In his account, Gundlach continued to fight regardless of whether he could actually inflict any damage on the enemy. After the British began using flamethrowers and soldiers started passing out due to the heat and lack of oxygen, though, he felt he had done his duty. Gundlach fought up until a recognizable point, the moment when his men became incapable of defending themselves, before saying “No, we can’t have that.” Private First Class Lorch of the 266th Infantry Division tells much the same story about his capture near Saint-Lô in mid-July 1944. Initially his unit was forbidden to surrender. But “when our ammunition ran out,” Lorch related, “our commander said: ‘Now they can go kiss our asses.’”595
Conversations among POWs taken captive during the German defense of Cherbourg in late July 1944 illustrate the relevance of the “fighting-to-the-bitter-end” idea as a norm for action. The soldiers knew that the loss of the city meant a huge setback for the Wehrmacht. And they repeatedly insisted both that the stronghold could not be defended by a ragtag and poorly equipped force, and that they themselves were not to blame for its
KÖHN: A “Leutnant” said to me: “What are we going to do about the ammunition tunnel?” So I said: “Blow up the opening to it. There’s nothing else we can do.” Then afterwards we ’phoned up and said that we had blown up the opening, but had previously called them to see whether there were still German soldiers or anything inside. A hundred-and-fifty men came out of there. They were hiding away in a corner at the back, and had been there for days. A hundred-and-fifty men! “Well, what have you done with them?” “I sent them into action immediately. They had no arms. I collected up some arms and sent them into action, and when I had done so, looked round, and they had all cleared off again.”596
The surveillance protocols are not the only source in which members of the Wehrmacht speak with outrage at the behavior of German soldiers at Cherbourg as a violation of military norms. With obvious annoyance, the port commander navy captain Hermann Witt relayed to Paris that a Major General Sattler had needlessly surrendered with four hundred men.597 What irritated Witt was not capitulation in and of itself, but the fact that Sattler allegedly gave up without a compelling reason. For Witt, that was a sign of a total moral collapse. “It was JENA and AUERSTÄDT all over again,” he complained a short time later as a POW, referring to Prussian troops’ historic defeats in the Napoleonic Wars.598 Saving soldiers’ lives in a lopsided battle was of no concern to many officers in Cherbourg. It was noted with satisfaction that the unit under the command of First Lieutenant Hermann Keil had held out to the very end at Cap de la Hague: “One can only say that our troops behaved in a most exemplary manner right to the last moment; their morale and behaviour were excellent.”599
Most soldiers showed at least a theoretical desire to hold out to the last. Nonetheless, situational factors, personal dispositions, and group dynamics often led to flexible interpretations of what that meant. Witt, the last man to surrender at Cherbourg, claimed he had fulfilled this ideal, as did Brigadier Botho Elster, who surrendered together with his twenty-thousand-strong troop at the Loire bridge in Beaugency on September 16, 1944, without firing a shot. Elster argued that he and his men had done everything they could to push through to the east, and that failings by the military high command had left him with no means of waging an honorable battle against the enemy.600
Regardless of how they had actually behaved, soldiers stylized their actions as fighting to the bitter end. One example of this is the bold tones used in radio messages by high-ranking officers to their superiors, shortly before they capitulated. The verbal noise such exchanges produced allowed both sides to tell themselves they were conforming to norms. And in fact, some of the men involved received coveted medals or promotions for their behavior.601
