Overlord (Pan Military Classics) (26 page)
Read Overlord (Pan Military Classics) Online
Authors: Max Hastings
Rifle fire from the village periodically flared up. We were in bewildering ignorance of what was happening. The rain dripped and trickled into our slits, and there had been no hot food since before dawn. The big shells banging away on the
T-roads jarred us, while the faces of the three dead Fusiliers could still be seen there as pale blobs through the gloom and rain, motionless among the shells, with their ghastly whiteness. And this, and those savage crashes, and the great spreadeagled hounds, and the grim churchyard across the wall, evoked a dull weight of depression such as one could never have dreamed. All the elation of the morning had ebbed away. It seemed there was no hope or sanity left, but only this appalling unknown and unseen, in which life was so precious where all rooted, and where all was loneliness and rain.
3
The prose of Passchendaele seemed born again. A new experience very terrible in kind was being created in Normandy – that of the infantry soldier locked in battle of an intensity few men of the Allied armies had ever envisaged at their battle schools in Britain. Nor was the struggle much less painful for the crews of the armoured units. A tank wireless-operator of the 4th/7th Dragoon Guards on the British left flank recorded in his diary the fortunes of his squadron on the morning of 26 June:
The whole squadron was now in the field, with the tanks scattered around by the hedges. We soon discovered from the wireless that we were in a trap. There appeared to be Tigers and Panthers all around us – there were about six on the high ground ahead, four in the edge of the wood just across the field to our left. Between them they covered every gap. The hours dragged by. In our tank we sat without saying much, listening intently to what was going on over the wireless. I was eating boiled sweets by the dozen and the others were smoking furiously. I didn’t know how long we’d been sitting there when the tank behind us was hit. It was Joe Davis’s. I saw a spout of earth shoot up near it as a shot ricocheted through it. Some smoke curled up from the turret, but it didn’t actually brew up. We did not know till after that the whole turret crew had been killed. Brian Sutton and his co-driver baled out, but I didn’t see them. That made six of the squadron killed already
that day. In Lilly’s crew Fairman had been killed inside the tank and Digger James had been blown apart by a mortar bomb as he jumped off the turret. Charrison was badly burnt and George Varley was rumoured to be dead. One of Thompson’s
crew, Jackie Birch, had been shot through the head by a King’s Royal Rifle Corps man who mistook him for a Jerry after he baled out . . .The Tyneside Scottish came back across the field in single file, led by a piper who was playing what sounded like a lament. I felt lucky to be alive.
4
A German counter-attack was repulsed on 27 June. The next day, in mud and rain, tanks of 11th Armoured at last poured across the bloody stream of the Odon to gain the heights of Hill 112 on 29 June. Now, at the desperate bidding of General Dollman of Seventh Army, who committed suicide a day later, General Hausser of II SS Panzer Corps launched a major counter-attack. 9th and 10th SS Panzer Divisions, newly arrived from the east, were hurled against VIII Corps – and driven back. It was a fine fighting achievement by the British divisions and their air support, marred by the tragedy that, at this moment, General Dempsey misread the balance of advantage. Still expecting a greater effort from Hausser’s Panthers, he concluded that O’Connor’s exhausted men were dangerously exposed east of the Odon. On 29 June, he ordered the withdrawal of 11th Armoured to the west bank. The next day, Hill 112 was lost. Montgomery ordered that EPSOM should be closed down. VIII Corps had lost 4,020 men, 2,331 from 15th Scottish Division, 1,256 from 11th Armoured and 43rd Division.
Major Charles Richardson of 6th KOSB came out of EPSOM, his first battle, overcome with horror and disgust after seeing his battalion lose 150 casualties. ‘We were one big family. I knew every man.’
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He remembered a briefing from a psychiatrist before leaving England, who said that if men wanted to talk about a terrible experience they had endured, it was essential to let them do so rather than to stifle it in their minds. Talk they now did, about the spectacle of the Royal Scots Fusiliers cresting a hill to find the Germans dug in on the reverse slope, ‘something we had never envisaged’; about the Germans who shot it out until the Borderers were within yards of their positions and then raised their hands,
‘much good it did them’; about the vital importance of keeping pace with the rolling barrage of the guns.
One of the most remarkable features of EPSOM, like almost all the Normandy battles, was that its failure provoked no widespread loss of confidence by the troops in their commanders generally, or Montgomery in particular, the one general familiar to them all. Senior officers criticized and cursed errors of tactics and judgement. The men fighting the battles became more cautious in action, more reluctant to sacrifice their own lives when told for the third, fourth, fifth time that a given operation was to be decisive. But at no time did their faith in the direction of the campaign falter. ‘We thought the senior officers were marvellous,’ said Trooper Stephen Dyson: ‘They had all the responsibility, didn’t they?’
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Lieutenant Andrew Wilson of The Buffs ‘. . . found it increasingly difficult to see how we should get out of all this – it seemed an absolute deadlock. There was some effect on morale, and places got a bad name, like Caumont. But when Montgomery passed us one day in his staff car all my crew stood up in the tank and cheered.’
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Lieutenant David Priest of 5th DCLI said: ‘I thought it was going alright, but it might take years. We didn’t seem to move very much.’
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After the war, Montgomery said:
Of course we would have liked to get Caen on the first day and I was never happy about the left flank until we had got Caen. But the important thing on the flank was to maintain our strength so that we could not only avoid any setback, but could keep the initiative by attacking whenever we liked. On this flank ground was of no importance at all. I had learnt from the last war the senseless sacrifice that can be made by sentimental attachment to a piece of ground. All I asked Dempsey to do was to keep German armour tied down on this flank so that my breakout with the Americans could go more easily. Ground did not matter so long as the German divisions stayed on this flank. If I had attacked Caen in early June I might have wrecked the whole plan.
