The Guns at Last Light: The War in Western Europe, 1944-1945 (19 page)

“The battle is not going at all well for us,” Rommel wrote Lucie on June 13, “mainly because of the enemy’s air superiority and heavy naval guns.” Almost as an afterthought he added, “I often think of you at home.”

*   *   *

Rommel’s lament would have delighted General Montgomery had he been privy to it. The 21st Army Group commander often tried to infiltrate the minds of his adversaries, to see the fight as they saw it. On the walls of his personal caravan, confiscated from a captured Italian field marshal in Tunisia, Montgomery had tacked up not only an invocation from
Henry V
—“O God of battles! Steel my soldiers’ hearts!”—but photos of prominent battle captains. A visitor to Montgomery’s encampment later counted “three of Rommel, one of Rundstedt, and about thirty of Monty.”

On D
+
2 he had come home to Normandy, ancestral seat of the Montgomerys, including one forebear who accidentally killed King Henri II with a lance through the eye during a joust in 1559. His command post was tucked into the grounds of an imposing manor house with a hip roof and six chimneys at Creullet, four miles inland of Gold Beach. A sign on the twenty-foot iron gate advised “All traffic keep left”—a bit of England imported to France. Montgomery had also brought his beloved “betting book,” a leather-bound volume in which innumerable small-stakes wagers—when Rome would fall, or the war end—had been entered in his tidy hand over the years; those resolved were marked “settled.” And his pets: “I now have 6 canaries, 1 love bird, 2 dogs,” he subsequently wrote, the latter a fox terrier named Hitler and a cocker spaniel named Rommel, both of whom “get beaten when necessary.” The menagerie soon included a cow, ten chickens, and four geese; the fowl gave omelet eggs for his mess. Church services from the Creullet garden were broadcast to Britain, with Montgomery—“slender, hard, hawk-like, energetic,” in an RAF officer’s description—reading scripture to officers sitting in the flower beds.

“The way to fame is a hard one,” he would write soon after the war. “You must suffer and be the butt of jealousy and ill-informed criticism. It is a lonely matter.” Lonely he was, but fame’s fruits pleased him: the newborns named Bernard, the marriage proposals from strange women, the beret craze in New York, and the fact that his Eighth Army flag from the Mediterranean had brought 275 guineas at auction, proceeds to the Red Cross. He was “Master” to his aides, “this Cromwellian figure” to Churchill, “God Almonty” to the Canadians, “the little monkey” to Patton, and, to a fellow British general, “an efficient little shit.” Churchill’s wife considered him “a thrilling and interesting personage … with the same sort of conceit which we read Nelson had,” while the prime minister’s physician concluded that “Monty wants to be a king.” Eisenhower came to believe that “Monty is a good man to serve under, a difficult man to serve with, and an impossible man to serve over.” That maxim would tidily sum up the Allied high command in Europe.

He had arrived for the second time in this war to direct a battle that simply
had
to be won—Alamein was the first—and as leader of what one historian called “the last great field army imperial Britain would send into battle,” a force officially anointed as the British Liberation Army. His command included an equal measure of Americans, but parity would soon yield to a threefold Yankee preponderance on the Continent; the imbalance was fraught with tension and grievance.

Few could gainsay his virtues: “the power of commanding affection while communicating energy,” a quality also attributed to Marlborough; a conviction that gratuitous casualties were unpardonable; a sense that he knew the way home. Omar Bradley, who would later grow to detest him, believed Montgomery in Normandy to be “tolerant and judicious,” a model of “wisdom, forbearance, and restraint.” If “tense as a mousetrap,” in Moorehead’s image, he could be charming, generous, and buoyant. George Bernard Shaw admired how “he concentrates all space into a small spot like a burning glass.”

“I keep clear of all details, indeed I must,” Montgomery told his staff. “I see no papers, no files. I send for senior staff officers; they must tell me their problems in ten minutes.” When pressing for a decision, he leaned in with jaws snapping: “Do you agree, do you agree, do you agree?” His shrewd intelligence officer, Brigadier Edgar T. Williams, later wrote, “One was impressed by his sheer competence, his economy, his clarity, above all his decisiveness.” A man of habit and discipline, Montgomery had been awakened after his usual bedtime of 9:30
P.M.
only twice during the war, both occasions in Africa, and he did not intend to be roused again. He had not come to France to lose the battle, to lose the war, or even to lose sleep. Certainly he had not come to lose a reputation earned at the cannon’s mouth, a reputation to which he was now chained.

