Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who Turned the Tide in the Second World War (40 page)

After one last attack upon the British sector on September 16 was frustrated by enormous Allied naval and aerial bombardments and large numbers of tanks, Kesselring pulled his diminished four divisions back to a newer defensive line south of Naples. As a parting shot, the new radio-controlled gliding bombs badly damaged HMS
Warspite
and sank the Italian battleship
Roma,
which was en route to surrender; British and American heavy cruisers, also badly hurt, limped or were towed back to Malta. It is hard, really, to term Operation Avalanche a success at all, since the best performances were from the outnumbered German defenders. In that same month of September 1943, the Wehrmacht was falling back hundreds of miles along the entire Eastern Front under the batterings of Ivan Konev, Nikolai Fyodorovich Vatutin, and Konstantin
Rokossovski’s armies. The contrast was embarrassing, putting further moral pressure upon the Western Allies to launch the repeatedly postponed invasion of France even if Alanbrooke and many experienced planners were doubtful of the outcome.

Looking back a full twelvemonth after Casablanca, then, it could hardly be said that the American or British record in putting troops ashore in the face of enemy resistance was impressive; in truth, it was pretty terrible. There was, moreover, another humiliation to come, along the Anzio beaches in January 1944. In some ways, the story of the Allies’ difficulty in implementing their scheme to dislodge Germany’s control over central Italy was the most embarrassing one of all. The statistical odds on each side—measured in divisions, armor, air control, special forces, naval support, or anything else—seemed to offer the prospect of a grand Allied invasion not far from Rome, thus cutting off Kesselring’s stubborn defense of the lower Gustav Line. Unfortunately, the Americans and British once again bumped into those most uncomfortable creatures, namely, German combat divisions. Many of the more experienced Allied units—and the better commanders—had been pulled back to the United Kingdom in anticipation of Overlord. Even so, they had enough material force to carry out this flanking amphibious operation and thus quicken the hitherto laborious advance up the rugged Italian peninsula. What they did not have was the imagination to anticipate, and then handle, the German counteroffensive. In this case the traditional British Army wariness about advancing too fast against Germans was compounded by the unwillingness of the American land commander, Major General John Lucas, to do much more than consolidate the beachhead.
²⁶
Instead of the spring of the panther, Churchill famously noted later, there were the floppings of a beached whale.

The swiftness of Kesselring’s reaction to the Anzio landing (he had previously been preparing for the Allies to invade
north
of Rome) was astounding. Within a week, urged on by Hitler, he had reorganized the entire German army command system in central Italy, shifted troops from the north and the south to the threatened area, and placed elements of no fewer than eight battle-hardened divisions around Anzio under the formidable General Eberhard von Mackensen’s direct command.
^d
When Lucas ordered the first advance—more than a week after the landings, which had taken place without opposition on January 22—the Wehrmacht was completely in place. By this time the overall Allied land commander in Italy, Mark Clark, was ordering attacks against the well-held Gustav Line farther south in order to relieve the hemmed-in amphibious forces—the exact reverse of the original plan. These gestures included the fabulously stupid bombing of the greatest Benedictine monastery in Europe, Monte Cassino, inhabited only by monks and refugees. Meanwhile, German artillery was harassing the Anzio beachhead, the Luftwaffe was bombing the ships offshore, and Kesselring was attacking on all fronts. By mid- to late February there was an acute danger of the Allied armies being pushed back into the sea, in a replay of Dieppe. Instead, it was a replay of Salerno. Reinforced by fresh units, and with new commanders on the ground, the American and British divisions just managed to hold their own, and when the persistent winter clouds at last cleared, in early March, Allied bombers and fighter-bombers compelled von Mackensen to cease his offensive. But with a mere five divisions he could still keep the Allied lodgement in check, some way from Rome, while his other units rested.

These narratives suggest that the chances of a successful Allied invasion of western France in 1943–44, which Hitler and the Wehrmacht high command were bound to regard as much more threatening than the campaign for Rome, were very uncertain, not just because of the much more difficult tidal conditions in the Atlantic but also because of who would be there to oppose it. If Kesselring could get eight divisions to the Anzio beachhead within a week, how many more could the equally bold Rommel get to Normandy or Pas-de-Calais in that same amount of time?

