Two days before that meeting, on Saturday 20 May 1944, Admiral Cunningham had been driving from a football match to his country home in Bishop’s Waltham near Southampton in Hampshire when he knocked a postman off his bicycle on the Tolworth roundabout; the victim died two days later. Cunningham employed characteristically nautical terms to describe to his journal how the man had ‘turned sharp across my bows and I caught him on the back wheel. The car turned 180 degrees and charged up on to the pavement stern first…the Bentley nearly capsized.’67 The coroner’s verdict of accidental death at the inquest, the admiral recorded, was ‘Very satisfactory for me but a tragedy for the poor widow.’ Brooke and Cunningham now had something somewhat macabre in common, right down to the make of car they had both been driving. (The two men also died within five days of one another in June 1963, Cunningham in the back of a taxi taking him from the Athenæum Club to Waterloo Station.)
The human cost of the Italian campaign was brought home heavily to George Marshall when he arrived at his office on the morning of Tuesday 30 May, to find a personal radio message from Mark Clark informing him that Allen Brown, his wife Katherine’s twenty-seven-year-old son, had been killed in action the previous day near Compoleone, south of Rome. Having no children of his own, Marshall had been a devoted stepfather, and he was utterly devastated. Brown had enlisted as a private and had progressed on his own merits to become a second lieutenant in the 1st Armored Division, the rank he held when he opened his tank turret to direct a group of Italian refugees down a road towards safety, just as a German sniper struck. Only the day before, the Marshalls had received a letter from him, looking forward confidently to the end of the war.
‘Allen was the apple of his eye,’ Frank McCarthy recalled of his boss, who as well as grieving with Katherine talked to friends who had also lost sons in the conflict, including Lord Halifax and Harry Hopkins.68 Their only possible consolation was that within a week the beginning of the liberation of western Europe would be at hand. ‘This is a distressing message to send,’ Marshall wrote, before giving the circumstances of Allen’s death to his widow Margaret.69 The couple had a two-year-old son. Allen Tupper Brown was buried in the beautifully kept Sicily–Rome American Cemetery and Memorial just outside the town of Nettuno, 38 miles south of Rome. To have lost his beloved stepson was painful enough for George Marshall, but to have lost him to a campaign that he had never believed would bring victory significantly closer must have made it more terrible still.
18
D-Day and Dragoon: ‘This world and then the fireworks!’ May–August 1944
A democracy cannot fight a Seven Years’ War.
General George C. Marshall, 19571
‘There have been recently disquieting signs of a possible divergence of policy between ourselves and the Russians in regard to the Balkan countries and in particular Greece,’ Churchill wrote to Roosevelt on 31 May 1944. ‘We therefore suggested to the Soviet Ambassador here that we should agree between ourselves as a practical matter that the Soviet government would take the lead in Roumanian affairs, and ourselves in Greece. I hope that you would give this proposal your blessing. We do not, of course, wish to carve up the Balkans into spheres of influence, and in agreeing to such an agreement we should make it clear that it applied only to wartime conditions.’2 The last sentence was superfluous: of course such an agreement would be a carve-up and equally obviously it would survive into the post-war world.
As might have been expected, Roosevelt replied negatively, saying that such a deal would only ‘result in the persistence of difficulties between’ Britain and the Soviets and instead they should ‘establish consultative machinery and restrain the tendency towards the development of exclusive spheres’. The President was not about to challenge the Red Army in eastern Europe. Before the development of the atomic bomb–the threat of the use of which was anyway utterly unthinkable against their courageous ally–there was nothing much the Western Allies could do about the Red Army, which mobilized twenty-five million troops during the Great Patriotic War. In the feverish ‘Red Scare’ of the early Cold War, Roosevelt’s supposedly appeasing policy towards the USSR was made much of politically by the Republican right and Senator Joseph McCarthy, but there was no genuine alternative, and indubitably not one that would have been acceptable to domestic political opinion in the West.
