Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (5 page)

It was a masterly performance – Montgomery at his very best in clarity of purpose and ruthless simplicity. After months of havering among staff officers fatally hampered by lack of authority, he had sketched the design for a feasible operation of war, and begun to exercise his own immense strength of will to ensure that the resources would be found to land five divisions and secure a beachhead large enough to provide fighting room for the Allied armies. He ignored the sensibilities of the existing staff of 21st Army Group, his command for the invasion, by replacing them wholesale with his own tried and tested officers from Eighth Army – De Guingand, Williams, Belchem, Richardson and others. One of their first horrified discoveries was that the RAF had begun intensive reconnaisance of the Normandy area. The airmen were hastily persuaded to widen their operations, giving special emphasis to the Pas de Calais.

It was characteristic of Montgomery that, having achieved so much so quickly, having made a forceful and vital initial contribution to OVERLORD, he should also seek to write into history his claim that the new plan was entirely his vision and his conception. In reality, most of the staff in England had been conscious for months of the need to strengthen the attack, but lacked the authority to insist upon it. Eisenhower himself immediately grasped the problem, and had some discussion of it with Montgomery. But throughout his military career, a worm of self-destruction in the austere, awkward little man in the beret caused him to disparage the contribution of his peers, shamelessly to seize the credit for the achievements of others, and rewrite the history of his own battlefield planning to conform with the reality of what took place. These were weaknesses which would come close to
destroying him, for they gained him few friends. His staff and subordinates admired and were fascinated by him; few found it possible to like him. ‘We never lost confidence in him,’ said one, talking of the Normandy period, ‘but we would very often say: “Oh Christ, what’s the little bugger doing now?” ’
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The support of one man, the CIGS, Sir Alan Brooke, had carried Montgomery first to the army command in which he gained fame in the desert, and then to the principal British role in OVERLORD. Without Brooke, it is unlikely that Montgomery would ever have gained the chance to display his qualities in the highest commands.

Montgomery’s self-esteem, at its most conspicuous in his dealings with Americans, rested upon his faith in himself as a supreme professional, a monkish student of war who understood the conduct of military operations in a way that escaped less dedicated commanders, such as Alexander and Eisenhower, who did not aspire to his summits of military intellectualism. He would never have found himself in the headmaster’s chair at St Paul’s in January 1944 had there not been much substance in his claims. In France in 1940, in England until 1942, in the Mediterranean in the 17 months that followed, he had proved himself a consummate trainer and motivator of troops, superb in his choice of subordinate staff and his organization of battles. He commanded immense respect from those who served under him for his willingness to listen to them, his directness and loyalty. Many senior officers in his armies went through the war quite unaware of the dark side of Montgomery’s character, the conceit and moments of pettiness, the indifference to truth where it reflected upon himself, the capacity for malice. And perhaps these very vices contributed to Montgomery a quality lacking in many brave and famous British generals – the iron will to prevail. Wavell was an example of an officer much beloved in the British army, of whom it has been said by his best biographer
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that he possessed the qualities for greatness in almost every sphere of human endeavour save that of high command in war. Alexander was a commander in the tradition of great Anglo-Irish military gentlemen – he lacked the intellect, the
ruthless driving force that enables a general to dominate the battlefield. The very qualities that made so many German commanders in the Second World War such unpleasant personalities were also of immense value to them in battle: relentless clarity of purpose, the absolute will to win. For all Montgomery’s caution in battle, the passion for ‘tidiness’ that more than once denied him all-embracing victories, this essentially cold, insensitive man was devoted to winning. The outstanding recent American historian of the campaign in north-west Europe has written: ‘There is every reason to believe in retrospect, as Brooke believed then, that Montgomery not only surpassed Alexander as an operational commander, but was altogether Britain’s ablest general of the war.’
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Eisenhower reached England on 15 January, and on the 21st presided over the first meeting of his staff and commanders at Norfolk House. It was overwhelmingly Montgomery’s occasion. He could claim the credit for having immensely refined the simple broad assault discussed earlier with the Supreme Commander, and was able to outline the new plan which in the weeks that followed would be transformed into the operational orders of the Allied armies. The Americans, on the right, would go for Cherbourg, Brest and the Loire ports. It was logical to land them on the western flank, because they would thus be conveniently placed to receive men and supplies arriving direct by sea from the United States. The British and Canadians on the left ‘would deal with the enemy main body approaching from the east and south-east’. Montgomery declared: ‘In the initial stages, we should concentrate on gaining control quickly of the main centres of road communications. We should then push our armoured formations between and beyond these centres and deploy them on suitable ground. In this way it would be difficult for the enemy to bring up his reserves and get them past three armoured formations.’
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On 23 January, after a final effort by the COSSAC staff to impose some of their own thinking upon Eisenhower, and perhaps also to salvage a little of their deeply bruised self-respect, the Supreme Commander formally accepted Montgomery’s proposals. The immense labour
began of translating these into operational reality – convincing Washington of the vital need for more landing craft, devising fire plans, air support schemes, loading programmes, engineer inventories, naval escort arrangements.

