Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (36 page)

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.’
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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.

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:

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:

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, originator of the 25-pounder and the entire range of successful anti-tank guns, wrote early in 1945:

Any armoured officer fighting in north-west Europe in 1944 would have echoed his sentiments.

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:

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 researchers
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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.
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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.
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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’.
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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: