pico’s field order of the day. Jones later described the incident: “We made an astonishing discovery: these ‘papers’ were the just written plans for the German forces on the eastern flank to withdraw for the next three days to fortified positions on the Italian frontier—and the Field Order and maps to carry them out! Working all night by candlelight, we translated/processed a complete report that by early morning was ready for me to wake up the General [Patch] who immediately gave me his L.S. [spotter] aircraft and had me flown to his headquarters.”4 The field order concluded with a warning indicative of the German state of mind in the closing stages of Dragoon. “Watch out—terrorists [the FFI] are everywhere . . . Do not go singly, only armed and in groups . . . Steer clear of the terrorist-infested city of Nice.” Frederick never openly acknowledged the importance of this document, but this did not bother Jones, who recalled: “He never gave anyone a pat on the back. You knew you were doing your job if he continued to let you serve him.”5
Nice was to be the next location of Frederick’s headquarters, and this decision plunged the commander of the FABTF into the midst of the intense factional infighting that accompanied the liberation of the city. The Resistance in Nice, the administrative center of the department, was controlled by the FTP while on its outskirts and in the mountains behind it the FFI were the dominant force. In addition, Dragoon’s success had prompted a sudden last-minute increase in the numbers of so-called Résistants, ironically dubbed “11th Hour Patriots,” which added to the prevailing sense of disorder and indiscipline in the city. Jones, who had been climbing a steep learning curve since arriving in France at the beginning of August, was keenly aware that Nice was a potential powder keg. He later observed: “To be brutally frank, there was very little Resistance . . . in southern France before the invasion because of the independent French nature. It was a motley group down there and I don’t think they ever got together. The only Resistance people that we really had were the FTPs . . . These were organized and the FFI were not. And now the non-Communists were refusing to sit back and let the Communists grab power.” At the time and later, Frederick was supremely indifferent to the nuances of French Liberation politics: “I was so busy fighting a campaign that I just didn’t know who the hell was a Communist and who wasn’t. I know that there were many false accusations and that some of them were made for personal reasons. If you didn’t like someone, you’d call him a Communist. Some people ran up big bills at the grocery store and then when we came in they’d denounce the owner as a collaborator in order to take him out and get him hanged. Naturally this caused a tremendous amount of ill will.”
Nice had been liberated, intact but unruly, on August 28. By September 5 sufficient order had been restored to enable Frederick to move his headquarters there from Grasse and to bring a temporary halt to the internecine warfare within the Resistance forces. On September 12, the FABTF was detached from the Seventh Army, placed directly under the command of Truscott’s 6th Corps,§ and tasked with sealing off the enemy’s escape routes from southern France. The line Frederick was to hold, and which remained unchanged until March 1945, focused on three entry points into the Italian theater: on the coast, beyond neutral Monaco as far as Menton; the Trende Pass, thirty miles to the north in the Alpes-Martimes; and to the northwest through the Larche Pass that connects Barcelonnette, in France, to Cuneo, in Italy.
