Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (59 page)

The Allies in Normandy faced the finest fighting army of the war, one of the greatest that the world has ever seen. This is a simple truth that some soldiers and writers have been reluctant to acknowledge, partly for reasons of nationalistic pride, partly because it is a painful concession when the Wehrmacht and SS were fighting for one of the most obnoxious regimes of all time. The quality of the Germans’ weapons – above all tanks – was of immense importance. Their tactics were masterly: stubborn defence; concentrated local firepower from mortars and machine-guns; quick counter-attacks to recover lost ground. Units often fought on even when cut off, which was not a mark of fanaticism, but of sound tactical discipline, when such resistance in the rear did much to reduce the momentum of Allied advances, as in GOODWOOD. German attacks were markedly less skilful, even clumsy. But they adapted at once to the need for infiltration in the
bocage
, a skill of which few Allied units proved capable, even at the end. Their junior leadership was much superior to that of the Americans, perhaps also to that of the British.

Few American infantry units arrived in Normandy with a grasp of basic tactics – a failure for which many men paid with their lives. The American airborne units showed what was possible on the battlefield, what the American soldier at his best could achieve. But only a handful of other formations proved capable of emulating the 82nd and 101st. The belief that firepower could ultimately save the infantry from the task of hard fighting underlay many difficulties and failures on the ground. It is interesting that Lieutenant Andrew Wilson, who fought as a British tank officer in north-west Europe and worked on occasion with American infantry, visited Vietnam a quarter of a century later as a correspondent, and noted the same carelessness on the battlefield that he had observed in 1944–45. Some more dedicated and skilful infantry
fighting earlier in the Normandy campaign might, in the end, have saved a great many American lives. Both British and American commanders sometimes seemed to search for scapegoats rather than causes of poor performance by their men on the battlefield. Some of the generals sacked in Normandy (and elsewhere) were incompetent. But there was a limit to what a corps or divisional commander could achieve with the material he was given. It is striking that when Patton or Collins were given poor-quality divisions with which to gain an objective, they could extract no better performance from these than less competent commanders. The same was true of the British 7th Armoured – none of its successive commanders in north-west Europe could make anything of it. The problems, where there were problems, often descended to regimental and battalion level. There were not nearly sufficient able field officers for any solution to be found in wholesale sackings.

The British were superior to the Americans in regimental leadership and staffwork. But they proved unable to generate the weight of fighting power – combat power, as the Americans call it – to smash through unweakened German defences. Germans who fought in the desert often expressed their surprise at the willingness of the British soldier to do what he believed was expected of him, and then to stop – even to surrender – when ammunition ran low, petrol ran out or he found himself encircled or deprived of officer leadership. Again and again in Normandy, British units fought superbly, with great bravery, only to lack the last ounce of drive or follow-through necessary to carry an objective or withstand a counter-attack. The inexperience of American, British and Canadian formations must be measured against the performance of 12th SS Panzer. This, too, was a ‘green’ division, which had never fought a battle before 7 June. The Canadian official historian wrote: ‘One suspects that the Germans contrived to get more out of their training than we did. Perhaps their attitude towards such matters was less casual than ours.’
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An ethos, a mood, pervades all armies at all times about what is and is not acceptable, what is expected. Within the Allied armies
in Normandy in 1944–45, the ethos was that of men committed to doing an unwelcome but necessary job for the cause of democracy. The ethos of the German army, profoundly influenced by the threat from the east, was of a society fighting to the last to escape
Götterdämmerung
. Lieutenant Langangke was perhaps not exaggerating when he said that as he sat in his Panther, knocking out Shermans one after the other, he felt like Siegfried. Mercifully for the future of western civilization, few men in the Allied armies ever believed for a moment that they were anyone other than Lindley Higgins from Riverdale in the Bronx, or Corporal Brown from Tonbridge. Montgomery wrote to Brooke from the desert: ‘The trouble with our British lads is that they are not killers by nature.’ Each man knew that he was a small cog in the great juggernaut of armed democracy, whose eventual victory was certain. Suicidal, sacrificial acts of courage were admired when performed by individuals and rewarded with decorations. But they were not
demanded
of whole Allied formations as they were of so many in Hitler’s armies. Even Corporal Hohenstein of that very moderate organization, the 276th Infantry, never allowed himself to be troubled by encirclement because this was an experience that he, like so many others, had often overcome in Russia: they were merely expected to break out of it. The attitude of most Allied soldiers was much influenced by the belief, conscious or unconscious, that they possessed the means to dispense with anything resembling personal fanaticism on the battlefield: their huge weight of firepower. This view was not unjustified. Artillery and air power accomplished much of the killing of Germans that had to be done sooner or later to make a breakthrough possible. But it could not do all of this. It is not that the Allied armies in Normandy were seriously incompetent; merely that the margin of German professional superiority was sufficient to cause the Allies very great difficulties.

All this Montgomery and Bradley understood perfectly well, and they shaped their plans and expectations accordingly. They had not been sent to Normandy to demonstrate the superiority of
their fighting men to those of Hitler, but to win the war at tolerable cost – a subtly but importantly different objective. Their business and their difficulty, while acknowledging the difference in mood and spirit between their own soldiers and those of Hitler, was to persuade their armies to do enough – albeit, just enough – to prevail on a given battlefield and in a given action. This they were at last able to do, inflicting an absolute defeat upon their enemies. Overall, it may be said that Montgomery accomplished as much in Normandy as he could with the forces available to him. He is owed a greater debt for his performance than has been recognized in recent years, when his own untruths and boastfulness have been allowed to confuse the issue; and when the root problem of the limited abilities of his troops, and the dynamism of the Germans, has often been ignored.

