Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (8 page)

Most of the men of that English ‘battle school army’ shared Wilson’s enthusiasm. Major Dick Gosling, ex-Eton and Cambridge, commanding a battery of self-propelled 25-pounders of the Essex Yeomanry, had been waiting to see action since 1939: ‘We were at the very peak of enthusiasm, fitness, training.’
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Major Charles Richardson of the 6th King’s Own Scottish Borderers had so far spent the war commanding a tactical school in Edinburgh, attending the Staff College and training troops amid a sense of lingering embarrassment that he had not seen a shot fired in anger,
although as he later concluded: ‘You fight a bloody sight better when you don’t know what’s coming.’
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Many of Lieutenant David Priest’s men of 5th Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry spent the weeks before D-Day attempting to master the art of wheeled warfare. They were a bicycle unit, and it was not easy for a soldier to pedal under the weight of full equipment: ‘the thing would rear up on you’.
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Typically, within hours of their arrival in Normandy, they were ordered to park their transport and never saw the bicycles again. Corporal Chris Portway of the 4th Dorsets claimed to find his experiences in Normandy infinitely less painful than ‘all those ghastly exercises’
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which preceded them. During one in which he took part, bitter British animosity towards the French-Canadians, who were acting as the enemy, boiled over into bloodshed near Reading, with men on both sides being killed. Trooper Steve Dyson became so miserably bored with infantry soldiering in England after 1940 that in desperation he volunteered for anything that offered a chance of escape – demolition, paratroops, military police. At last he was accepted for armour, and found himself perfectly happy, for he loved his tank. Private Mick Anniwell, a 30-year-old former shoe-factory worker and scoutmaster, now posted to 2nd Royal Ulster Rifles, quite simply loved the army and everything that happened to him in it. For many working-class civilians, the 1930s had not been a happy time. In the wartime army, not a few found a fulfilment, a comradeship and sense of purpose that they would spend the rest of their post-war lives seeking to recapture.

Other men, not surprisingly, felt more resigned to their part in the invasion than exhilarated by it. Lieutenant Arthur Heal was a bespectacled 28-year-old sapper, who found that throughout his service career, ‘I never felt like a soldier’. Heal was simply ‘eager to see the end of it all and be able to go home’.
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Private Charles Argent of 2nd King’s Own Scottish Borderers was one of those unfortunate men who spent the war being shunted abruptly from posting to posting, each more dismal than the last, after failing to
be accepted for the navy or the Parachute Regiment. In the spring of 1944, he was one morning issued with tropical kit, which was promptly withdrawn. The next day he was sent on a mortar course. At last, on the very eve of invasion, he was posted to the Lowland Division where he knew no one, and was conscious of his very un-Scottish origins. Nor, of course, was he detailed as a mortarman.

7th Armoured, 50th Northumbrian and 51st Highland Divisions had been brought home from the Mediterranean, where they had gained great reputations, specifically to provide the stiffening of experience for the British invasion force. From an early stage there were rumours among the men of 50th Division that they were expendable, that they would be used on the battlefield for tasks in which the rate of attrition would be high. Curiously enough, this did not seem greatly to dismay them, and 50th Division’s record in Normandy was very good. Among the other veteran formations, however, there was cause for real concern. Lieutenant Edwin Bramall, posted with a draft of eager and untested young officers to the 2nd King’s Royal Rifle Corps of 4th Armoured Brigade, found that ‘as a battalion, they were worn out. They had shot their bolt. Everybody who was any good had been promoted or become a casualty.’
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Many of the men from the Mediterranean, above all the old regular soldiers, were bitter that, after fighting so hard for so long, they were now to be called upon once again to bear the brunt of the battle. A staff officer described the difficulties with one unit recalled from the Mediterranean for the invasion: ‘The 3rd Royal Tank Regiment were virtually mutinous just before D-Day. They painted the walls of their barracks in Aldershot with such slogans as “No Second Front”, and had it not been for their new commanding officer, David Silvertop – the best CO of an armoured regiment that I met during the war – I really think they might have mutinied in fact.’ Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Carver of 7th Armoured’s 1st Royal Tank Regiment found some of his senior NCOs appearing before him to protest about their role, and echoing complaints from their wives, who demanded to know why those who had sat
in England for four years and had not ‘done their bit’ could not now take over the burden. It was a sentiment shared by the Prime Minister:

If the Prime Minister’s closing clause can be regarded with scepticism, his earlier remarks were the subject of repeated altercations with his CIGS, who patiently reminded him of the realities of modern war, of the essential need for the vast ‘tail’ behind OVERLORD, and also of the utter exhaustion of Britain’s manpower reserves. The British army that landed in Normandy would be the greatest force that Montgomery ever commanded in north-west Europe. Thereafter, as casualties mounted, its numbers must remorselessly decline. This reality was at the forefront of every British commander’s mind from the first clash of arms before Caen until the last shots before Luneberg. So too was the knowledge that the early weeks in Europe would be the last of British parity with the Americans in ground-force strength. In July, the American armies would begin to outnumber the British, and thereafter their strength would rise month by month until they dwarfed those of their ally. Already many British servicemen were irked by the extraordinary social dominance the Americans had achieved within Britain, with their staff sergeants receiving the pay of British captains, their vast reservoirs of equipment for themselves, and candy for British children.

From the moment that they boarded their trains at the docks and cursed the narrowness of British carriage doors for a man in full equipment, the fresh Americans found the encounter with the
tired British a strange and bewildering experience. ‘And where do you make your home, Colonel?’ Lieutenant Julian Bach heard a newly-arrived Mississipian captain ask a somewhat frigid British officer at their first uneasy meeting over dinner. ‘Which home do you mean?’ inquired the Colonel unhelpfully. ‘I have three.’ The Mississipian enjoyed his revenge the next morning when he watched the Englishman’s expression as he poured marmalade on his porridge.
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Impeccably tailored American officers – and other ranks – crammed the London hotels and restaurants. Corporal Bill Preston of the 743rd Tank Battalion spent his working days practising submarine escapes from the amphibious DD tank in which he would land in Normandy – he and his crew learned that they had 20 seconds in which to get out if the Sherman foundered. But like so many young non-commissioned Americans, he confused the British by the breadth of his social connections, and found it much easier to book a table at the Mirabelle by using the name of his uncle at the US Embassy than by quoting his own. General ‘Pete’ Quesada of IXth Tactical Air Command brought a few of his pilots along whenever business took him to London, and they found no difficulty in making friends. He wrote to his mother in New York asking her to send him a monthly parcel of a box of Montecristos, six boxes of stockings and six lipsticks. Deadpan, for the rest of the war she dispatched regular consignments of men’s long socks and vaseline sticks for chapped lips.

Yet if it is easy to focus upon points of friction between the Americans and their hosts, it remains far more remarkable how effectively Allied co-operation worked at every level. Beneath the tensions between governments and army headquarters on matters of high policy, officers of the two nations worked side by side with extraordinary amity in the preparations for OVERLORD. Just as there were boorish Englishmen such as the Colonel who met Julian Bach, so there were Americans of poor quality, such as General ‘Pinky’ Bull, Eisenhower’s G-3 at SHAEF, who inspired the disrespect of almost all who worked with him. But most Englishmen
were deeply impressed by the energy, the willingness to learn, and the determination to finish the job of their transatlantic allies. The Americans, in their turn, respected the British forces which had been fighting for so long. Much will be said below about differences and jealousies that developed between British and Americans. Reports of these should never mask the co-operation between them, a unity between allies at working level that has seldom, if ever, been matched in war.

If several British formations that went to Normandy were already battle-weary, some of their American counterparts were alarmingly under-prepared and inadequately led for the task that they were to perform. Even though the British divisions were drawn from a citizen army, the British class system and military tradition meant that their men were far more deeply imbued with the manners and habits of regular soldiers than their American comrades. From the first day of the war to the last, the US Army could never be mistaken for anything other than what it was – a nation of civilians in uniform. Perhaps the greatest of all America’s organizational achievements in the Second World War was the expansion of a tiny regular army of 190,000 men into an eight-and-a-half-million-strong host between 1939 and 1945. Even the peacetime cadre had scarcely been an impressive war machine. One cavalry division in the 1940 Louisiana manoeuvres was obliged to rent its horses, and when these poor nags proved useless, to withdraw them by truck to rest areas after the second day.

