Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (46 page)

The defeat of the German counter-attacks was encouraging to the Americans, but provided little consolation for Bradley, wrestling with his fundamental problem of breaking through into Brittany. At the highest level, the Americans discussed with deep concern the problem of giving their infantry divisions something of the thrust and attacking power that so far seemed the monopoly of the Airborne. ‘We were flabbergasted by the
bocage
,’ said General Quesada of IXth Tactical Air Command, who was working daily alongside Bradley. ‘Our infantry had become paralysed. It has never been adequately described how immobilized they were by the sound of small-arms fire among the hedges.’
⁴
Patton reminded an old French army friend of a remark that he had made in the First War: ‘He had said, “The poorer the infantry the more artillery it needs; the American infantry needs all it can get.” He was right then, and still is.’
⁵
First Army reported on ‘the urgent need for the development of an aggressive spirit by the infantry soldier . . . The outstanding impression gained from a review of battle experience is the importance of aggressive action and continuous energetic forward movement in order to gain ground and reduce casualties.’
⁶

It had become brutally apparent to every man in First Army that service in an infantry unit was an almost certain sentence to death or wounds. The top sergeant in Corporal George Small’s anti-aircraft battalion routinely threatened jesters: ‘One more crack like that and you’ll find yourself in the infantry.’
⁷
The unfortunate 90th Division suffered replacement of 150 per cent of its officers and over 100 per cent of enlisted men in its first six weeks in action. Typical tank casualty figures showed that in June alone, the 712th Battalion lost 21 out of 74 in 16 days of action, the 746th 44 out of 51 in 23 days, the 747th 41 out of 61 in 10 days. In July, the 712th lost 21 out of 68 in 16 days, the 756th 51 out of 91 in 29 days. Temporary or permanent losses from ‘battle fatigue’ had reached an alarming 10,000 men since D-Day, around 20 per cent of all casualties. Between June and November 1944, a staggering 26 per cent of all American soldiers in combat divisions were treated for some form of battle fatigue; this was out of a total of 929,307 such cases in the US Army in the Second World War. There was a real fear that ‘battle fatigue’ was reaching epidemic proportions. The after-action medical report of First Army declared that:

Every army in the Second World War recognized battle exhaustion or shell shock as a genuine, curable condition among soldiers under acute strain. But it was felt by many officers in 1944 that the US Army had become too ready to allow its men to believe that battle exhaustion was an acceptable state. There is a narrow
borderline between humanitarian concern and dangerous weakness. If Patton had been overharsh in his treatment of battle exhaustion in Sicily, there seemed grounds for believing that in Normandy, First Army moved too far in the opposite direction. Major Frank Colacicco of the 3rd/18th Infantry described how men appeared before him claiming battle fatigue and, if challenged, defied him to court-martial them. ‘What was five years in the brig? They knew that the US government would fluke out.’ By July, the rear areas of all the Allied armies were generously populated with deserters, whom American units often treated with much greater forbearance than the British. Provost-Sergeant James Dobie of the British 5th King’s Regiment was astonished to discover, when he returned two errant GIs to their unit, that ‘they were greeted like long-lost brothers instead of absentees’. The German army’s discipline was not based entirely upon natural loyalty. Between January and September 1944, the Wehrmacht executed almost 4,000 of its own men, 1,605 of these for desertion.

Some senior Americans regretted that their army had failed to adopt Montgomery’s policy before D-day, of leavening untried divisions with key officers and NCOs who possessed battle experience at battalion level and below. There had also been a failure to make the men of First Army familiar with their leaders. An extraordinary number of American soldiers who fought in north-west Europe regarded the high command as impossibly remote, and Eisenhower and Bradley as hardly comprehensible figures. A few divisional commanders – Huebner, Cota, Barton, Rose, Eddy – became widely known and respected by their men. But the roll call of senior American officers found wanting and sacked in Normandy was astonishing: two successive commanders of 90th Division, Brown of 28th Division, McMahon of 8th (who told Bradley frankly, ‘Brad, I think you are going to have to relieve me.’),
⁹
Watson of 3rd Armored, to name only the most prominent. Bradley found 83rd Division’s leadership ‘uncertain’, and that of the 79th and 80th suspect. Of the corps commanders, only Collins had distinguished himself. The commander-designate of First Army,
Courtney Hodges, was considered by most of his peers to be an officer of limited imagination and self-effacing personality. Bradley described him as ‘one of the most skilled craftsmen under my entire command’, but was constrained to add that he was also ‘essentially a military technician . . . a spare, soft-voiced Georgian without temper, drama, or visible emotion.’
¹⁰

If Bradley’s personal modesty was one of his most engaging characteristics, it contributed to the impersonality of his army. Whatever men thought of Patton – and many scorned him – all of them knew who he was. Most took a pride, then and later, in serving with Patton’s Army. As Montgomery understood so well, the cult of personality can be immensely valuable in war. The lack of it within the American army in Normandy – the difficulty for most infantry replacements of identifying with a man, a unit, anything human beyond their own squad save the vast juggernaut of tanks and guns with which they rolled – contributed significantly to the difficulties of the American army. Where the German army did its utmost to maintain men in regional formations, the Americans pursued a deliberate policy of dividing men from the same town or state – a legacy of the First War, when the pain of a local unit’s destruction was thought to have borne too heavily upon individual communities. But even industrialized war on a vast scale needs its focus of identity, its charismatic leaders. These were instinctive human necessities that America’s commanders seemed slow to understand.