Much of the criticism emanating from SHAEF, the airmen and Washington was based upon the inability of men lacking direct contact with the battlefield to grasp painful truths. The American and British public had been fed for years upon a necessary diet of propaganda about the superiority of their fighting men to those of the enemy. Even some senior service officers could not now understand the difficulty of fighting the German army. Brooke did, and his awareness lay at the heart of many of his fears about OVERLORD and about the course of the campaign on the continent. He was too big a man to continue to support Montgomery blindly, merely because the Commander-in-Chief of 21st Army Group was his protégé. He backed Montgomery and sympathized with his disappointments and failures because he understood, perhaps better than any man outside France, the difficulty of arranging matters so that British and American soldiers could defeat German soldiers on the ground. Brooke knew – as surely also did Montgomery in his secret thoughts – that it was the Allies’ superiority of
matériel
that enabled them to prevail at the last, assisted by competent generalship and a solid performance by most of their men on the battlefield. Patton’s headlong rush around western France was a far less impressive command achievement than the
cool, professional response of Bradley and his corps commanders to the Mortain counter-attack. By that first week of August, the balance of psychological advantage had at last shifted decisively. The German thrust lacked conviction – even formations such as 2nd SS Panzer fought half-heartedly. Meanwhile, the Americans had gained a new confidence in their own powers. Isolated infantry units held their ground; headquarters staffs kept their nerve; the American forces dispatched to meet the Germans – with the possible exception of the 35th Division, which seemed slow to achieve the relief of the 30th – drove hard and sure to throw back the panzers.

Normandy was a campaign which perfectly exemplified the strengths and weaknesses of the democracies. The invasion was a product of dazzling organization and staffwork, and marvellous technical ingenuity. Once the armies were ashore, there was no firework display of military brilliance. Instead, for the armies, there was a steady, sometimes clumsy learning process. Each operation profited from the mistakes of the last, used massed firepower to wear down the Germans, absorbed disappointments without trauma. This last was a true reflection of the nature of the struggle: most German commanders, amidst the insuperable difficulties of grappling both with Hitler and the Allies, declined towards a state bordering on hysteria. Among the Allied armies, however, there was sometimes gloom, but never real alarm or nervousness. These symptoms were more in evidence at SHAEF, where the role of impotent spectator taxed some men, even the highest, beyond endurance. Montgomery and Bradley and their staffs and corps commanders merely fought, reconsidered, and fought again until at last their resources granted them victory. Armchair strategists and military historians can find much to look back upon and criticize in Normandy. On 22 August 1944, it is doubtful whether many regrets troubled the Allied army commanders in France.

One lesson from the fighting in Normandy seems important for any future battle that the armies of democracy might be called
upon to fight. If a Soviet invasion force swept across Europe from the east, it would be unhelpful if contemporary British or American soldiers were trained and conditioned to believe that the level of endurance and sacrifice displayed by the Allies in Normandy would suffice to defeat the invaders. For an example to follow in the event of a future European battle, it will be necessary to look to the German army; and to the extraordinary defence that its men conducted in Europe in the face of all the odds against them, and in spite of their own demented Führer.

Liddell Hart described Normandy as ‘an operation that eventually went according to plan, but not according to timetable’.
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A good case can be made that the Allies’ disappointments and delays in gaining ground eventually worked to their advantage. Just as in Tunisia, more than a year earlier, Hitler’s obsessive reinforcement of failure caused him to thrust division after division into the cauldron for destruction. By the time the breakout came, no significant forces lay in front of the Allies before the German border. Paris fell on 25 August, Patton crossed the Meuse on 31 August, and was at Metz on the Moselle the next day. The Guards Armoured Division reached Brussels on 3 September, after advancing 75 miles in a single day. 11th Armoured reached Antwerp on the 4th, to find the port intact.

On 1 September, Eisenhower assumed direct control of the Allied armies in the field – to Montgomery’s bitter frustration, disappointment and chagrin. The Commander-in-Chief himself was the only man at 21st Army Group unable to understand the imperative by which American dominance among the armies demanded American command in the field. Williams and de Guingand attempted to explain this reality to him, and the fact that his loss of control was inevitable, ‘even if the Americans thought you the greatest general in the world – which they do not.’
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At this juncture, there were perhaps 100 German tanks on the entire western front against over 2,000 in the Allied spearheads;
570 Luftwaffe aircraft against the Allies’ 14,000. By yet another Herculean feat of organization, Student mobilized 8,000 men of First Parachute Army to cover a 100-mile chasm in the front. The Allies paused to regroup and resolve their immense logistical problems. By mid-September, the German line was thickening everywhere. ‘I left France almost convinced that Germany was through and that the war would end in 1944,’ wrote Gavin of the 82nd Airborne. ‘But many in the division felt more cautious, since the fighting at times had proved to be far more difficult and costly than we had anticipated.’
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The battles in Holland and along the German border so often seem to belong to a different age from those of Normandy that it is startling to reflect that Arnhem was fought less than a month after Falaise; that within weeks of suffering one of the greatest catastrophes of modern war, the Germans found the strength to halt the drive of Horrocks’s XXX Corps in its tracks, and to prolong the war until May 1945. But if this phenomenon reveals the same staggering qualities in Hitler’s armies which had caused the Allies such grief in Normandy, it is also another story.