by Paul Kennedy
Both the Battle of the Atlantic and the great struggle across the Eastern Front were battles of attrition, grinding on for year after year, swaying backward and forward, with each side pulling in more and more reinforcements, introducing newer weapons, employing the latest intelligence, fighting at the northern and southern fringes but always needing to get control of the central area. Across the early years of 1941 and 1942, these great naval and military struggles for Europe unfolded with extraordinarily heavy losses—though never enough to push any combatant out of the war, as had happened earlier to countries such as Poland, France, Norway, and others. The deeper resources of the great powers made for a larger and longer war. Only in mid- to late 1943, however, did the conclusion become clear: Doenitz’s U-boats could not win in the Atlantic, nor could Manstein’s panzers win in Russia. The defeated German forces, land, air, and naval, would still remain dangerous and would still fight very well, but their days of going forward were over. Gone, too, were any hopes of negotiating some sort of 1918-style compromise peace. The “unconditional surrender” demanded at Casablanca meant just that.
Second, in neither the Atlantic nor the Ostfront campaign did any single wonder weapon transform the course of the fighting. The Battle of the Atlantic was not won particularly by Enigma, nor by the Hedgehog and the homing torpedo/depth charge, nor by miniaturized radar, nor by long-range aircraft and escort carriers, nor by operational research, nor by Liberty-ship construction output, nor by the hunter-killer groups, nor by the Leigh Light, nor by the bombing of the U-boat pens and shipyards. But by the middle of that decisive year of 1943, they all came together to help turn the tide; the historian who overemphasizes any one of these aspects distorts the larger, holistic account. In much the same way, the Great Patriotic War was not won chiefly or overwhelmingly by superior Red Army intelligence, or by increasing aerial supremacy, or by the T-34-85 tanks, or by the PaK units and the minefields and the river-crossing battalions, or by better logistical support, or by better fighting morale. Victory required all these elements, and they needed to be organized. But it took time to assemble the various pieces, just as it takes time to bring together an orchestra and train it to deliver a fine performance.
By 1943, the British Admiralty, and especially its Western Approaches Command, had at last achieved that satisfactory level. By around the same time, perhaps a little later, the Stavka and the forward operating army groups under Zhukov and Vasilevsky had done the same. Given the sheer number of armies, divisions, regiments, air groups, partisan cells, engineer battalions, railway and bridging teams, and behind them transport managers, production planners, and factory leaders, the overall organizational feat of this badly damaged Russian state was simply astounding, and is still not fully recognized in the West even today. By contrast, while the Germans fought extraordinarily well in all theaters of war, added a special racially driven ferocity to their fighting on the Eastern Front, and produced some first-class weapons for that grim campaign, the full and efficient orchestration of all the pieces in the Third Reich’s Ostfeldzug never occurred. Those despised, Jew-ridden, bolshevized, peasant-heavy, and backward Slavs, those fragile serfs of the inept Communist regime, actually managed to organize the way to victory better than the famously efficient Prussians and the fanatical Nazi Supermenschen.
One final thought: it may be many years before historians are allowed to mine the archival sources that will disclose the full story of the middlemen and organizations that contributed to the turning of the tide in the Great Patriotic War. We know how the great land battles in the east unfolded, and we have good biographical details on a figure as eye-catching as Zhukov.68 And we have a better idea nowadays about how Stalin and the Stavka ran the show. But what about the lesser-known contributors to the Soviet victory? Who were the problem solvers in that part of the story, the equivalents to the innumerable players on the Anglo-American side whose tales are so readily accessible? Clearly they existed and made enormous contributions in the three years between Barbarossa and Bagration, creating ever-smoother feedback loops between the top and bottom levels of the Soviet war machine and producing, eventually and after many setbacks, the instruments for the Red Army’s smashing victory. Their achievements are manifest, but their own histories are not yet known to the world.