Private Gerard Ascher, a 27-year-old New Yorker who worked in the family business until he was drafted in 1943, was one of countless thousands of infantry replacements shipped to Normandy in June 1944 in anonymous packages of 250 men, to be directed wherever casualties dictated. One of his group gazed around at Normandy for a few minutes after their landing, then declared decisively: ‘This is no place for me,’ and vanished from their ken for ever. Ascher reached the 357th Infantry in darkness with an unknown young Mississippian, to be greeted by a lieutenant, who said simply: ‘You two stay in this hedgerow – the others
are in that one.’ The New Yorker’s memories of the campaign were above all of disorientation, of utter ignorance of their purpose: ‘I really couldn’t fathom the whole thing – I couldn’t understand what it was all about. I never remembered seeing the battalion commander except at ceremonies.’
¹¹
If all infantrymen in all armies share something of this feeling, and if Ascher was uncommonly unlucky to be sent to the 90th Division, his sentiments reflected a problem that afflicted much of the American army in north-west Europe. Very many soldiers respected their NCOs. But in sharp contrast to the British army, in which most men looked up to their officers, few American rankers admitted to thinking well of theirs. Corporal George Small wrote of ‘this nearly universal scorn of American soldiers for most officers’.
¹²
Above all at platoon level, the ‘90-day wonders’ – the young lieutenants upon whom so much junior leadership depended – seldom won the confidence and respect of their soldiers.

The men of Bradley’s army might not be privy to ‘the big picture’, but in early July 1944 they felt a deep sense that much was going wrong. ‘We were stuck,’ said Corporal Bill Preston of the 743rd Tank Battalion: ‘Something dreadful seemed to have happened in terms of the overall plan. Things were going very awry. The whole theory of mobility that we had been taught, of our racing across the battlefield, seemed to have gone up in smoke.’ Sergeant Bill Walsh of the 102nd Cavalry thought that the struggle between Germans and Americans resembled ‘a pro fighter taking on an amateur who didn’t want to fight. None of those American infantry boys wanted to be over there.’ Lieutenant Philip Reisler of 2nd Armored felt that the campaign had become ‘like an interminable succession of Thermopylaes. In every engagement, we were only able to present one tiny unit to the enemy at a time.’

Yet even as First Army’s difficulties seemed at their greatest, the transformation of American fortunes was at hand. Together with
General Collins of VII Corps, Bradley had conceived a new plan. To clear the way for a major offensive, Collins’s men began to push forward to the St Lô–Périers road. By 20 July, they had reached positions commanding it. On 18 July, at a cost of 3,000 casualties in the 29th Division and more than 2,000 in the 35th, the Americans gained the vital heights of St Lô. The battle for the shattered rubble of the town was one of First Army’s outstanding feats of arms in the campaign, driving back General Eugene Meindl’s II Parachute Corps yard by yard, despite constant casualties. The body of Major Thomas Howie, killed leading the 3rd/116th Infantry to the rescue of the 2nd Battalion on the outskirts of St Lô, was laid on a bier of rubble outside the church of Notre-Dame. Hill 122 joined a host of other Norman map references among the American army’s battle honours. The German 352nd Division, whose presence had wrought such havoc with American plans on 6 June, was now in ruins. Even Meindl’s paratroopers had cracked. The stage was set for the supreme American military achievement of the Normandy campaign, Operation COBRA.

It was symbolic of the contrasting approaches to war by the two principal Allies in Normandy that the British codenamed their greatest efforts after race meetings, while the Americans adopted a symbol of deadly killing power. Montgomery’s official biographer has recently argued that it was the C-in-C of 21st Army Group who produced the essential framework for COBRA, in a declaration of future intentions dated 13 June. After discussing immediate objectives for that period, he continued:

‘This was,’ declares Montgomery’s biographer, ‘
town for town the layout for the American Operation “Cobra”
.’
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[emphasis in original] If this assertion arouses ire among the ghosts of the First Army, it is also true that, after the event, Americans were too eager to write into history the view that COBRA was expected from the outset to lead inexorably to Lorient, Le Mans and Argentan, and that from its launching the rest of the campaign was preordained. In reality, of course, it would have been extraordinary to plan it as anything of the sort. It was an ambitious, well-conceived blueprint for a major offensive. Considering the proven difficulties of wrestling ground from the Germans, and the earlier failure of many equally high hopes, it could never have begun as more than that. To suggest that the Americans now consciously embarked upon a completely new phase of the campaign – ‘the breakout’ – is to pretend that they had not been trying desperately to escape from the
bocage
for many weeks already. What took place in late July on the American flank was that First Army launched an offensive that worked, assisted by the absence of most of the best of von Kluge’s army, who were engaged with the British and Canadians in the east. They then pursued and exploited their success with dramatic energy.

No earlier statement of objectives by Montgomery can diminish the personal achievement of Bradley, whose plan COBRA was. During the weeks since 6 June, there had been a subtle but steady shift in the command relationship between 21st Army Group and the Americans, reflecting both the growing weight of US strength now deployed in Normandy, and the shrinking confidence of First Army in Montgomery’s superior wisdom and experience. There was still the closest consultation between the Allies, and great care was taken to mesh British and American plans. Montgomery confirmed American intentions in crisply-worded written orders. There is little doubt that his
negative
authority over First Army was undiminished: he could have prevented, the Americans from embarking upon a course of which he disapproved. But he could no longer expect to exercise
positive
authority, to compel them to initiate operations for which they felt disinclined. A study of
Montgomery’s files for this period, his successive orders to the armies, might give a different impression. But in real terms, while the Americans accepted his co-ordinating authority, it would be inaccurate to describe him as their commander, in the sense that Bradley was commander of First Army.