As the Americans advanced eastward, German resistance stiffened. Lieutenant General Karl Pflaum, the commander of the 157th Division, observed after the war: “The protection of the passes at the French-Italian mountain frontier was especially important for the German troops in Italy. An advance by American troops over the passes into Italy in the rear of the German front could mean its destruction. Apparently they [OKW] preferred weakening the 19th Army to paralyzing the Italian front . . . From the very beginning it could be supposed that the American forces would attempt an advance into Italy from southern France over the Alpine passes. It was very tempting, indeed, highly possible and promising.” Although beset by a high desertion rate, the 148th Division also conducted an orderly withdrawal to the Italian border, skillfully choosing resistance points at which to slow the advancing Americans. The divisional commander Fretter-Pico was awarded the Knight’s Cross for his role in the retreat, which was described in arguably over-generous terms in the propaganda that accompanied the award: “Therefore, and because of his good knowledge of the enemy positions, Lieutenant General Fretter-Pico decided under his own responsibility to retreat slowly and in several steps, so that the entire movement to the Var lasted about one week. Because the division commander visited his troops down to the level of the company command posts daily in the heaviest enemy artillery and mortar fire, and was thus able to picture the situation as it really was . . . the difficult operation succeeded smoothly and according to plan. It not only succeeded in enabling the division to pull back without any loss of weapons and equipment, in other words in full combat strength [sic] but also in transporting back all the supplies.”6
While Frederick’s men were pushing the 157th and 148th Divisions back to the Italian border, the Kriegsmarine was embarking on a last desperate throw of the dice in the coastal waters off Menton. The only weapons available to it were the midget submarines and assault boats deployed by K-Verbände (Kleinkampfverbände, small combat teams). The midget submarines, or Marder (Pine Martens) were three-ton vessels consisting of two torpedoes stacked one on top of the other. The upper torpedo had its warhead removed to allow the installation of a small steering compartment in which the Marder’s pilot was seated beneath a perspex dome, much like a fighter pilot in his cockpit. Fitted with a dive tank and compressed air pump, the vessel could submerge to a depth of one hundred feet, which severely limited its endurance. In combat it operated just below the surface, its electric motor giving it a maximum surface speed of about six knots on the surface and five knots submerged, with the perspex dome peeping above the waves and allowing the pilot to maneuver toward his target. Marders had been used in August 1944, with limited success and heavy losses, off the Normandy beaches, where they sank a Liberty ship, a barrage balloon vessel, a landing craft, a minesweeper, and a destroyer. They also damaged a cruiser and an obsolete French battleship, the Courbet, employed as a block-ship.
The first twelve Marders to arrive in Menton were those of 1/K-Flotilla commanded by Oberleutnant zur see (Lieutenant First Grade) Peter Berger. At 0600 on September 5 they set off to attack American warships just off the coast. They were spotted by the minesweeper USS Incredible, whose skipper Bob Ekland, noted, “Twelve human torpedoes attempted to pass through our formation, presumably on their way to the cruisers because none hit any of the minesweepers. They cruise with the torpedo under the water and with just the head of the pilot in a glass dome above water. We all fired at them and I’m sure my ship hit at least two of them.”7
At 0812 the French destroyer Le Malin (“The Malign One”) a veteran of the Torch and Salerno landings, spotted a suspicious object in the water, prompting the destroyer USS Ludlow to depth-charge the target. This prompted a lively hunt for more of the tell-tale perspex domes, which kept popping up like whack-a-moles in an arcade game. At 0836 Le Malin opened fire on a dome, and twenty minutes later the Ludlow engaged another. Le Malin rescued one of the pilots while another Marder was sunk. The domes, glinting in the sunlight, made excellent targets. The captured pilots were happy to explain the workings of the Marder to their captors and from whence they had come, a launching site to the east of Monaco. One of them claimed that he had made three runs at Le Malin and had finally fired his torpedo at the Ludlow before a burst from one of her 20mm antiaircraft guns had forced him to take to the water. When told by his captors that Brussels had been taken by the Allies [on September 3] he refused to believe them, insisting that Germany would win the war.
Of the five Marders that approached the Allied ships on September 5, four were lost. Four days later the Kriegsmarine threw in a bigger attack, by fourteen Marders and six assault boats armed with depth charges. The latter were either radio-controlled or steered by crews who abandoned ship at the last moment. Ten of the Kriegsmarine flotilla were destroyed by American destroyers and PT boats. The Germans persisted with Marder and explosive-laden motorboat attacks throughout September, albeit on a steadily diminishing scale. On the evening of September 29, the American destroyer Gleaves, patrolling off San Stefano, was ambushed by three groups of explosive boats and fought a high-speed running battle with them, destroying one with depth charges and seeing another self-destruct. The next day the Gleaves returned to the scene of the skirmish to search for wreckage and survivors. She found two survivors and one intact boat, the first to fall into Allied hands. The boat was retrieved and later disarmed by an American bomb disposal unit. Unlike the captured Marder pilot, both the Kriegsmarine men rescued by the Gleaves freely admitted that Germany had lost the war.
Dragoon, over which so many Allied arguments had raged, was now a fast-receding memory. At the end of November, First Airborne Task Force was deactivated. In a farewell letter, Frederick congratulated his men: “You may take pride in your accomplishments knowing that you performed difficult missions well. I am proud of having commanded a force of superior combat soldiers whose aggressive, offensive spirit brought defeat to the enemy throughout a long series of engagements. I wish to each of you good luck and hope that in all your future assignments you achieve the same success that has marked your operations in southern France.”
