Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (2 page)

Perhaps I should also avow a debt of gratitude to the British Army and the Royal Navy. One morning early in April 1982, I was sitting at my desk in Northamptonshire seeking to make the leap of imagination that is essential to books of this kind, to conceive what it was like to crouch in a landing craft approaching a hostile shore at dawn on 6 June 1944. By an extraordinary fluke of history, less than two months later I found myself crouched in a British landing craft 8,000 miles away. In the weeks that followed, I had an opportunity to witness an amphibious campaign whose flavour any veteran of June 1944 would immediately have recognized, even to the bren guns, Oerlikons and Bofors hammering into the sky. I would like to think that the experience taught me a little more about the nature of battles, and about the manner in which men fighting them conduct themselves. It has certainly made me all the more grateful that my generation has never been called upon to endure anything of the scale and ferocity that encompassed the men who fought in Normandy.

Guilsborough Lodge,

Northamptonshire

October 1983

On the night of 9 May 1940, Lieutenant John Warner did not reach his bed until 2.00 a.m. Along with the other officers of the Royal West Kents deployed along the Belgian frontier with the British Expeditionary Force, he had been celebrating in the mess amid the traditional rituals of the British army, with the regimental bands beating retreat in the little town square of Bailleul. It was unusual for all three battalions of a regiment to be campaigning – if the ‘bore war’ in France could be dignified as such – alongside each other, and their party did justice to the occasion.

They were asleep a few hours afterwards when they were forced to take notice of ‘some enormous banging all over the place’.
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The German offensive in the west had begun. As the West Kents hastily prepared to march that morning of 10 May (caching the band instruments which they would never see again) it is a measure of the British army’s collective delusion that they were ordered to advance to the Scheldt and to expect to remain there for some months.

In reality, they occupied their positions on the river for just four days before a trickle, and then a stream, of Allied soldiers began to pass through them towards the rear. Rumours drifted back also that ‘the French had packed it in down south’. Their colonel, Arthur Chitty, hated the enemy with all the fervour of a regular soldier who had been captured in the first weeks of war in 1914 and spent four years behind the wire. Now, he organized the pathetic deployment of their Boyes anti-tank rifles in an antiaircraft role. Shortly afterwards, the Germans arrived.

The 4th West Kents were deployed along the river bank. For
reasons best known to itself, the battalion on their right chose to take up positions some way back from the waterline. As a result, the enemy was quickly able to seize a bridgehead on the British side, threatening the flank of the 4th. John Warner, a 23-year-old solicitor from Canterbury with a Territorial Army commission, claimed that, ‘as a lawyer, I was a cautious chap who always liked to look round corners before turning them’. Yet he found himself leading a succession of headlong charges against the Germans with his bren-gun carrier platoon which resulted in what he later called ‘a very interesting little battle’, and won him the Military Cross. The West Kents held their ground, but they were outflanked and soon forced to withdraw, their rear covered by the Belgians. In the days that followed, driving and marching north-westwards along the dusty roads, they fought one more significant action against the Germans in the forest of Nieppe, but found themselves chiefly confounded by the appalling traffic jams clogging the retreat, refugees and British vehicles entangled upon roads endlessly strafed by the Luftwaffe. Warner and his carrier platoon struck off across country to escape the chaos, which was fortunate, because shortly afterwards the Germans struck the main column, capturing the entire headquarters of the 1st West Kents, just ahead of the 4th. The young officer was dismayed by a brief visit to divisional headquarters, where ‘control had broken down completely’. Morale among his own men remained surprisingly high, but the enemy had achieved absolute psychological dominance of the battlefield. ‘We thought the Germans were very good. In fact, we overestimated them,’ said Warner. Like so many others, the West Kents bitterly cursed the absence of the Royal Air Force, and became practised at leaping into ditches at the first glimpse of an aircraft.

