Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (9 page)

Major Harry Herman, executive officer of the 9th Division’s 2nd/39th Infantry, had a far shrewder notion of what they faced than most of the invaders. A graduate of Michigan University, his father had been killed in the First World War, his great-grandfather wounded at Gettysburg. As a student, he had read
Mein Kampf
and been a member of an anti-war group. He was earning $18,000 a year with the prosperous family business in January 1940 when, despite his pleas for a deferment, he became the 21st American to be drafted. Like hundreds of thousands of others, he endured the confusion and hardship which marked the first year of the American army’s vast expansion, passed out of officer school top in weapons and tactics, bottom in personal appearance, and was shipped to Ireland with his division in October 1942. In January 1943, Herman shared the American army’s bitter humiliation in the Kasserine Pass, running for his life amidst men throwing away their arms and equipment, deployed by commanders ‘who had no idea how to make dispositions for battle. It was awful – there were no supplies, no water, no officer leadership. But then we refitted, we went back, we did better. In a way, the North African campaign was a blessing to American troops.’
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By the time they went into Sicily, they had learned a great deal – about the need to move along the ridge lines, instead of the valleys that they had been taught to use in training,
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about leading from the front, about controlling venereal disease among the men.

Yet when the 1st and 9th Divisions were brought back from
Sicily to prepare for OVERLORD, there was bitter resentment among many officers and men that they should be asked to do it all again. They felt that they had done their share, that it was time to go home and reap the glory, leaving the next battlefield to the millions of other men who had thus far endured nothing. Some officers successfully arranged transfers. ‘Morale was not high,’ said Herman. Major Frank Colacicco of the 1st Division’s 3rd/18th found the same feelings among his own men: ‘We felt that we’d done our war, we should go home. We kept reading in the papers about the huge increase in US strength.’
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Bradley wrote: ‘Much as I disliked subjecting the 1st to still another landing, I felt that as a commander I had no other choice . . . I felt compelled to employ the best troops I had, to minimize the risks and hoist the odds in our favour in any way that I could.’
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Bradley and other American commanders were acutely conscious of the shortcomings of some American formations, above all of their commanders. Marshall wrote in March about the embarrassment of having been compelled to relieve a succession of generals, including two corps commanders: ‘. . . we couldn’t relieve any more without a serious loss of prestige. What seemed to be lacking in each case was aggressive qualities . . .’
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As the men of the 9th and 1st – now under the command of the forceful Clarence Huebner – began to train in south-west England, as they absorbed the green replacements to fill up their ranks, ‘we recovered pretty quickly,’ in the words of one of their officers.
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That their participation should have been thought essential to the invasion of Europe engendered a sense of pride: ‘We thought the outcome of the war depended on the 1st and 9th Divisions,’ said Harry Herman. ‘We felt it was inevitable that we had to do this thing. There was no way out.’ Herman himself had become a successful soldier who no longer looked beyond the next battlefield: ‘I didn’t think the war was ever going to end. I thought that for the rest of our lives, we should be fighting one way or another.’
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Like most Americans, Technical Sergeant Bill Walsh felt no great animosity towards the Germans – he merely regarded the war as a
job to be got over before they could all go home. His principal concern was that the waterproofing on his tank should prove secure enough to get him ashore. A dentist’s son from New Jersey, he had joined the Essex Troop of the local National Guard in 1938. They were a mounted unit and in those days of the Depression, Walsh was among thousands of young men for whom the Guard provided a social life to which they could not otherwise have aspired. He took part in the US Army’s last review of mounted cavalry, and as they trotted past to the tune of
Old Grey Mare
, most of the men were choking back tears. They were among the first units to ship to Europe, where they converted to tanks and began the long two-year wait before the 102nd Cavalry went into action. Walsh and his crew admitted no great apprehension to each other about D-Day: ‘The movies always show people talking to each other about their problems and fears before action. We never did.’
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Corporal Dick Raymond of 3rd Canadian Division was in reality an 18-year-old American, the son of an upstate New York chicken farmer who ran away across the border to join the Canadian army – which had a reputation for not asking many questions – in January 1942, when he was 16, ‘an underachieving high school drop-out’.
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He was thrown out after a month, but was soon back at Niagara, greeting the recruiting sergeant, a familiar landmark of the place and the period, at the border. To Raymond, who had grown up listening to CBC Radio from Toronto, Canada sounded exciting. The Canadian army seemed full of Americans. When he was sworn in with a detail of other new recruits, they were told that Americans could keep their hands by their sides when the moment came for the oath to the King. Most of the men in the room did so. There were deserters and rejects from the American army, one or two curious fragments of human flotsam from the Spanish Civil War, and the first American negro Raymond had known, a huge, clever man, rumoured to be a lawyer from West Virginia. The young New Yorker found the army tough. When he was foolish enough to reveal that he had some money, it was quickly beaten out of him. He learned to drink and to cheat with
some thoroughness. He became cynical about the manner in which the volunteer Canadian forces cleared the military prisons and hospitals in their desperate struggle to fill the ranks before the invasion. He retained a low opinion of most of the officers corps. But he loved their regimental traditions, the pipes and kilts of the Canadian Scottish units. And for all their lack of discipline, he came to admire immensely their behaviour on the battlefield.

