Alas, “too many of his best qualities were matched by folly or misjudgment,” as his biographer Ronald Lewin would write. He was “a man made to be misunderstood,” one of those “whose qualities intensify rather than expand during the course of their lives.… Like Bottom, he could play the ass while unaware of his metamorphosis.” His bumptious, cocksure solipsism already had infuriated sundry generals in the Mediterranean, both American and British. If, as Churchill posited, a gentleman was “someone who is only rude intentionally,” then Montgomery was disqualified. Knowing and unknowing, he could offend, rankle, enrage. Hardly a fatal flaw for a subaltern brawling in the trenches, this defect proved near mortal in coalition warfare, when political nuance and national sensitivities could be as combustible as gunpowder.
He remained “very small-boyish,” in the phrase of the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart, scarred by the cold, shrewish mother who was forever saying, “Find out what Bernard is doing and tell him to stop.” (He would refuse to attend her funeral.) A bully boy at St. Paul’s and Sandhurst, he never quite outgrew the athlete who could be disruptive and fractious unless he was made team captain. “As long as 51 percent of your decisions are right,” he had recently told Shaw, “you’ll succeed.” In truth his generalship reaped a far higher winning percentage, but by his account all too often the brilliant plan was his, the brilliant victory was his, the golden laurels were his, his, his. Brigadier Williams proposed a motto for Montgomery: “Alone I done it.”
“Enjoying life greatly,” he wrote to his rear headquarters in Portsmouth on June 13, “and it is great fun fighting battles again after five months in England.” Several thousand men were dead, and thousands more had been maimed. Here was a man made to be misunderstood.
* * *
The OVERLORD plan was largely his, and now he sought to make it work. Since early May, Montgomery had intended to lure as much of the enemy’s weight as possible to the British and Canadian divisions on his left wing, allowing the American right to capture Cherbourg and then thrust south of the Cotentin Peninsula. He reiterated the scheme to Field Marshal Brooke in London on June 11: “My general policy is to pull the enemy on to Second Army so as to make it easier for First Army to expand and extend the quicker.” To gain maneuver room in the beachhead, he had called for “powerful armored force thrusts” on both left and right, beginning on D-Day afternoon, and he had been ready to sacrifice four tank brigades in an exchange of metal and men for space.
Yet after a week the beachhead remained pinched and crowded. Thirty-four Allied armored battalions and more than 300,000 troops had landed, with two thousand tanks, but they had nowhere to go. On the left, Second Army had blunted the German counterattack without building momentum or gaining elbow room. The feeble direct assault on Caen had failed, and a proposal to drop British airborne troops behind the city found no favor with Eisenhower’s air chief, Leigh-Mallory, who feared heavy aircraft losses. “He is a gutless bugger who refuses to take a chance,” Montgomery fumed to his chief of staff on June 12. “I have no use for him.”
A flanking attack from west of Caen began with promise on June 13 when the British 7th Armored Division—the famed Desert Rats from Africa—captured Villers-Bocage, guided through the village streets by gendarmes and baying civilians. Then calamity: on the far side of town, Tiger tank fire raked the lead column; within fifteen minutes, more than a dozen British tanks and as many trucks had been gutted, most by a single audacious panzer commander, SS captain Michael Wittmann. Winkled out of Villers-Bocage, with losses exceeding fifty armored vehicles, the clumsy British attack collapsed. The chastened Desert Rats drew back behind the massed fires of 160 Anglo-American guns and 1,700 tons of RAF bombs that turned the village into a smoking hole.
“The whole show on land is bogged up,” Leigh-Mallory told his diary on June 14. “The Hun has kicked us out of Villers-Bocage and there is no sign of any forward movement, or a chance of it.” With the front lines static—Tommies would not tramp the rubbled streets of Villers-Bocage again until August—the battle soon turned into an attritional struggle of snipers and artillery barrages in what Moorehead called “a gunman’s world.” “Bloody murder, people dropping dead,” a company commander wrote. “One of my platoons ran away and was brought back at pistol-point.… The same platoon ran away again.” A British corporal’s diary entries for three consecutive days in mid-June:
June 18: Day of Hell. Counter-attack.
June 19: Day of Hell. Counter-attack.
June 20: Day of Hell. Advanced. Counter-attacked.