Alas, “too many of his best qualities were matched by folly or misjudgment,” as his biographer Ronald Lewin would write. He was “a man made to be misunderstood,” one of those “whose qualities intensify rather than expand during the course of their lives.… Like Bottom, he could play the ass while unaware of his metamorphosis.” His bumptious, cocksure solipsism already had infuriated sundry generals in the Mediterranean, both American and British. If, as Churchill posited, a gentleman was “someone who is only rude intentionally,” then Montgomery was disqualified. Knowing and unknowing, he could offend, rankle, enrage. Hardly a fatal flaw for a subaltern brawling in the trenches, this defect proved near mortal in coalition warfare, when political nuance and national sensitivities could be as combustible as gunpowder.

He remained “very small-boyish,” in the phrase of the military historian B. H. Liddell Hart, scarred by the cold, shrewish mother who was forever saying, “Find out what Bernard is doing and tell him to stop.” (He would refuse to attend her funeral.) A bully boy at St. Paul’s and Sandhurst, he never quite outgrew the athlete who could be disruptive and fractious unless he was made team captain. “As long as 51 percent of your decisions are right,” he had recently told Shaw, “you’ll succeed.” In truth his generalship reaped a far higher winning percentage, but by his account all too often the brilliant plan was his, the brilliant victory was his, the golden laurels were his, his, his. Brigadier Williams proposed a motto for Montgomery: “Alone I done it.”

“Enjoying life greatly,” he wrote to his rear headquarters in Portsmouth on June 13, “and it is great fun fighting battles again after five months in England.” Several thousand men were dead, and thousands more had been maimed. Here was a man made to be misunderstood.

*   *   *

The
OVERLORD
plan
was
largely his, and now he sought to make it work. Since early May, Montgomery had intended to lure as much of the enemy’s weight as possible to the British and Canadian divisions on his left wing, allowing the American right to capture Cherbourg and then thrust south of the Cotentin Peninsula. He reiterated the scheme to Field Marshal Brooke in London on June 11: “My general policy is to pull the enemy on to Second Army so as to make it easier for First Army to expand and extend the quicker.” To gain maneuver room in the beachhead, he had called for “powerful armored force thrusts” on both left and right, beginning on D-Day afternoon, and he had been ready to sacrifice four tank brigades in an exchange of metal and men for space.

Yet after a week the beachhead remained pinched and crowded. Thirty-four Allied armored battalions and more than 300,000 troops had landed, with two thousand tanks, but they had nowhere to go. On the left, Second Army had blunted the German counterattack without building momentum or gaining elbow room. The feeble direct assault on Caen had failed, and a proposal to drop British airborne troops behind the city found no favor with Eisenhower’s air chief, Leigh-Mallory, who feared heavy aircraft losses. “He is a gutless bugger who refuses to take a chance,” Montgomery fumed to his chief of staff on June 12. “I have no use for him.”

A flanking attack from west of Caen began with promise on June 13 when the British 7th Armored Division—the famed Desert Rats from Africa—captured Villers-Bocage, guided through the village streets by gendarmes and baying civilians. Then calamity: on the far side of town, Tiger tank fire raked the lead column; within fifteen minutes, more than a dozen British tanks and as many trucks had been gutted, most by a single audacious panzer commander, SS captain Michael Wittmann. Winkled out of Villers-Bocage, with losses exceeding fifty armored vehicles, the clumsy British attack collapsed. The chastened Desert Rats drew back behind the massed fires of 160 Anglo-American guns and 1,700 tons of RAF bombs that turned the village into a smoking hole.

“The whole show on land is bogged up,” Leigh-Mallory told his diary on June 14. “The Hun has kicked us out of Villers-Bocage and there is no sign of any forward movement, or a chance of it.” With the front lines static—Tommies would not tramp the rubbled streets of Villers-Bocage again until August—the battle soon turned into an attritional struggle of snipers and artillery barrages in what Moorehead called “a gunman’s world.” “Bloody murder, people dropping dead,” a company commander wrote. “One of my platoons ran away and was brought back at pistol-point.… The same platoon ran away again.” A British corporal’s diary entries for three consecutive days in mid-June:

June 18:
Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

June 19:
Day of Hell. Counter-attack.

June 20:
Day of Hell. Advanced. Counter-attacked.