Let us pause for reflection here. What the above campaign analyses suggest is that the argument for an invasion of France in the year 1943
was utterly wrong. Without control of the Atlantic, with the Allied bombing campaign being beaten back, with so many raw troops (and inexperienced commanders), and without the experiences of large-scale amphibious landings, an attack upon Normandy would have been, well, silly, not to mention tragic. It is terribly important to re-cover the many doubts among Allied planners during 1943 and 1944 about the chances of a successful move into France and then a march to Berlin. If this interpretation be true, then it tilts against the overwhelming “inevitablism” of much of the literature on the Second World War, an inevitablism so eloquently captured in the titles of Churchill’s own multivolume history:
The Grand Alliance
(volume 3),
The Hinge of Fate
(volume 4),
Closing the Ring
(volume 5), and
Triumph and Tragedy
(volume 6).
²⁷
It is worth recalling that, shortly after giving the final order to go on June 5 and only a few hours before the entire operation started, a lonely Eisenhower sat down and wrote one of the most astonishing letters ever written by a military commander. In this contingency communique he acknowledged that the Normandy invasion had failed, that he had withdrawn the Allied forces, and that he himself accepted full and undivided responsibility.
²⁸
Of course, this letter was totally secret; had even an inkling of the text gotten out over the next few days, the shock waves among the nervous Allied forces would have been devastating. It is just one more confirmation—perhaps the greatest of all—of Ike’s character, his generosity of mind, his deep awareness that mankind does not know what the next day will bring, and his instinctive understanding of Clausewitz’s warning that as soon as the battle begins, all the greatest prewar planning lies in the hands of the gods.

It is thus another sobering reminder, and from an impeccable source, that the struggle between the Axis and the Grand Alliance was not preordained to be over within another year. It is also a reminder of what the string of previous Allied landings in North Africa, Sicily, Salerno, and Anzio both had and had not revealed to the team of increasingly experienced military leaders and their planners. It had taught them a million lessons: about aerial reconnaissance and support, bombardment, special landing craft, beach-clearing devices, offshore command ships, logistical flow, interservice cooperation. All of these, they now recognized, just had to work well, and work together. By June 5, then, the Allied planners knew many, many things, just like the fox in
Archilochus’s poem.
^e
But there was one big thing they didn’t know and would not know until the end of the next day: whether the formidable German army, with much more intimidating beachhead defenses and a far larger number of divisions than they had faced during any of the Mediterrranean landings, would drive them back into the sea.

The minesweepers did it first, of course. On the evening beforehand, dozens of them set out from Spithead and the Solent to cut ten paths through Rommel’s outer line of maritime explosives. Behind them came 2,700 vessels (not counting the 1,900 landing craft in their mother ships), carrying in this first wave alone 130,000 soldiers, 2,000 tanks, and another 12,000 vehicles. As was now standard practice, Royal Navy submarines were used to mark flight paths for the Allied aircraft and to guide the leading assault ships to the beaches. Essentially uninterrupted by German naval or aerial attacks, this great force emerged from the sea as dawn broke on June 6, and thus began the recovery of western Europe. The Royal Navy, conscious of its heritage, named the operation Neptune, not Overlord.
²⁹

Four out of the five amphibious landings worked well; the fifth, at Omaha, stumbled badly, though only briefly. At the end of that historic day, all those men (plus the airborne divisions ahead of them) had been landed, and many more were crossing the Channel behind them. They had not been pushed back into the sea or held for long, if at all, on the beaches. Like the waters of a breached dam, the Allied armies poured inland, meeting resistance in some places and swirling past those obstacles in other places. Covered by airpower, the tanks, mobile artillery, and motorized infantry surged through gaps and places of least resistance. By the end of June, American and British units were 20 miles inland and heading south, while the whole Cotentin Peninsula had been liberated. A month later, U.S. troops were close to the Loire Valley and rapidly wheeling east. On August 25, 1944, Free French and American troops entered Paris.

How did they do it?

