Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (35 page)

The Americans indeed possessed an excellent rifle in the semiautomatic Garand, and the British an adequate one in the bolt-action Lee-Enfield. But on the European battlefield, as commanders
learned, men seldom fired their rifles. They had little need of accuracy when they did so, for they could rarely distinguish a target. American research showed that, in many regiments, only 15 per cent of riflemen used their weapons in any given action. What mattered was the weight of fire to saturate the battle area. For this, the Germans possessed the supreme weapons in their MG 34 and 42 machine-guns – invariably known among the Allies as Spandaus – with their fabulous rate of fire drowning out the measured hammer of the British bren or the American BAR squad light machine-gun. The MG 42’s tearing, rasping 1,200 rounds a minute, against the bren’s 500, proved deeply demoralizing to men advancing against it. A German infantry company carried 16 machine-guns, compared to the British 9, and the American 11, although the heavy Vickers and Brownings of the Allied support companies somewhat redressed this balance.

The handle on the German ‘potato-masher’ hand grenade enabled it to be thrown further than its British or American counterparts. The German Schmeisser was a far superior submachine gun to the American ‘grease gun’ or the British sten, which the War Office had ordered in quantity, in an eccentric moment in 1941, although it derived from a German patent sensibly spurned by the Wehrmacht. All the German small arms enjoyed a significant advantage over their American counterparts – in using ammunition with powder which produced less flash and smoke. It was markedly easier for a German soldier to pinpoint American fire than
vice versa
, a technological advantage upon which Marshall commented acidly in a post-war report.

The Germans had made themselves masters in the handling of mortars. Their mortar ‘stonks’, landing without warning in the middle of Allied positions, inaudible in transit because of their slow flight, grated the nerves of every British and American unit in Normandy, and were responsible for an extraordinarily high proportion of casualties – 75 per cent for much of the campaign. Every infantry division possessed some 60 81 mm and up to 20 120 mm mortars, which could throw a 35-pound bomb 6,000 yards.
The Allies also, of course, possessed mortars, but never mastered the art of concentrating them with the devastating effect that the Germans achieved. Above all, men detested the
Nebelwerfer
, the multi-barrelled projector whose bombs were fitted with a brilliantly conceived siren, causing them to wail as they flew through the air, which had an effect on those who heard them often more penetrating than their explosive power.
Nebelwerfers
came in three sizes: 150 mm (75-pound bomb, 7,300-yard range); 210 mm (248-pound, 8,600-yard); 300 mm (277-pound, 5,000-yard). Each of the five regiments of these – the bulk of them concentrated in the British sector in Normandy – contained 60 or 70 projectors, some of them track-mounted. German infantry anti-tank weapons were also markedly superior. British battalions were equipped only with a spring-loaded projector named the PIAT, which threw a 2½-pound bomb 115 yards and demanded strong nerves from its aimer, who knew that if he lingered long enough to fire at his target with a chance of success, failure meant probable extinction. Even in short-range tests in England, the PIAT scored only 57 per cent hits. The American bazooka packed a wholly inadequate projectile for penetrating German tank armour. The Germans, meanwhile, were equipped in Normandy with the excellent
Panzerfaust
, the finest infantry anti-tank weapon of the war. Gavin’s paratroopers seized and employed as many as they could capture.

At a higher level Allied artillery and anti-tank guns were good and plentiful. Indeed, every army fighting in Normandy singled out the British and American artillery as the outstanding arm of the Allied forces. Artillery was responsible for more than half the casualties inflicted in the Second World War. Normandy was the first campaign in which the British used the new discarding-sabot ammunition
⁵
for their 6- and 17-pounders, with formidable penetrating effect. But the towed anti-tank gun was of little value to troops in attack, and even very accurate artillery fire proved an uncertain method of destroying enemy troops who were well dug in. The British 25-pounder was a fine gun, outranging the American 105 mm by 13,400 yards to 12,200, and was immensely valuable
for ‘keeping heads down’. But it lacked killing power against defensive positions. It was essential to bring down medium or heavy artillery fire for decisive effect, and there was never enough of this to go round. Nor did the Allies possess any weapon with the physical and moral effect of the German 88 mm, the very high velocity anti-aircraft gun that had been used against ground targets with dazzling success since the early days of the war. Time after time in Normandy, a screen of 88 mm guns stopped an Allied attack dead. Firing high-explosive airburst shells, it was also formidable against infantry. The unforgettable lightning crack of an 88 mm remained implanted in the memory of every survivor of the campaign. It was a mystery to the Allied armies why their own industries failed to build a direct copy of the 88 mm, the Schmeisser, or the potato-masher.

