The American War Department could not claim ignorance of the enemy’s developments in the field of gunnery. As early as May 1942, Major Jarrett of US Army Ordnance shipped a captured 88 mm gun across the Atlantic with a report emphasizing its potency. There were a variety of causes for the American failure to pursue the improvement of the Sherman at once. The designers were pinning most of their hopes upon early production of an entirely new replacement tank. Enormous effort was wasted on a new model, named the T20, whose development spanned three years and seven pilots, but of which only 120 reached the battlefield at the end of the war. General Electric were labouring on a strange white elephant designated the T23. Colonel Ross wrote that ‘there can be no excuse for the abysmal ignorance of tank tactics generally and tank operations in Europe in particular which prompted this half-hearted attempt to design a worthy successor to the Sherman when the simple answer was to design a better gun, something infinitely easier than a tank.’11 There was undoubtedly chauvinistic resistance in the US to copying either the German 88 mm or, more plausibly, the British 17-pounder. Since the first days of the war, tank design also suffered from the misconceptions of General Lesley McNair, the principal architect of the US army in the Second World War. McNair believed that armoured divisions would chiefly be employed for exploitation and pursuit, and that tanks would seldom be called upon to fight other tanks. He fell victim to the same fallacies that underlay the creation of the battle-cruiser by the admirals of an earlier generation, sacrificing armour to speed only to discover that mere pace in battle is almost meaningless, unless matched by survivability.
Above all, there was a belief at the top of the American armed forces that the Allied armies possessed such a vast numerical superiority of tanks that some technical inferiority was acceptable. Yet when a Sherman tank in Normandy, or even a platoon or battalion of Shermans, found itself confronted by enemy tanks whose armour their guns could not penetrate, numerical advantage seemed to mean little. The apprehension and caution of tank crews were well founded. They knew that if they were hit, they almost certainly burned. If they burned, each crew member had only a 50 per cent statistical prospect of survival. Bradley wrote: ‘This willingness to expend Shermans offered little comfort to the crews who were forced to expend themselves as well.’12
We all thought that our tanks were deficient [wrote a British tank officer], and I believe that this had a highly adverse effect on morale. In the end we all became ‘canny’, and would obey orders only to the extent that there appeared a reasonable expectation of successfully carrying them out. There was thus a sort of creeping paralysis in the armoured units; because of the pervading fear of 88s, Panthers, Tigers and Panzerfausts, initiative was lost and squadron commanders tended to go to ground at the first sign of any serious opposition and call up an artillery ‘stonk’. With any luck, as the day wore on, the battle died down and that was at least another day got through.
If the technical detail above seems laboured in a campaign narrative, it has been pursued because no single Allied failure had more important consequences on the European battlefield than the lack of tanks with adequate punch and protection. No weapon, above all no tank, is good or bad in isolation. It must be judged against the enemy weapons which it is expected to fight. Sufficient examples have been given elsewhere in these pages of encounters between German and Allied tanks in which it was not uncommon for the panzer to destroy four, five or even more Shermans before being knocked out itself. The Allies’ failure to make forceful judgements about the need to match each new generation of German tanks and the blindness of the General Staffs to the need for bigger tank guns, cost them dearly on the battlefield. Even huge losses of Shermans could be made good. But the knowledge of their own tanks’ weakness had a serious effect upon the confidence and aggressiveness of Allied units wherever armour met armour.
The Panzer VI, or Tiger, was the most feared German tank in Normandy, almost impenetrable by frontal Allied tank gunfire, and packing a devastating punch with its 88 mm KwK 36 gun. Muzzle velocity in all guns is chiefly a function of barrel length, and Allied troops were always shocked by their first encounters with the Tiger’s gun, ‘as long as a telegraph pole’, as so many men reported. Its 20-pound shell could penetrate 120 mm of armour at 100 yards, 112 mm at 500 yards, 102 mm at 1,000 yards. The Tiger itself carried 100 mm of frontal armour, 80 mm of side armour, weighed 54 tons and had a maximum speed of 23 mph. It was normally employed in independent battalions allocated to German corps or divisions for specific operational purposes. Its principal shortcomings were clumsiness of movement and lack of mechanical reliability.