Churchill shared Roosevelt’s belief that it was possible to win the friendship of Stalin, and that it was worth something once gained. Yet on 5 June 1944 the Yugoslavian Communist statesman Milovan Djilas met a ‘lively, almost restless’ Stalin at his dacha outside Moscow. Stalin left Djilas–and, through him, the Yugoslavian partisan leader Marshal Tito–in absolutely no doubt about the true level of trust and warmth he felt for his Western Allies. ‘Perhaps you think that just because we are allies of the English we have forgotten who they are and who Churchill is?’ Stalin asked. ‘There’s nothing they like better than to trick their allies…And Churchill? Churchill is the kind of man who will pick your pocket of a kopeck, if you didn’t watch him. Yes, pick your pocket of a kopeck! By God, pick your pocket of a kopeck! And Roosevelt? Roosevelt is not like that. He dips in his hand only for bigger coins. But Churchill? Churchill–will do it for a kopeck.’3 Stalin then ridiculed Overlord, predicting that it would all be called off if there was fog in the English Channel. ‘Maybe they’ll meet with some Germans!’ he continued, accusing the Allies of cowardice.
Yet, far from cowardly, British strategy had been like that of the matador in a bullfight, and now was the moment for the sword to be thrust between the bull’s shoulderblades. ‘It is very hard to believe that in a few hours the cross Channel invasion starts!’ wrote Brooke on 5 June. ‘I am very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall so very very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing of its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war. I wish to God it were safely over.’ Churchill reacted very differently; after a ‘good lunch and as usual lots of wine’ at Downing Street, Cunningham wrote, ‘PM very worked up about Overlord and really in almost a hysterical state…He really is an incorrigible optimist. I always thought I was unduly so but he easily outstrips me.’4 Perhaps Churchill’s optimism hid a deeper fear, and was primarily adopted to put heart into those around him, part of the duty of a leader on the eve of so great an undertaking as the Normandy landings.
The Prime Minister was not quite so optimistic at the evening War Cabinet. After extolling Alexander’s ‘brilliant campaign’ to capture Rome–which had finally fallen the day before after nine months–he said of Overlord that the ‘Danger of this operation is very great during the next thirty or forty days.’ Nevertheless he did think that ‘We will get ashore and establish [a] bridgehead.’5 Over Rome, the Secretary for India Leo Amery recorded in his diary that ‘Winston expressed himself very disappointed that Brooke could not assure him that we could overtake and destroy all the retreating Germans.’
Most of the rest of the meeting was spent discussing de Gaulle, who had refused to broadcast to the French people on their liberation unless certain political conditions were met by Eisenhower. ‘I’m nearly at the end of my tether,’ Churchill said, although he accepted that ‘it doesn’t make the slightest difference to the outcome.’ When Eden tried to explain de Gaulle’s objections, the Prime Minister interjected: ‘De Gaulle refuses to participate. It is an odious example of his malice…he has no regard for common causes–I may have to exhibit him in his true light, as a false and puffed up personality.’6 Cunningham summed it all up as: ‘Prima Donna de Gaulle making a nuisance of himself.’
The first time that Major Eisenhower met Harry Butcher, at the home of Butcher’s brother’s landlord in Chevy Chase in 1927, Ike had performed a strange party trick: ‘He stood stiffly erect, slowly fell forward without moving a muscle, but, at the last instant just before it seemed as if he would break his nose on the floor, his strong hands and muscular arms
quickly broke the fall.’ Now, seventeen years later, would he get a bloody nose in Normandy? He feared defeat enough to write a resignation letter to Roosevelt beforehand, which turned up in one of his pockets some time afterwards.
As they went to bed that night, Churchill said to Clementine: ‘Do you realize that by the time you wake up in the morning, twenty thousand men might have been killed?’ The actual figure for D-Day was 4,570 Allied soldiers killed, comprising 2,500 Americans, 1,641 Britons, 359 Canadians, 37 Norwegians, 19 Free French, 12 Australians and 2 New Zealanders. Afterwards, however, the numbers stayed high, and in the thirty-five days after 6 June Allied casualties–that is, killed and wounded–ran at an average of 1,800 per day, as compared to 2,121 per day during the battle of Passchendaele.