For the Americans in the west, progress was a bit more heartening. The V and VII Corps, heaving inland from Omaha and Utah respectively, merged into a single front after the capture of Carentan and the repulse of a ragged counterattack by the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division on June 13. “Lousy & undersized & scurvy & dirty,” a combat engineer wrote in describing a gaggle of prisoners, “with greasy hair & flat mouths & short necks.” A four-day struggle by the 82nd Airborne to secure a bridgehead over the Merderet finally won through, although more than one thousand paratroopers remained missing, and the 101st Airborne could not account for nearly three thousand more. Here too the landscape was wrecked—“When I first saw Isigny, with walls toppling and everything afire,” an officer reported, “I thought of Carthage”—but most civilians seemed agreeable even amid the ruins. “The people are friendly & called us Libirators,” a sergeant from the 18th Infantry wrote in his diary.
Bradley late on June 13 halted V Corps’s drive toward St.-Lô; with the British stalled around Caen, he feared vulnerable flanks if the American salient grew too frisky. He also amended his original plan to simply bash on toward Cherbourg. Instead, he chose to first cut the Cotentin Peninsula by shoving three divisions west to the sea, blocking German reinforcements and sealing escape routes. The 4th Division, with Ted Roosevelt, would continue hammering northward toward the port.
“I’m sitting in a little gray stone Normandy château,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor from a grim encampment fifteen miles southeast of Cherbourg. Rough Rider stood outside beneath a camouflage net, a sunburst hole in the windshield from a shell fragment.
I don’t suppose there’s a man here who’s thirty but they look old.… Behind me lies a hard fought field.… The dead lie sprawled in every attitude. Their uniforms are dirty and torn, their faces are like yellow clay, and unshaven. Brown, dried blood stains them.… Today’s been one of those days in battle when the heebie jeebies are in order.
No one took a greater proprietary interest in the Norman battlefield than the dour Frenchman known as Deux Mètres. At 5:40 A.M. on Wednesday, June 14, Charles de Gaulle and fifteen companions left London’s Connaught Hotel in six automobiles, including a luggage car carrying 25 million francs. Escorted by two motorcycle policemen, the convoy drove to Kings Stairs in Portsmouth. Just before nine A.M. the French destroyer La Combattante, flying a tricolor embroidered with De Gaulle’s initials—“not altogether in accordance with regulations,” as a petty officer conceded—singled up her lines and made for France.
In his own fashion, De Gaulle had mended fences with Churchill after their railcar tiff ten days earlier. He rescinded his ban on placing French liaison officers in Allied units and, he reported, “I wrote to Mr. Churchill to salve the wounds he had inflicted on himself.” Now, in his belted uniform, leather tunic, and two-star kepi, he scanned the horizon with field glasses for a first glimpse of the country he had fled in 1940 under a Vichy death sentence. “Has it occurred to you, General,” an aide asked aboard Combattante, “that four years ago to the day the Germans marched into Paris?” With a lift of his great beak, De Gaulle replied, “They made a mistake.”
Montgomery had authorized a visit by De Gaulle and two minions; instead, a platoon of nineteen came ashore by DUKW at Courseulles on Juno Beach just before two P.M. Declining an invitation to dine—“We have not come to France to have luncheon with Montgomery,” De Gaulle told an emissary from 21st Army Group—he in
stead drove by jeep to Creullet for a brief, awkward conference. The French general “clearly believed small talk to be a vice,” a British diplomat observed, and conversation often “flowed like glue.” A British officer in Creullet reported that De Gaulle, “forgetting no doubt General Montgomery’s dislike of smoking … smoked cigarettes all over his famous caravan.” Montgomery was reduced to discussing his wall photos of Rommel. “I missed him in Africa,” he told De Gaulle, “but I hope to get him this time.”