In 1927, a 22-year-old Czech named Frank Svboda won a scholarship to a college in Iowa, where he took a master’s degree in theology, was ordained, and subsequently became a presbyterian minister among the Czech community in New York. In 1943, he volunteered to become an army chaplain – he had already done infantry training with the Czech army – and was sent for three months to the chaplain’s school at Harvard. He found himself with a Jewish rabbi in the next bunk and a Catholic priest in the one below: the latter remarked cheerfully that he had never expected to find himself bedding down with heretics. Then he was posted to the 79th Division in Arizona and, in March 1944, came with them to England. They were awed by the blitzed streets of Liverpool as they marched through, and touched by the kindness of the local Cheshire families who invited so many men to tea each Sunday afternoon, despite their own desperate shortage of rations. Svboda’s invasion equipment comprised a bible and a portable communion set. As a European he understood, in a way that his unblooded division did not, that the Germans would be very difficult to defeat. In the big tent that he used as a chapel before they sailed for France, he listened to men’s problems – ‘mostly about their wives’ – and held services for soldiers who filed in carrying their rifles and helmets: ‘They were going into battle as people go to church, with a sense of reverence. There was no rowdiness or drunkenness.’
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It was not remarkable that the lofty sentiments about D-Day were chiefly expressed by the senior commanders. ‘I don’t have to tell you what a big show this is, or how important,’ the commander of the American Western Naval Task Force, Rear-Admiral Alan
Kirk, wrote to a friend in Washington on 10 March: ‘If this is successful the war is won, if this fails it may go on for years. Perhaps too it will settle whether we or Russia dominate the world for a while.’
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Colonel Paddy Flint, the colourful old commander of the 9th Division’s 39th Infantry, wrote in a much more homespun spirit to the wife or mother of every officer under his command before D-Day. ‘We are sort of putting our affairs in order,’ he said. ‘Maybe it is just the spring housecleaning that we used to do under Mother’s direction when I was a little boy at home. Anyway, I know you will understand. I just wanted to tell you how much we think of your son Harry in the Regiment . . .’
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At St Paul’s School on 15 May, Montgomery presented the OVERLORD plan for the last time before the senior officers of the Allied armies, crowded on wooden benches behind the single row of chairs at the front for the King, Churchill, Smuts and Brooke. One of the greatest throngs of commanders in history was gathered in the hall for the briefing: Bradley, whom the British respected and would come to respect more as one of the Americans ‘who really understood the battle’; General J. Lawton Collins of VII Corps – the nervous, explosive, ambitious ‘Lightning Joe’ who had made his reputation commanding a division on Guadalcanal; Gerow of V Corps, less impressive and untried in action; Corlett of XIX Corps; Middleton of VIII Corps. The British showed consistent concern in north-west Europe about the quality of American command and staffwork at corps and division level. Some senior Americans agreed later that this criticism had some force. There were simply not enough thoroughly trained staff officers to go round their vastly expanded army. But there were also, at St Paul’s, some outstanding American divisional commanders – Huebner of 1st Division, Barton of the 4th, Eddy of the 9th.

