Overlord (Pan Military Classics)

by Hastings, Max

  The revelations since 1974 of Allied success in breaking German codes in the Second World War have created some illusions that Ultra provided a magic key, an open sesame for the Allies on the battlefield. Important as Ultra’s contribution was, its supply of information was erratic and incomplete. It provided vital strategic guidance, and its forewarning of German attacks was often of immense importance to the formations seeking to parry these. But Ultra could seldom provide decisive intelligence for Allied troops going into an attack. Only fighting power could gain objectives on the battlefield. It was about this that Churchill and Brooke remained so uncertain in the winter of 1943.

  Yet given impetus by American determination, the planning and preparation of OVERLORD now gained pace, and were not to slacken again. Through the winter of 1943 and even into the spring of 1944, other plans and other problems were also occupying and vexing the minds of the British and American high commands. But one by one lesser operations – CULVERIN, BUCCANEER, HERCULES, PIGSTICK – withered on the bough. One of the most divisive Anglo-American quarrels of the war, which continued until high summer of 1944, concerned the diversion of forces from Italy for the ANVIL landings in the south of France. In a moment of strategic fantasy, Roosevelt proposed that ANVIL should precede the landing in Normandy by a month. But inexorably distractions were cast into the wings. The concentration narrowed until it focused decisively upon OVERLORD. This was an operation for which all paper estimates of strength promised Allied victory. Yet the consequences of failure were so great as to haunt the leaders of the Grand Alliance.

  Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan had been designated Chief of Staff to the Supreme Allied Commander – COSSAC – in April 1943, when there was no appointed Supreme Commander, and for the remainder of the year he and his Anglo-American staff were responsible for the outline planning for OVERLORD. He wrote in his initial report of 15 July: ‘An operation of the magnitude of Operation OVERLORD has never previously been attempted in history. It is fraught with hazards, both in nature and magnitude, which do not obtain in any other theatre of the present world war. Unless these hazards are squarely faced and adequately overcome, the operation cannot succeed. There is no reason why they should not be overcome, provided the energies of all concerned are bent to the problem.’16

  The COSSAC staff’s crippling handicap was that without the authority of a Supreme Commander they were compelled to carry out their task within limitations laid down by the Chiefs of Staff. Morgan was instructed to plan an operation, with a specified and quite inadequate weight of resources, that would put only three divisions ashore in the first landings in France. OVERLORD, even more than any ordinary operation of war, demanded a commander who could decide what forces were necessary for its execution, and then insist that these were provided. It was not until the end of the year that the commanders were appointed; only then was sufficient authority brought to bear upon this issue to enable demands for extra men and ships to be made, and met.

  Yet within the limitations of their brief, Morgan and his staff achieved a great deal. They drew upon the fruits of aerial reconnaissance and a canvass of Britain for pre-war holiday photographs of every yard of the coast line of France. The limiting factors for an invasion site were the radius of air cover (effectively the range of a Spitfire, 150 miles); the limits of beach capacity (it was scarcely possible to unload any army beneath steep cliffs); the length of the sea crossing; and the strength of the German defences. For the first three the Pas de Calais, opposite Dover, offered the most obvious advantages. To the end some soldiers, including General Patton, favoured the Pas de Calais as the shortest route to the heart of Germany. Yet Morgan and the Chiefs of Staff easily rejected this choice because of the strength of the German defences. Eyes swung west, towards the broad beaches of Brittany, the Cotentin, Normandy. Brittany lay too far away, beyond the reach of dominant air cover. The Cotentin offered the Germans too simple an opportunity to bottle up the invaders within the peninsula. Very early on, in the spring of 1943, decisive attention concentrated upon the beaches, woods and undulating fields of Normandy. ‘The Cotentin peninsula and the hinterland behind the Caen beaches are on the whole unsuitable for the use of large armoured forces, coming particularly to the marshy river valleys near the coast and the steep hills and narrow valleys in the Normandy highlands,’ reported Morgan. ‘The area N, NW and SE of Caen is good tank country, and in this area the enemy is likely to make best use of his panzer divisions.’17

