On Tuesday, August 18, 1944, with another fighter escort, Morgenthau flew to Cherbourg, the once-great French port that had been mined by the Germans, then shelled by the Allies. Morgenthau observed, “It is to hell and gone.”
Eisenhower’s chief of staff, General Walter Bedell Smith, had told Morgenthau that he could not travel beyond SHAEF forward headquarters, but Morgenthau pulled rank and told Smith he would let the local commander, General Omar Bradley, “decide how far I can go.”
He filmed the battlefront with a sixteen-millimeter camera and toured evacuation hospitals, which depressed him. He later said that the “odor of the wounded” was so strong “that I had all I could do not to vomit.”
Source:
Beschloss, Michael R. “We Will Have to Get Awfully Busy.” The Conquerors: Roosevelt, Truman, and the Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1941-1945. New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007. 74. Print.
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