Sir Miles Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army, was a retiring figure almost unknown to the British public, and said later to have been treated more like a corps than an army
commander by Montgomery. But Dempsey was a great professional, a brilliant judge of ground, an utterly reliable agent for the execution of his Commander-in-Chief’s wishes. Crocker of 1 Corps was a tough, dependable commander who never caused Montgomery unease in Normandy – unlike Bucknall of XXX Corps, about whom Brooke always had doubts, and who was destined for dismissal. Crerar, who would command the Canadian army when it followed the assault formations into the line, was considered an unimaginative, stolid administrator; Montgomery had tried hard to dispense with him, but political imperatives were too strong. Crerar’s senior corps commander, Guy Simonds, was to prove one of the outstanding leaders of the campaign – a dour, direct, clever gunner upon whom Montgomery increasingly relied. For the rest, there were two veterans of the desert, O’Connor of VIII Corps and Ritchie of XII. At divisional level, with brilliant exceptions such as Roberts of 11th Armoured, the British team could better be described as solid than inspired. There were already doubts about 7th Armoured’s commander, Major-General W. R. J. ‘Bobby’ Erskine, who had been quite unexpectedly plucked from a staff job to take over the division, and was widely considered to have been promoted above his ceiling. Erskine loved and admired the men of his formation deeply, and here lay the root of much trouble in Normandy: he was too ready to accept the word of his subordinates that they had done all that could be expected of them. He was not a man to drive his command. But in war, as in all human endeavours, there are never sufficient men of a calibre perfectly suited to the demands of the hour. The shortcomings of the Allied command team from OVERLORD were mirrored by those of the Germans on the far shore.

Montgomery’s presentation on 15 May, like his earlier briefing on 7 April, was acknowledged even by his critics as a brilliant performance: a display of grip, confidence, absolute mastery of the plan. He had already conducted a long session – Exercise THUNDERCLAP – with his ground force officers before the huge relief model of the battlefield, at which he threw out situations and
possible setbacks to test their responses. It was Montgomery’s misfortune that his very mastery of advance planning became a source of scepticism to his enemies, following the inevitable imperfections of reality on the battlefield. Throughout the Normandy campaign, Churchill never erased from his memory a paper of Montgomery’s of which he received a copy, stressing the need for rapid armoured penetrations after the landings: ‘. . . I am prepared to accept almost any risk in order to carry out these tactics. I would risk even the total loss of the armoured brigade groups . . . the delay they would cause to the enemy before they could be destroyed would be quite enough to give us time to get our main bodies well ashore and re-organized for strong offensive action.’
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Likewise, Bradley did not forget Montgomery’s remarks to him at St Paul’s about the prospect of tanks reaching Falaise on D-Day ‘to knock about a bit down there’.
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Montgomery would have been entirely justified in saying privately to Bradley and Dempsey – above all to Churchill – that whatever exhortations he gave the troops, he did not expect deep penetrations on D-Day from inexperienced troops recovering their land legs. But he did not do so. And thus he paid a price after the event, when the hopes that he had expressed both publicly and privately, to officers both high and low, were disappointed.

In the last weeks before D-Day, the principal dissension within the Allied high command concerned not OVERLORD, but the projected invasion of southern France, ANVIL, to which the Americans were firmly committed and the British bitterly opposed, because this would certainly cripple operations in Italy. Shipping difficulties forced the postponement of ANVIL from a landing simultaneous with OVERLORD to a secondary operation ten weeks later, and the arguments between London and Washington continued until the last days before its launching. This became the first major decision of the war over which the Americans adamantly refused to bow to British pressure, and went their own way. It was an augury of
other painful blows to British confidence and pride which lay ahead.