  Throughout the spring and summer, a constant succession of meetings took place at Norfolk House, COSSAC headquarters in St James’s Square. Most were attended by around 40 British and American officers of colonel’s rank and above, working painstakingly through every aspect of the invasion. Despite disparaging comments made later by Montgomery and his staff about COSSAC’s achievements, the contemporary minutes and memoranda are eloquent testimony to the remarkable range of difficulties they isolated and discussed. ‘The crux of the operation,’ wrote Morgan, ‘is . . . likely to be our ability to drive off the German reserves rather than the initial breaking of the coastal crust.’18 The order of Allied priorities must be Caen, Bayeux and the road to St Lô, followed by the road to Falaise and the port of Cherbourg. There was a danger that if Allied assault divisions pursued overly ambitious objectives inland on D-Day, they would be caught in vulnerable and over-extended positions by the inevitable German counter-attack. COSSAC identified the immense problem of beach exits – the difficulty of pushing vehicles rapidly inland from the landing craft. There were endless staff war games, such as Exercises JANTZEN and HARLEQUIN, testing possible Allied and German movements around the Norman beaches. The planners endured moments of despair. In August, aerial photographs revealed massive German flooding of river areas around Caen, which caused the Operations Division to minute: ‘The full implications of this have not yet been assessed, but it is quite possible that it will finally “kill” OVERLORD.’19

  It did not of course do so, and a few days later the staff were considering and rejecting the possibility of a feint invasion: ‘The feint will be over by D-Day and it will be clear that it was only a feint and the threat to the Pas de Calais will have disappeared, and the enemy may move his reserves. If we are to maintain our threat, we must dispense with the feint. If we are to have the feint, we must dispense with the threat.’20 Here was the germ of FORTITUDE, the brilliant Allied deception operation which would keep the German Fifteenth Army locked in the Pas de Calais deep into July 1944.

  While the planners studied beach gradients and the complexities of the French railway system, Roosevelt and Churchill considered leaders. Both Marshall and Brooke were disappointed in their passionate hopes of the Supreme Command, Marshall because he was indispensable in Washington, Brooke because he was British. On 7 December, Roosevelt was met at Tunis airport by General Dwight Eisenhower. As soon as the two men were side by side in the back of a staff car, the President told him simply: ‘Well, Ike, you are going to command Overlord.’ Eisenhower, a 54-year-old Kansan who had risen from colonel to general in three years and who had scarcely heard a shot fired upon a battlefield, was to arouse the scorn of many more brilliant soldiers in the years that followed: ‘Just a coordinator, a good mixer, a champion of inter-Allied cooperation, and in those respects few can hold a candle to him,’ wrote Brooke. ‘But is that enough? Or can we not find all the qualities of a Commander in one man?’21

  Eisenhower was sensitive to the well-founded charge that he was no battlefield commander: ‘It wearies me to be thought of as timid, when I’ve had to do things that were so risky as to be almost crazy.’22 But history has thus far remained confident that whatever his shortcomings as a general in the field, he could not have been matched as Supreme Commander. In 1944–45, he revealed a greatness of spirit that escaped Montgomery, perhaps every British general of the Second World War with the exception of Slim. The shortcomings of the Allied high command in north-west Europe in 1944 have provoked close critical study. Most writ
ers have chosen to consider the successes and failures of Eisenhower and his lieutenants in isolation;23 they have been reluctant to compare them with the collapse of so many other military alliances in other ages, or to reflect upon the vast weight of forces assembled in north-west Europe, which rendered meaningless any comparison with the command methods of Marlborough and Wellington, even those of Grant and Sherman. The most vivid contrast is that of the Allied SHAEF and the German OKW. Alongside the command structure of their enemies, that of the Allied forces was a masterpiece of reason and understanding. Eisenhower understood that in some respects his authority was that of a constitutional monarch: the power that he held was less important than the fact that his possession denied it to others. Eisenhower lacked greatness as a soldier, and tolerated a remarkable number of knaves and mischief-makers in his court at SHAEF. But his behaviour at moments of Anglo-American tension, his extraordinary generosity of spirit to his difficult subordinates, proved his greatness as Supreme Commander. His failures were of omission, seldom of commission. It remains impossible to conceive of any other Allied soldier matching his achievement.