When they reached the Dunkirk perimeter, Warner was ordered to abandon his vehicles. But having brought them intact every yard of the way from the Scheldt, he stubbornly drove into the British line, and handed over the carriers to one of the defending battalions. For the next three days, he sat in the sand
dunes waiting for rescue, with a motley group of some 60 men who had gathered around him. He thought miserably: ‘Here I am with an MC in the field, and now I’m going in the bag.’ On the third day, he wearied of hanging about where he had been told to, and marched his men determinedly onto the Dunkirk mole, where he parlayed them a passage on an Isle of Man pleasure steamer. Thus, sleeping the sleep of utter exhaustion on the sunlit decks, they sailed home to England.

Curiously enough, while senior officers and statesmen were vividly aware that Britain had suffered catastrophe, once the young men of the BEF were home, very few saw their misfortunes in such absolute terms. It is the nature of soldiers to take life as it finds them from day to day. In the months and years that followed Dunkirk, John Warner shared the British army’s dramas and anti-climaxes, abrupt moves and lengthy stagnations, leaves and exercises, promotions and changes of equipment. He spent some months defending Romney Marshes, ‘prepared to do or die’. A keen young soldier, he wrote to the legendary apostle of armoured warfare, Captain Basil Liddell Hart, explaining that he had mislaid his copy of the author’s
The Future of Infantry
during the goings-on in France. Liddell Hart sent him a new one.

Warner never consciously considered the prospect of going back to fight against the German army in France until one day in 1942, when he attended an officers’ conference in Doncaster addressed by his corps commander, Lieutenant-General Frederick Morgan. Morgan astonished them by expounding upon future landings across the Channel, ‘talking of how we were going to stream across north-west Europe with huge tank power. For the first time, we did start to think seriously about going back.’ The conference addressed itself to some tactical problems. An officer inquired how advancing forces would indicate their progress. ‘They can set fire to the villages they pass through,’ said Morgan unanswerably. Not only new armies, new equipment, would be critical to a landing in Europe: so also would a new spirit.

The chance of war dictated that John Warner did not remain
with the 4th West Kents, which was fortunate for him, because the battalion was sent to Burma. If he had gone with it, he would probably have died, like so many others, on the tennis court at Kohima. Instead, he was posted to become second-in-command of 3rd Reconnaissance Regiment, earmarked with its division for north-west Europe. It was with 3rd Recce that in June 1944, Major Warner returned to the battlefield from which he and his comrades had been so ruthlessly ejected four years earlier. Along with a million and a half other Allied soldiers, he went to Normandy.

Not the least remarkable aspect of the Second World War was the manner in which the United States, which might have chosen to regard the campaign in Europe as a diversion from the struggle against her principal aggressor, Japan, was persuaded to commit her chief strength in the west. Not only that, but from December 1941 until June 1944 it was the Americans who were passionately impatient to confront the German army on the continent while the British, right up to the eve of D-Day, were haunted by the deepest misgivings about doing so. ‘Why are we trying to do this?’ cried Winston Churchill in a bitter moment of depression about Operation OVERLORD in February 1944,
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which caused in him a spasm of enthusiasm for an alternative Allied landing in Portugal. ‘I am very uneasy about the whole operation,’ wrote the Chief of the Imperial General Staff, Sir Alan Brooke, as late as 5 June 1944. ‘At the best, it will come very far short of the expectations of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing about its difficulties. At its worst, it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war.’
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Had the United States army been less resolute in its commitment to a landing in Normandy, it is most unlikely that this would have taken place before 1945. Until the very last weeks before OVERLORD was launched, its future was the subject of bitter dissension and debate between the warlords of Britain and America.