Throughout the war, the British authorities were at pains to stifle any public debate about the shortcomings of their tanks, although these were well known throughout the British army. The Labour MP Richard Stokes, who had himself fought gallantly in the First World War, was a thorn in the government’s flesh on the issue of tank design, as he was also about strategic bombing, the ‘unconditional surrender’ doctrine, and other embarrassing military matters. Stokes made himself intimately acquainted with every detail of British and German tank performance – thickness of armour, relative muzzle velocities and so on. He became the scourge of the government benches by rehearsing these unwelcome facts at every opportunity. On 30 March 1944, he requested that a Churchill and a captured Tiger tank should be brought to the House of Commons for members to judge for themselves the fighting power of each. The Prime Minister replied:
No sir. I think the trouble and expense involved, though not very great, is still more than is justified to satisfy the spiteful curiosity of my Honourable friend.13
Stokes was aided and abetted by a handful of like-minded spirits. On 20 July 1944, Mr Ellis-Smith asked the Prime Minister for details of the relative performance of British and German tanks. Mr Churchill replied:
Before the House rises I shall hope to give a solid report upon the performances of British tanks in the various theatres of war. For the present I rest on my statement of 16 March, as follows: ‘The next time that the British Army takes the field in country suitable for the use of armour, they will be found to be equipped in a manner at least equal to the forces of any other country in the world.’
On 25 July 1944, Stokes asked the Secretary of State for War, ‘whether he will assure this house that our troops in Normandy are equipped with tanks at least the equal of both the German Tiger and Panther in armour and armament?’ As in almost every debate in which this issue was raised, P. J. Grigg dismissed Stokes with the assurance that public discussion of this issue was not in the public interest. The backbencher denounced ‘the most complete humbug with which this matter is treated’. On 2 August 1944, Stokes yet again savaged the government about the shortcomings of British tanks: ‘Relatively speaking, today, we are just as far behind the Germans as we were in 1940. I submit that this is a disgraceful state of affairs.’ Another MP, Rear-Admiral Beamish, leapt to the government’s defence: ‘The Honourable member has spent his whole time in doing everything he can to lower the prestige of the British army.’ Stokes rejoined: ‘My criticisms have been based upon irrefutable facts.’ Hansard recorded the laughter of the House. ‘It is all very well for honourable members to laugh,’ said Stokes, ‘but these men are dying.’ He quoted a letter that he had received from a Churchill tank crewman who suggested that the Secretary of State for War should go out and fight ‘with one of these ruddy things’. The Speaker intervened to reproach Stokes for his language: ‘I have heard bad language from him three times.’ Stokes declared that he was merely quoting the direct speech of others, from the battlefield. It was self-evident that his information, and his report on the sentiment of tank crews, were entirely well founded. But he remained a prophet without honour. The government lied systematically, until the very end of the war, about the Allies’ tragic failure to produce tanks capable of matching those of the Germans.
Colonel Campbell Clarke, perhaps the foremost British ordnance expert of the war, origi
nator of the 25-pounder and the entire range of successful anti-tank guns, wrote early in 1945:
We here in Britain have some time ago reached the stage where military weapons have developed somewhat beyond the educational capacity of the average soldier to appreciate their functional use; still more so that of the General Staff officer to direct their future lines of development for war. The inevitable consequence has been, and will increasingly be, tactical stagnation and ‘surprise’ by an enemy who is prepared to plan new methods for their use in conjunction with a first-hand knowledge of technical possibilities and limitations.14
Any armoured officer fighting in north-west Europe in 1944 would have echoed his sentiments.