  The Americans were irked by the appointment of Englishmen to all three subordinate commands for OVERLORD – Sir Bernard Montgomery on land, Sir Bertram Ramsay at sea, Sir Trafford Leigh-Mallory for air. Yet another Englishman, Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder, would serve as Deputy Supreme Commander, a recognition of the critical importance of the air forces to the invasion. Eisenhower quickly realized that his command difficulties with OVERLORD would be much greater than those of TORCH not merely because of the scale of the Normandy invasion, but because in North Africa ‘we were then engaged in desperate battling and everybody could see the sense of and the necessity for complete unification. The answer also lies partially in the fact that those three men [his deputies in the Mediterranean] were of the broadest possible calibre, while two of my present commanders, although extremely able, are somewhat ritualistic in outlook and require a great deal more of inoculation.’24 He referred to Ramsay and Leigh-Mallory; but he had also wanted Alexander instead of Montgomery as ground commander.

  This was the final occasion of the war on which British officers achieved such a measure of authority over Americans, and Americans bowed to British experience and allegedly greater military wisdom. This was ironic, for the invasion was preeminently an American design, reflecting an American willingness to confront the enemy head-on in a collision which Britain’s leaders had sought for so long to defer. But for the British people far more than for the Americans, the invasion represented a rebirth, a return, a reversal of all the humiliations and defeats that they had endured since 1939. Here, at last, the British army could resume that which it had so disastrously abandoned at Dunkirk: the battle to defeat a major German army in north-west Europe.

  2 » PREPARATIONS

  Commanders

  General Omar Bradley, Commander designate of the American First Army in north-west Europe, landed in Britain to take up his appointment on a bleak autumn morning in September 1943. Like most Americans, he did not find his spirits exalted by the renewed encounter at a northern airfield with weary, seedy, rationed, wartime Britain: ‘The waitress, a stocky Scottish girl with a heavy brogue, offered me a choice of two entrées – neither of which I understood. “Let me have the second,” I replied nonchalantly. She returned with stewed tomatoes. The first choice had been boiled fish. Prestwick taught me to confine my breakfast thereafter to the US army mess.’1 A steady, careful, thoughtful Missourian, like most American professional soldiers Bradley came from modest origins. His father died when he was 14, leaving his mother, a seamstress, to bring him up. He himself worked in a railway workshop until he was able to gain a place at West Point. He served as a soldier for 32 years before seeing action for the first time as a corps commander in Tunisia. Now, just eight months later, he was to bear direct responsibility for the American army’s greatest operation of the war thus far. He was 50 years old. If he lacked Patton’s driving force and flamboyance, he had proved himself a commander of exceptional stability and discretion, whom men liked and immediately trusted. Bradley could ‘read’ a battle.

  He had been plucked from Sicily to Washington for a briefing about his new appointment, seeing Mrs Bradley for the last time before VE Day in her modest temporary home at the Thayer Hotel in West Point. He waited a week for an appointment with General Marshall, at last finding himself squeezed in during the Chief of Staff’s journey to Omaha, Nebraska, for an American Legion convention. The President met him, and talked of his fear that the Germans might develop their atomic bomb in time to influence the invasion. Then Bradley flew to Britain, and travelled to London to meet the COSSAC staff and to be briefed about the progress of planning. One morning he walked through Hyde Park and stood amongst the crowd at Speaker’s Corner to listen to a soapbox orator bellowing his enthusiasm for the ‘Second Front Now’, a catchphrase of wartime Britain so familiar that it had become a music-hall joke. ‘I thought of how little comprehension he had of what the “Second Front” entailed,’ wrote Bradley, ‘of the labors that would be required to mount it,’2 Then he drove to his new headquarters at Bristol to meet the staff with whom he must prepare the American invasion force.

  Montgomery arrived in England on 2 January, and immediately began to whip up a whirlwind. He had learned of his own appointment only 10 days earlier, following a protracted period of apprehension that he might be passed over in favour of Alexander, Churchill’s favourite general. Having spent the night at Claridge’s, at 9.00 a.m. the following morning he attended a briefing at his new headquarters, St Paul’s School in Hammersmith, where he had once been a pupil. He heard the COSSAC staff outline their plan. Forearmed by a discussion with Eisenhower in Algiers and a glimpse of Churchill’s copy in Tunisia a few days earlier, Montgomery found little difficulty in taking the floor when the briefers had finished and demolishing their points one by one in a 20-minute ‘Monty special’. Like Eisenhower and Bedell Smith, he had been immediately convinced that the front was too narrow, the assault lacking in power and depth. He sent the COSSAC staff back to their offices to consider the implications of a far wider assault, perhaps reaching from Dieppe to Brittany. At the second day’s session, he accepted the naval arguments against landing west of the Cotentin, but continued to insist upon a line reaching at least as far north as what became Utah beach. On the third day, he crushed formal protests from senior British and American COSSAC officers who insisted that what he wanted could not be done with the resources. The resources must be found, he declared flatly, or another commander appointed to carry out the invasion.