It is not known whether Eisenhower on the morning of D-Day got out of bed crying, ‘This world and then the fireworks!’, as Butcher recorded he used to do in the mornings, but he was called early by Admiral Ramsay with good news about the naval side of the landings and shortly after 6.40 a.m. there was more from the RAF’s Trafford Leigh-Mallory about the air situation, with only twenty-one of the 850 American C-47s and eight out of the four hundred British planes missing, and only four gliders unaccounted for. Most ‘Hun’ night-fighters, Leigh-Mallory reported, were over the Pas de Calais and only three had flown over the beaches themselves.7
On 6 June 1944 there were twenty-eight German divisions stationed in south-eastern Europe, twenty-eight in Italy (of which only twenty-three had an effective manpower strength), eighteen in Norway and Denmark, and fifty-nine in France and the Low Countries.8 Some historians quote as low a figure for France and the Low Countries as fifty divisions, with the confusion arising from the classification of some of the divisions as ‘reforming’ and ‘refitting’ at the time of the invasion, including at least half a dozen in the south of France.
Everything is relative, and in the words of the British Official History, ‘in the months preceding Overlord the number of German divisions rose in France and the Low Countries at times when they [also] rose slightly in Italy and South-east Europe’. In January 1944, there were twenty-eight panzer divisions facing the Russians and eight in the rest of Europe, whereas by mid-June these figures had changed to eighteen and fifteen respectively.9 Hitler was thus reinforcing both France and Italy at the expense of his Eastern Front. Yet that does not detract from Brooke’s argument that, if there were no active Italian front, there would have been even more German divisions in France.
Five infantry divisions, three airborne divisions and three armoured brigades landed on and behind the five Normandy beaches on D-Day itself, which were built up to twenty-four divisions by D+30 days and more than thirty divisions by D+60. Within immediate range were six German infantry divisions and one panzer division, but within 200 miles there were a further twelve infantry and two panzer divisions, making twenty-one German divisions in all, many of them high-quality, veteran units.10 D-Day thus needed all the diversions it could possibly get. (It also needed all the ingenuity it could get, but probably not the idea that Admiral King suggested to the Joint Chiefs of Staff for large numbers of American jackrabbits to be swept up, taken over to Normandy and released to bound ahead of the GIs, tripping the wires and letting off the mines and booby-trap grenades. The idea was duly noted in the records.)11
There have been many, such as Albert Wedemeyer, who have argued that Overlord would have been better undertaken in 1943 than 1944. Interviewed by SOOHP, General Handy recalled the time that Wedemeyer told Churchill that it ‘might have shortened the war by a year’:
The Old Man threw a complete conniption fit. But a good case could be made for Al’s thesis. We took the scarcest thing and used it in the most ineffective way. We moved all our troops to Africa and we had to move them all back with the thing that was shortest of all, shipping. Now, if we had concentrated and continued to build up in the UK, you can easily picture we might have been ready a year ahead.12
Yet Handy himself went to Omaha Beach along with Rear-Admiral Cooke, and described it as ‘carnage’. He remembered thirty years later: ‘Well, hell, that was the one place I got close to the war…I tell you, we hung on there by our eyelashes for hours. It was God-awful…it was nip and tuck…Afterwards you lose sight of how close it is if it’s a success.’ He himself was losing sight of the likelihood of success in believing that the invasion could have taken place a year earlier.