a The term blitzkrieg gets used, often sloppily, to cover different though related things. Literally, it translates as “lightning war.” As such, it could be applied to many campaigns (that of Frederick the Great; Israel’s 1967 fighting), although the word popularly arose to describe the so-called German way in warfare in 1939–41—fast battleground movements by armored and motorized infantry units to take the enemy’s army off guard, sometimes followed by a pulling back to regroup and then strike again. German tactical airpower (dive-bombers, medium-range bombers) gave it a new touch. It has nothing in common with the London Blitz of 1940–41 (although obviously the Luftwaffe was once again to the fore), which was a lengthy aerial bombing campaign against the capital city.
b Witzig and Otto Skorzeny (whose daring raid captured Mussolini and brought him out of captivity) compete for being the model for the Michael Caine character (a paratroop colonel who fought in the Low Countries, Crete, and Russia) in the celebrated novel and movie The Eagle Has Landed.
c As this chapter unfolds, it will be clear that the standard units of military size—army groups, divisions, brigades, regiments, battalions, et cetera—only help us a small way in understanding the effective power of one protagonist vis-à-vis another in a campaign. American divisions were huge; Soviet divisions were half their size. German divisions on the Eastern Front had shrunk to one-quarter of their size by 1944, but Hitler still insisted on calling them divisions. Tank numbers were similarly confusing; if it took four or five T-34s to knock out a Panther during the 1943 Battle of Kursk, what did raw numbers matter? The same was true in the naval balances, though in a reverse form—British cruisers and destroyers were far better balanced in the North Atlantic than their massive, top-heavy German equivalents, which yawed so much that their crews became seasick.
d It is hard to extricate this word from the German language: the literal meaning is “cauldron battle,” though in practice it was understood to involve an outflanking move, a breakthrough, an encirclement, and, in its highest form, a pincer movement that fully enclosed the enemy’s army and compelled its surrender. The ghosts of the ancient Battle of Cannae, and of the recent Schlieffen Plan, haunted this operational dream.
e Frustrated at Auchinleck’s caution even after receiving so many reinforcements, Churchill sent him off to India. His successor, Gott, was killed unexpectedly in an air crash, and Bernard Montgomery was then placed in charge of the Eighth Army. He himself was almost as cautious as Auchinleck, and his chief achievement hitherto had been his careful management of the retreat of his division toward and through Dunkirk in 1940. After Alamein, however, Montgomery became the popular symbol of the restored glory of British generalship.
f Hence the continuing calls by Libya and Egypt for the British, German, and Italian governments to take steps to have millions of these wartime mines destroyed, since they continue to cause casualties among local civilians and their animals, make oil exploration dangerous, and even deter tourism.
g Ironically, von Rundstedt would be back, as C in C West, during the Normandy battles.
h It was probably the general major of the tank armies, Khlopov, who signed off on the report, though the signature is incomplete. One has the sense that his office was very pleased to use a U.S. “neutral” report to push the blame for all these weaknesses back to the designers and manufacturers.
i I use the term “small warfare,” Kleinkrieg, here in the German navy’s sense of smaller weapons that could hurt or sink far bigger craft. Thus in naval warfare this includes torpedoes, submarines, and mines, all of which could destroy battleships.
CHAPTER FOUR
HOW TO SEIZE AN ENEMY-HELD SHORE
Fair Stood the Win
d for France
When we our sails advance,
Nor now to prove our chance
Longer will tarry.
—MICHAEL DRAYTON (1563–1631), “AGINCOURT”
The Earl of Chatham, with his sword drawn,
Stood waiting for Sir Richard Strachan;
Sir Richard, longing to be at ’em,
Stood waiting for the Earl of Chatham.
—CONTEMPORARY DOGGEREL VERSE ON THE FAILURE OF THE WALCHEREN EXPEDITION, 1809
The special feature of amphibians is that they can and do inhabit two worlds, the sea and the land. Generally they are happier and safer in the watery element, and creatures such as turtles and seals advance onto the shore with increasing vulnerability, though no one would regard a fully grown Nile crocodile as easy prey. The very act of moving from sea to land is full of risk—unless, of course, that step is unopposed and takes place in favorable weather and topographic conditions. In wartime, such circumstances are not often at hand.