  It was a masterly performance – Montgomery at his very best in clarity of purpose and ruthless simplicity. After months of havering among staff officers fatally hampered by lack of authority, he had sketched the design for a feasible operation of war, and begun to exercise his own immense strength of will to ensure that the resources would be found to land five divisions and secure a beachhead large enough to provide fighting room for the Allied armies. He ignored the sensibilities of the existing staff of 21st Army Group, his command for the invasion, by replacing them wholesale with his own tried and tested officers from Eighth Army – De Guingand, Williams, Belchem, Richardson and others. One of their first horrified discoveries was that the RAF had begun intensive reconnaisance of the Normandy area. The airmen were hastily persuaded to widen their operations, giving special emphasis to the Pas de Calais.

  It was characteristic of Montgomery that, having achieved so much so quickly, having made a forceful and vital initial contribution to OVERLORD, he should also seek to write into history his claim that the new plan was entirely his vision and his conception. In reality, most of the staff in England had been conscious for months of the need to strengthen the attack, but lacked the authority to insist upon it. Eisenhower himself immediately grasped the problem, and had some discussion of it with Montgomery. But throughout his military career, a worm of self-destruction in th
e austere, awkward little man in the beret caused him to disparage the contribution of his peers, shamelessly to seize the credit for the achievements of others, and rewrite the history of his own battlefield planning to conform with the reality of what took place. These were weaknesses which would come close to destroying him, for they gained him few friends. His staff and subordinates admired and were fascinated by him; few found it possible to like him. ‘We never lost confidence in him,’ said one, talking of the Normandy period, ‘but we would very often say: “Oh Christ, what’s the little bugger doing now?” ’3 The support of one man, the CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, had carried Montgomery first to the army command in which he gained fame in the desert, and then to the principal British role in OVERLORD. Without Brooke, it is unlikely that Montgomery would ever have gained the chance to display his qualities in the highest commands.

  Montgomery’s self-esteem, at its most conspicuous in his dealings with Americans, rested upon his faith in himself as a supreme professional, a monkish student of war who understood the conduct of military operations in a way that escaped less dedicated commanders, such as Alexander and Eisenhower, who did not aspire to his summits of military intellectualism. He would never have found himself in the headmaster’s chair at St Paul’s in January 1944 had there not been much substance in his claims. In France in 1940, in England until 1942, in the Mediterranean in the 17 months that followed, he had proved himself a consummate trainer and motivator of troops, superb in his choice of subordinate staff and his organization of battles. He commanded immense respect from those who served under him for his willingness to listen to them, his directness and loyalty. Many senior officers in his armies went through the war quite unaware of the dark side of Montgomery’s character, the conceit and moments of pettiness, the indifference to truth where it reflected upon himself, the capacity for malice. And perhaps these very vices contributed to Montgomery a quality lacking in many brave and famous British generals – the iron will to prevail. Wavell was an example of an officer much beloved in the British army, of whom it has been said by his best biographer4 that he possessed the qualities for greatness in almost every sphere of human endeavour save that of high command in war. Alexander was a commander in the tradition of great Anglo-Irish military gentlemen – he lacked the intellect, the ruthless driving force that enables a general to dominate the battlefield. The very qualities that made so many German commanders in the Second World War such unpleasant personalities were also of immense value to them in battle: relentless clarity of purpose, the absolute will to win. For all Montgomery’s caution in battle, the passion for ‘tidiness’ that more than once denied him all-embracing victories, this essentially cold, insensitive man was devoted to winning. The outstanding recent American historian of the campaign in north-west Europe has written: ‘There is every reason to believe in retrospect, as Brooke believed then, that Montgomery not only surpassed Alexander as an operational commander, but was altogether Britain’s ablest general of the war.’5