For a year following the fall of France in 1940, Britain fought on without any rational prospect of final victory. Only when Hitler
invaded Russia in June 1941, the most demented of his strategic decisions, did the first gleam of hope at last present itself to enemies of the Axis. For the remainder of that year, Britain was preoccupied with the struggle to keep open her Atlantic lifeline, to build her bomber offensive into a meaningful menace to Germany, and to keep hopes alive in the only theatre of war where the British army could fight – Africa and the Middle East. Then, in the dying days of the year, came the miracle of Pearl Harbor. Britain’s salvation, the turning point of the war, was confirmed four days later by another remarkable act of German recklessness: Hitler’s declaration of war upon the United States.

The outcome of the Second World War was never thereafter in serious doubt. But great delays and difficulties lay ahead in mobilizing America’s industrial might for the battlefield, and in determining by what strategy the Axis was to be crushed. To the relief of the British, President Roosevelt and his Chiefs of Staff at once asserted their acceptance of the principle of ‘Germany first’. They acknowledged that her war-making power was by far the most dangerous and that, following her collapse, Japan must soon capitulate. The war in the Pacific became overwhelmingly the concern of the United States navy. The principal weight of the army’s ground forces, which would grow to a strength of eight million men, was to be directed against Germany and Italy. This decision was confirmed at ARCADIA, the first great Anglo-American conference of the war that began in Washington on 31 December 1941. America committed herself to BOLERO, a programme for a vast build-up of her forces in Britain. Churchill, scribbling his own exuberant hopes for the future during the Atlantic passage to that meeting, speculated on a possible landing in Europe by 40 Allied armoured divisions in the following year: ‘We might hope to win the war at the end of 1943 or 1944.’
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But in the months after ARCADIA, as the first United States troops and their senior officers crossed to Europe, it was the Americans who began to focus decisively upon an early cross-Channel invasion. The debate that now began, and continued
with growing heat through the next 20 months, reflected ‘an American impatience to get on with direct offensive action as well as a belief, held quite generally in the US War Department, that the war could most efficiently be won by husbanding resources for an all-out attack deliberately planned for a future fixed date. American impatience was opposed by a British note of caution: American faith in an offensive of fixed date was in contrast to British willingness to proceed one step at a time, molding a course of action to the turns of military fortune.’
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Here, in the words of the American official historian, was the root of the growing division between the Combined Chiefs of Staff throughout 1942 and much of 1943.

At first, American thinking was dominated by fear of a rapid Russian collapse unless the western Allies created, at the very least, a powerful diversion on the continent. ROUNDUP was a plan for an early invasion, with whatever forces were available, which the British speedily took pains to crush. Under strong American pressure, Churchill agreed in principle to the notion of executing ROUNDUP with 48 Allied divisions not later than April 1943. But the British – above all Sir Alan Brooke – privately continued to believe that ROUNDUP neither could nor should take place. Despite their assent to the operation, in the name of Allied solidarity, they began a successful struggle to divert resources towards much more modest – and in their view, more realistic – objectives. In the summer of 1942, the Americans reluctantly acceded to GYMNAST, an operation for the invasion of French North Africa. This was allegedly to be undertaken without prejudice to ROUNDUP, because of well-founded British fears that America would shift the weight of her effort to the Pacific if it became obvious that many months must elapse before major action took place in Europe. But as the BOLERO build-up in Britain fell behind schedule, the desert campaign dragged on without decisive result, and the tragic Dieppe raid demonstrated some of the hazards of cross-Channel operations, it became apparent in Washington as well as in London that there could be no campaign in France in 1943. GYMNAST was
translated into reality by the TORCH landings of November 1942. It was at Casablanca in January 1943 that the Anglo-American leadership met for their second major conference.

This was to be the last meeting at which, by dint of brilliant military diplomacy, the British gained acceptance of their own ideas about the manner in which the war should be pursued. The Americans reluctantly accepted HUSKY, the invasion of Sicily, with the prospect of further operations in Italy. They also undertook a commitment to an even greater combined bomber offensive against Germany, POINTBLANK, designed to ‘weaken Germany’s war-making capacity to the point to which invasion would become possible’.