This chapter is about the evolution of amphibious warfare during the Second World War until the great Normandy invasion of June 1944. By its very nature, it is not about peaceful and uncontested landings of men from ships to shore, such as William III’s crossing to southern England in 1688, which brought an end to the Stuarts’ reign. The focus here is upon military operations against a shoreline held by defenders determined to frustrate the intended invasion. It covers failed assaults from the sea, but it is essentially a study of how certain organizations found solutions to one of the most difficult challenges facing any army: how to land on an enemy-held shore under counterattack.
In that sense, like the other chapters of this book, it addresses the central question of how to gain the advantage over the enemy and thus contribute to the winning of the conflict. It is intimately linked to three of the other four chapters. The Pacific War of 1941–45 (chapter 5) is about battles in a theater where landing on a distant and often hostile shore was at the heart of strategic success or failure. Thus, while devoted to Allied amphibious warfare in Europe, this chapter cannot be separated from the virtually simultaneous campaigns waged in Guadalcanal, the Gilberts, and the Marianas, because of so many similarities. But it also cannot be divided from those in the first two chapters. In the saga of the West’s defeat of Nazi hegemony of Europe, three successive steps were intended to fit smoothly together, like a tightly glued triangle. The first was control of the Atlantic seas and the defeat of the U-boats, with sea power greatly assisted by airpower; the second was the domination of the skies, with the Allied air forces in the United Kingdom and North Africa reliant upon continuous seaborne munitions, fuel, and parts; and the third was the invasion of the enemy’s shores, with the vulnerable armies protected both by sea and air. The colossal Normandy operation was thus to be the spectacular fusion of maritime, aerial, and land power, the apotheosis of combined arms.
Sea Landings in History
The history of amphibious warfare goes back well before the modern term itself. The massive landing by the Persians at Marathon, the ill-fated Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BCE, Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55 BCE, and some of the Crusades are invoked as examples of assault upon the land from the sea.1
Looking back to those earlier ventures can help to clarify the enduring, historic features of this special form of warfare. It is not about raids upon an enemy’s shore, such as Sir Francis Drake’s attack on Cadiz and other Spanish ports in the 1580s. Those were strikes from the sea, but a permanent lodgement on the beachhead followed by an advance upon the rest of the mainland was not intended. Operations such as the assault upon Cadiz usually had a smaller, more specific purpose, such as throwing the enemy’s intentions into disarray (Drake’s assault was a preemptive disruption of the Armada) or hurting his offensive capacities (like the Zeebrugge Raid of April 1918, where the British planned to block egress by U-boats from the German-occupied port), or were simply persistent, small-scale attacks to stretch out and, it was hoped, wear down the defenders. Royal Marine commando units carried out many of that sort of raid throughout much of the Second World War, compelling Hitler to order the stationing of vast numbers of Wehrmacht troops along Europe’s western shores, from northern Norway to France’s border with Spain. In late December 1941, for example, a commando raid successfully destroyed the German power station, factories, and other installations at Vaagso, halfway up the Norwegian coast, and in February 1942 another famous raid attacked and seized vital radar equipment from the Bruneval station, near Le Havre.
But these were not invasions; at Bruneval, the commandos actually parachuted in, seized the machinery, and left by the sea.2 Some of them had specific utility, such as the acquisition of the radar equipment, or the later midget submarine raids on enemy merchant ships in the Gironde (the “Cockleshell Heroes”). Sometimes, perhaps, the merits were psychological; they certainly were to Churchill, who almost immediately after the fall of France—and well before the Battle of Britain—ordered the Chiefs of Staff to propose “measures for a vigorous, enterprising and ceaseless offensive against the whole German-occupied coastline.”3 Finally, even the smallest raid, whether a success like Vaagso or a failure like Guernsey (July 1940), produced lessons: about training, command and control, land-sea communications, weapons used, vessels used, accuracy of prior intelligence collection, and so on.