7 » THE BATTLEFIELD
From the beachhead to the front
By the last days of June, the battle for Normandy had taken on the character that it was to retain for the two months that followed: a struggle involving more than 1,000,000 men pitted against each other on a front of scarcely 100 miles. By August, the numbers would be over 2,000,000. Each morning, while in the fighting areas armoured units ground forward from their night harbours and headquarters staffs plotted the hopeful course of the next battle, thousands of infantrymen lay in their foxholes scratching laconic letters home, overshadowed by a consciousness both of the censor’s eye and of the desultory shell and mortar fire around them. ‘Dear Mum,’ wrote Private Sid Verrier of the 2nd Ox & Bucks on 27 June:
I’m still feeling rather dirty after living the way I have done since D-Day and I will be very glad to have a good bath, change into civvies and go for a nice walk round the parks at home. Better than a walk would be a couple of days sleep. Still I’m not grumbling, life is too sweet . . .1
On the beaches, new columns of men waded ashore from their landing craft, each one awed by the feeling that he was conducting his own personal invasion, no matter how many others had gone before. Bradley, as he came ashore at Omaha on the second day, was puzzled by the sight of a broken tennis racquet and a sodden boxing glove drifting side by side amid the debris in the surf. Ceaseless columns of vehicles bumped across the piers and out of the LCTs beached on the sand, to follow the outstretched gauntlet of a military policeman towards some rendezvous inland. When Trooper Stephen Dyson drove his tank up Juno beach in the last days of June, he jumped down from the hull and filled a matchbox with French sand the moment that the Churchill had cleared the LCT. His squadron harboured alongside tanks of 11th Armoured Division, veterans of some weeks’ experience. They chatted together. The 11th Armoured men derided their late appearance on the battlefield. ‘They told us that the Germans were very, very good.’
Every man who approached the French coast that summer was amazed by the panorama of shipping that met his eye, the Rhino ferries shuttling out to the transports with cargoes of dejected German prisoners, the huge caissons and heavily gunned piers of the Mulberry harbours, whose creation had done so much to convince doubters, such as the Prime Minister, that OVERLORD was feasible. In fact, there will always be grave doubt as to whether the Mulberries justified the enormous cost and effort that was put into them. Their scale fascinated and impressed contemporary servicemen and the first generation of post-war historians, but recent researchers2 have focused much more closely upon the American achievement of unloading stores at a greater rate directly across the beaches than had been managed across the Mulberry before the American harbour was wrecked in the ‘great storm’ of 19–21 June. The storm itself, treated by some chroniclers as a veritable cataclysm, has also been the subject of modern dispute. At no time, it has been pointed out, did the winds exceed force six, a moderate blow by nautical standards. The inability of the Mulberries to withstand it – for the British harbour was also severely damaged – seems to reflect more upon the strength of the structures rather than upon the nature of the gales. There was no doubt of the impact of the storm upon the Allied unloading programme, or of its serious effect upon operations at the front. But the surprise of the Allied command about the consequences of the storm was caused chiefly by their expectation that the huge Mulberry programme should have been capable of overcoming any problems of delay. It is likely that Allied unloading operations could have been shielded from the sea just as effectively merely by sinking the screen of blockships and creating a network of piers, rather than by devoting the labour of 45,000 men to building the Mulberries.3 Some of the same doubts apply to another celebrated innovation, PLUTO – PipeLine Under The Ocean – a device for pumping petrol direct from England to the armies in France. It was 41 days before PLUTO was in position. A few weeks later its submerged couplings gave way and a new line had to be laid from Dungeness to Boulogne. This began to yield 700 tons of fuel a day only in January 1945.4
The slow progress inland resulted in a dramatic surplus of vehicles ashore in the first weeks after D-Day – in the first 11 days 81,000 were landed for the Americans alone. Every GI required 30 pounds of supplies per day to support him in action, compared with 20 pounds per British soldier, and a German quota that sometimes fell to four pounds. The Allied armies demanded 26,000 tons of stores a day to sustain them in action. By 25 July, there were 1,450,000 men ashore – 812,000 American, 640,000 British and Canadian. Amid this vast movement of humanity, some simply disappeared into the administrative jungle. General Gerow of the US V Corps was compelled to make a personal visit to England to locate one unit under his command which he was persistently assured was with his corps in Normandy.