‘If you see fighter aircraft over you,’ Eisenhower told his men just before D-Day, ‘they will be ours.’ He was right: Allied planes made 13,688 sorties that day, to the Germans’ 319, but it was not a promise the Supreme Commander could have made his men before 1944. It is true that up to two million slave-labourers had built the Atlantic Wall since 1942, but set against that are the factors that the Germans could have concentrated forces faster against the beachhead in 1943 than in 1944, when bombing had ruined many supply lines; American troops coming to Britain would have had to face the U-boats in 1942 and 1943, when the menace was at its height; without Torch and Husky the Germans might have taken the offensive in the Mediterranean–as Rommel begged Hitler to do–perhaps with Malta falling, the Middle East being overrun, Turkey brought into the war on the Axis side, and Russia left vulnerable through the Black Sea.13 Hundreds of thousands more Germans had been killed on the Eastern Front by 1944 than was so in 1942, and above all, over the question of morale, acute German officers recognized by June 1944 that the war was likely to be lost in a way that they simply did not before the battle of Kursk.
What is certain is that the invasion could not have been delayed much beyond the summer of 1944, for London was coming under devastating nightly attacks from both V-1 flying bombs and V-2 rockets. For all the deliberations of the Government’s special anti-V weapon ‘Crossbow’ Committee, one of the few defences against the V-1s was to fly close to them and tip their wings–an immensely risky and difficult manoeuvre if one was lucky enough to intercept them at all–and the only response to the V-2s was to destroy their very well-camouflaged launching sites, preferably from the ground.
In 1956 Marshall made a terrible admission to Pogue about the lack of proper intelligence before D-Day. ‘Don’t quote this,’ he told his biographer, but ‘We didn’t know we were going to hit such rough country…G-2 let me down every time in everything. They never told me what I needed to know. They didn’t tell me about the hedgerows, and it was not until later, after much bloodshed, that we were able to deal with them.’14 Later in the same interview, after Marshall had said, ‘We had to pay in blood for our lack of knowledge,’ he repeated: ‘Don’t print that.’ It is traditionally an invocation, along with ‘Burn this letter,’ that automatically guarantees careful preservation and extensive quotation. The admission that Marshall was not warned about the bocages–the deep, thick, ancient Norman hedgerows that gave the German defenders such fine defensive cover–is a serious one, and a significant failure of US Military Intelligence (G-2). Brooke knew all about them because he had retreated over precisely that ground to evacuate from Cherbourg in June 1940, but his warnings were largely disregarded as yet another excuse for not invading.
The day after D-Day, Alexander reported that if he were left with his twenty-seven divisions in Italy, and not lose any to Anvil, he could break through the Apennines into the Po Valley, take eighteen divisions north of Venice and force the Ljubljana Gap between Italy and northern Yugoslavia. Once there, he stated in his memoirs, ‘the way led to Vienna, an object of great political and psychological value’. This prospect appealed to Churchill and Clark, but not to very many others. Brooke told Churchill that with Alpine topography and winter weather, ‘even on Alex’s optimistic reckoning…we should have three enemies instead of one’.15
Marshall vociferously opposed forcing the Ljubljana Gap, arguing that Eisenhower needed the southern French ports so that he could deploy on a much wider front, and that the Germans would merely withdraw from north Italy to the Alps under Alexander’s attack, wh
ich could then be held with far smaller forces. Alexander forever thereafter believed that his ‘lost’ seven divisions–about which he lamented as much as did the Emperor Augustus for his lost legions of the Teutoburgerwald in ad 9–would have ‘broken the Gothic Line in August, crossed the Po in September, captured Venice and Trieste in October’ and so on. Since they had been withdrawn for the Overlord assault, pursuant to the agreement between Brooke and Marshall, we shall never know what they might have achieved elsewhere, but Anvil could not have been a success without them.
Churchill’s dreams of British Commonwealth forces planting the Union Jack over Schönbrunn and the Hofburg before the Russians arrived in Vienna was ended by Brooke, who knew Marshall’s view of it. There would still be plenty of teeth-gnashing before Churchill relinquished his project, which he clung to with the tenacity he had also shown over the operations in northern Norway, Sumatra and the Andaman Islands. Yet Roosevelt had promised Stalin Operation Anvil at Teheran, and Marshall meant to honour it.
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