It is the lessons of larger and more purposeful amphibious operations that claim attention here. The first was that specialized troops and specialized equipment were needed to carry out a successful invasion against a determined land-based enemy. Sometimes, perhaps, a hastily flung-together unit, if it possessed the element of surprise, could pull off an operational miracle, but when launched against a foe who had prepared its defenses well, such attacks were usually a recipe for disaster. It is therefore not surprising that historians call our attention to two innovations by the army of Philip II, since that service was one of the driving forces behind the “military revolution” of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The first was the creation by Madrid of specially trained troops assigned to their various armadas and experienced in moving from ship to land; the Royal Spanish Marines were born in 1560s operations to recover Malta, and other powers followed by establishing their own such units. The second was the establishment of specific weapons platforms and the implementation of suitable tactics for their success in battle. Thus, in the May 1583 Spanish operation to recover the Azores from an Anglo-French-Portuguese garrison, “special barges were arranged to unload horses and 700 artillery pieces on the beach; special row boats were equipped with small cannons to support the landing boats; special supplies were readied to be unloaded and support the 11,000 men landing force strength.”4 The attackers also practiced deception, a partial force landing on a distant beach and distracting the garrison while two waves of marines got onshore at the main point.
The third, equally important general lesson was that those who ordered an amphibious operation, whether it be the king of Spain in the 1580s or Churchill, Roosevelt, and the Combined Chiefs of Staff in 1942–43, had to eliminate interservice rivalry and create some form of integrated command. Rivalry among allies is one thing (Wellington often claimed that having enemies was nothing like as bad as having allies), but rivalry between the armed services of one’s own nation is altogether more serious. In many cases, operational failure was due to a lack of appreciation of what the other service could or could not do, or even how the other service thought. The doggerel at the beginning of this chapter about the Earl of Chatham and Sir Richard Strachan was not chosen merely as an example of puckish Regency satire. The Walcheren invasion of 1809 was a disaster. The place was badly chosen, being a low-lying island ridden with malaria; there were no serious preparations (tools, barges, intelligence) for an advance from the island into the Netherlands; Chatham did little with his 44,000 troops, and Strachan and his ships stood offshore. There was no planning staff and no integrated command structure. It was a total mess, neithe
r the first nor the last of its kind.
The final lesson was the oldest of all: that no matter how sophisticated and integrated the armed forces involved in a landing were, they were always going to be subjected to the constraints of distance, topography, accessibility, and the weather conditions of the moment. The internal combustion engine conquered much of time and space. Against the blunt force of a gale, it was greatly hindered and reduced in its power (as we saw from the physical difficulties that Churchill had in simply getting to Casablanca). Given that the tides changed daily—in the Atlantic, there were very large vertical rises and drops—and that a storm could come up swiftly, there was always great unease at the idea that forces would be landing upon an open shore, even a lee shore.
Wherever possible, then, invasion planners, thinking also of the follow-on troops and supplies, desired a safe, functioning harbor in which their ships could rest securely and through which reinforcements could flow. The problem, of course, was that any good harbor worth its name was going to be heavily defended by cannon, bastions, outerworks, innerworks, and possibly mines and hidden obstacles, while the invading troops and their transports would be offshore, churning away in collective seasickness and the ebb and flow of the tides before the bloody assault was made. The history of amphibious warfare is thus also replete with examples of attacks that were repulsed—in 1741 the British put 24,000 men, 2,000 guns, and 186 ships against Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), yet still were driven off by a much smaller Spanish garrison holding a massive fortress. Trying to seize an enemy harbor naturally provoked an enormous defensive reaction and most probably would be fatal; landing on beaches, whether nearby or farther away, exposed the troops to the watery elements and also forced them to bring their own communications systems (bridging equipment, repair units, spares) until they reached the enemy’s roads. But deciding against any amphibious attack and staying with a land campaign (as the Allies did in Italy between 1943 and 1945, apart from Anzio) meant that one could not take advantage of the opportunities of maritime flexibility and would instead be forced to grind on. One of these operational options might be a winner, but it was impossible to say in advance which one it was.