Inland from the beaches, newly arriving men gaped at the massive dumps of fuel, ammunition, supplies, the parked ranks of brand-new tanks, vehicles, guns that crowded every field. Uncamouflaged, their safety was a spectacular tribute to the Allies’ absolute command of the air. As for so many others, the first impression of Major Charles Richardson of the 6th KOSB was astonishment that the beachhead was so well organized, and bewilderment about where to find a field in which to put anything. Tank tracks scarred the countryside in all directions. Unit signposts and field telephone cables were nailed to every tree by the roadside, or draped along branches and ditches. Patton, when he came, was delighted by the droll spectacle of telephone wires suspended between the crucifixes at every crossroads. The crashed aircraft that lay everywhere reminded him of ‘dead birds partly eaten by beetles’.5 Soldiers were puzzled, sometimes angered, by the sight of French civilians tending their fields or going about their business with their little carts, apparently indifferent to the claims of their liberators to gratitude. One morning a few days after the landing, Corporal Charles Baldwin of the Westminster Dragoons was sent back to the beaches to bring forward a draft of replacements for his squadron:
Just after leaving Crepon by jeep, in a field on my right I noticed some dead British infantry. There were two civilians there and I pulled up. Another jeep containing a military police lance-corporal pulled up behind me. We walked towards the two men and it became apparent that they had been looting the bodies. Two had had their boots removed. The civilians started to speak quickly in French. But the military policeman simply said: ‘Bloody bastards’ and shot them with his sten gun.6
Private John Price found most of the French sullen, and was struck by the predominance of the elderly – the young or middle-aged appeared to have fled. But he was touched when a kindly old clockmaker asked for a penny, and worked it into a ring for him. Many of the British, after years of privation at home, were disgusted by the abundance of food in the Norman villages. ‘The civilians seemed to have eaten well,’ said Alfred Lee of the Middlesex Regiment. ‘We saw no skinny ones.’7 There were persistent rumours throughout the beachhead of Fifth Column activities by local Frenchmen spying for the Germans, and these multiplied mistrust. ‘We almost had the feeling that these people had not been hostile to the Germans,’ John Hein of the US 1st Division said wonderingly.8 A captured German of 12th SS Panzer wrote cynically in his diary: ‘As we are marched through the town towards the port, the French insult us, shake their fists and make throat-cutting gestures. This
does not really shock us. We are used to this sort of thing from the French. If it was the other way around, they would be threatening the Tommies . . .’9 In the British sector, it was found necessary to mount pipeline patrols to prevent civilians from inserting wooden plugs at intervals along them in order to drain off fuel supplies for themselves. Most Normans treated the fighting armies with impartial disdain or occasional kindness. Helmut Gunther of 17th SS Panzergrenadiers once asked an elderly woman why she gave his men cream, and she answered gravely: ‘Because I have a grandson who is a prisoner in Germany, and I hope that the people there are doing the same for him.’10 It was not remarkable that so many French families were shocked and appalled by the cost of liberation to their own homes, which if anything were looted more thoroughly by the Allied than the German armies. ‘We have been reproached,’ wrote a local writer bitterly a few months later, ‘at least by those who regard the battle of Normandy as a military tattoo, for failing to throw ourselves on the necks of our liberators. Those people have lost sight of the Stations of the Cross that we have passed since 6 June.’11 When it began to rain early in July, the locals told the soldiers that there had not been a summer like it for 50 years. But for this, at least, they did not seek to blame the Allies. They shrugged: ‘C’est la guerre.’
A few overworked Norman prostitutes were already plying their trade. One day General Bradley was astonished to notice a village near Isigny with ‘Off Limits’ signs posted outside it, and drove in with General ‘Pete’ Quesada of IXth Tactical Air Command. He found a house marked ‘Prophylactic Station’, containing three sleeping GIs, none of whom recognized their army commander when he awakened them. He inquired how much business they were doing. The medic shrugged. ‘Well, yesterday there was just the two for the MPs and one for me and that was it.’ Characteristically, Bradley moved on without inflicting the trauma of his identity upon them.12
Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Page 27