Even at war, American’s ground forces – above all, her corps of infantry – remained something of a Cinderella. A 1942 plan to create an army of 334 divisions, 60 of them armoured, shrivelled to a reality of 89 combat divisions by May 1944, 16 of them armoured. These might be compared with Japan’s total of 100 divisions, and the Red Army’s 300 – albeit smaller – formations. Huge reserves of manpower were drawn off to feed their air corps, service units, and base troops. Where officers made up only
2.86 per cent of the German army, they represented 7 per cent of the US Army, many of whom never approached a front line. By 1944, it was evident to American’s commanders that serious errors of judgement had been made in the mobilization of the nation. The most critical, which would markedly influence the campaign in north-west Europe, was that too little emphasis had been placed upon manning the infantry regiments at the very tip of the American spear. The air corps, the specialist branches, and the service staff had been allowed to cream off too high a proportion of the best-educated, fittest recruits. Infantry rifle companies would be called upon to fight Hitler’s Wehrmacht, ‘the most professionally skilful army of modern times,’
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with men who were, in all too many cases, the least impressive material America had summoned to the colours.

To some extent, this reflected the natural urge of the United States to make the utmost use of technology in fighting the war. But there was also a contrast between the social attitudes of America’s ‘best and brightest’ young men towards military service and that of their counterparts in Europe. In America, a military career has never been honourable in the European manner, outside a few thousand ‘army families’. It has traditionally been the route by which impoverished young men – not least Eisenhower and Bradley – can carve out a career for themselves without advantages of birth. George S. Patton was a rare exception. He himself wrote: ‘It is an unfortunate and, to me, tragic fact that in our attempts to prevent war, we have taught our people to belittle the heroic qualities of the soldier.’
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It is striking to observe that in the Second World War, privileged young Englishmen still gravitated naturally towards rifle and armoured regiments. Their American counterparts by preference sought out exotic postings in the air corps or OSS, or managerial roles on army or diplomatic staffs. It never became fashionable for young Ivy League Americans to serve as front-line officers. This is not to deny that many did so, and fought with gallantry. But it does suggest that the American army’s ‘teeth’ elements were severely blunted because they lacked
their proper share of the ablest and fittest officers and men. On a tour with General Eisenhower on 4 April, Commander Butcher recorded in his diary: ‘I am concerned over the absence of toughness and alertness of young American officers whom I saw on this trip. They are as green as growing corn. How will they act in battle and how will they look in three months time?’
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In those weeks, hundreds of thousands of young men of Bradley’s assault divisions were asking themselves the same question. Private Lindley Higgins was ‘dumb enough not to feel the slightest trepidation. We really thought that at any moment the whole Reich was going to collapse. We saw what we had, heard what they didn’t have. We really thought that we only had to step off that beach and all the krauts would put up their hands.’
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This was a delusion much more common among formations such as the 4th Division, in which Higgins was a rifleman, than among those which had fought in North Africa and Sicily. A shipping clerk from the Bronx – an uncommonly perceptive one – he went to work on 8 December 1941, listened to President Roosevelt’s broadcast to the nation, and walked immediately to the army recruiting office in Whitehall Street. His father was delighted: ‘He thought the army would straighten me out’. Higgins himself expected to be home within a few months. Instead, he spent two years practising assault landings on the American east coast, ‘spending a lot of time fighting the North African campaign – we kept being told that this or that would happen in the desert.’ The war seemed very remote from them. They felt unable to relate anything in their own experience to what was taking place in Europe and the Pacific. Even in their final pre-invasion exercises in Devon, they concentrated chiefly on the fun of firing the hayricks with tracer bullets: ‘We were a singularly callous and unfeeling group of young men.’ But now they burnt their personal papers according to orders, and speculated about where they were going. They were told that it was to be an inundated area, so Higgins said confidently: ‘I know geography – it’s got to be Holland.’ Their regimental and battalion commanding officers were relieved a few weeks before the landing.
At the final briefing their new CO told them that under no circumstances would they turn back after they left the landing craft. It would be a court martial offence to stop or retreat on the beach. At the assembly area outside Plymouth, as they queued for food, Higgins’s friend John Schultz peered at his plate and groaned: ‘Boy, this is the big one. If they’re starting to serve steak, we’re in trouble.’ Higgins tried to grasp the reality of what they were about to do: ‘Me, Lindley Higgins, from Riverdale in the Bronx, was about to invade France. It was a problem that my mind in its then state of maturity couldn’t possibly cope with.’