The speed and scale of Operation Dragoon mark it out as one of the most significant Allied victories in the West in the summer of 1944. In a campaign lasting little more than a month it had liberated nearly two-thirds of France. The planners’ cautious predictions had been confounded. It had been estimated that the Seventh Army would not reach the Rhône Valley until mid-October and Lyon until mid-November. There can be no doubt that in July 1944 the diversion of Wehrmacht attention and strength from southern France to Normandy fatally undermined the defense of the Riviera and its hinterland. But the fact that the operation was such a signal success owes much to the strategic insight and persistence of General George C. Marshall and his planners in Washington, who retained faith in the operation during its long gestation when faced throughout with Churchill’s stubborn advocacy of operations in Italy and the Balkans.
The FFI could also take great credit for the role it played in Dragoon. It was no match for the Wehrmacht in open battle, but it had significantly undermined the occupation forces’ ability to effectively block the Allies’ northward drive, particularly around the pivotal point of Grenoble. This operational failure led to the interdiction of Army Group G on the road to and from Montélimar, a disaster Blaskowitz had feared but for which he could not provide an adequate response. The battle at Montélimar was to be the key engagement of the campaign.
Counterfactual arguments have been advanced, notably by John Keegan, that the campaign in southern France was strategically advantageous to Hitler, who readily abandoned the theater while leaving the bulk of the Allied forces in Italy lodged against the strong defenses of the Gothic Line, at a safe distance from the industries of northern Italy and the Alpine approaches to the borders of the Reich. Keegan argued that the Führer remained obsessed with the Balkans, which was also an overriding and misguided British priority, while Dragoon had funneled the Allies’ amphibious, naval, and air reserves into an operationally vacant zone. By the same token, it could be argued that the continuing disposition of U.S. Seventh Army in Italy and Army Group G in southern France, combined with an Allied lodgement north of the Loire, could have led to a German flank attack on the Allies mounted in the autumn of 1944 by elements of Blaskowitz’s Army Group reinforced by formations from Germany—in effect an earlier version of the Battle of the Bulge. Hitler had already planned such an operation in September 1944, with the aim of cutting off the U.S. Third Army, but the speed with which Dijon fell limited the counterblow to a series of ill-coordinated attacks in Lorraine. In the final count, it is clear that the prosecution of the Dragoon plan remained clearly in line with Eisenhower’s strategy of a broad advance into Germany on all fronts, a hard position to maintain when dealing with prima donnas like Patton and Montgomery, and a thankless burden that the supreme commander bore with great tact and skill. It also underlines America’s colossal industrial and war-making reach and power at one of the crucial turning points of the 20th century.
What was undeniable was the severe handling during Dragoon of Army Group G, which ended the campaign a shadow of its former self. In a month of fighting it had lost over half of its fighting strength. By mid-September, it had sustained over 130,000 casualties, 7,000 of which were killed, 20,000 wounded, and 105,000 captured. These figures do not include those for the formations left behind to defend the Atlantic “fortresses,” some 25,000 men. The Army Group’s combat units had been shredded, with most of its infantry divisions reduced to three thousand or fewer effectives. The 11th Panzer Division had only twelve tanks and two assault guns left. In comparison, Allied casualties were less severe. The U.S. 6th Corps sustained 4,500 battle casualties and French Army B a similar number, depending on whether one takes into account FFI casualties. Both sides, tired but battle-tested, faced a grueling autumnal slugging match in the Vosges.
In a subsequent tribute, the Seventh Army acknowledged the FABTF’s role in the campaign in southern France: “These successes, in driving a strong enemy force from a large section of France in which he had every advantage of observation, terrain and organized defense, were won at high cost to the First Airborne Task Force. Virtually one-third of its personnel were either killed or wounded. However, the damage inflicted on the enemy far exceeded our losses. Approximately 4,000 of the enemy were captured and unknown numbers were killed and wounded. The German 148th Infantry Division was completely decimated and the 34th Division, which was rushed to its rescue, was badly mauled. The aggressive spirit manifested by the officers and men of First Airborne Task Force has added another glorious page to the history of the American Army.”