Of all the features that contributed to the Allied victory in Normandy, the key one, surely, was that of command and control. Without it, all else, even superb performance at the tactical level, would fail. The massive, complex orchestration of the Anglo-American-Canadian invasion of western France needed a superbly talented control organization. Fortunately for the invaders, they had an Allied Combined Operations Command under Admiral Bertram Ramsay that had been brought, through earlier experience, to remarkable standards of coordination of planning. It was no coincidence that the commanders who had shown themselves most adept in joint, interservice operations in the Mediterranean theater—Eisenhower, Tedder, Ramsay—were brought back to London in late 1943 to run the show, as were field commanders such as Montgomery, Miles Dempsey, Omar Bradley, and Patton, who could focus on the land battles. Upon their return, they found detailed provisional invasion plans that could be modified and improved upon, such as by their decision to land on five beaches, not the original three. They also found the early drafts of logistical schemes of the most staggering, yet necessary, detail, which could then be further refined.
^f
Every ship’s captain, every divisional commander, would have his own briefing book. Nothing would be left out.
³⁰

The genius who masterminded all this was a rather modest British naval officer. Bertram Ramsay (1883–1945) had entered the Royal Navy at the age of fifteen, served in the Dover Patrol during the First World War, and after peacetime service retired in 1938. A year later, Churchill bullied him into reentering the service. (How, really, did Winston recognize and promote such people—Ramsay, Hobart, William Slim, Tedder, and even Alanbrooke himself?) Ramsay’s war record is extraordinary. Appointed as C in C, Dover Command, the most ancient of all in the Royal Navy, he ran with great efficiency the Dunkirk withdrawal in June 1940, then controlled the Narrow Seas until he was appointed the chief amphibious planner for Torch and Sicily. He was then summoned home, at sixty-one years of age, to become a full admiral and the naval commander in chief of the Allied Naval Expeditionary Force for the Normandy landings. Tragically, Ramsay was killed in
France in an aircraft crash in January 1945 while heading to a conference with Montgomery about the future pursuit of the war. But in many ways his job was done, and much of what follows is his story.
³¹

There were three other positive prerequisites for the success of Overlord: command of the air, command of the sea, and well-handled deception and intelligence. Take any one away, and the story could have been different. There were also two negative or “might-have-happened” factors that could have been decisive in ruining the enterprise—the weather in the English Channel and the nature of the German military positioning and response.

Command of the air over western Europe called for a number of things. The first was the broader isolation of France, in particular to the west of Paris, from the sort of armored counteroffensives that Kesselring and von Mackensen had orchestrated so successfully in Italy; this time the fabulous Wehrmacht capacity to recover and strike back fast had to be blunted. The second was the direct aerial coverage of the beachheads and landing waters, so that the troops would indeed know that if there were planes overhead, they were Allied fighters. The third was provision of tactical bombing support, both against the immediate German coastal defenses and, as the breakout unfolded (if all went well), against further opposition in the field.

The wrecking of German communications to and from the Atlantic shores—the western part of the so-called Transportation Plan to cripple the defender’s capacity to reinforce—was overwhelmingly successful. The scheme itself had been controversial among Allied commanders for some months beforehand (see
chapter 2
), but at the end of the day the bombers really did come and bomb. A gigantic armada of Allied medium and heavy bombers, diverted temporarily from their strategic bombing campaign against Germany, plastered enemy-held railway lines, roads, bridges, and marshalling yards, inflicting paralysis upon almost all networks. While the heavy bombers worked better farther east, generally disrupting everything from fuel dumps to railway stations, the smaller aircraft carried out remarkable close-action attacks; on May 7, for example, eight P-47 Thunderbolts completely took out the critical railway bridge across the Seine at Vernon, and many more bridges and crossings suffered the same fate.
³²
For successful German panzer leaders, so used to freedom of movement across the North
African sands or the Russian steppes, the fact that northwest Europe was riddled with medium-sized rivers and vulnerable bridges turned out to be a dreadful restriction upon their assumptions about tank mobility. And, as they would find out, if an armored column was stuck down a long lane waiting to cross a river somewhere in France, they would very soon be at the mercy of the RAF’s rocket-firing Typhoons.