Two mobile brigade groups were placed on standby in Kent and Sussex lest German commandos seek to land and dislocate the build-up. Work began on printing millions of maps in conditions of absolute secrecy, copying air photographs in their thousands, stockpiling artillery ammunition in hundreds of thousands of rounds. The vast business of marshalling American formations arriving almost weekly from across the Atlantic would continue until ports in France became available. Each armoured division required the equivalent of 40 ships, 386,000 ship tons as against 270,000 tons for an infantry division. Every formation required camps in Britain, trains to move them there, training grounds, rest areas, supplies. Tank crews must test fire their weapons, infantrymen zero their rifles. A proposed scale of one ounce of sweets, two ounces of biscuits and one packet of chewing gum for every man of the assault forces necessitated the distribution of 6,250 pounds of sweets, 12,500 pounds of biscuits and 100,000 packets of gum. Armoured units were reminded that their tanks’ mileage before the invasion was to be restricted to 600 (Churchills), 800 (Cromwells and Shermans). The Air Ministry was pressed to get some of its prototype helicopters into service, although the airmen warned that none were likely to be available. Amid serious fears that the Germans might use gas against the invaders, 60 days’ supply of gas shells was prepared for retaliatory use, and aircrew were specially trained for gas bombing. Training maps showing real terrain with fictitious names were issued to commanding officers. A staggering weight of orders and schedules was drawn up and sealed, a necessary security risk being taken to brief the naval units some days before the armies knew where they were to sail.

All this was completed in a mere 17 weeks before the newly-revised date for D-Day, 5 June. Its accomplishment remains the greatest organizational achievement of the Second World War, a
feat of staff-work that has dazzled history, a monument to the imagination and brilliance of thousands of British and American planners and logisticians which may never be surpassed in war. At Norfolk House, a succession of 12-day courses were held for Allied supply officers, 70 at a time, to study the huge problems of the Q branch. 25 square miles of west Devon between Appledore and Woolacombe were evacuated of their entire civilian population to enable the American assault forces to rehearse with live ammunition. All over Britain exercises were held, christened with characteristic inappropriateness – DUCK I, II, III, BEAVER, FABIUS, TIGER – first for groups of specialists, then for increasingly large bodies of men, until at last entire divisions were engaged. In the assembly areas great tented encampments were created, equipped with water points, field bakeries, bath facilities, post offices, each one camouflaged with the intent of making it indistinguishable from 10,000 feet. The British devised a vehicle waterproofing compound from grease, lime and asbestos fibres. The American initial landing force comprised 130,000 men, with another 1,200,000 to follow by D+90. With them would go 137,000 wheeled and semi-tracked vehicles, 4,217 full-tracked vehicles, 3,500 artillery pieces. Week by week, the transatlantic convoys docked in British ports, unloading new cargoes of artillery shells from Illinois, blood plasma from Tennessee, jeeps from Detroit, K ration cheese from Wisconsin.