Then it was off to Bayeux, where a loudspeaker truck announced, “General de Gaulle will speak at four o’clock at the Place de Château.” Down the Rue Saint-Jean he walked, “a stiff, lugubrious figure,” in Moorehead’s description, preceded by saluting gendarmes on wobbly bicycles, and greeted with tossed peonies and cries of “Vive De Gaulle. À bas les boches, à bas les collaborateurs.” Several thousand people awaited him beneath the regimented lime trees in the grassy square. “At the sight of General de Gaulle,” he later wrote in his memoirs—as usual referring to himself in the third person—“the inhabitants stood in a kind of daze, then burst into bravos or else into tears.… The women smiled and sobbed.” Beneath the blue Cross of Lorraine, he proclaimed the resurrection of the French Republic, here in what he would call “our glorious and mutilated Normandy.” His delegates—and the steamer trunk containing 25 million in banknotes—would remain to rebuild a government, with Bayeux as capital until Paris was unshackled. “The path of war is also the road to liberty and to honor,” he told the cheering throng. “This is the voice of the mother country.”
After belting out “La Marseillaise,” he pressed on to Isigny and Grandcamp. But when Montgomery learned that the Frenchman had reserved fourteen hotel rooms in Bayeux, he furiously ordered him back to England, threatening to arrest and deport him personally. At 8:30 P.M. De Gaulle reluctantly reboarded La Combattante, convinced that “France would live, for she was equal to her suffering,” while privately wondering, “How can one be expected to govern a country that has two hundred and forty-six different kinds of cheese?”
Montgomery wrote Churchill that De Gaulle’s reception “was definitely lukewarm and there was no real enthusiasm.” That was false. In fact, De Gaulle had stolen a march on the Anglo-Americans, demonstrating both his popular legitimacy and his principle that liberated France could be governed by Frenchmen rather than by another military occupation. “Blessed be he,” the author André Gide would write, “through whom our dignity was restored.”
Terror Is Broken by Terror
IN happier days, when the Reich was ascendant and the conquest of Britain seemed inevitable, Hitler had ordered construction of an elaborate command post for the German invasion of England in 1940. Tucked into a sheltered valley outside Margival, seventy-five miles northeast of Paris, Wolfsschlucht II, or W-II, was among more than a dozen elaborate Führer headquarters built in occupied Europe by a force of 28,000 workers pouring a million cubic meters of concrete. W-II rambled across ten square kilometers, with hundreds of offices, garrison rooms, and guest quarters appointed with thick rugs and new maple furniture. Engravings looted from Parisian art shops hung on the walls, and a bootjack could be found in every wardrobe. Larders held tons of canned meat and cherries, sugar, and tinned asparagus. Camouflage netting by the acre concealed the complex; rails leading into a train tunnel were painted rust-red to simulate disuse. Potemkin farmhouses, barns, and pig pens, and a grove of fake trees hid gun batteries on an adjacent ridge. An inconspicuous teahouse atop the Führer’s personal bunker offered a fine view of Soissons Cathedral, five miles south.
Although W-II had never been used, locals deemed it “the most forbidden place in France,” and it was here that Hitler ordered Rundstedt and Rommel to meet him for a secret conference on Normandy. The Führer and his entourage flew from Berchtesgaden in four Focke-Wulf Condors to Metz, then drove 175 miles in armored cars to Margival. (Venturing farther west by air seemed foolhardy when even SS soldiers had begun referring to predatory Allied fighter-bombers as “meat flies.”) At nine A.M. on Saturday, June 17, Hitler received the two field marshals in an entry hall with cyclopean walls and a green tile fireplace.
This was Hitler’s first return to France since 1940, and he looked like a man who was losing a world war: eyes bloodshot and puffy from insomnia, skin sallow, the toothbrush mustache a bit bedraggled. Aides reported that even his passion for music had waned. “It is tragic that the Führer has so cut himself off from life and is leading an excessively unhealthy life,” wrote his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels. Often he checked his own pulse, as if fingering mortality; a quack dubbed the Reich Injection Master frequently administered sedatives or shots of a glandular concoction. He shunned bright lights and wore a cap with an enlarged visor to shield his eyes. “I always have the feeling of tipping to the right,” he complained. He spoke of retirement, of a life devoted to reading, or meditating, or running a museum. His battle captains disappointed him, and of eighteen German field marshals and forty full generals, he would quarrel with more than half before the calamity ended. In Berlin it was rumored that he intended to take personal command in the west.