Yet the greatest failure was that of the tank. How could American and British industries produce a host of superb aircraft, an astonishing variety of radar equipment, the proximity fuse, the DUKW, the jeep, yet still ask their armies to join battle against the Wehrmacht equipped with a range of tanks utterly inferior in armour and killing power? A British tank officer, newly-arrived in France in June 1944, recorded a conversation with his regimental adjutant about the state of the armoured battle:

If this account
⁶
bordered upon satire, the reality was little different – the product of an extraordinary lack of Allied foresight. A specialist who was intimately concerned in the British tank design
programme from its earliest days, Colonel George Macleod Ross, suggested after the war that the War Office made a fatal error by separating the development of fighting vehicles from that of tank guns. Ross, and other experts, argued that it was vital to design the right tank gun, and then to build a suitable vehicle to carry it. Instead, throughout the Second World War, a succession of British tanks were produced in isolation from any consideration either of the enemy gun that they must expect to meet, or of the weight of armour that their own gun must expect to penetrate. Tank design was located at Chobham, while gun design was sited at Woolwich. Although the design of the superb British 17-pounder gun was approved and a prototype constructed in June 1941, it was not mounted in a tank until the first Sherman Firefly was belatedly produced in August 1943, in too small a quantity to influence OVERLORD decisively. ‘It is not unfair to say,’ declared Ross, who served for much of the war as British Technical Liaison officer to the US Army Ordnance in Detroit, ‘that little of the labour and materials expended on the 25,000 British-built tanks helped to win the war.’
⁷
A visit to Eighth Army in the desert by a temporary technical observer in November 1942 resulted in a disastrous report to the War Office, allegedly approved by Montgomery, asserting that ‘the 75 mm gun is all we require’.
⁸
This report set the seal upon British tank gun policy for much of the rest of the war, ensuring that 6-pounder and 75 mm-gunned Churchills and Cromwells would form the basis of British tank strength. ‘None of our authorities seemed to understand as the Germans did’, wrote Ross, ‘the need in war for sustained improvement of weapons.’
⁹

Yet the decisive force in wartime tank production, as in so much else, was the United States. Russell Weigley, an outstanding American analyst of the US army in the war, has highlighted the failure of its architects to match their end – the application of concentrated power upon the battlefield – to their means: principally, the Sherman tank. Against 24,630 tanks built by the Germans and 24,843 made by the British by the end of 1944, the Americans turned out a staggering 88,410, 25,600 of which were
supplied to the British. The great majority were Shermans, first produced in 1942, and dominating all Allied armoured operations in 1944–45. Two-thirds of the tanks employed by British units in Normandy were Shermans, the balance being chiefly Cromwells (7th Armoured Division) and Churchills (79th Division and independent armoured brigades). The Sherman was a superbly reliable piece of machinery, far easier to maintain and with a track life five times longer than its German counterparts. It weighed 33 tons, compared with the 43 tons of the Panther, and 56 tons of the Tiger. Its fast cross-country speed reflected the Americans’ doctrinal obsession with pace in armoured operations. It possessed two important advantages over its German opponents: a faster speed of turret traverse to engage the enemy, and a higher rate of fire. Conversely, it suffered two critical weaknesses: first, its readiness to catch fire, which caused soldiers on the battlefield to christen it ‘the ronson’ or ‘tommy cooker’. This was a reflection upon its design and thin armour, rather than (as the US War Department suggested tetchily after early complaints) because its crews were loading too much ammunition into its turret. Second, and more important, it was undergunned. Its original 75 mm gun produced a muzzle velocity of 2,050 feet-per-second against 2,900 f.p.s. of the British 17-pounder and the 3,340 f.p.s. of the German 88 mm. At a range of 200 yards, the British gun had almost thrice the penetration of the 75 mm. A Tiger could knock out a Sherman at a range of 4,000 yards, while the American tank could not penetrate a Tiger’s frontal armour at all. Even when the Sherman was upgunned with a 76 mm, it was compelled to close to within 300 yards of a Tiger to have a chance of knocking it out. ‘Not only do German Mk V and Mk VI tanks keep out a greater proportion of hits than Shermans,’ concluded a gloomy SHAEF Operational Research report in 1944, ‘but also they are
far less likely to brew up when penetrated
’ (emphasis in original).
¹⁰
Even the much lighter 25-ton German Mk IV tank, which made up about half the tank strength of the panzer divisions, packed a KWK 40 75 mm gun with a muzzle velocity 20 per cent greater than the Sherman’s
75 mm. This was capable of penetrating 92 mm of armour at 500 yards against the 68 mm of the Sherman’s gun.

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.