The British protested somewhat about the vast allocation of shipping that was proving necessary to provide American troops with their accustomed level of supply. Even the US War Department admitted that its huge support organization was ‘a factor which produced problems not foreseen . . . the
matériel
needed to provide American soldiers with something corresponding to the American standard of living [caused] a prodigious growth of service and administration units.’
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The British official historian wrote more portentously: ‘The Americans’ belief in their technical supremacy had a significant effect both on strategic thought and on its execution, while their widespread enjoyment of a high standard of living was partly responsible for a quantity of
equipment which others might find extravagant, but which, in their case, may have been at the least a stimulant and at the most a necessity.’
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Each American soldier in Normandy received six and a quarter pounds of rations a day, against three and a third pounds for his German enemy. Since only four pounds per man of the American ration was consumed, it was clear that a huge and characteristic waste of shipping was involved. Meanwhile the German small-arms ammunition scale for a rifle company was more than double that of its American equivalent, 56,000 rounds to 21,000.

Throughout this period, 21st Army Group’s headquarters was pre-occupied with operational planning. The specialist branches of the American and British forces were responsible for solving the technical and logistical problems of invasion. The huge, bloated staff at SHAEF circulated enormous quantities of paper between their departments – reports, minutes, studies of German reinforcement capability, French railway capacity, German coastal gun range, Allied naval bombardment power. Some of this was extremely valuable, much of it not. But it was Montgomery’s staff which bore the overwhelming burden of planning the battle, using very little paper and very long hours of debate and thought. Eisenhower summarized his own preoccupations before OVERLORD as: the French political complications; the allocation of resources; air organization and planning. At 21st Army Group, the staff shared the Supreme Commander’s concern about the air problem, but were chiefly haunted during those spring weeks by fear that some breach of security might compromise the landing. If it did so, there was every prospect that the Allies would learn of the enemy’s knowledge through Ultra. But until the very morning of D-Day, the possibility that the Germans might secretly be waiting for the Allies in Normandy remained the overriding nightmare of the planners. Only with forewarning did the Germans possess a real prospect of turning back the invaders on the beaches.

It was agreed that gaining a foothold on D-Day was a huge organizational task, but presented no intolerable tactical risks given the weight of Allied resources. All the imponderables, the great dangers, lay in the battle of the build-up. Immense labour was devoted to comparisons of the likely Allied and German strengths. An uncommonly gloomy SHAEF estimate of April 1944 predicted that by D+14 the Germans would have 28 divisions in Normandy against 191/3 Allied; by D+20: 30 to 242/3; by D+30: 33 to 282/3.
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The differences of opinion between German commanders about the best methods of defending Normandy were known at 21st Army Group through Ultra. But as Montgomery’s brilliant intelligence officer, the 31-year-old Brigadier Bill Williams, declared: ‘All the time we were asking ourselves: To what extent would these chaps make a good showing despite Hitler?’
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The behaviour of the Führer himself, together with the success or failure of the Allies’ FORTITUDE deception plan based upon the fictitious threat to the Pas de Calais posed by General Patton and the ‘First US Army Group’, would determine whether the German build-up attained its immensely dangerous theoretical maximum. The Allies’ appreciation in April spotlighted ‘the grave risk of stabilization’ – a euphemism for stalemate – ‘around D+14 . . . The greatest energy and initiative will be required at this period to ensure that the enemy is not allowed to stabilize his defence.’
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Afterwards, there would be much discussion about how far the Allied command had anticipated the difficulties of fighting in the close country of the Norman
bocage
. The SHAEF appreciation declared: ‘Generally speaking the area will not be an easy one for forces to advance through rapidly in the face of determined resistance, but it will likewise be most difficult for the enemy to prevent a slow and steady advance by infiltration . . . Tanks can penetrate most of the hedgerows. It is difficult to judge whether such terrain favours defending or attacking infantry . . . The tactics to be employed in fighting through
bocage
country should be given considerable study by formations to be employed therein.’
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But they were not. The British 7th Armoured Division was preparing
for D-Day amidst the flatlands of East Anglia. Most British infantry battalions knew little of the infiltration tactics in which the Germans were so skilled, and relied overwhelmingly upon the straightforward open order advance, two companies forward. Many American formations were training on Dartmoor and Exmoor. As a senior staff officer said afterwards: ‘We simply did not expect to remain in the
bocage
long enough to justify studying it as a major tactical problem.’
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