9
It was in consequence of nonsense such as this that a great professional soldier caused so much of the controversy about the Normandy campaign to focus upon his own actions. By his determination to reap the maximum personal credit for victory and to distort history to conform with his own advance planning, he also heaped upon himself the lion’s share of responsibility for much that went wrong in Normandy. No sane commander could have mounted British attacks of the kind that took place in June and were to follow in July without every hope of breaking through the German defences, or at least of causing the enemy to make substantial withdrawals. Part of Montgomery’s exceptional quality as a commander lay in his ability to retain an atmosphere of poise, balance and security within his armies when a less self-disciplined general could have allowed dismay and disappointment to seep through the ranks. Montgomery served his own interests and those of his men very well by maintaining his insistence to his subordinates that all was going to plan. But he did himself a great disservice by making the same assertions in private to Eisenhower, Churchill, Tedder and even his unshakeable patron, Brooke.
Even Montgomery’s admirers concede the lack of concern for truth in his make-up.
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Like Sherlock Holmes’s silent dog, an interesting sidelight on the general’s character is revealed by the episode of the salmon before D-Day. Visiting troops in Scotland, he cast a fly on the Spey with signal lack of success. On his return, he sent a fish to his close friends the Reynolds, who ran a school, with a note: ‘I have just got back from Scotland and I send you a salmon – a magnificent fish of some 18 lb. I hope it will feed the whole school.’
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It would be a natural assumption of anyone receiving such a note and such a gift to assume that the donor had caught it himself. Many men would have inserted a jesting line to explain that this was not the case. It seems typical of Montgomery that, while not positively asserting that the salmon was his own prize, he was perfectly content to leave such an assumption in the minds of the Reynoldses.
Montgomery’s version of the fiasco at Villers-Bocage on 12/13
June was given in an equally characteristic letter to Brooke on the 14th:
When 2nd Panzer division suddenly appeared in the Villers-Bocage-Caumont area, it plugged the hole through which I had broken. I think it had been meant for offensive action against I Corps in the Caen area. So long as Rommel uses his strategic reserves to plug holes, that is good. Anyhow, I had to think again, and I have got to be careful not to get off balance.
12
Montgomery was perfectly justified in telling Brooke that the German commitment of armour to create a defensive perimeter was in the long-term interests of the Allies. But it was, of course, preposterous to assert that 7th Armoured Division had ‘broken through’ anything before it encountered Captain Wittman’s Tiger tank. Only the leading elements of 2nd Panzer were deployed in the area in time to influence Erskine’s withdrawal. It must be to Montgomery’s credit that, while he accepted any available glory for his army’s achievements, he did not seek to burden it with blame for failures. But it was rash to expect shrewd and thoroughly informed officers at the War Office and SHAEF to accept indefinitely and at face value such travesties of reality as the account above. As Villers-Bocage was followed by EPSOM, and EPSOM by GOODWOOD, it was not the doings of Second Army, but Montgomery’s version of them, that became more and more difficult for his peers and critics to swallow. As early as 15 June, Leigh-Mallory recorded his reservations about the handling of the ground campaign in a fashion that was widely echoed among the other airmen, and Montgomery’s enemies:
As an airman I look at the battle from a totally different point of view. I have never waited to be told by the army what to do in the air, and my view is not bounded, as seems to be the case with the army, by the nearest hedge or stream. I said as much, though in different words, to Monty and tried to describe the wider aspects of this battle as I see them, particularly stressing the number of divisions which he might have had to fight had
they not been prevented from appearing on the scene by air action. He was profoundly uninterested. The fact of the matter is, however, that we have reduced the enemy’s opposition considerably and the efficiency of their troops and armour even more so. In spite of this, the army just won’t get on . . . The fact remains that the great advantage originally gained by the achievement of surprise in the attack has now been lost.
13
Much attention has been focused since the war upon the issue of whether Montgomery’s strategy in Normandy did or did not work as he had intended. The implicit assumption is that if it did not, his methods were unsound. Yet his initial plan to seize Caen, and his later movements to envelop the town, seem admirably conceived. The failure lay in their execution. The focus of debate about many Allied disappointments in Normandy should not be upon Montgomery or for that matter Rommel, but upon the subordinate commanders and formations who fought the battles. How was it possible that German troops facing overwhelming firepower and air power, often outnumbered, drawn from an army that had been bled of two million dead in three years on the eastern front, could mount such a formidable resistance against the flower of the British and American armies?
The British experience during the June battles gave their commanders little cause for satisfaction about the fighting power of many of their troops, the tactics that they had been taught to employ, or the subordinate commanders at division and corps level by whom they were led. Earlier in the war Brooke wrote gloomily: ‘Half our corps and divisional commanders are totally unfit for their appointments. If I were to sack them, I could find no better! They lack character, drive and power of leadership. The reason for this state of affairs is to be found in the losses we sustained in the last war of all our best officers who should now be our senior officers.’
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Even in 1944, it was striking to compare the very high quality of Montgomery’s staff at 21st Army Group with the moderate talents revealed by many field commanders of corps and
divisions. Bucknall was already suspect as a leader of large forces. Some of those working most closely with O’Connor believed that he too fell short of the qualities needed for corps command in Europe in 1944. Much as he was liked by his staff, many of his officers believed that he had been out of the war too long now to take a grip on a vast new battlefield. At divisional level, confidence had been lost in Erskine. There were doubts about G. I. Thomas of 43rd Division – ‘the butcher’ as he was known – one of the most detested generals in the British army. The performance and leadership of 51st Highland was the subject of deep disappointment.