For the Americans in the west, progress was a bit more heartening. The V and VII Corps, heaving inland from Omaha and Utah respectively, merged into a single front after the capture of Carentan and the repulse of a ragged counterattack by the 17th SS Panzer Grenadier Division on June 13. “Lousy & undersized & scurvy & dirty,” a combat engineer wrote in describing a gaggle of prisoners, “with greasy hair & flat mouths & short necks.” A four-day struggle by the 82nd Airborne to secure a bridgehead over the Merderet finally won through, although more than one thousand paratroopers remained missing, and the 101st Airborne could not account for nearly three thousand more. Here too the landscape was wrecked—“When I first saw Isigny, with walls toppling and everything afire,” an officer reported, “I thought of Carthage”—but most civilians seemed agreeable even amid the ruins. “The people are friendly & called us Libirators,” a sergeant from the 18th Infantry wrote in his diary.

Bradley late on June 13 halted V Corps’s drive toward St.-Lô; with the British stalled around Caen, he feared vulnerable flanks if the American salient grew too frisky. He also amended his original plan to simply bash on toward Cherbourg. Instead, he chose to first cut the Cotentin Peninsula by shoving three divisions west to the sea, blocking German reinforcements and sealing escape routes. The 4th Division, with Ted Roosevelt, would continue hammering northward toward the port.

“I’m sitting in a little gray stone Normandy château,” Roosevelt wrote Eleanor from a grim encampment fifteen miles southeast of Cherbourg.
Rough Rider
stood outside beneath a camouflage net, a sunburst hole in the windshield from a shell fragment.

I don’t suppose there’s a man here who’s thirty but they look old.… Behind me lies a hard fought field.… The dead lie sprawled in every attitude. Their uniforms are dirty and torn, their faces are like yellow clay, and unshaven. Brown, dried blood stains them.… Today’s been one of those days in battle when the heebie jeebies are in order.

No one took a greater proprietary interest in the Norman battlefield than the dour Frenchman known as Deux Mètres. At 5:40
A.M.
on Wednesday, June 14, Charles de Gaulle and fifteen companions left London’s Connaught Hotel in six automobiles, including a luggage car carrying 25 million francs. Escorted by two motorcycle policemen, the convoy drove to Kings Stairs in Portsmouth. Just before nine
A.M.
the French destroyer
La Combattante,
flying a tricolor embroidered with De Gaulle’s initials—“not altogether in accordance with regulations,” as a petty officer conceded—singled up her lines and made for France.

In his own fashion, De Gaulle had mended fences with Churchill after their railcar tiff ten days earlier. He rescinded his ban on placing French liaison officers in Allied units and, he reported, “I wrote to Mr. Churchill to salve the wounds he had inflicted on himself.” Now, in his belted uniform, leather tunic, and two-star kepi, he scanned the horizon with field glasses for a first glimpse of the country he had fled in 1940 under a Vichy death sentence. “Has it occurred to you, General,” an aide asked aboard
Combattante,
“that four years ago to the day the Germans marched into Paris?” With a lift of his great beak, De Gaulle replied, “They made a mistake.”

Montgomery had authorized a visit by De Gaulle and two minions; instead, a platoon of nineteen came ashore by DUKW at Courseulles on Juno Beach just before two
P.M.
Declining an invitation to dine—“We have not come to France to have luncheon with Montgomery,” De Gaulle told an emissary from 21st Army Group—he instead drove by jeep to Creullet for a brief, awkward conference. The French general “clearly believed small talk to be a vice,” a British diplomat observed, and conversation often “flowed like glue.” A British officer in Creullet reported that De Gaulle, “forgetting no doubt General Montgomery’s dislike of smoking … smoked cigarettes all over his famous caravan.” Montgomery was reduced to discussing his wall photos of Rommel. “I missed him in Africa,” he told De Gaulle, “but I hope to get him this time.”

Then it was off to Bayeux, where a loudspeaker truck announced, “General de Gaulle will speak at four o’clock at the Place de Château.” Down the Rue Saint-Jean he walked, “a stiff, lugubrious figure,” in Moorehead’s description, preceded by saluting gendarmes on wobbly bicycles, and greeted with tossed peonies and cries of
“Vive De Gaulle. À bas les boches, à bas les collaborateurs.”
Several thousand people awaited him beneath the regimented lime trees in the grassy square. “At the sight of General de Gaulle,” he later wrote in his memoirs—as usual referring to himself in the third person—“the inhabitants stood in a kind of daze, then burst into bravos or else into tears.… The women smiled and sobbed.” Beneath the blue Cross of Lorraine, he proclaimed the resurrection of the French Republic, here in what he would call “our glorious and mutilated Normandy.” His delegates—and the steamer trunk containing 25 million in banknotes—would remain to rebuild a government, with Bayeux as capital until Paris was unshackled. “The path of war is also the road to liberty and to honor,” he told the cheering throng. “This is the voice of the mother country.”