Hitler sat hunched on a wooden stool, fiddling with his spectacles and a fistful of colored pencils as Rommel opened the session with a glum progress report. The Allies had landed at least twenty divisions in Normandy—half a million men with 77,000 vehicles. The German Seventh Army opposed them with the equivalent of fourteen divisions, and those depleted units averaged under 11,000 men, compared with almost 17,000 a few years earlier. German casualties had reached 26,000, including more than 50 senior commanders. Allied naval guns could hit panzers more than twenty-five kilometers inland, while the enemy’s superiority in matériel was at least as profound as it had been in Africa.
Anglo-American warplanes harried the battlefield to a depth of 150 kilometers or more; day marches in fair weather were suicidal. Rail traffic could get no closer to the beachhead than two hundred kilometers. Air attacks now immobilized nearly three hundred trains a day. German aircraft reinforcements were shot down at a rate of three dozen each day, while others lost their way, ran out of fuel, or were destroyed by their own antiaircraft guns; of fifty-seven fighters that left Wiesbaden for Évreux, only three arrived. At dusk on Wednesday, British planes had dropped twelve hundred tons of explosives on Le Havre port, including six-ton “Tallboy” bombs, and more attacks followed on Thursday. Seven hundred French houses had been destroyed in Le Havre, but so too sixty-three German vessels, including attack boats and minesweepers.
Rommel pointed to a large map. Just this morning American tanks had crossed the Cherbourg–Coutances road; soon the Cotentin Peninsula would be severed, trapping forty thousand troops and dooming Cherbourg. If the Anglo-Americans broke free of the beachhead, either south of Caen or below the Cotentin, the road to Paris lay open and Brittany could be cut off.
Hitler stirred on his stool. “Don’t call it a beachhead, but the last piece of French soil held by the enemy,” he said calmly, adding, “Cherbourg is to be held at all costs.”
Rundstedt said little, taciturn as usual in his trim gray uniform with the carmine trouser stripe that marked a general staff officer. If Rommel was an unlicked cub, then Rundstedt—at sixty-eight, the oldest German field marshal, he had been a Prussian soldier for half a century—was known as both der alte Herr, the old gent, and der schwarze Ritter, the black knight. The scion of Junker gentry and eight centuries of soldiering ancestors, he had served as an army group commander and then military governor in Poland. After receiving his marshal’s baton in 1940, Rundstedt arrived in France to help plan SEA LION, the aborted invasion of England. During the subsequent attack on the Soviet Union, he commanded six field armies, captured the Ukraine, and then retired in late 1941 after a spat with Hitler, only to return in uniform as commander-in-chief for the west.
Beset by rheumatism, an ailing heart, and what one general called “psychic resignation,” Rundstedt lived in the Parisian suburb of S
t.-Germain-en-Laye, where he slept late, read Karl May westerns, and addressed visitors in credible French or English. He disdained both the telephone and the “brown dirt” of Nazi thuggery; although loyal to Hitler, he was not above deriding him as “the Bohemian corporal,” or denouncing the Führer’s orders with his favorite epithet, “Quatsch!” Nonsense! He “would have been most happy if Prussia had remained alone,” his chief of staff later observed, “just as before 1866.” Rarely did he visit the front, considering the Atlantic Wall “a bit of cheap bluff.” He preferred to command from a one–to–one million scale map on which the beachhead—or rather, that last bit of France held by the enemy—was hardly bigger than a playing card. His pessimism ran deep, and the past ten days had only deepened his gloom.
Now Rundstedt stepped forward to support the Marshal Laddie. A rigid defense of the Cotentin was doomed, he warned. Better to pull exposed German forces back inside Cherbourg’s bristling fortifications. Hitler nodded in agreement, but believed southern approaches to the port should also be defended. “The fortress is to hold out as long as possible,” he said, “if possible until about mid-July.” He had earlier drawn a line with a red pencil across the peninsula below Cherbourg, declaring, “They must hold here.”
What about further Allied landings? the Führer asked. Rundstedt thought another invasion was likely. Intelligence from Britain suggested that fifty more divisions had coiled for a second, larger blow. For this reason the German Fifteenth Army had diverted but a single division to Normandy; twenty-one others remained in the Pas de Calais, peering seaward. Yet even if the Allied force in Normandy had been bottled up for the time being, Rundstedt agreed with Marshal Rommel that it was “impossible to hold everything.” Both men advocated evacuating southern France to the Loire River, shortening German lines and forming a mobile reserve of some sixteen divisions to safeguard the line of the Seine.
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